 Welcome to today's edition of content web at content web. We talk about content publishing web design and then web development. I'm your host Abhishek Rai. I'm the founder of the shack. It's a community for indie businesses and rebel entrepreneurs. I've been sending a weekly newsletter for past two and a half years. But today's focus is someone else's newsletter and we will talk about the content strategy of newsletters. If you remember in 2000s, blogging was a rage. Everyone from institutions to corporates to individuals, they were publishing their blogs to connect with the audience and the community. In the same way newsletters are the rage today. They are the buzz. They have that. They have the same buzz today. There are thousands of thousands of newsletters which are being published using free and paid platforms such as MailChimp and Substack. But an impactful newsletter for the newsletter to be impactful. It has to have a proper content strategy. It should engage the audience and it should give the clear outcomes for the publisher and the reader. So today's session will be in two parts. The first session will be for 15 minutes. We have our today's guest is Pranay. He heads research at Takshila Institution. He has been publishing a newsletter which is called Anticipating the Unintended. He has already sent more than 15 newsletters. So he will be sharing his journey in the first part, which is for 10-15 minutes. How the idea came about and how he engages his audience and what are the core tenets of his newsletter, which he adheres to for every week, twice a week, which they sent. In the second part of the session, which will be for 30-45 minutes, I'll be exploring the content strategy with Pranay. At the same time, towards the end, you can also ask questions in Q&A box above at Zoom or at the same time, you can also ask questions if it fits the flow of the session. You can ask it directly or we can wait towards the end of the session to discuss more points. This is how the today's session will go. Let's start the session. Over to you, Pranay. Let's start the presentation. All right. My presentation is visible to all right. Yes. Okay. I'll get started. Hi, everyone. I'm Pranay. I head research at Takshashira Institution and for the last seven, eight months, I've been working co-writing on a newsletter called Anticipating the Unintended. So I'm going to talk about that. My aim was just to share my experiences building this newsletter and just so that it might help someone who was at the margin and thinking of starting one on their own. So I'm not an expert, but I'm trying to share my experiences based on what I have done and what I have worked with my co-writer over the last seven or eight months. So that's what I'm going to share in my 15 minutes. All right. So before I get started, just so that you have an idea, this is about the newsletter. So started back in October last year and currently we are two of us who write twice a week. On the weekend, we have a review section and on the weekdays midweek, we write an essay on public policy. So the entire name as you can see, it's about trying to anticipate some of the unintended consequences of public policies that happen. And as you can imagine, Indian governments give us a lot of chance to do this. There are a lot of policies happening every week and there are a lot of those policies which have unintended consequences. So our whole aim was to try and educate about public policy, try to tell this to people that you can anticipate things which go awry in public policies even before they are put in place. So that was the aim. So we started in October 2009. After that, we had around 2000 plus organic subscribers. Currently, we don't have a paid version, not thought of going paid completely yet. But that's how that's a community we've built up till now. And the content as the last line says, we have a mix of essays. We have definite sections in our review, which happens on weekends. So one is, for example, policy WTFs where we discuss some egregious policies every week. So that brings in some humor, things which people would like to know and they will find it surprising. Then we have frameworks in public policy where we try to give one framework a week, which helps people think about policy making in general. Then we have sections on India policy watch and foreign policy. We have areas that both of us are interested in and that's why we structured it. So that's about our newsletter and it's on Substack. So the second thing I just wanted to talk about why a newsletter, mainly because I'm sure a lot of you must be already doing writing and you would wonder why should I do a newsletter. So I thought I'll just put down a few points which might help you make that decision. The first thing that I realized and these are all points based on my own experience. So it's not about what others would have in mind, but this was something that I had thought when I was trying to think of creating a newsletter. So one idea that I had was there is a lot of abundance on the internet. There is audience for virtually everything online. But there is so much information that the act of curation itself becomes valuable. So I thought if I could curate a lot of things related to public policies, maybe it will be useful for someone, at least a small section of people if not the whole world. So that was my idea initially to start off that why not curate important things and let's see if people find it interesting. The second thing why a newsletter is yes, if there is an ability to monetize on newsletters easily, especially on platforms such as Goast and Substack. So that was the idea. We've not yet monetized, but we just enjoy it. So that's why we do this and it helps build a brand. So the newsletter gets tagged to the people who are writing and because you are writing consistently week on week. It really I think helps build a brand. It helps people associate you with a product that they can go back and look at. Then third one is this is a personal thing. When I started, I already used to read a lot of public policy things here and there. But I thought I wanted to structure it so that I go back to that reading week on week and I go back to writing on that week on week. So that was some personal goal that I had set and that I thought starting a newsletter will push me towards that goal even more. So that was the third reason and then off late platforms such as Goast and Substack have made newsletter creation really easy. Even for the podcast integration is really good in some of these. So that helps. I know Abhishek writes a newsletter on MailChimp but I always found MailChimp very distant for me and especially the interface becomes really challenging. The fonts go or I and all that but with Substack, I found that capability was quite limited but it worked for the content that we were writing which is primarily text and some images here and there. And podcast links that we just import just embed a link or to Spotify or to SoundCloud from there. So that sort of was our aim and Substack did the job for us. The next one was yeah, this was a personal thing that I found and email subscriber, the connect you have with an email subscriber is much, much deeper than someone following you on social media. Because I somehow feel email is sort of a sacred space. You don't want people, everyone to let you access to that email ID and they are willing to hear you week on week. I think that connect is really solid but you can build communities around that. So we get some really good feedback on email because of the email subscriber and we realize our open rates are quite high at least around 40-45% consistently. So I thought that email connect helps on social media following 1000 people but you are not going to subscribe to 1000 newsletters. So you have a smaller set of people whom you want to listen to week on week so that email subscriber link was sort of more personal and I find it more cherishing if someone, one additional subscriber we get on our newsletter. The next one is just some random thought this before starting when I was seeing a lot of newsletters coming in. This relates to what Abhishek began with that newsletter is a new blog is how I was also a new open and podcast is sort of a new open and unfortunately after Google Reader, that email has now effectively become your RSS feed reader. So that was the thing in my mind that I primarily use one email ID just for reading all my newsletters. So that's how I began with and I thought maybe we can start a newsletter and see email is a way to reach people. I used to do blogging earlier but again the issue with blogging is it's very difficult for someone to expect someone to go and reach your blog week on week and because there are so many things they can access. So if you have an email subscription, I think you will be able to get more views is how I thought about it. So this was my experience why a newsletter. The next section that I just want to talk about is what should I write on ensure some of you might have those questions as well what are the kinds of things you would want to write on. So these are some things again based on my experience one if you want to if you are new to newsletters and just start with something you already read a lot on. So it really helps if you have a really wide reading on a particular subject and you just want to tell the story you don't need to bother about whether there will be an audience for this or not because I'm sure if you read it. There are 10,000 other people at least who will also be interested in that. That was what I thought I was already reading a lot of public policy I do teaching in that so I thought let me use this opportunity to tell some of the things that I've been teaching and reading. Second one was something that you are passionate about and even if it seems quite obscure no worries try and start if the newsletter works it works if it fails you can move on to another newsletter. So that was my idea. The third one is something that you want to write and read about consistently as I said I wanted to read structure my reading on public policy and structure my writing. So that was sort of an additional motivation to get started with the newsletter. So that is another thing that you would want if you are thinking of starting a newsletter you might consider that. The fourth point is I often get this that what do I write on what are the topics that I can write on. So I just had a simple two by two matrix on the right side. So the way you can think about it is one is domains and one is discipline. So domain just means something that you have a deep mastery on something that you have you know you know in and out of that. So in public policy space for example public health and foreign policy education policy the technology policy are some domains which people are experts in. So there are a lot of people who have done great national education policy since when it came out and all the education policies and they depend on site. So there are a lot of people who have that domain expertise and they can easily start newsletters in that. I'm sure you would have also come across blogs which deep dive into a domain and there are really good public health blogs as well. But my idea behind this newsletter was the other axis which is the discipline part. So discipline basically means areas from which which give you essential tools that can be applied across all public policies. So I thought because I teach fundamentals of public policy ideas of economic reasoning ideas of public policy ideas of sociology social psychology are some tools that I have learned. And I thought they apply to all the domains that are there in public policy. So I thought let me start a newsletter on this discipline of public policy rather than deep diving into one domain like education or public health etc. Because there were I didn't have any comparative advantage in that and there were enough other people who are already doing that. But there was no other newsletter that I found which talked about public policy discipline as a general thing that can be applied. So that's what my thinking was behind starting this. So I think if you want to consider you can think about starting in a domain or about the discipline that might apply across the sectors that you work on. So that was my presentation on what should I write on. The next one is non-exhaustive typology. I thought I'll just give an idea about the kinds of newsletters I have come across. Again it's non-exhaustive so there might be many more but these are the three kinds of newsletters I have come across. One is links every newsletter which are just collections of links. So there's one really good newsletter which just curates all the op-eds across all important news papers in India and they send it once every day at 8 a.m. also. So that is one kind of newsletter that you can think of. If you do a lot of reading and you just want to share a particular topic in a domain you can consider this one. The second kind of newsletter which is really popular is the news heavy kind of creation content. So that is basically a lot of block codes about someone in the news said this. So what does this mean kind of putting blocks from newspapers or articles and then a summary of the person who's writing the newsletter. So their own take on what is going to happen. Plus there are analysis or there are short essays as well in the middle. So some of the examples of that kind of newsletters are that there's a really popular one called Somosism. This is a very popular paid newsletter now on China and Bill Bishop writes it. If you just go and have a look at it you will understand what I'm saying about block code summary analysis and he does this every week. I think it's the most popular newsletter on China. Then of course I'm sure people would have accessed Benedict's newsletter which is on technology. Again a lot of block code summary analysis kind of thing. Then there is political fix I on China which my colleague Manoj runs and there is one called Daily Skin which is more of an organizational thing which curates news. And really sharp things on specific newsletters. So that's the second kind. The third one is an analysis heavy newsletter which is really more of a blog. So the examples of that are parent data, very popular one on Substack. There is a new journal which has started on Substack or Persuasion which is also a lot of blogging kind of work. Then our own newsletter sort of falls into this category. It is more of long form pieces and also some structured sections that we have on the weekend editions. So that is what our idea is. Alright that is my typology. Next I just want to end with things that you should keep in mind while writing a newsletter. I thought this might be useful. So one thing was the first point is read unless you are reading really extensively in that you will soon run out of ideas for a newsletter. So reading is really important and reading diverse subjects is important to keep writing week on week and keeping that tempo a year from now. The second one is don't let the best be the enemy of the good. So often you might think that do I have enough knowledge or do I have the expertise to write. So the way I would put it is just start experiment early, get feedback and then you can then improve change. So one good suggestion that some Karthik told Karthik Shashankar writes another two or three newsletters. He told me is before you get a lot of subscribers just experiment with your format. Try different things out so that by the time you have a critical mass of subscribers you have settled on a format that you want to write. So I did that initially I just wrote a few essays then both of us combined then we wrote things like structured sections in BSA and all that. So basically start experiment keep changing and you can improve on the book. The third one is be disciplined keep your schedule. So this was really important. My co-writer Raghu is really good at this. So we always aim to have the newsletter on Sunday or Wednesday and we always try to stick to that schedule. Never change that schedule. So keeping that schedule is a way to respect your readers. So you are always communicating that we are going to be having an edition by the end of Sunday and then people even expect that. So that helps so being disciplined really helps. Otherwise soon the bi-weekly newsletter becomes weekly, monthly and then two monthly and so on. So that's the slippery slope that you want to be aware of. The fourth one is, inform, educate, surprise and engage. So for example one section of our newsletter is about education. That's the frameworks in public policy. So telling from books from other writers just educating people about them with our commentary. Inform is when we talk about what is happening in India in the policy space. Are there things which are happening that people should be aware of like Raghu had written a newsletter recently. An edition on what will happen to schools after COVID-19. So that is kind of things that people want to know about. So that is the informing function. The third one is surprise. So that is where we have this policy WTF section where we really bring out some egregious policies that governments come out with. So the aim there is to surprise and make people think that even these kinds of policies are still made. So that was the aim there. And the fourth one is engage. That is just about building the community, responding to your readers and getting feedback from them. Also I have seen this that often people are now using substack just to dump their opinion pieces which they write in many other newspapers and other publications. I think that doesn't work enough. So even if you do a part of your newsletter which is dumping opinion pieces from elsewhere. It's useful to think of these four functions and if you are able to do it apart from your opinion pieces as well. So that is one thing. The fifth one is humor helps. So adding some humor adds to the newsletter gets subscribers interested. And right like you are having a good conversation with a friend. So that basically it's more informal communication rather than using really tough words and tough words. And terms that people might not understand. Sixth one I realized is team up the more people you have the more diverse readers you have and you will eventually run out of ideas. So it helps if you have another person who is equally interested and engaged in writing the newsletter. So then you can bounce ideas off and create a long list of topics that you want to cover. And week on week then you can bring a topic depending on what's happening across the world. If there are interesting things happening in a particular realm you can pick that and write on it. Then seventh one is once you have a theme in mind you can filter events and news through that frame. So this is what we do because we are writing on public policy. So we have frameworks and ideas in mind and then given how news happens and given how events happen in that space. We try to apply that framework and tell stories about it. And finally writing is painful. There's no getting around it. So this is another suggestion start with the habit of writing 200 words a day and by the end of the week you will have a thousand word newsletter which is really good. So it's a good size of an addition to have. So that is one more thing to consider. You can dump it by writing 200 words a day and by the end of the week you have a good size that can be sent back. And yeah finally this is where I want to end that when in doubt just experiment and see if it works it works or else you can move to the next newsletter.