Before building landing pages or choosing an email platform, validate your newsletter concept by directly asking people to subscribe. If you can't get 10-20 people from your network to say yes, the idea might need refinement. This avoids building infrastructure for an unproven concept.
Running paid ads for a new newsletter is a mistake. First, prove you can convert an existing organic audience (e.g., from social media). If your core followers won't subscribe, there's a content or messaging mismatch. Paid ads will only waste money by scaling a message that doesn't resonate.
New creators often waste time debating which email service provider (ESP) is best. The tool will not make or break your newsletter's success in the early stages. The right approach is to pick any platform, start publishing, and only reconsider your choice after six months of consistent effort.
Creators often avoid resharing content, fearing they'll annoy their audience. In reality, most people haven't seen it. To cut through the noise, you must shamelessly repurpose newsletter content for social media and vice versa, presenting the same core ideas from different angles repeatedly.
Avoid list-cleaning automations with a small subscriber base (e.g., under 1,000). Instead of deleting inactive subscribers, personally email them to ask what they're struggling with. This approach turns a technical cleanup task into a valuable user research and re-engagement opportunity.
Be cautious with the "resend to unopens" feature. Tests show it often fails to meaningfully increase overall open rates. Worse, it can annoy subscribers and lead to spam complaints, especially since open-tracking pixels are not foolproof and may misidentify readers as non-openers.
Don't build elaborate welcome sequences before you have subscribers. The priority is validating your idea and growing your list. This avoids building features for a non-existent audience. A simple three-sentence welcome email is sufficient for early stages.
In the beginning, don't get lost in the weeds of perfect analytics and UTM parameters to track every subscriber source. It's a form of procrastination. For attribution, just add a simple question to your welcome email: "Where did you find the newsletter?" This is all the data you need early on.