Potential new newsletter formats

[ivanagas]

A Q1 goal of ours is: Test a new format that can potentially help us publish more regularly.

Requirements:

• Same complexity or easier than existing newsletters.
• Maintains PostHog vibes.
• High-quality content readers actually like.

Success:

• 40% open rate.
• Similar engagement to past 5 newsletters
• Low unsubscribers

Podcasts are being worked on which many newsletters use to boost posts, could lead to interviews down the line as well (so not including those here).

Potential formats:

Looking at a bunch of different newsletters, the vast majority of posts are “normal” ones like we are doing. It’s tough to find post type that fits out requirement for less work (hopefully we’d have picked the low hanging fruit if it existed).

Also, thinking more about it, it is sort of a bad sign that we never shipped a different format when James was here. I remember this was one of the first things we talked about together.

Some options that could work as alternate formats:

Best of roundups.

Although we are past 2024, we could do one for 50k or 2 years of Product for Engineers (March 8th). This roundup LinkedIn post of mine did pretty well.

Examples:

• https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-best-of-lennys-newsletter2024
• https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/wrapped-the-pragmatic-engineer-in
• https://refactoring.fm/p/the-best-of-refactoring-in-2024

Topic roundup

Combine multiple articles about a given subject into a post. Could be a combination of ours and others. Could also include good reads from our internal Slack + some commentary, books people have read recently.

Examples:

• https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/p/5-frameworks-to-master-communication-and-influence
• Refactoring’s Monday ideas: https://refactoring.fm/p/testing-in-prod-engineering-balance
• https://www.latent.space/p/2025-papers

Ideas:

• Product frameworks you need to know
• Your guide to becoming a successful product engineer. How to become a successful product engineer in 2025.
• Your guide to finding product market fit

Other format ideas:

These are ideas I’m not as keen on, but just throwing them out there for the record and in case others are.

Surveying our team, product engineers, founders

Lenny does this a lot, along with market research like salaries, investors, etc. Really, this relies on a data source. We do have a data source in our team and users.

The problem is I feel like we are bothering people by doing this and that their attention is best spent elsewhere. Getting responses is inconsistent, could use in-app surveys but worried about being intrusive.

We could ask our team questions like “What you’re career journey is like” but I feel that if they aren’t fully motivated to participate, they just won’t. They also are busy building.

Guest posts

A significant number of Lenny, Jordan, and other newsletters rely on guests to write newsletters with them.

No one has (seriously) reached out to us about this. I would also bet that bringing it up to the quality we expect would be a lot of work.

News posts

Some newsletters, like Pragmatic Engineer, post commentary about news.

Looking at popular tech news newsletters like Newcomer and Clouded Judgement, they get significantly less engagement than our average posts. They rely on publishing more often to make up for that. This would need to be a consistent thing rather than a one off, so that the audience is expecting it.

I also feel like we’re not so good at keeping up with whatever the coolest, latest tech trend or story is. I remember we were talking about writing something around Founder Mode but never went in on it.

[daniloc]

Product frameworks you need to know

This leads me to my favorite thing to write: product reviews.

It would be a straightforward thing to have a review of a specific developer product/tool/service/whatever. What we like, why we like it. This would be amenable to a consistent format, and the value created is about the insight, less than the prose, so this could turn around quickly to the point where we could have several in the hopper within weeks.

Good, reliable tentpole we could build around, perhaps?