👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can borrow for your newsletter.

This week, I’m sharing 4 lessons you can learn from Doomscrollers’ recent launch. I’m also trying out a new section I think you’ll love (read to the end to find it!). Reading time: 3 minutes.

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Lesson #1: Use the crowd

Doomscrollers’ cofounders Liat Fainman and Salman Sohani are no strangers to research.

• Liat researches the future of news consumption for the Financial Times and serves as a digital anthropologist at University College London

• Salman started an entrepreneurship accelerator for high school students, gathering insights from 1k+ young people

Salman is also a member of Stealth Mastermind, an invite-only community for entrepreneurs. A few weeks before they launched their newsletter, Salman dropped this ask in the Stealth community (which I’m a part of):

He got some pointed feedback, with people raising questions about:

• The audience they were trying to reach and why this content was relevant to them

• The founders’ objectives with the newsletter and what action they wanted readers to take (questions that are relevant for all of us)

Salman’s response?👇️ 

Kristin Kenzy—author of the Drunk Business Advice newsletter, who started and runs the Stealth community—chimed in with some helpful advice, building on another member’s comments:

Lesson #2: Find your differentiator

In Liat and Salman’s case, it’s data.

• They’re using their own proprietary research to decode Gen Z for people like me (my kids are both Gen Zers, and I can use all the help I can get!)

• They plan to create a Gen Z database and use it to connect companies directly to young people through polls and personal interviews

Here’s a peek at their debut issue, which explores the growing political divide between young men and women:

Their first issue was dramatically better than the beta issue Salman shared with the Stealth community, a reminder of how important feedback can be.

Lesson #3: Show why it matters

If you’re looking to appeal to Gen Z and not waste your audience’s time, get to the point and spell out clearly why something is important:

They also explicitly answered the “so what” question, sharing takeaways for the different audiences they’re trying to reach:

Lesson #4: Crush the launch

They might have needed a little help figuring out their newsletter format, but Liat and Salman knew how to nail the launch.

A few days beforehand, Salman posted an update in the Stealth community, asking for people to help boost a LinkedIn post.

But instead of just sharing the post, he encouraged people to sign up for their “virtual launch”, using a party invite app to help promote their launch-day LinkedIn post, which broadened their distribution:

The virtual launch, which one Stealth member called “f*cking BRILLIANT”, helped drive hundreds of newsletter sign-ups and Instagram followers. It’s a strategy more of us should start using when we need to hype something.

A thing I liked: These awesome subject lines

Subject lines are the front door to your newsletter. Good ones invite readers in, bad ones keep readers out. Here are a few of my favs from last week:

“Stop Being January” (Hung Up)
“Gen Z’s Jerry Springer show” (User Mag)
“Disney’s Crucial ~$4B Acquisition” (SatPost)
“The internet four years from now” (Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends)
“So Where Should We Build Ten New Cities in the US?” (Uncharted Territory)

Hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. See ya next week!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Let me know what you thought about today’s issue—hit reply and tell me, or click the links at the bottom!🙏 

P.P.S. [Sponsored] Fun fact about the guy behind Boletin Growth: He’s spent more than $7M across his past roles on paid ads for newsletter growth and worked on the ad accounts of 50+ fast-growing newsletters. If you want to grow your newsletter with paid ads, do yourself a favor and snag one of his spots for February here.

ICYMI: Links to recent issues

🔮 6 newsletter predictions for 2025
📧 What I learned taking Sam Parr’s email copywriting course
📨 The 5 coolest things I saw in newsletters in 2024
🤖 Want to write killer subject lines? Borrow this prompt
📈 The secret to Semafor’s growth