Hiya 🌊,
One of the hardest parts of growing a newsletter (or any creative project) isn’t ideas. It’s momentum.
Most people I speak to aren’t stuck because they lack talent. They’re stuck because they don’t know:
- what should stay free
- what they could realistically charge for
- or where to focus without burning out
And when things stall for too long, months can pass where not a lot of progress happens.
We lose a sense of where to begin because it suddenly feels like a mammoth task.
I procrastinated before starting a paid newsletter by practising writing in public on Medium. I set myself a slightly unhinged challenge: 100 articles in 100 days.
There was no plan to make money. It was just a public experiment — and it turned out to be the thing that helped me figure out what worked and what people actually valued.
Before my Substack account was completely wiped, one article in particular really travelled. It was called “Borrow Everything I Know About Growing a Newsletter.”
It struck a nerve and became a live workshop, which I’ve now run twice with Creative Mornings.
There’s a replay here if you’d like to catch up:
👉 https://creativemornings.com/blog/level-up-borrow-everything-i-know-about-growing-a-newsletter
I’m popping back tomorrow to run a free accountability session building on this (so you don’t have to spend three months testing things out on your own).
Together, we’ll:
- spend 30 minutes mapping what should stay free vs what you could charge for
- then get playful with a Generative AI exercise to help you imagine (and articulate) the future of your newsletter
If growing a paid newsletter has been hovering on your radar, and you want a focused, playful hour to think it through come and sit with us?
Tue, Feb 3
7–8pm CET / 6–7pm UK / 1–2pm ET / 10–11am PT
👉 Register here:
https://creativemornings.com/talks/level-up-accountability-hour-borrow-everything-i-know-about-growing-a-newsletter
Lucy x
PS: This really is a genuinely free, one-off live session. There’s no programme pitch, no upsell, and no funnel at the end.
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