Why I'm excited about newsletters

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Style Pass

2021-06-22 17:00:04

The Sample's immediate form is fairly straightforward. You can see half of it by looking at the landing page. I describe it in classified ads like this:

The Sample is a newsletter curated by AI. Each morning it selects a different newsletter issue to forward you, based on your interests.

The Sample helps you get more subscribers. Submit your newsletter and it'll get forwarded to people who are interested in similar topics. If you share a referral link for The Sample, your newsletter will get forwarded more often.

That last sentence hints at The Sample's medium-term form: a network for newsletters. The whole reason that Twitter's acquisition of Revue is so interesting is because Twitter already has a big network which they can use to drive subscriber growth. Substack likewise will probably need to build more of its own network if they want to keep charging 10% of premium subscriptions.

The Sample's key difference is that it isn't bundled with a specific publishing platform: it's an a la carte network. In the same way that Google makes many independent websites discoverable, The Sample is meant to make many independent newsletters discoverable. After all, that's one of the reasons newsletters are so popular in the first place: you can publish content and build an audience without being dependent on a platform.