 Okay, I will, because for you, a lot of this comes very naturally to you because probably from people from our generation we have, especially those people who have been on the internet throughout their life because for you, if you were part of discussion forums and those were in things in early 2000 or late 90s, that's where we got all our information from. You're making me feel old. Yeah. And the blogs were the best place to get. So I remember visiting middle stage and knowing everything about literature because Chandra Haas used to write that blog, Amit Verma used to write the same blog then he shifted to his uncut. And those were like the islands of you just wanted to go there and get maroon and get out of it and feel very good about it. Newsletter even then did not happen the way it is happening now. And because for us, it's like an easy transition. We have, it's like a blogging in a different form because giving links and remember like backlinks used to be so big if you would, and then you would give a shout out to other bloggers and you would have a list of people who you should read and so on so forth. But a lot of people like, if you remember a lot of people who were likely 10 years younger than me, for the first time when they came to the net, they only had Google sheets to work on. They only had Google presentations or email. They haven't ever accessed native clients. Now the same thing is happening with the newsletter. So we may also have to like, I would ask you questions because these guys who start a substack or who are going to start scroll stack for them, it's not newsletter actually it just like, Oh, there is an audience. There's a lot of influencers out there. There's a lot of audience which I can influence with my writing and I just need to write. So the question number one, which, which, and this is coming from a perspective of a very common layman person who wants to start who's interesting, who's interested in the newsletter and then he wants to think, Oh, what is the first thing which I should do? How should I scout because you had, you were reading Politico and then these guys shifted to Exios and then. So someone like you is always aware what you want to write and it just a matter of like sitting quietly for 20 minutes and then exactly know what you have to do. Now imagine if someone who wants to go to scroll stock, scroll stack or any other and wants to think of a topic and audience. What is the first step which you would suggest in terms of picking the audience and then thinking of a newsletter? What is the, what is your, what was your thinking process when you were doing political fix or daily fix or you subcontinental breakfast for that matter? Right. Yeah. So as to what you're saying earlier, it, it, yeah, for those who didn't grow up with the blogging world, it really, I didn't expand on this enough, but to me, the real space of book podcasting to some extent, although podcasts are harder to build and harder to grow in a certain way, but newsletters as well are a return to that form where it's a little more intimate. You're speaking a little more directly to your reader than you are on by writing posts that go up on Facebook or on a site or Twitter, which, which while a lot of people that we know on blogging basically moved to Twitter, it then became this really wild public space where you're not having engaging interesting conversations necessarily. But for those who are not familiar with that space, who like you said, came to the internet without seeing these, these wonderful little bubbles of interesting information where we built community and we spoke back to each other that that really felt intimate. I think that that is the word that I would suggest. Yeah, it can, it can be hard to look at the internet now and say, I can build a newsletter that that people will want to pay attention to. I think to the way it worked for me, of course, is a little different than it might be for someone who's not necessarily in the new space. But I think the, the ingredients are the same. Do you think there is a tremendous need or interest in the thing that you would like to see for me? It was like if, if the political fix already existed, somebody else was already doing it in a way that was useful, I would not have built it. Maybe I would have liked to write that sort of thing anyways, but part of the reason for wanting to build it was because I didn't see it out there in the space and I was interested in that sort of thing. And then, of course, this might be a bit hubristic or I'd be narcissistic, but I was like, there are probably other people out there like me who also are interested in the same sort of thing. So, so the first question is, would I read this, right? Is that, is there a compelling reason for me to put this product out? And, you know, the medium you can find based on that, I could have decided to turn it into a podcast. I could have turned it into a website itself. For various other things, as I said, we tried the Daily Fix as an article rather than a newsletter. So you find your medium, but specifically with, with newsletters, is it, would, is this something you would read? And can you think of a small community? It doesn't have to be large. That would be interested. And then the third, I think I would always say for that person who's thinking about starting a newsletter, she should think about what the objective is, is it that, you know, you just want to, you, you want a space for your writing? I absolutely think the newsletter space is sufficiently interesting right now and not so, you know, jump the shark, like I said, that, that you wouldn't be able to find a small community. It's almost operating like early to mid-blogging space at the moment, though it's, you know, jokes are already starting to surface that everyone has a newsletter now. But I think, I think it's still possible that if you think that you would read it, and that if you would read it, there's a small other community and, and you're clear on what you want out of it, that either you want, it's just a space for your writing, or you actually want to promote something about your career, your products, if it's something to do with your business or, you know, journalism. If you're clear in what it is that you expect out of it, I would put a few of these things as the first questions that you should answer before attempting to get into the space. Great. So when you started political fixancy, you also have the luxury of knowing your audience a little better than others because someone who is just starting out, I, I, I started with, because when I started this earlier, I would send you letters for the brand because I ran a marketing digital marketing agency. But when I started mine, the first 10 people were my friends and first 50 people were the friends of friends whom I had asked knowing that they, they can, and it was a street knife fight kind of a thing. Hey, do you want to read my newsletter? I'll send you the link or I'll include in the list. That was what I, I did, but coming because you were also at the same time, it was, it may also be difficult for you because you were accessing a huge number of audience. So though it seems usually easy that, hey, Rohan already has an audience, so his newsletter will already become one of the most read newsletters, but I'm sure that you would have diced the information, looked at the audience. How did you do it? Were there, were there surveys or you get some kind of data dumped to look at the kind of subscribers or readers you have, did scroll stacks, tech help you in any sort of way? So that would be interesting to know. You don't have to like diverse exact numbers or something, but how did you get to know the hang, how did you get the hang of the audience which you were wanting to reach out to other than the assumption you had? Yeah, good question. No scroll stack was being and is developed completely separately to scroll itself. And so I wasn't working with that at all. To me, like for example, one of it, one thing that I decided was that I would take a big subject that is popular for a certain amount of time. So the elections last year as a test balloon, right? This is something that people are going to pay attention to and there's an opportunity to grab people's attention. So otherwise your difficulty often is like you said, you either have to force people to read something, you have to really push hard to get them initially and then maybe that ball will start rolling. But I thought instead of taking fully that chance, why not take something big and do a pop up newsletter, essentially three months? I know I'm doing this, but if it's unsustainable and my assumptions are not panning out, then, you know, we abandon it or we change form accordingly. So one of it was the idea that it's attached to something specific that gives people a reason to even check it out in the first place. I had a Google form out there pretty early, initially just sent it to friends saying like, what it is that you would like to do or to see in terms of election coverage, what do you want us to do at scroll? And initially it was not even newsletter specific. It was like, what kind of reporting is well? What kinds of things are you missing from your media diet? And this was to friends initially. Then I put it on Twitter and asked other people to spread it around sent it to a bunch of students, I know, because I do some recruiting for scroll and said, OK, what are you guys, you know, journalists and students, like you find few places based on that idea of like, who's going to read this? I know an audience. I don't know. I'm saying I got the survey out to 200 people, not a huge number of people. But even that is is as you see people starting to say the same sorts of things, you get a sense of what they want. At the same time, what I found very interesting is that, of course, people might say something and then what they actually do with the newsletter is very different. So I was I had a very link heavy newsletter early on, and I moved more and more to full consumption inside the inbox without having to click through the link. Even if I had a link in early on, I would say, oh, read this great piece written by so and so writer from this place. And I wouldn't say anything more about it towards the end of my process. I started to realize people want that sense of completion within the inbox. And so any time I include a link now, I try and describe what's within it. So you might still want to click through. But if you've only read the newsletter and haven't clicked through, you still have a sense of what's going on. And that's something I got to know from actually paying attention to how people read because in service, they would say we want lots of links. We love them, but actually the way people were responding to and then, but when I when I moved to a very analysis heavy thing, people are saying we're missing the links. So what ultimately happened now with political fixes, that's why I do a Monday one, which is analysis and a Friday one leading into the weekend where people can collect a few more interesting links and click through to them over the weekend. But yeah, so the process is very is is a lot of trial and error. Ultimately, it's taking some assumptions, maybe giving yourself a high percentage shot, right? Like if I had not started around the elections, I would have had a harder time. But elections are a great time or take any big event in that sense or something that you think will work and say, even just the start of the year saying, like I'm going to start something new, like it might be a way to get people to pay attention and more likely to get that little click, even an answering a survey that could lead you to better informed decisions about how to make something. I think I also actually emailing people and asking them. I don't do too much and I don't know if other people might tell me what they think. I don't I don't tend to email people when they unsubscribe, because sometimes I find that a bit either creepy or a little, you know, and my newsletters. I think for super intimate newsletters, it makes sense doing that, but people who do subscribe and send in letters or responses, I say thank you for kind words. But then I always ask them, what else do you think we could do? What is it that you like about the newsletter, etc. So having that direct line of communication is what reminds me of blogging and also that is is crucial to keeping that sense of like this is an always an experiment, we're always playing around with what we're doing and seeing whether people like it or not. You're absolutely right. It's we had a huge audience on scroll. My audience on the newsletter is actually tiny compared to the scroll audience. And yet, in some ways, I like it in a very different way because scroll does not speak from the first person. My newsletter is from the first person. It is a more direct connection to me rather than to the news organization in a way. And and that again, it reminds me of those those great days when you're building community in a relatively smaller space. Yeah. So I mean, Financial Times has great legacy of like sending newsletters like rec and all and people read that and they have a huge following. And the very particular voice. So when you when you started this and when you did the so one of the funny things which I remember about doing these pilots, someone wrote on the Twitter that pilots never fail, but they never scale. So so I my question is coming from that point of your pilot work. It was around elections. It worked for you. So two things. One, how did it is are there any numbers which you can share? Is it in thousands and lakhs of subscribers which you reach out to and how did the growth? How did it happen over the period of time? Was there a lot of period and then there were spurts of growth because elections. But then the current government has never given you a chance not to be interested in politics ever. So has it been a exponential growth? And we expect another four years of exponential growth and then something like that. But ideas and do you categorize your audience? Like, do you have some personas in your mind that oh, one audience is like this, one audience group is like this and the other one is like this? Right. So a bunch of things there. I would say, yeah, that's an interesting point about pilots and scaling. Of course, maybe my experience is not comparable to many others because I have this huge advantage of a giant funnel at scroll. So for about six months, we didn't advertise the newsletter on scroll.in at all. It was basically just pushing it out on Twitter and the articles that were going up. And, you know, I was in the thousand space at that point. And we're still in the in the large thousands, honestly, on the newsletter with, you know, something like 35 to 40 percent of people opening every week, which is pretty high for a for a new space where about 17 is 17 percent of an open rate is average. Part of it is the question of a match between how big you want to be and how big you can be. Right. I might want to be to me, this is a 20, 30,000 newsletter, maybe a 50,000 at most. If I spend a lot of money really to acquire an audience because it's it's a bit geeky. It's a bit policy heavy. There's there's a bit of insidery stuff, which is something that I wanted to do. And for me, it was easier to make that decision to not have it be a hundred thousand or one like two like three like newsletter, which, of course, is not something that has happened in India yet, let's say, but also not even able to do that because we already have scroll and an article is always going to get read much more than a newsletter. So the aim for me was to have this be a more dedicated community that paid attention to what we were doing instead of trying to surf in a sea of wave or anything like that. And to eventually, if possible, monetize it or use that community to get them to subscribe to scroll or things like that. So for me, the objective was also pretty clear that I'm not trying to get to a massive audience because we have the massive audience. I'm trying to build a more dedicated community that is that's find value in my voice. Growth is pretty steady in part because we now advertise on on scroll. So really, it is about the funnel because if you're not able to get people to even figure out what this is, you know, it is going to be hard for you to spread. You'll spread in the twos and the threes and the tens and 20s initially. And that goes up to the hundreds, two hundreds when you're able to either advertise a little bit or find some form of circulation. One big thing I suggest to everyone is what we used to do back in the day with blog roles, which is basically if there are fellow folks who are doing interesting things, you do crossovers, right? You you cross post for them and you post on your own or you you guest post things like that, but you're basically giving their audience a chance to reach you and your audience a chance to reach them. That sort of thing for the political fix, constant iteration in looking at this scroll quite honestly, didn't have a clear newsletter aim because we're a really small news organization. And again, the first the first idea is always the site of building that and making sure it's it's sustainable. To me, this was more of a pet project that I wanted to see and and pull off entirely and pilot myself. I do think we could acquire a lot more users. If you know, people do that through, you know, paid acquisitions. People do that through Morning Brew style referral programs, giving people incentives to sign up and things. To me, it's mostly been organic plus recirculation on scroll.in. I would expect it to continue growing. We do see bumps at December. Very few people were reading lots of people on holiday, etc. And so it made me start to think of actually, let me take that into into mind and give January, let a bunch of early issues in January be recapped. So what happened in December? Look forward to the ways of getting people interested in it again. And then again, you start seeing that that graph climb quite a bit. You're right. This government, we've, you know, since the election fix, we've had what happened in Kashmir. We have had this NRCC, we've had riots in Delhi. And then we've had COVID and the lockdown and the migrant crisis. So in terms of interest, I have been, I don't know, lucky is not the right word for all of these awful things. But, you know, there hasn't been no lack of interest. And so that growth is also steady. I have focused a little more on who I want to pay attention to because I don't want to do lay political commentary. A big part of, for me, the political fix is indexing politics and policy. So a lot of what I'm trying to do is take something that is very political or newsy and give people a sense of the underlying depth in terms of policy by pulling in research, pulling in academics, talking about what is underlying that subject. And so I know it's going to be geeky and not go over a certain point. But that might be a super valuable audience, you know, a bunch of academics or people in think tanks are in government basically paying attention to this. To me, that's almost a more valuable audience than having one lack of people who occasionally click this open to see what's going on. They, you know, like I said, the Times of India has six or seven people on a daily newsletter that does a great job. And I'm never going to be able to compete with that. So I also find my niche and try and stick and develop that community really well. Great. So when you decided that this is my objective and this is the audience I want to get to, and I'll have a steady growth. Are there a couple of examples of a particular newsletter which really stood out for you or was that the moment that something clicked in your head and said, oh, wow, this is what I want to continue more or particular topic which is that, oh, I just discovered this because I came across this feedback. So a couple of examples which were like the aha moment for you. Right. Because writing a newsletter is a very dreary thing. You keep doing it like week after week or twice a week at times. It's just not as enjoyable as people think it is. But then there are those moments of very silent achievements which you count for yourself. Oh, I got this. Now I should do this. Couple of examples which really stood out for you. So I'll take you back a little bit on this. Early on with both the election fix and the political fix, I had a colleague, Nitya, who made these amazing illustrations. I can't show you the, my favorite one is Modi as a Superman and bullets of criticism of him bouncing off. But I bring this up to point out that one of the things was that was entirely extraneous to me, but might be important for people paying attention is that the imagery really matters, either picking great photos, finding ways to get people like no matter how good your writing is, you know, if it's the first time you're getting people to pay attention. Like, of course, you can go back to the political newsletter and like it's completely dry, it's gray. It's meant to be read on the phone and super easy and short. That works for political because that's what they are. But I would say for anyone who's looking to venture into the space, your newsletter has to look good. I had the privilege of having a great illustrator, a colleague who was able to make these fun illustrations and things like that. But even now, she no longer works with us. And I just spend a little bit of time on a free Photoshop alternative, honestly, to churn out not really illustrations, but produced photographs that go with the political fix, that try and tell a story a little bit. And I could say, aside from, you know, aha moments or things, I know people have responded to me saying that they saw it or they paid attention because of the photo or the illustration. So it's invaluable, making sure that you find a way for people to hook into your product. And this is, I mean, after six years of helping helm a digital outfit, I mean, I can tell you this is standard for digital products in general, right? My very macabre illustration of this is that it's a, you're a lifeguard and there's a sea of people out there who are all drowning. So which one are you going to pick? And the one who's able to get your attention first is that, right? Like that's what you're trying to do on Facebook or Twitter if that's where you're sharing or on Google News. And so having a good headline and a really nice image matters ultimately, at least early on, as you're trying to get people to pay attention. I find, what I found early on, I interviewed a couple of people not knowing whether folks would pay attention. And immediately, I mean, part of the thing, like I said, is that the political fix is coming from my voice. It has first person in it, although we don't like to use the I much in scrolls copy or even in the political fix, but you know it's coming from me, it's a little more conversational and chatty. And I got more comfortable with that over the course of the newsletter compared to my sort of reporters or editors voice. And you can do that easiest when you're talking to someone. And so we interviewed someone. In fact, I did my first interview at in August of Constantine Xavier who's a think tank scholar after the audience wrote in, somebody wrote in saying, this is someone I think you should be talking to. And I really enjoyed that sort of thing. So when I just had my first couple of Q&As which were based off books that were coming out, I started asking people who they would like to hear from. And I started getting a lot of response. And it really surprised me early on when I asked for responses on like, what do you think about this subject? What do you make of this thing that's happening in the world? Very few people were actually responding. But when I asked maybe a more simpler thing like, who else would you like to hear from? I got a lot of responses. And I think, again, centering people at the core of your stories or what you're talking about, like fellow, whether it's colleagues, you're the subjects of what you're writing about, always making sure the stories about humans that tends to work a lot. And I would have to think about, like I said, for better or worse, it's been an extremely newsy year. And so each one of those things has given us a pretty good bump. A part of it is also that the Indian media space is shrinking to some extent and people able to say certain things like, we're able to write, I think, intelligently about the protests that happened last year or about the riots. And that really gave us a lot of interest. But in between, in January, like I said, when I saw this dip in December, I decided, okay, let me talk to the rest of my team and get each person in my team to send in a prediction for what they think, not 2020, but the decade of 2020 going forward will be for the new space and politics in India. And just getting these voices, actually a lot of people loved that piece, which was not my voice at all. So take what your mileage may vary on that that they really enjoyed other voices there. But I got a lot of great feedback from having a bunch of different people. And so you don't need your own team to do this, right? You can ask friends and things like that and get other voices into your space. Mixing up formats, I find works really well. Of course, one is testing out formats to see which ones people like week on week, but then also mixing up occasionally having a list of occasionally pulling an outside voice, occasionally doing a more graphical thing. I think is really what keeps people paying attention. And those are the ones that I found have got the best response. So now do you have a style guide, a Vegas style guide of sorts in your head? Or do you have a lens like I was listening to Rafat, who is founder of Skift, a travel platform. And he in fact built his first entire company on a blogging platform. And so he suggests and a couple of other people also suggest that, oh, like people from DigiDay they suggest, oh, I have a lens. So Rafat's lens is marketing strategy and technology. So anything which is happening in the field of travel, he will filter it through these three lenses for the larger audience. Do you have, and obviously there are style guides. Like I, when I think of a newsletter, I'm constantly thinking of like very basic thing that one part of it should inform, one part of it should educate, one part of it should connect my readers with other readers like they should identify. And the last is help them grow their businesses because I'm writing a business newsletter. And my lens is largely industry, businesses, industry and economy. Any issue anywhere in the world impacting these three small businesses in these three realm, I have to write about it. So do you also have a Vegas? It does not have to be like very formal. I mean, like Economist has a very formal style guide. This is how you will use. These are the headings which you will use. Bloomberg has a lead. This is how you have to like write the first paragraph. Do you have some rules, rule book or have you come up with something? Or do you just naturally just write something? So scroll has a style guide for the website. And so a lot of the stuff like, and some of it is key in what I said early on, which is that we try to assume that nobody has previous knowledge, right? I can't just introduce even something as common as CBI or AIADMK, we used to fight with our editor all the time having to actually say all India, Anna, Dravid and Munitra Karagam for every, like it's a lot of space. But the idea is to not assume that your reader knows what you're talking about. So even if you put that whole thing, you also put a comma and say, you know, one of the big political parties in Tamil Nadu in the south of India, et cetera. Some of my readership is quite international. I have a lot of academics who use my newsletter to pay attention to me in the States. And so I keep that dictum of always making sure that it's accessible. So while the full scroll style guide doesn't always apply to the political fix because I speak more within an authorial voice rather than a brand voice, the simple suggestion that was given to me back in journalism school in America and I find this, this is the way I write, which is, is it an interesting story? Imagine telling your mom this at the breakfast table. Now, the reason why the breakfast table is that there's lots of other things competing for your interest in the morning. And so this has to be interesting enough. But why your mom? Because you're not going to throw in swear words. You're not going to be profane. You're going to keep it interesting enough. You're not going to assume she knows the youth lingo and it makes me sound old to say the word youth lingo. But the idea is that for me, writing is best unless you have a very specific style and a writerly style is best when it sounds like you're telling someone an interesting story. So in the back of my head, my style guide is like if I said this out loud and somebody was sitting in front of me, is it going to be interesting? Have I kept them hooked? Of course, some things you change to make sure it's interesting on the page. But that's the base style, right? In terms of formatting, like I said, I've kept trying to alter that. I learned to not put in links that are, like in the early days of blogging, you would have this thing where you'd, it would almost be like a Simpsons episode where you'd put in a link that's really a joke, but you have to click it to get that joke. And over time, I was like, I can't do that because people are not clicking. And so it's almost wasted space, although we have unlimited space. So I learned to keep everything within the inbox and then keep a very specific space, which is my linking out space where I tell people, like if you enjoy the links, you come to that section, but everything else you should be able to read within the inbox. In terms of a lens, the political fix is quite clear. We keep you informed. So anything, it's not meant to be comprehensive. You're not going to be on top of everything that's happening in India from week to week. For that, you do daily newsletters, right? Like you go to something like the Time Stop 10 or there's a couple of new ones. I'm forgetting the names now. Alex Michoudry has just started a new one. That's pretty good. There's the- Splainer. Splainer, that's right, yeah. And there's a few other ones that do that really well. Or you could just, or you could read Scroll Not In, right? The website is pretty comprehensive, but what I'm trying to do here is to give you analysis of what we think is the most interesting or important topic. I'm not always picking like for about three months, the most interesting thing was COVID. So I wasn't doing COVID every week, but maybe finding an interesting aspect. And some of this, because scroll is so small, some of this is not just the DNA of the political fix. It's also the DNA of Scroll Not In, which is that I'm interested in federal subjects. I'm interested in things that question the relationship between the citizen and the government. I'm interesting in how politics interact with policy. So not, I don't find useful the regular chatter on evening back and forth between a spokesperson of this side and that side, but more importantly, okay, the migrant crisis is huge. What data can I pull out to give you a deeper understanding? So for me, the lens is partly I have to inform you. Like I can't pick the random thing that is interesting me this week. It has to to some extent be the thing that's topical or interesting and it has to be accessible. So even if I'm writing about the complex issue of GST compensation, which I think is fascinating, you probably don't, you know, I have to make sure it's accessible. I find a frame and analogy, something interesting that introduces you to that subject. And the final thing is I try and get some depth. So to me, like find, use basically use news as a way to get your attention and then divert that. Like it's almost a sleight of hand. Divert you to reading about more boring geeky, but more important, you know, policy stuff. Great. And I mean, just like just final three questions. You can take as much time as you want or as less as. In fact, there are like four things. One, we want to know a bit about the tech part of what you use. Do you use off the shelf tech solution or how did you start or you had your team building it for you? Like how do you access those analytics? Where do you get those numbers from? Is there a, so you don't have to disclose. Exactly, but some part of it. Then is there a plan in your plan that you access social media in a particular way to spread the growth or increase the growth of your audience and then we also want to know we also want to know one book which you want to, which won't, I mean, this is a very difficult thing for a journalist to say or just read this one book and this will help you. But think of like someone who is starting out and wants to like brush up on writing or brush up on understanding something. Like one book, I will not name that book now. Maybe if I name that, maybe you want to say about the same book. And lastly, when I started reading when I started following you on Twitter in the early days, earlier days when probably you came to India whenever you used to tweet a lot about music. I remember happening in Delhi, classical music if I'm wrong, if I'm not right. There was Delhi events and there was Rohan's Twitter feed which would tell, hey, this classical music performance is taking place there. So yeah, so that last bit, do you also like put that bit of personality into a newsletter or not once in a while? So these are like, yeah. I'm gonna go back to the resources one here only because I would say for those who are like are super interested in this stuff, all of these places. I'll flag Dan Oshinsky for example here. Dan ran the newsletters for the New Yorker for a little while. He's working somewhere else at the moment. I can't remember where, but he runs a monthly Google document with a bunch of resources and interesting things about newsletters and he will respond to your email extremely promptly no matter how big like his work is. He does actually consultancy for newsletters as well. So like he, I think it's his business as well, but he's extremely prompt in replying to things and he's got great collections of newsletters and it's called not a newsletter because he puts it out on a Google Doc. It's about newsletters, but it's a collaborative Google Doc that comes every month and I would highly recommend that for all questions about tech, about analytics, about funnels and how to convert and so on. But specific to scroll honestly, because our core thinking at the end of the day is on the site, we're focusing on that and really the newsletter is something that scroll stack was being built and it's built outside. It's not part of scrolling in that sense and it's being built outside and it has lots of fascinating things that would be relevant here, but Ritesh will talk about those next week. But for me, we started off on MailChimp using simple analytics. I of course have the Google Analytics of scroll.in and I know where my readership is and I can look over that cross section a little bit. We also have subscribers and contributors on scroll.in and many of those are newsletter readers. The political fix is not our only newsletter for a while, we ran a newsletter for our magazine section, for also for our sports section and we had a very popular one called Books and Ideas run by Arunava Sinha who is the best Bengali translator and really it's incredible to me how much work he gets done because he works at scroll and also teaches at Ashoka and also trunklets books. So we had a bunch of these things and we had we were basically using MailChimp when Substack showed up sort of independently. I was interested in it simply for people who are paying attention or interested in this, Substack is free, right? Until you're trying to monetize it relative to MailChimp where beyond a certain point an audience you need to pay for, Substack at the moment and who knows if this is scalable whether they'll keep this forever but Substack if you're not charging people for it is completely free no matter how big your list is which is a useful thing. I honestly don't know what the specifics are for scroll stacks and you'll have to ask Ritesh about that. Yes, yes, yes. But yeah, so that's the simple tech reason. I pay attention to the simplest analytics. I'm not very complex on this front. I look at the open rate which I think is important. To be fair MailChimp had better ones than Substack did MailChimp would give me a sense of people whether people are repeat openers where they're coming from and so on Substack is much more simple in just telling me how many people are opening week to week and I would have to look more specifically to see if it's the same people opening week to week. So it's not as complex in its analytics but I think it does the job for anyone who's starting out. And beyond that I honestly rely a lot more on direct feedback and I try and keep, it's not on every newsletter and I haven't done it well for the last few months but usually I try to keep a Google form open with three or four questions in an open space in the newsletter at all times so that anyone who wants to give me feedback at any given moment is able to click through and just tell me what they think and it has genuinely informed how I have changed formats, tried different things on the site. I think that covers like all of these things here I have read through all of them and they really are full of great stuff. I mean understanding a funnel, trying to figure out how to keep loyalty. For anyone who's interested in the news game, one of the big struggles for journalism organizations over the last decade has been to get readers to pay directly for news and what has become conventional wisdom now is that simply the best way of getting people to subscribe by paying money to a news organization is if they're accessing you through email because email is a little more intimate, it's a little more relevant to you than maybe finding someone on Facebook, Twitter or going directly to the site. So lists have become extremely important for news organizations as ways of just databases for which to convert subscribers and so newsletters are crucial that way and growing them is extremely important. As regards the book, was the question a book that you think is specific for writing specific to newsletters? I don't think I have something. Not for the newsletter, yeah, for writing. Yeah, for any book which comes for the audience like you're talking about or who wants to do newsletters and have some idea because it will include a bit of writing, a bit of planning with our understanding how this, basically it's journalism in a different form and people like me, like I'm not a journalist. So when I picked up William Zincer's on writing style that helped me a lot because he kind of took up, so I was always very conscious about my grammar that I'm always wrong, my pronunciation is not right. But then he said, no, that's not, you have to worry about less, you don't have to worry about everything, just focus on these four things. So that kind of helped me. Yeah, sure. So I'll just take you back to these suggestions which are the newsletters that I really love strategy. I think there's a really good job of it and money stuff just to get a sense of, and Vox Sentences is a great newsletter that's link-based basically, it's explaining the news. The book I'll pull out, I haven't read this in a long time but I remember it being extremely influential for me which is Stephen King's on writing. Stephen King is the horror writer, right? He's not someone who I think of as being classically a high art in that sense. And I believe he wrote this book which is part memoir, part guide to writing. Soon after he had his famous accident in the main way, it was a life-threatening accident. I read it a long time ago, maybe a decade ago but it stuck with me because it was both extremely interesting as a memoir but also really a good guide. It made you want to start writing immediately after you're done with it. He doesn't mystify the process, he doesn't make it seem like this magical thing that just emerges from your brain. He talks about it as more like methodical. You have to get to it every day. These are some clever ways of putting your words onto paper and cleaning them up afterwards. It's not necessarily good for digital or good for newsletters or good, but it's good writing tips and a very readable book. So Stephen King's on writing, I would suggest that. Perhaps it's only a book they haven't made a movie about. I'm sure they'll documentarize it. Was there something at the very end? Yes, one question. I asked that, you had already covered that in the answers. A bit about music, why not a newsletter, a sub-stack or a scroll stack because that would be sacrilege when I say sub-stack to you guys. Why not a music newsletter from you, someone who can like, I started reading but then I've been listening to classical music and Delhi events is a very messy place to go and find out what's happening. Sadly, it's really, I have a random book suggestion there for you if you're interested. It's called Ragan Josh by Shila Dhaar, this beautiful book about music in Delhi in which I believe Bade Ghulam Ali Khan refuses to go to the AIR studio because he's afraid if he sings to a recording studio, it'll take his voice out and he'll never get it back. Beautiful book. My answer is if you could kindly ask the news cycle to quieten down a bit, I'd be happy to do that sort of thing but it's been a bit relentless since the elections. We have not had a little moment of quiet on that front. There was a time in my life that I thought I would be a pop culture writer and not someone into hard politics or news and I really enjoy even maybe bridging that space between what is popular on Twitter but also finding classical, getting people interested in those kinds of things. So it fascinates me but honestly, it's purely a function of time at the moment. I mean, also over the last year, I saw the first episode of this thing called Bandish Bandits on Amazon which is about classical music and the first episode was really bad in my opinion but I still sat through the concert at the end of it and I was just like, it's been so long since I've heard live music and it's something I really miss but yeah, there's not been much time. Honestly, that's the only way but I like Twitter and Instagram which I have as private as these spaces where I can be online without always having to be on top of the news although I don't do it as much out like from my side on Twitter. I have a lot of people that I follow who are into random things like birding and dinosaurs and music that are interesting to me but they're not necessarily part of my work or my day to day. The other side of it is that when your day job I guess is writing and thinking of these things, it's hard to have a side gig that's also writing. I much prefer now like so while I would love to do something on the side about music or something else, I think I would attempt to take the tabla up again at some point or something to that effect rather than another thing that involves writing. Oh yes, maybe I don't know. Like releasing a list or two about, because I follow coffee very closely and then there are roasters who release their music and their playlists once in a while and then their take is totally different than what I usually listen to. And then I really feel that there should be some like Music Room was a book which kind of told stories like Kulam Ali Won Singh and unless he ate kebabs because he said that that's what my voice comes from and so on so forth. I wish that part is also kind of, I mean people like you and I who have other interests should also do something about it. Just have a word with the powers that be to quieten down the news cycle and be happy to. Great, so that's pretty much Samsa part today's session and it was a great session. I really love talking with you. There are some great tips I will share in a summary and I will also share the summary with you and the audience. Zainab, I think we are done with the today's session. Thanks again for joining. Yes, and you might want to just put a plug again for next week's session, which is again. Yes, oh I'm sorry about it. So next week we have Ritesh who is one of the founders of Scrollstack, which people at times call Substack for India, but it has solved the solution such as earning money by using, by writing and doing creative stuff. You can write it pretty much anything and then ask money from the audience. Next week we'll discuss the tech part of it in terms of how we can create content, how we can earn money. That's next year we'll put it out on social media and more details will go out as we do that. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks Rohan. It was great talking to you.