You have the time to run a technical newsletter
A dad's playbook for running a newsletter when you have very little free time.
This is the 6 month anniversary of this newsletter’s first subscriber. As of today, I have 267 subscribers. It’s not much, but I didn’t have a social media following when I started, and I built it on very little time per week.
Starting this newsletter was a big deal for me. It was the first serious hobby I had since my daughter was born in 2023. And even now, I only get an hour or two per day to myself. But I’ve still managed to publish one to two times per week.
I’m so grateful for all of my readers. To pay it back, this post has everything that I’ve learned about running a newsletter on minimal free time. Even if you can only cobble together a few hours a month, you can still publish one post per month.
“How do you know that I have the time to run a newsletter? You don’t know my life.” Buddy, if you have the time to argue with strangers on the internet, I don’t want to hear it.
“Why would I start a newsletter?” That’s a separate post. Right now, I’m assuming that you are motivated and just want a playbook. Anyways, here we go!
Where should I publish my work?
You have limited time. Pick an existing platform instead of trying to write your own. You have plenty of options: Substack, Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, etc. Just do some basic research. For example, Substack has good discovery features that can get you extra subscribers, but its code blocks are terrible. So if you were going to share a lot of code in your posts, you’ll want to use a different platform.
Who is my audience?
The most important thing isn’t “what,” but “who.” Pick an audience and write each post to them. I personally imagine a junior engineer when I’m writing. They understand the fundamentals. But I have experience that they don’t, so it provides a natural premise for explanation. It’s also fun for more senior people to follow along. Finance nerds subscribe to Money Stuff even though it contains a lot of really basic explanations. Similarly, technical people aren’t scared away when the target audience is more junior than them.
How should I get my topics?
News is the best story source. There’s always something new happening. There might be a slow news week, but it’ll always pick up again.
You will want to scan for stories as quickly as possible. Here’s what you’re going to do:
Make a list of all of the subreddits, social media accounts, industry publications, etc that you can think of. Basically anything that has news on your beat.
Whenever you start writing, open up every single one of these sources.
Is there anything that you find interesting? Is anything funny? Is there anything that you know more than average about? These are great story opportunities.
Of course, there are plenty of things to write about besides news. You could pick a facet of a technology that you find interesting. You could tell a war story. Whatever it is, you want to keep the topic focused. Don’t write a complete guide to every frontend technology; you’ll never finish. But is there an interesting use case for HTMX that people might not realize? A cool trending GitHub project that people don’t know about yet? Those sound achievable in a few hours.
Another useful format I’ve found is “be the guy who actually reads things.” For example, for this post on Google’s illegal ad monopoly, I went through the court filing, took the time to understand the arguments in the case, and then explained why it was interesting to the reader.
How do I write a post?
Write an outline. It’s the first thing you should do. I write most of my posts across two days. On the first day, I research topics and then write an outline. The next day, I turn the outline into a post, and then schedule it for the next morning and go to bed.
There are two reasons that you should write an outline. First, moving items around a bulleted list is really easy. Rewriting a few pages of text is a waste of time. Second, I find that the outline loads the topic into my brain. When I finally sit down to write the post, it’s been rattling around my brain for about 24 hours. The writing flows much more easily.
How do I promote a post?
This is the part that I’m worst at. Some weeks I just don’t have the energy to write AND promote, and the promotion falls by the wayside. But every single subscriber has found my newsletter because I promoted it, so it’s clearly important.
First, assemble a list of possible places to post. I have tried posting on Hacker News, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. Obviously there are an almost unlimited number of sites and aggregators you could post to.
Next, don’t wear out your welcome in any of them. Most places have clearly-posted rules about self promotion. Follow them. Be a good citizen. Don’t get banned. Over time, you’ll get a feel for what posts are appropriate for what places.
You should also pay attention to any promotional tools that your platform offers. I’ve gotten some subscribers from Substack’s Notes feature, even though I’m terrible at using them.
What would I do if I had more time?
I would likely have one more post a week. I’ve also played with the idea of having 3 posts per week without having more time. I’ve been mulling over the logistics of having a news roundup issue every Sunday, and moving my first weekly post to Tuesday. For a while I was dissuaded because Pragmatic Engineer has one. But my links would be different and I would have different things to say, so maybe it’d be worth it?
I would be more diligent about self-promotion. First, I would set up Client/Server social media accounts and automate posting across all of them. Same with Substack notes. I would set up extra content messages to be posted on days that I don’t publish content on the main newsletter.
I would start looking for cross-collaboration opportunities with other newsletters.
What else should I know?
Rapid fire:
Tell people that you are doing it. Post your first post to your LinkedIn and Facebook. Mention it at lunch. Tell your friends. I feel blessed by how many people I know have told me that they like my posts, or that they think that I’m doing a good job. The people around you are a built-in source of encouragement. Use them.
Most of your posts are going to be duds. But the posts that do blow up will be huge. I have 43 posts, and only six posts have over 1000 views. The two biggest posts have around 50,000 views each.
Every post is a reminder to unsubscribe. You should prefer not clicking “publish” over publishing a half-baked story.
You won’t always have a topic to write about. Sometimes it’s just a slow news week. If you want a challenge, try to find a new format and see if you’re happy with the results. Otherwise, just skip this issue.
Ask people to subscribe. Put a “Subscribe” call-to-action somewhere in your Substack post1.
You can use LLMs as much or as little as you want. It’s your site. For Client/Server, I write every single word in the body of the posts. My personal viewpoint is “what would be the point if a robot did my hobby?” I do use ChatGPT to help me brainstorm titles and subheads. I tried using it for proofreading and was underwhelmed.
Substack will prompt you to do this when you publish. There’s a reason for this