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How to Start an Email Newsletter

2022-08-05 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 13:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

In the first episode of Creatorpreneur Club, Ali argues that an email newsletter is the best starting point for a new creator (free, low-friction, private, all about writing, and an audience you own that can later make money), suggests writing about anything you enjoy, curating, or covering an interest, and recommends starting free on Substack or Revue.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: what the newsletter earns Ali, Alex Lieberman, and the first episode of Creatorpreneur Club

  • ★★★ Ali calls starting an email newsletter one of the best decisions of his life as a creator: each email he sends now makes him around $5,000, more than a whole month of full-time work as a doctor paid him. — 00:00:00 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali's video on starting an email newsletter is the first episode of Creatorpreneur Club, a new series on principles, strategies and tools to start or level up creative entrepreneurial projects. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Ali says an email newsletter is the perfect starting point for someone new to being a creator, first of all because it is completely free, unlike the costs of starting a YouTube channel. — 00:00:29 · YouTube

00:00:36 — Part one: why you should start an email newsletter

  • ★★ Ali's second reason to start with an email newsletter is that it is very low-friction: anyone who can type can send one, while YouTube, TikTok or Instagram take more effort and faff. — 00:00:58 · TikTok, Instagram, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali's third reason: an email newsletter is private in a nice way, since no algorithm brings anyone to it, so you can send your first issues in private and get past the emotional barriers of starting something creative. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali's final reason an email newsletter is a great starting point: it is all about writing, which is also what good YouTube videos and TikToks come down to. — 00:01:56 · TikTok, YouTube

  • ★★★ On public platforms you do not own the audience, Ali says: YouTube owns his, so he is building a house on borrowed land, while moving viewers onto an email list gives him a direct relationship with them. — 00:02:26 · YouTube

    “I'm just building a house on borrowed land.”

  • ★★ Ali sells his products through his email list rather than his YouTube channel, because people on an email list have given permission to be contacted. — 00:02:55 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, YouTube

  • ★★★ Ali's team has made over $2 million selling the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, mostly through its email list rather than the YouTube channel, where he tends not to mention it. — 00:02:55 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, YouTube
  • ★ Ali has made a number of friends through his newsletter: readers replied, he replied back, and some met up in real life or on Zoom calls. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali's second main reason to start an email newsletter is that the newsletter itself can become an asset you can make money from later on. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Ali wrote his weekly email newsletter for about three and a half years before making money from it, apart from a few dollars from Amazon affiliate links to books. — 00:03:24 · Amazon
  • ★★★ Sponsors have recently started paying five, six or seven thousand dollars for a slot in each weekly issue of Ali's newsletter Sunday Snippets. — 00:03:53 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Alex Lieberman started Morning Brew in his university dorm room as a daily email newsletter on business and sold it five years later for $70 million. — 00:03:53

00:04:50 — Part two: what to write about: whatever you want, curation, or something that interests you

  • ★★★ Asked what to write about in a newsletter, Ali says you can write about whatever you want: for a new creator it is about finding content you enjoy creating for its own sake. — 00:04:52
  • ★★★ Ali advises against starting a newsletter, YouTube channel or TikTok to make money from day one: early on, when nobody watches or reads, extrinsic motivation is a hard reason to keep doing it. — 00:05:21 · TikTok, YouTube
  • ★★★ Intrinsic motivation, such as writing Harry Potter fan fiction for the joy of it, makes it much easier to stay consistent, Ali says, and consistency is the ultimate secret to results in the creator economy. — 00:05:50 · identified motivation, Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ In his newsletter Sunday Snippets Ali writes about whatever has been on his mind that week; last week (week of 25 July 2022) he wrote about the Odyssey plan he is using to figure out what to do with his life. — 00:05:50 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Whenever Ali feels weird about his YouTube channel it is because he is over-optimising for the numbers; his newsletter, a public journal sent to readers he considers friends, makes it easy not to care about them. — 00:06:49 · Sunday Snippets, YouTube
  • ★★ Another option Ali gives for a newsletter is curation: each week share the things you read, listened to or watched that you found interesting. — 00:06:49
  • ★★ Tim Ferriss started his newsletter Five-Bullet Friday by sending friends a weekly list of five things he enjoyed, then his audience; it now has over two million subscribers. — 00:07:18 · Tim Ferriss

00:07:47 — Morning Brew sponsor read

  • ★ Ali guesses that Tim Ferriss makes millions of dollars a year from his single email list. (hedged) — 00:07:47 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ A third option Ali gives for a newsletter is to write every week about something that interests you, which is how Morning Brew started. — 00:07:47

00:08:45 — Alex Lieberman's start; the newsletter as a practice ground for being a creator

  • ★★ Ali interviewed Morning Brew's founder Alex Lieberman on his podcast the week before this video, a talk that also covered life, happiness and the death of Lieberman's father. — 00:08:45
  • ★★ An email newsletter is a fantastic practice ground for trying out being a creator, Ali says: you may find you do not like it, which is fine, or find it fun and stick with it. — 00:09:15
  • ★★ Ali has kept up his email newsletter for four years; it is now a staple part of his business and fun, and he will probably keep doing it for the long term. — 00:09:44 · Sunday Snippets

00:10:12 — Part three: picking a platform and setting up a free newsletter on Substack

  • ★★ Ali has used ConvertKit for his newsletter for over two years: it is a paid platform, but ridiculously powerful if you want to take a newsletter seriously. — 00:10:17
  • ★★ ConvertKit has a free plan, Ali thinks for the first 1,000 subscribers; after that you pay, and it gets quite expensive. (hedged) — 00:10:17
  • ★★ Ali's business pays several thousand dollars a month for ConvertKit, which he says is totally worth it. — 00:10:17
  • ★★★ To start a newsletter from scratch without spending anything, Ali recommends Substack or Revue rather than the paid ConvertKit. — 00:10:46 · Revue
  • ★★ Ali used Revue, which is free and was recently bought by Twitter, for the first two years of his newsletter; on Twitter people can subscribe to a Revue list straight from your profile. — 00:10:46 · Revue, Twitter
  • ★★ If Ali were starting a newsletter from scratch today, he would probably go with Substack. (hedged) — 00:11:16
  • ★★ To start on Substack, Ali says, go to substack.com, hit start writing, and make an account or sign in with Twitter. — 00:11:16 · Twitter
  • ★ A Substack newsletter doubles as its own website, as Ali's new aliabdaal.substack.com does. — 00:11:45
  • ★★ Ali personally knows people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from a newsletter started free on Substack, later turning on paid subscriptions, sponsorships or their own products. — 00:12:44

00:13:14 — Offer to subscribe to viewers' newsletters, course plug and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali promises to subscribe to the email newsletter of any viewer who starts one and emails him, so they will have at least one subscriber. — 00:13:14

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Answering a viewer, the channel says both free newsletter platforms Ali recommends, Substack and Revue, allow monetisation later. — creator comment · Revue
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether creators own their email list on Substack, the channel says they do and believes the list can be exported at any time. (hedged) — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: ConvertKit · Substack · Sunday Snippets

Also: People: Alex Lieberman · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Creatorpreneur · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Five-Bullet Friday · Harry Potter (book series)

Organizations: Amazon · Instagram · Morning Brew · TikTok · Twitter · YouTube

Concepts: affiliate marketing · extrinsic motivation · identified motivation · Odyssey plan

Products: Revue

Also centred on Substack: How To Build A Website in 2026 · How to Build a Website with No Code (2026)

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