Hi, All! Welcome to alohomora - unlocking magical insights in consumer, enterprise & culture.
Looking forward to connecting with everyone in the coming weeks and months. Feel free to forward this monthly newsletter to friends, and to reply directly with any thoughts you may have! Hope you are all staying safe and healthy.
The modern email newsletter serves two purposes for the reader beyond bringing news:
Newsletters widen one’s aperture by exposing them to new ideas, content, readings, products, and companies.
Newsletters connect concepts and facilitate deep thought.
I've unsubscribed from all newsletters that don't bring me "newsletter bliss." That is, I unsubscribe from newsletters that do not facilitate new learning or help me connect my thoughts in a novel way. For those I do retain, they excite me when they hit my inbox every day or week. They offer me a dose of adrenaline the way getting something in the mail would.
This compendium of newsletters keeps me updated in a high-fidelity way; their collective wisdom is perfectly curated to my taste.
These newsletters also satiate my need for most news. The New York Times, formerly my core source of news, I now read mostly for their COVID-19 updates and for NYT Cooking!
The only print magazine I subscribe to is Vogue. Despite the fact that the content is not specifically curated to my interests, I continue to subscribe because Vogue works to broaden my mind beyond tech, which I live and breathe, into arts, fashion, and culture. I have always been interested in connecting the tech and creative worlds.
The goal of this essay is to explore the future of the newsletter. Newsletters have become a medium of choice for their ability to allow writers to build and curate community, tell stories, and share their personalities and contrarian thoughts. With some exceptions, the below is primarily focused on newsletters compiled by one person or a small organization, rather than by a large enterprise.
One of the first newsletters I subscribed to was theSkimm. Over time, I unsubscribed, and my newsletter repertoire became more curated based on my career and hobbies. I would bucket the newsletters I now receive into the following categories (with publishing platform denoted in parenthesis):
Consumer: LeanLuxe (Mailchimp), ThingTesting (Mailchimp), Chips + Dips (Substack), Sarah’s Retail Diary (Mailchimp)
Fashion: The Technology Edit: Vogue Business (Mailchimp + third-party tools)
Venture: Axios Pro Rata (custom-built CMS called Eden + third-party tools), Next Big Thing (Substack), Term Sheet (Iterable), Strictly VC (Sendgrid), Femstreet (Substack), Morning Brew (Campaign Monitor), Brianne Kimmel (Substack), Accelerated (Substack)
Tech: Benedict Evans (Mailchimp), Nathan Benaich (Revue)
Psychology: Maker Mind (Mailchimp), Check Your Pulse (Substack)
Among these newsletters, some are highly specific, yet collectively, they overlap. It feels necessary to get through all of the information as not to miss anything, but makes sense to skim because the information is often duplicative. Despite loving my newsletters, I've hit maximum capacity. This content is important for my job, but requires lots of time to digest.
A useful software for me could categorize all sections of a standard venture newsletter: new fund announcements, financing rounds, long-form articles, interviews, etc., delete the duplicative information, retain the original information, and provide me one newsletter with all the news I need. All my news collated in one mega newsletter, curated for Morgan. Substack could eventually go here depending on adoption. This brings us to the topic of "picks and shovels" and the future of email communication.
Newsletters have unbundled lots of what we traditionally see as journalism, but they are likely to be bundled in some form once again. Acquisitions have been slow so far in this space, but those that have taken place allow existing outlets to reach highly engaged new audiences: Robinhood acquiring MarketSnacks, Axios folding Sports Internet into Axios Sports, and theSkimm’s recent talks to be acquired. Expect this trend to accelerate. Communities with newsletters like ThingTesting, for example, would be a great acquisition target. ThingTesting’s platform solves one deep-rooted problem (high-quality product discovery) and pairs it with a strong brand and a highly-engaged audience.
As digital media companies like Buzzfeed and Vice struggle, the next wave is curated content. But how curated is too curated? How many newsletters can we handle before getting overloaded? The systems enabling writing and distribution, like Substack and Mailchimp, as well as those curating the day’s most impactful news like The New Paper, are democratizing creative pursuits, and eschewing reliance on advertising, which proved a challenging dependency for media companies past and present.
As they grow, newsletters will have also to conquer the world outside of the inbox. They will build communities and stay connected with users through texts, podcasts, community gatherings, and more… stay tuned!
Great Content of the Week: Andrew Chen’s 10 Years of Professional Blogging, What I’ve Learned
Lastly, I’ll ask for input on my topics for next month. Feel free to cast your vote HERE. The topic will be connected in some way to the topic from this week. This way, we can create a topology of where we’ve been, where we can go, and understand how ideas are connected, which is why we get newsletters in the first place!
Future Topics:
The future of voice / audio and text as communication mediums
More on the “picks and shovels” behind newsletter and digital media technology
Inspired by Benedict Evans in Vogue Business’ Technology Edit podcast " We still think computer vision is about cat pictures, and it is actually about turning image sensors into universal ways to allow computers to see the world.”