How to start a newsletter
The platform question gets most of the attention and matters least. The parts that are genuinely hard to undo are your sending domain, your consent record, and the cadence you promised.
8 minute read
Decide what it is before you decide where it lives
The first decision is not which platform. It is one sentence a stranger can read in five seconds that says what arrives, how often, and who it is for. That sentence does more work than it looks like. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,153 US adults in August 2025 and found that among people who get news from newsletters, 71 percent subscribe to fewer than five and only 3 percent to more than ten. You are not competing against every publication in your field for a slot. You are competing for one of about four, against things the reader already chose and mostly likes. A newsletter described as thoughts on marketing loses that fight before it starts. Write the sentence first. If you cannot, you do not have a newsletter yet, you have an intention.
What actually differs between platforms
Every platform worth using lets you download a CSV of your subscribers. Substack's own documentation walks you through it from the Subscribers page or from Settings, and the others are no harder. So exporting is not what anybody really means by owning your list, because everybody has it. Three things do differ. Whether mail goes out from a domain you control or one the platform lends you, which decides whose reputation you are building. Whether paid subscribers can move with their billing intact, which is a payments question rather than a feature question. And how much of your growth comes from the platform's own recommendation network, because growth you rent is growth you hand back at the door. Substack takes 10 percent of paid subscription revenue and charges a one-time $50 for a custom domain. Those numbers are the easiest to compare and the least interesting part of the choice.
Your sending domain is the thing you cannot re-buy
Google's email sender guidelines are the closest thing this medium has to a rulebook, and they became enforceable in February 2024. Every sender needs SPF or DKIM configured on their sending domain. Anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses needs SPF and DKIM and DMARC, and the domain in the From header has to align with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. Google also asks bulk senders to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10 percent and never to reach 0.30 percent. That last figure is the one to internalise. Reputation is slow to build and fast to lose, and it attaches to your domain rather than your account, so it follows you to whatever platform you move to next. Sending from a subdomain, so one bad month cannot poison your ordinary mail, is convention rather than a Google rule.
The legal minimum in the United States
The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide is short and worth reading in full, because the requirements are unglamorous and therefore easy to skip. Your From, To and routing information must be accurate. The subject line must reflect what is actually in the message. If the message is an advertisement, you have to say so clearly. You must include a valid physical postal address, and a street address, a PO box, or a private mailbox registered with the USPS all count, which is the escape hatch most people writing from a kitchen table do not know exists. The opt-out has to be easy to recognise and must keep working for at least 30 days after you send. You have 10 business days to honour it, and you cannot charge a fee or demand anything beyond an email address. The FTC puts the penalty at up to $53,088 per email.
If one subscriber is in the EU or the UK, the rules change
CAN-SPAM is an opt-out regime. Europe is not. Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive permits direct marketing by electronic mail only to subscribers who have given prior consent, with one narrow exception: if you obtained the address in the context of selling someone a product or service, you may market your own similar products, provided you gave a clear opportunity to object when you collected it and in every message since. Article 13(4) separately prohibits concealing who the mail is from, or sending without a valid address the recipient can use to make it stop. On top of that the Court of Justice held in Planet49 that a pre-ticked box is not valid consent, so the newsletter checkbox must be unticked and separate from your terms checkbox. The directive is implemented nationally, so check your country's version. Record when and how each person subscribed.
Pick the cadence you can hold on a bad week
Cadence is a promise, so make one you can keep during a bad week rather than a good one. The pressure runs the opposite way from what most people assume. In the same Pew survey, 62 percent of newsletter readers said they do not read most of what they receive, which means the marginal extra issue is more likely to be ignored than read. HubSpot's poll of 400 consumers attributed 51 percent of unsubscribes to frequency alone, with 34 percent saying daily or more was too much and 17 percent saying weekly or more. That is a small sample and should be treated as directional, but it points the same way as the Pew figure. Monthly, sustained for two years, beats weekly abandoned in March, and readers do notice the distance between what you promised and what arrives.
Write the first three before you announce anything
The failure mode is not issue one. Everybody has energy for issue one. It is issue two, arriving seven days later with a full week of other work stacked in front of it, which is why the drafts you want in the bank are the ones nobody is waiting for yet. Treat the first ten issues as a single unit rather than ten separate performances. Keep the structure identical even when it starts to feel repetitive, because the repetition is yours and the familiarity is theirs. Do not redesign the template, do not move the send day, and do not stop to interpret numbers from a list too small to produce a signal. If you can hold the shape for ten issues, you will have found the two or three recurring segments the newsletter is actually about.
The list grows outside the emails
Almost none of your growth happens inside the newsletter itself. It happens wherever your audience already is, which for anyone making video means the video. A subscribe line in a description does close to nothing. A spoken reason mid-clip, with the address on screen, does considerably more, because the ask lands while the person is still interested in the thing you were saying rather than after they have left. Practically that means every recording should produce a handful of vertical cuts, each carrying the same one-sentence promise you wrote at the start. That is the pass FrameOS is built for: the long recording in, captioned vertical clips out in one sitting, so the newsletter's growth channel does not need an afternoon of its own every week. 300 credits for 3 days · no card.
FAQ
Do I legally need a physical address in my newsletter?
In the US, yes. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide requires a valid physical postal address in every commercial message. It does not have to be your home: a street address, a PO box, or a private mailbox registered with the USPS all satisfy the requirement. Penalties run to $53,088 per email, and this is one of the most commonly skipped rules among small newsletters.
Which newsletter platform should I start on?
Almost any of them, because they all export a subscriber CSV. Judge them on three things instead: whether mail sends from a domain you control, whether paid subscribers can move with their billing intact, and how much of your growth would come from the platform's own recommendation network. Substack's 10 percent revenue share and one-time $50 custom domain fee are easy to compare and matter least.
How often should I send a newsletter?
As often as you can sustain without dread, which for most people starting out is fortnightly or monthly rather than weekly. Pew Research Center found 62 percent of newsletter readers do not read most of what they receive, so extra issues are more likely to be ignored than valued. HubSpot's consumer poll put roughly half of unsubscribes down to frequency alone.
Do I need consent before emailing someone in the EU or UK?
Yes. Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive allows marketing email only to people who gave prior consent, with a narrow exception for existing customers being told about your own similar products. The Court of Justice ruled in Planet49 that a pre-ticked box is not valid consent, so the subscribe box must be unticked and separate from your terms acceptance.
Sources
- CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business · Federal Trade Commission
- Email sender guidelines · Google
- Directive 2002/58/EC (ePrivacy), Article 13: Unsolicited communications · EUR-Lex
- Email Newsletters as a Source of News · Pew Research Center
- How do I export my email list on Substack? · Substack
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