424. Start a newsletter 🧚
The five best platforms for newsletter creators who wan to build a brand
Hi there 👋
Last week, I had the chance to participate in one of my favorite newsletters, Hema Padhu’s First Impression. Hema is one of the best marketers I know, especially around positioning and GTM strategy, and she has helped dozens of young startups scale. Here’s her most recent post, all about what marketing leaders need to succeed in new roles. Check out the full archive below for even more good stuff (including one about B2B brand-building, my favorite):
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Top 5 newsletter platforms for creators and brands
I’ve been asked several times now, “Should I start a newsletter?”
My answer is always an enthusiastic, “Yes!”
Of course, there’s the practical questions of what to write about, how often to post, which platform to use (we’ll get to that in a second), and there’s the existential questions about whether the Internet needs more content, what your purpose is for building a brand, how to overcome impostor syndrome to become a person with a newsletter, etc.
I started my newsletter more than six years ago, and it has been one of the best decisions I have made. (This is also what I remind myself on the weeks where I don’t really feel like writing anything — weeks like this week, if you can believe it!)
This is the newsletter playbook I wrote back in the day when I was just getting started. There’s still a lot of relevant stuff in there about choosing a topic, iterating on format, experimenting with what works. But the tools themselves have changed.
In fact, today’s newsletter platforms make it easier than ever to get started.
And to get paid! 🤑
If you’re thinking of starting a newsletter, there’s no better time than today. I’ll write more in a future email about my purpose and process behind this newsletter — or feel free to reach out if you need any questions answered right away. Otherwise, check out the list of top newsletter platforms below. And let me know how to subscribe to your new content!!
Top 5 newsletter platforms
1. Ghost
Part website-builder, part newsletter platform, Ghost is the most robust option on this list because it allows you to do so many cool things with your brand. I first came across Ghost as a website tool, similar to WordPress. We ended up switching from WordPress to Ghost to run the Buffer blog.
But now they’ve doubled-down on the distribution side of your content, building a best-in-class newsletter system that allows you to grow your subscriber list and monetize your content.
Ghost is unique with its:
Extensive, fully customizable themes. There’s a whole theme library to choose from, or you can code your own
Super low payment fees — as low as 0%
Strong focus on SEO best practices so your archive of content keeps getting views
Mission-focused: They are open source, non-profit, carbon neutral, fully remote, and have never taken VC money
Other website tools have started to roll out email marketing features as well, but they aren’t on par with what Ghost has made. Here’s something I wrote about my website tool of choice, Squarespace, a couple years back:
2. Substack
Perhaps the most well-known tool at this point when it comes to creator newsletters, Substack started as almost like a Patreon for writing and has since grown into a platform for creators of all types — writers, podcasters, videographers, you name it — in addition to adding community features, mobile apps, even a mini-social network.
(The social network, by the way, brought up some real concerns about Substack’s content moderation policies moving forward. It’s worth a read.)
I run this newsletter on Substack because it makes writing easy, it makes collecting payments easy, and — most importantly for me — it makes distribution easy.
Substack has the best built-in network effects of any newsletter program out there.
I do little-to-nothing to promote this newsletter, and I get a steady stream of people finding and subscribing every day thanks to the Substack network:
People can find newsletters through leaderboards and directories based on topic
Writers can recommend other writers and pin these recommendations to their homepages
You can @ mention people and publications within newsletters. Like this:
and so much more
I’ve even gotten paid subscribers because Substack has proactively surfaced my newsletter to people it thinks might be interested! (Of course, it’s in Substack’s best interest to get me more subscribers because Substack takes a 10% cut of everyone’s subscription revenue.)
According to Substack:
More than 40% of all new free subscriptions and around 12% of paid subscriptions to Substacks come from within our network.
3. ConvertKit
ConvertKit has branded itself as email marketing for creators for many years now (it was a smart way to differentiate and deposition from Mailchimp), which has given it a leg up in building the best features and workflows for this audience. They’re known and loved for their audience growth tools and their integrations with commerce platforms for creators who are selling courses, content, experiences, etc.
Most recently, they rolled out a creator network — a similar concept to the network effects that take place at Substack.
Big-time folks with established brands like Ryan Holliday (Ego Is the Enemy Ryan Holliday) use ConvertKit, but so too do thousands of up-and-coming profiles, and the creator network should be a way to make getting started at ConvertKit even more attractive.
4. Mailchimp
Mailchimp can do it all, which is both great news and scary news if you want to use it for your burgeoning brand. There’s a lot of things you can do with Mailchimp, including build a newsletter from scratch — this is what I did when I first started building my newsletter. It’s easy to get started, you can completely customize the content of your newsletter, and you get such great visibility into the performance of your content and the activity of your subscribers.
If you crave control and optionality, then Mailchimp is great. You can take your email list and work with Mailchimp’s other tools to run pretty much an entire business and marketing strategy.
Of course, if this seems like too much, I totally get it. For me, Mailchimp was the platform where I spent the most time week-to-week on building my newsletter and scaling my audience.
5. Beehiv
If you want to build a newsletter like Morning Brew, then you’ve come to the right place!
Beehiv is built by the same team that made Morning Brew. The platform contains all the stuff you’d expect from a newsletter platform today: custom newsletters, forms and subscriptions, payments, referral programs, integrations. The only knock on Beehiv is that it’s new, it’s at feature parity with other platforms, and it’s main claim to fame is that, unlike the competition, it has an ad network where you can serve ads to readers. Oh, and it’s built by the team at Morning Brew!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
