I Trust This Finds You Well

Thinking about email differently

“I’m also thinking of starting a Substack?”
“A substack or a blog?”
“A Substack.”
“What’s a Substack?”
“It’s a blog.”

This conversation (loosely) played out at a recent family lunch when my brother, Gareth, suggested he’d be making another foray into writing online. Whether you call it a Substack, an email newsletter or a blog is semantic. If you want to create an online home for your writing and build an email subscription list, Substack is the way to go.

When I think of the email newsletter, I think back to Gareth’s emails from London in 2004/5. Under his nom de plume, Poncey Malherbe, he regaled us with tales from watching Bob Dylan at the Brixton Academy to partying with the England Rugby Team after beating the Springboks at Twickenham.

One of Poncey’s tales circulated the University of Cape Town’s Comm-Lab wildly. It may have been the one where we shared brandy and cokes with West Indian cricket fans at The Oval in the rain. This was as viral as things got in 2005. 

A maverick entrepreneur - who owned a prime piece of South African online real estate - was keen to unmask The Ponce and offer him a job as the editor of what would become South Africa’s leading rugby website.  Which he did. The young entrepreneur was Dave Wessels. The story goes that Dave, now the Stormers’ Director of Rugby, registered the website domain SARugby.com (and several others) with his dad’s credit card as a teenager in the 90s. 

Dave slipped off to the family PC midway through dinner with the idea that “The Internet” his parent’s guests were talking about - still with the finger speech bubbles - was going to be big business. Owning website domains was the way to do it and he got there early in the land-grab. 

The website domain you own these days seems less important than your audience, as more and more of the content we seek comes trickling into our inboxes. I think that this is a good thing, as I’m more likely to consume content that I have a genuine interest in this way, rather than surrendering myself to social media’s algorithms.

Browsing the internet used to feel like a trip to the farmers market on a Saturday morning, where you checked in on your favourite merchants, and carefully selected your essentials for the day. It now feels like Times Square on Black Friday, and the thought of popping out to get the proverbial eggs and milk can be an anxiety-inducing affair.

So from the warm cocoon of my Gmail inbox, I can take a leisurely moment to chew on some content on:

• writing online from David Perell;

• a data driven approach to parenting and pregnancy from Emily Oster;

• improving relationships from Esther Perel;

• neuroplasticity and creative experiments from Charlotte Grysolle; and

• frameworks for personal growth from Sahil Bloom.

And once I get through it all, you’re going to have to watch out for this guy.

It’s strange to think that decades later, we’ve gone through the full circle of the internet experience and landed back on email newsletters. It’s not such a far-fetched thought when you consider The Lindy Effect, the theory that the longer something has been around, the longer we can expect it to be around.

Sahil Bloom provides the Lindy Effect 101 here with the story about Lindy’s, a New York deli frequented by comedians in the 1960s. The observation was made that “the more stage appearances a Lindy's comedian made, the more future appearances he could be predicted to make” — this ‘life-expectancy’ is proportional to its age. 

In other words, email has been around for three decades, and we can expect it to be around for at least another three. Some social media platforms may end up burning out as quickly as they arrived, and we shouldn’t be quick to write off handwritten letters still being a thing in thousands of years’ time.

When Gareth recently saw Dave, he explained his understanding of Substack and how I was using it to build up an email distribution list. Dave opened the web browser on his phone, (kindly) subscribed to my newsletter and quickly retorted, “We must start a Substack, Ponce!”. I really hope they do. And if you’re interested in starting a Substack of your own, I recommend David Perell’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Online. 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash