This week I took a rather big decision. For months I’ve been in doubt with which app I should continue to make notes, save interesting links, gather knowledge and all together work in during the day. I have been an avid Evernote user for many years, but unfortunately it didn’t grow with me and how I want to do my work. Since the start of 2020 I have been flip-flopping between Notion and Roam Research. Yes, the two big names in knowledge management. each with their own cult and following. I decided to go with Notion and went all-in. I still have my Evernote notebooks, especially for searchable documents, but all of my work is happening in Notion now. Even writing this newsletter happens in Notion, so I can play around with different blocks of news and links before I put it all in Revue and send out the newsletter.

When I took the plunge, I also decided to learn more about Notion. That’s why I started a newsletter. Because why not? It is a newsletter that curates news about Notion from various sources like Youtube, blogs and Reddit. It’s a different kind of newsletter than the ones you might subscribe to. It is a collection of links, put together by an algorithm instead of a human. Some days you might have ten very good links, some days you just have 2 Youtube videos.

I wrote a post on Indiehacker how I built this newsletter in Mailbrew and how I started it with a Twitter list. You too can make your own newsletter like this. It takes 30 minutes to build one so it could be something to try out for a topic you are interested in.

Have a great week and don’t forget to take a look at Thanks for Subscribing, I’ve added dozens of new titles to the directory!

Frank

Lenny Rachitsky made an incredible deck on how he launched a paid newsletter. How he decided on price, made the pitch to his existing (free) subscribers and what he did on Launch Day. It’s very well designed and fun to read. Check out his deck and take notes for your own launchplan.

Substack is a great service, but there are some downsides. For most publishers, it’s the absence of your own domainname and the transaction fees you pay to use their platform. Dan Rowden gives an excellent tutorial on Indiehackers to make your own Substack-like newsletter and blogplatform using Ghost. You can run this on your own server, have your own domainname, use memberships and email features and you don’t have to pay transaction fees. If your adventurous, this might be something for you to try!

🔊 If there is one podcast you should listen to this week, make sure it’s Content Heroes with Ann Handley. In 30 minutes she gives so much nuggets of wisdom on email newsletters (nót email marketing! She’ll explain…) and why you should focus on the letter part of newsletter, instead of the news-part. She’ll sign off with great advice for all those who are afraid to write online (spoiler-alert, you’re not afraid, just scared you’ll make grammar-mistakes…)

🏤 When you start your own newsletter, you are bound to make mistakes. It happens to all of us. That’s why it’s so great the fine folks of Stacked Marketer wrote a comprehensive guide of email deliverability. With all their tips to make sure your email newsletter arrives at your reader, including the mistakes they made. It’s long, has some technical magic and abbreviations included like BIMI and DMARC but don’t let that scare you off. There’s a tip for you in there, I know for sure!

🥳 Finally a big shoutout to Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She runs the Telegram group Newsletter Geeks and writes the great newsletter Maker Mind. Today she sent out the 50th issue and with it an excellent blogpost with 50 lessons learned. It’s one of those rare treasures on the web shared by likeminded people in love with newsletters. Bookmark it and read from it every now and again. You will become a better person, I promise! My favorite tips are #24, #35 and #13.

Brought to you by Thanks for Subscribing, to make your inbox happy again!

That’s it for this week. Share, like, subscribe. Support your local newsletter-author, show them some love. Find more interesting newsletters at my website and submit yours!

👋 Do svidaniya (That’s goodbye in Russian!)