👋 Hi Reader, ICYMI, there has been a mass outcry on X over Youtube’s AI review decisions over entire Youtube channels getting wrongfully banned overnight at scale. Youtuber 'Norse797', who had over 100k subscribers and 25 million lifetime views on his YT channel covering aviation news, was served a ban by an automated Youtube decision mod. Seems serious, until you realize, the purported reasons were over his comments as a teen years ago on an alternate account. norse797 @bjr2730 YouTube...
10 days ago • 3 min read
👋 Hi Reader, As you are well aware, I took over LetterStack less than a year ago as the present owner. I spent the last two decades building and launching products, but to be honest, no endeavour in my career gives me more joy than to write to you folks every Saturday. I know we are not a big community at this point, in fact, we are less than a thousand people. But the fact, that more than half of you open and devour the posts I send out every weekend, is immense motivation to show up, every...
17 days ago • 1 min read
👋 Hi Reader, Many newsletter creators want to do well by their local communities and build a local presence, but they shy away from niching down into a local newsletter. Why? Finite addressable market, for starters. So I decided to dig deep and find out what the read on local newsletters look like. Thanks to Aniket Panjwani’s excellent newsletter database, I got a quick jumping off point. Ankit Panjwani (who writes the Content Quant newsletter) is not the typical content...
24 days ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, As you folks are aware, I have a day job where I help early stage founding teams find their first 10,000 customers (what the cool kids call as 'GTM') at Anushka Ventures, and then I funnel my learnings into LetterStack. Most of these founding teams tend to have a watering hole on LinkedIn, which makes it easier for us to convince them to go all-in on LinkedIn-first content. An accidental fallout of that conversation is the aspect of getting into LinkedIn newsletters, and then...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, If you have known me for a while and have been a subscriber here, you might describe my relationship with AI as a dramatic jilted lover with massive withdrawal symptoms. I have hemmed and hawed at the prospect of writing with the help of AI. I have tried ChatGPT, Claude, and the plethora of tools available which claim to make AI-written-slop sound human. (Yes, tried that one too) So unless you are a writer whom I have known pre-ChatGPT for your writing, I am going to take...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, I like watching TBPN, a technology daily show, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. It usually plays in the background, as I go about my daily work routine. TBPN brings up the who’s who of technology and media to talk about their opinions on the media status quo, so that intersection is of deep interest to me, to know what’s happening in tech. TBPN's main site The reason I bring them up is they released a Media Market Map on X, which apparently captures the transition from...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, I firmly believe that you create what you consume. For starters, I wanted my 10-year-old kiddo not to consume brainrot on YouTube Kids. She spent a lot of time on Victorious (which is not entirely bad), but I would rather she spend more time watching Carmen Sandiego (where she learnt about a new city in every episode) So my wife and I decided she needs to watch quality entertainment, so we decided to introduce her to…Full House. Yes, the 90s sitcom with Bob Saget and John Stamos....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
👋 Hi Reader, I am a Kyla Scanlon fan. I admire her book ‘In This Economy’ and her work on Substack. So when she wrote recently about the attention economy on this thought-provoking piece Who's Getting Rich Off Your Attention? I had to sit down and write my perspective on how it applies so deeply to my mission at LetterStack. Kyla's book on Amazon Kyla speaks in detail about how only a few media empires have quietly consolidated the TV, and now social, attention span online. These few...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, I admire Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm. He always puts the spotlight on thought pieces (not like LinkedIn Thought Leadership, actual long-form thesis) where the attention is due. So when he talked about Noema’s latest piece on ‘The Last Days of Social Media’, natually I lined it up for a Friday read. And what I read, validated what I had been mulling all along, on why I started LetterStack in the first place. Justin's post on LinkedIn It’s this: with AI slop taking...
2 months ago • 2 min read