Helloooooooo,

If you could be a worm (any worm), which would it be?
My cliché answer is caterpillar. But if I really think about it, I wanna be an earthworm.

Slim. Shiny. Living alone. All cute.

So, did you do your homework?
Yeah, I have some questions you were supposed to answer before this Friday and the deadline is almost up.

If you realised you don’t want to start a newsletter right now, save this and come back to it later when you actually start one.

And if you do have your answers ready, here’s the actual technical part and things to keep in mind while starting your newsletter.

Short answer: it depends on your topic and your purpose.

I don’t have much experience with Kit, so I won’t talk about that. Let’s cover Substack and Beehiiv.

Purpose

If your goal is to build a meaningful list, nurture them every week, and maybe sell something to them eventually, Beehiiv is your platform.

It offers:

If your goal is discovery, talking to more people rather than deeply nurturing a smaller group, and just being creative with no pressure, go for Substack.

Substack works more like social media. You can get discovered through Notes, recommendations, and the platform itself, while still building an email list.

Monetization

Beehiiv monetization is very straightforward.

Substack monetization is more community-driven.

Mass appeal topics? Go to Substack.
Personal stories, opinions, book reviews, life essays, creative writing. Things anyone can stumble upon and enjoy.

Niche topics, specific problems, deep nuances for a very defined audience? Beehiiv makes more sense.

For me:
I run this newsletter on Beehiiv because I talk to a very specific audience and the list really matters. Also, I share a lot of things here that I don’t want to be publicly discoverable.

I’ve also run two newsletters on Substack.
One around personal stories.
Another around book reviews.
Both had wider appeal and worked better in a discovery-first environment.

Bare minimum? Once a month.

If your newsletter needs a lot of research and thinking, make it bi-weekly and publish on alternate weeks.

If you have updates, lessons, stories, or reflections to share regularly, weekly works best. Like this one.

If it’s about trends, news, current market updates, or fast-moving information, you can even publish daily.

If you don’t want to commit to a specific day yet, go with the bare minimum. Once a month is perfectly fine.

My reading newsletter didn’t even have a fixed date. I published whenever I finished a book. You can be sporadic too. It all depends on how clearly you set expectations with your readers.

This question has a lot of nuance.

You need to:

Every time I talk about money made from my newsletter and share that on LinkedIn, I’m almost guaranteed at least 50 new subscribers.

No, this doesn’t come from having 10k LinkedIn followers.

It comes from a post going viral.

And posts usually go viral when they hit a very specific pain point.

For example, saying “I went from 20k to 100k in 6 months” works because that is the exact problem my audience wants to solve.

If your newsletter is on Substack:
Write good Notes. Be present. Comment. Be seen.

If it’s on Beehiiv:
Write good tweets or LinkedIn posts, wherever your audience already hangs out.

What about Lead magnets?

Not a huge fan.

Most people come for the free thing, not the newsletter, and then leave quietly. That messes with your open rates and CTR.

That said, lead magnets can work if they’re sold properly through content.

So honestly, the answer is boring but true.

Write more.
Write better.

That is it.

TL;DR:

Pick the platform based on your goal.
Set the lowest possible frequency you can sustain.
Write to real pain points.
Focus more on good writing than growth hacks.

I hope this answers your questions about whether to have a newsletter and how and where to set one up!

Now go own your audience!

see ya!
Nikita