👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight the formats, strategies, and best practices of leading newsletters to help you grow and monetize your newsletter.

In today’s edition: We go inside The Hustle’s content playbook, which I’ve spent the past five years helping to build. If you’re not familiar with The Hustle, it’s an irreverent daily business and tech newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers.

For today’s email, I’m focusing on writing with voice and personality, which helps differentiate The Hustle from dozens of other biz/tech newsletters and keeps our readers coming back. Total examples: 5. Total reading time: 2 minutes.

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Example 1: Lean into snark

Since our early days, we’ve thought of ourselves as a kind of anti-media company. We’re not against the media, we’re just not like most of it.

If you read mainstream outlets, you know what I’m talking about: the stilted language, the self-importance, the lack of regard for the reader’s time.

Our goal every day is to do the opposite: write like we talk (i.e., speak conversationally), and don’t take ourselves too seriously (i.e., make 🔥 memes).

Example 2: Be relatable

The Hustle team treats every word in our email—from the subject line to the final nickname—with care. Our intro sets the tone for what follows, often riffing off the day’s business news with personal, witty takes.

Here’s an example my former colleague Zack Crockett wrote a few years ago, which I’ve annotated to show you how he infused his voice into the writing.

Example 3: Call people out

My colleague Juliet Bennett Rylah does a masterful job of finding stories that are a) widely interesting b) relevant to our audience and c) have main characters you can make fun of, as she did here with Kylie Jenner…

Example 4: Write inviting headlines

My colleague Ben Berkley, a former top editor at The Onion and ClickHole, is the best headline writer I’ve ever worked with. He and our team have perfected the art of making headlines conversational and inviting.

Example 5: Develop a “signature”

We give our editor a funny nickname at the bottom of every email. It ensures we have at least one joke in every newsletter, and gives people a reason to read to the end.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s examples. I’ll be back next week with a new set.

-Brad

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