How to Grow a Newsletter

Dave Pell has been writing online for almost as long as the internet has existed. His popular newsletter, NextDraft, has over 140,000 subscribers. NextDraft covers the day’s ten most fascinating news stories, delivered with a fast and pithy wit.

Dave has been a syndicated writer on NPR, Gizmodo, Forbes, and Huffington Post. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from U.C. Berkeley, and his master’s in education from Harvard.

Besides being a prolific writer, Dave is also the Managing Partner at Arba, LLC. For more than a decade, Arba has been angel investing in companies like Open Table, GrubHub, Marin Software, Hotel Tonight, Joyus, and Liftopia.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Dave merged his two writing passions into a successful product
• The key to building a strong relationship with your audience
• How Dave dramatically increased signups to NextDraft

Links & Resources

• Flicker
• Unsplash
• Fareed Zakaria
• Jim Rome
• The Skimm
• Morning Brew
• The Hustle
• Spark Loop
• Sam Spratt

Dave Pell’s Links

• Dave Pell on Twitter
• NextDraft newsletter
• Dave’s new book: Please Scream Inside Your Heart
• NextDraft app
• PleaseScream.com

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Dave:
If you have something to say in one way or another, the internet is a great place for people to figure out a way to receive it. So, that’s pretty powerful and still excites me. I still press publish with the same enthusiasm now than I did when the internet first launched.

[00:00:23] Nathan:
In this episode I talk to Dave Pell, who has been writing for basically as long as the internet has been around. He’s been an investor since the early days. He’s been writing since the.com bust, and even before then. He writes his popular newsletter with 140,000 subscribers called Next Draft.

We have this really fun conversation about writing. His writing process. How he grew the newsletter. Bunch of other things that he cares about. Even a few things that I was interested in, like he doesn’t have his face in photos on the internet very much. He has his avatar instead. So, just getting into why that is.

He also has a book coming out soon. It’s called Scream Inside Your Heart, which is a fun reference to some memes from 2020. So, enjoy the episode. There’s a lot in there.

Dave. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:12] Dave:
Thanks a lot for having me on.

[00:01:14] Nathan:
Okay. So you’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been writing on the internet since the .com era. So, I’m curious maybe just to kick things off, what have you seen—I realize this is a giant question.

What have you seen change? What are some of those trends that you’ve seen, that you either really miss from the early days, or some of those things that you’ve held onto from the early days of the internet, that you’re really still enjoying?

[00:01:46] Dave:
Yeah, that is a pretty huge question, but I’ll give it a shot. The thing I miss from the early days of the internet is that our democracy was not being destroyed by the internet in the early days of the internet. So, everything we thought we were building, basically it turned out to be the opposite of what actually happened.

The part about the internet that I still feel is there, although a little bit less so because of the big companies have sort of taken over all the platforms and stuff, is just the idea that someone can have a passion or a creative output that they want to share with the world, and they can mold internet tools to fit their skills, and then use the internet to broadcast that out, and still become sort of pretty popular withour the “OK” of some gatekeeper at a publication, or at a television studio, or whatever.

The indie spirit of the internet still lives on. It ebbs and flows, and has a lot of different iterations. But that was the thing that excited me the most when I first played with the internet. And that’s the thing that continues to excite me the most now.

[00:02:57] Nathan:
I always think of the newsletter, and your newsletter in particular, is that indie spirit. Is that what you see most commonly in newsletters? Or are you seeing it in other places as well?

[00:03:10] Dave:
I see it in podcasts. I see it in newsletters. I see it in people sharing their art, sharing their photography on Flicker, and up through the more modern tools. I go to a site called Unsplash all the time to look at images, and it’s just basically regular people sharing their images.

Some of them are professional photographers, some aren’t, and they’re getting their work out there, and then some of them probably get jobs out of it and stuff like that. So, just the idea that you can have some kind of creative output and have a place to share it. And try to get an audience for that is really inspiring.

It’s a lot harder than it used to be because there’s a few billion more people trying to get attention also, and because there are more gatekeepers now. So, you have to, hope that your app meets Apple’s guidelines, or that different products you might want to share on the internet have to meet certain classifications now, whereas they might not have in the very early days of the internet. But in general, if you have something to say in one way or another, the internet is a great place for people to figure out a way to receive it.

So, that’s pretty powerful, and, still excites me. I still press published with the same enthusiasm now that I did when the internet first launched.

[00:04:32] Nathan:
Yeah. So let’s talk about the main project that you have right now, which is Next Draft. Give listeners the 30-second pitch on Next Draft, of what it is.

[00:04:46] Dave:
Sure. Basically I call myself the managing editor of the internet. What I basically do is a personality-driven news newsletter where I cover the day’s most fascinating news. I cover 10 stories. A lot of times in each section there’s more than one link. I give my take on the day’s news, each individual story, and then I link off to the source for the full story.

When I first launched it, I called it Dinner Party Prep. I provided enough information for you to sort of get the gist of the story. And if there’s topics you want to dig deeper, you just click and, you know, go get the story yourself. So that’s sort of the overview of it.

[00:05:27] Nathan:
Nice. And you said that you’re obsessed with the news maybe in a somewhat, even unhealthy way. why, where did that come from?

[00:05:36] Dave:
Y...