Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write It Anyway.  🔗 **Source:** [Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write It Anyway.](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/nobody-wants-your-newsletter-you) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [writing, newsletters, creator-economy, persistence, attrition, publishing, pkm, survivorship-bias] > author: Joan Westenberg > source: joanwestenberg.com > reference: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/nobody-wants-your-newsletter-you > date created: 2026-08-01 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # 🏷️ Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write it Anyway. > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧭 Table of Contents - 🔗 References · 📝 Summary · 📖 Main Content · 📚 References · 🗣️ Paraphrase · 📰 Newsletter - ✅ Action Items · 🧪 Hypotheses · 📊 Methodology · ❓ Questions · 🔮 Future Research · 💡 Implications - 🧠 Learning Styles · 📊 Accessibility · 🌍 DEIB · ✅ Logical Validity · 🛡️ DARVO · 🎯 Conclusion · 🧱 Refactor Appendix ## 🔗 References - Source: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/nobody-wants-your-newsletter-you (Joan Westenberg) - Named examples: Tim Ferriss, Ben Thompson (Stratechery), James Clear (*Atomic Habits*), Samuel Johnson (*The Rambler*, 1750–52) - Platforms named: Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, Medium, LinkedIn Newsletters ## 📝 Summary **What it argues.** Newsletters overwhelmingly fail, the attention distribution is brutally unequal, and you should start one anyway — because the returns that justify writing are not audience returns. **The setup.** Westenberg leads with the discouraging numbers — a 99% failure rate within 90 days, explicitly attributed to hearsay and hedged as feeling "directionally accurate," and, presented more firmly, Substack's 35 million registered accounts with the top 1% of newsletters capturing roughly 90% of attention, revenue, and readership. Platform proliferation has intensified the competition. Their characterization of the resulting field is not gentle — a pig trough of shit and swill. **The turn, which is the piece's actual contribution.** They invert the discouraging statistic into an encouraging one. If 490 of every 500 new newsletters die within six months, your real competitive set is not 500. It is the ten that persist — plus, they add, your own instinct to quit. **That reframing is the transferable idea:** in a field with extreme attrition, persistence *is* the selection mechanism, so the effective competition is a small fraction of the nominal competition. Most people who appear to be competing with you are in the process of leaving. **Why write regardless of audience.** Three intrinsic reasons: writing is how thinking gets clarified, and the presence of even a hypothetical reader imposes a rigor private journalling does not; a public archive compensates for unreliable memory; and connection — "I write so that I might not be alone in the world." **Why people actually quit.** Not inability, but expectations calibrated against the wrong reference class — comparing a third issue to an operation with a million subscribers and ten staff. Their image is a child abandoning a vegetable garden because a prize tomato failed to appear overnight. **Obscurity as an asset.** A small audience raises your risk tolerance. You can experiment in ways an established writer cannot afford to, because nothing is at stake yet. **Practical guidance.** Pick a schedule and keep it; write about something you cannot stop writing about; don't look at your numbers for six months; read widely and daily; publish. **The historical anchor.** Samuel Johnson published *The Rambler* into a crowded London market of circulars, to a small audience, in an era of limited literacy. His forgotten contemporaries are the comparison. Today's writers have distribution he could not have imagined. **Their closing motive is unusual and worth noting**: they say plainly that they want more competition — from writers with genuine passion. **Bottom line.** A motivational essay with one genuinely sharp analytical idea at its center. The attrition-not-competition reframe is sound and portable. The statistics under it are one hearsay figure and one uncited one, and the success examples are textbook survivorship bias — a flaw made conspicuous by the fact that the essay's own thesis is about survivorship. ## 📖 Main Content ### 🗒️ Notes **Segment 1 — The brutal math** The opening is deliberately deflating. Nobody asked you to write a newsletter, and nobody, at baseline, cares. > [!quote] > Nobody asked you to write a newsletter; and as a baseline, nobody gives a shit The figures given, with their framing preserved because it matters: > [!quote] > Someone told me last week that 99% of newsletters fail in their first 90 days, and that feels directionally accurate. > [!quote] > Substack has 35 million registered accounts, and the top 1% of their newsletters capture roughly 90% of the attention, revenue, and readership. Ghost, Beehiiv, Medium, MailChimp and LinkedIn Newsletters have widened the field further. The first figure is openly hearsay and is hedged. The second is asserted without a source. The underlying power-law shape is well-attested in attention markets even where this specific parameterization is not, which is why the argument survives the weak sourcing. **Segment 2 — The inversion** Here the essay turns, and this is its real content. If 490 out of every 500 new newsletters are gone within six months, the competition is not 500. > [!quote] > you don't actually have to compete with most of them The remaining field is the ten or so that do not quit — and, they add, your own instinct to quit, which they treat as a competitor in its own right. **Segment 3 — Three reasons to write anyway** *Clarity.* Writing is a thinking instrument, and the public version differs from the private one because strangers can mirror your words back to you. > [!quote] > We write to think; both in private…and in public when our words reach total strangers who can mirror them back to us. *Archive.* Memory is unreliable; a public blog is described as the best available patch, producing a record of one's intellectual development over time. *Connection.* The most direct line in the piece: > [!quote] > I write so that I might not be alone in the world. **Segment 4 — Why writers actually quit** Not incapacity — miscalibrated expectations. Writers expect a defined amount of growth in thirty days, and compare an early issue against operations with a million subscribers and a staff of ten or more. The analogy: a child who abandons a vegetable garden because a prize-winning tomato failed to grow overnight. **Segment 5 — The freedom of being unread** Low readership is reframed as a permission structure. A small audience means a higher risk threshold — you can throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Established writers cannot do this, because they have something to lose. > [!quote] > The weird is a good place to be. Enjoy it **Segment 6 — Precedents** Three writers who began without audiences: Tim Ferriss, whose first blog posts drew single-digit comments and readership; Ben Thompson, who wrote Stratechery for years before it became a career; and James Clear, who blogged for years without a book deal before *Atomic Habits*. **Segment 7 — Practical guidance** 1. Pick a schedule and stick to it. 2. Write about something you can't stop writing about — ignore trends and analytics. 3. Don't look at your numbers for the first six months. 4. Read widely, often, daily. 5. Publish. You can't grow if you don't post. Points 2 and 3 are the substantive ones, and they are mutually reinforcing: intrinsic motivation is what survives an absent audience, and not looking at the numbers removes the signal that would otherwise erode it. **Segment 8 — Samuel Johnson** *The Rambler* was published to a small audience in a crowded market of London circulars, at a time when most people could not read. Johnson persisted; his contemporaries are forgotten. > [!quote] > They wrote through the void The contemporary contrast: today's writers have distribution Johnson could not have imagined, and access to more written material than anyone in history. **Segment 9 — The closing** Unusually, they asks for competition — specifically from people with genuine passion who actually care. It is a rhetorically effective move, and it is also the only point in the essay where their own interest is visibly at odds with their advice, which they do not remark on. ## 📚 References - **Primary** — the essay itself - **Secondary, uncited** — the 99%-fail-in-90-days figure and the Substack top-1%/90% figure; neither is attributed - **Illustrative** — Tim Ferriss, Ben Thompson, James Clear (biographical claims, uncited) - **Historical** — Samuel Johnson, *The Rambler* (1750–52) - **Platforms** — Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, Medium, LinkedIn Newsletters - **Absent** — no data source, no methodology, no counter-examples, and no discussion of writers who persisted and still failed ## 🗣️ Paraphrase Nobody asked you to write a newsletter and nobody cares that you have. Almost all of them fail inside three months, and on Substack a tiny fraction of writers take nearly all the attention and money. There are more platforms than ever, so more people are trying. But look at what those numbers actually mean. If 490 out of 500 newsletters are dead within six months, you aren't competing with 500 people. You're competing with the ten who keep going — and with your own urge to stop. Write anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with readers. Writing is how you find out what you think, and writing in public does something private notebooks can't, because strangers reflect your words back to you. It also builds an archive, which matters because memory is bad. And it's a way of not being alone. People don't quit because they can't write. They quit because they expected a certain amount of growth in a month, and because they compared their third issue to someone with a million subscribers and ten staff. It's a kid giving up on a vegetable garden because the prize tomato didn't appear overnight. Being unread is also a gift. Nobody's watching, so you can take risks that established writers can't. Being strange is fine right now — enjoy it. Tim Ferriss's early posts had single-digit readership. Ben Thompson wrote Stratechery for years before it was a job. James Clear blogged for years before *Atomic Habits*. So: pick a schedule and keep it. Write about the thing you can't stop writing about, not the thing that's trending. Don't look at your numbers for six months. Read constantly. And publish, because nothing grows if you don't post. Samuel Johnson wrote *The Rambler* into a crowded market of London circulars, for a small audience, when most people couldn't read at all. We remember him and not his competitors. You have distribution he couldn't have dreamed of. And to be honest, I want more competition — from people who actually care. ## 📰 Newsletter **The 490 who quit aren't your competition** Joan Westenberg opens [this one](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/nobody-wants-your-newsletter-you) about as warmly as possible: *"Nobody asked you to write a newsletter; and as a baseline, nobody gives a shit."* Then the numbers. 99% of newsletters dead inside 90 days. On Substack, the top 1% taking roughly 90% of the attention, revenue and readership. More platforms every year, so more people piling in. And then they do something better than the usual pep talk, which is to take the discouraging statistic seriously enough to work out what it actually implies. If 490 out of every 500 newsletters die within six months, **you are not competing with 500 people.** You're competing with the ten that don't quit. Everyone else in your nominal competitive set is in the process of leaving. That's not a motivational reframe, it's arithmetic — and it generalizes well past newsletters. In any field with brutal attrition, persistence *is* the selection mechanism, which means the effective competition is a small fraction of the apparent competition. Open-source maintainers. Side projects. Conference speakers. Anywhere the visible crowd is mostly transient. They're also right about why people actually stop. Not inability — reference class. You compare your third issue against an outfit with a million subscribers and ten staff, and conclude something about yourself. Their image is a kid abandoning the vegetable patch because the prize tomato didn't show up overnight. The advice that follows is short and two items of it are genuinely load-bearing: write about the thing you can't stop writing about, and **don't look at your numbers for six months.** Those work together. Intrinsic motivation is the only kind that survives an empty room, and checking analytics is precisely the thing that erodes it. Best line, on being unread: *"The weird is a good place to be. Enjoy it."* Nobody's watching, so you can take swings an established writer can't afford. Two honest caveats, though. Neither statistic carries a source, and the 99%/90-day figure has the texture of a number that circulates because it's memorable rather than because it's measured. And the Ferriss/Thompson/Clear examples are survivorship bias in its purest form — we don't hear from the writers who kept a schedule for five years and remained unread, and there are far more of them. That's a strange flaw for an essay whose entire thesis is *about* survivorship. The argument survives it, because the argument doesn't actually need those examples. It needs the arithmetic, and the arithmetic holds. ## ✅ Action Items **DevRel** - The attrition insight applies directly to community content and to speaker pipelines: the visible field is mostly transient, so the durable competitive set is small. Worth stating to people discouraged by apparent crowding. - "Don't look at your numbers for six months" is a genuinely contrarian metrics position and worth arguing about internally — it is the correct advice for building a voice and the wrong advice for a funded program. **OSPO** - Same reframe for contributor retention: the sustaining cohort is a small fraction of the nominal one, and effort is better spent on the persisters than on top-of-funnel volume. **Community** - The reference-class error (comparing your start to someone else's steady state) is a named, fixable discouragement mechanism worth surfacing to new contributors explicitly. **WordPress subteams** - **Marketing** — Directly applicable to WordPress newsletter and publishing advice; the intrinsic-motivation-over-analytics argument is a real position to take or reject. - **Training / Learn WP** — The persistence framing is useful for contributor onboarding content. - **Community** — See above; reference-class discouragement. - **Core / Core Performance / Core AI / Core Program Team / Mobile / Playground / Support / Design / Documentation / Photos / TV / Polyglots / Accessibility / Meta / CLI / Hosting / Tide / Openverse / Themes / Plugins** — Not applicable to this source; it is an essay on independent writing with no WordPress-technical surface. **The WPOCC** - Contributor-retention framing: fund and support the persisters rather than optimizing recruitment volume. **FAIR** - Not applicable to this source. **Personal / vault** - Strong connect to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Writing Is Thinking Made Visible]] — "we write to think" is that note's thesis stated by a practitioner. - Connect to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Reading Without Writing Is Consumption Without Comprehension]]. - The power-law claim connects to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Active Installs Reward Existing Winners]] and [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Concentration Beats Coverage Under Retrieval]]. - Relevant to courtneyr.dev publishing cadence. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. **Effective competition in high-attrition fields is a small fraction of nominal competition**, and can be estimated directly from survival curves rather than from entrant counts. 2. **Withholding analytics for a defined initial period increases publication persistence**, testable as a straightforward A/B with new writers. 3. **Reference-class miscalibration predicts quitting better than output quality does** — testable by surveying quitters on whom they compared themselves to. 4. **Intrinsic topic motivation ("can't stop writing about it") predicts persistence better than audience growth in the first six months.** 5. **Small audiences correlate with greater formal and topical experimentation**, measurable by variance in post format and subject across audience-size cohorts. 6. **The 99%-in-90-days figure is not empirically grounded.** Directly testable against Substack or Ghost cohort data, and worth testing because the essay's setup depends on it. 7. **Survivorship-adjusted returns to persistence are far lower than the named examples imply** — the missing denominator is writers who persisted and remained unread. ## 📊 Methodology **What kind of source this is.** A persuasive essay, not an analysis. It cites statistics without sources, selects examples to illustrate rather than to test, and makes no attempt at falsification. Judged as an essay this is normal; judged as evidence it is thin, and the distinction matters because the piece's central move is quantitative. **What is actually load-bearing.** Only one claim — that attrition reduces the effective competitive set — and it is a deduction rather than a measurement. Given *any* high attrition rate, it follows. It does not depend on the 99% figure being accurate, only on attrition being large, which is uncontroversial. That is why the argument survives its weak sourcing. **Where the method fails.** - **One hearsay statistic and one uncited one.** The 99%/90-day claim is openly flagged as something someone said and hedged as "directionally accurate" — honest framing, weak evidence. The Substack top-1%/90% figure is asserted without qualification or source. - **Survivorship bias in the examples**, which is the significant flaw. Ferriss, Thompson and Clear are sampled on the outcome. The comparison group — people who followed exactly this advice for years and remained unread — is invisible and much larger. An essay about who survives should have noticed this. - **The Johnson comparison inverts its own point.** Johnson is remembered precisely because he is the rare survivor of a field whose other members are forgotten; invoking him as encouragement is sampling on the outcome again, at a distance of 275 years. - **No falsification condition.** No circumstance is offered under which someone should *not* start a newsletter, which makes the advice unconditioned. **What would strengthen it.** Cohort survival data from a platform; base rates for outcomes among writers who did persist; and one honest paragraph about persisting and still failing. ## ❓ Questions - Where does 99%-in-90-days come from, and how is "fail" defined — no second issue, no growth, no revenue? The author is candid that it arrived as hearsay, which makes the question sharper rather than softer: the number is doing real rhetorical work on the strength of feeling directionally right. - What is the actual distribution of outcomes among writers who *did* persist five years? This is the number that would make the advice honest, and it is entirely absent. - Does "don't look at your numbers" hold for writers whose goal is professional, or only for those writing to think? - Is the attrition-reduces-competition argument sound in a power-law market, where the top 1% are entrenched incumbents rather than fellow persisters? Surviving to year five may not move you toward that 1% at all. - Does the intrinsic-motivation advice conflict with the closing request for more competition? Wanting a larger field of passionate writers is at odds with advising individuals to ignore whether anyone reads them. - How much of Ferriss's, Thompson's and Clear's outcome is attributable to persistence versus timing, positioning, and platform conditions that no longer obtain? ## 🔮 Future Research - **Survival curves for newsletters** by platform and cohort — the empirical foundation the essay assumes and does not supply. - **Analytics exposure and persistence**: whether metric visibility causally reduces publication continuity in early-stage writers. - **Reference-class effects on creative persistence**, generalizable well beyond writing. - **Whether persistence converts to audience in power-law markets**, or whether incumbency dominates persistence past a threshold. - **Writing as a thinking instrument**: whether public writing measurably improves reasoning relative to private writing, which is the essay's most interesting untested claim. ## 💡 Implications **For practice.** The two pieces of advice worth acting on are pick a cadence and hide the metrics — and they are one idea, not two. Analytics in the first months supply a signal that is almost pure noise, and reacting to noise is how a practice dies. Choosing a topic you cannot stop writing about is the same principle applied at selection time rather than at review time. **For anyone discouraged by a crowded field.** Count the persisters, not the entrants. This is a genuine correction to a common and demotivating error, and it applies to open-source contribution, conference speaking, and side projects at least as well as to newsletters. **For metrics design generally.** There is a real tension here worth holding rather than resolving glibly. "Don't look at your numbers" is good advice for building a practice and bad advice for running a program. The difference is whether the activity's purpose is formation or delivery — and conflating those is how organizations end up either metric-blind or metric-captured. **For this vault specifically.** The claim that writing for an audience imposes a rigor private notes do not is directly relevant to the Permanent-note practice. An atom written as if someone will read it is disciplined differently from a captured highlight — which is the same distinction between capture and synthesis that runs through the vault's PKM material. **Caution.** Do not carry the statistics forward. One is openly hearsay and the other is uncited, and the argument does not need either. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - **Visual** — Weak. Plain prose; no charts, despite an argument that is fundamentally about a distribution and would be clarified by one. - **Aural** — Strong. Conversational, profane, rhythmic; would read well aloud and loses little as audio. - **Verbal** — Very strong, and the native channel. The essay's force is entirely in phrasing — "a pig trough constituted of 50% shit and 50% swill," "they wrote through the void." - **Kinesthetic** — Moderate. The five-point guidance is immediately actionable, and the core recommendation is to go do the thing. - **Logical** — Mixed, and worth separating. The central inversion is a clean deductive move. The supporting apparatus — unsourced statistics, outcome-sampled examples — is weak. A logically-minded reader will find the best idea and the worst evidence in the same essay. - **Social** — Moderate. Direct second-person address and a closing invitation into a shared field, but no dialogue or multiple perspectives. - **Solitary** — Strong. Written for a reader alone at a keyboard deciding whether to continue, which is exactly the situation it addresses. - **Naturalistic** — Present only as metaphor: the vegetable garden and the prize tomato, which is the essay's most effective image. **Reading level estimate.** Roughly Grade 9–11. Short sentences, direct address, profanity used deliberately for emphasis rather than filler. Accessible prose carrying an argument with a quantitative core — the reasoning is harder than the vocabulary. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment Mapped to WCAG 2.2 AA, for the article as published. 1. **Info and relationships (SC 1.3.1, A) — likely passes.** Standard blog structure with headings; a hosted newsletter platform generally emits reasonable semantics. 2. **Reflow and text spacing (SC 1.4.10 / 1.4.12, AA) — likely passes.** Plain prose, no tables or figures, reflows cleanly. 3. **Contrast (SC 1.4.3, AA) — unverified** without inspecting live styling; low-contrast body text is a common failure on writer-platform themes. 4. **Reading level (SC 3.1.5, AAA — aspirational) — comfortably met** for a general audience, which is unusual for a piece making a statistical argument. 5. **Non-text content (SC 1.1.1, A) — not applicable in practice.** No substantive images; correspondingly no alt-text exposure. 6. **Link purpose (SC 2.4.4, A) — unverified.** Platform names are mentioned; whether they are linked and how those links are labelled is not determinable from the extracted text. 7. **A content note rather than a WCAG item.** Sustained profanity is used as a stylistic device. This is a legitimate voice choice and it does restrict where the piece can be shared — workplace, classroom, church-adjacent contexts — which is a real distribution constraint worth naming for a piece about distribution. **Summary.** Structurally unremarkable and probably fine, which is the expected profile for text-only prose on a managed platform. The one substantive accessibility improvement would be visualizing the survival claim, which would help every reader and not only those with reading difficulties. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment - **Cultural breadth.** Narrow. The frame is Anglophone Western creator economy; the historical anchor is 18th-century London. No non-Western publishing tradition or non-English-language market appears. - **Inclusive language.** No exclusionary language. Address is universal second-person, with no assumptions about the reader's identity. - **Neurodiversity support.** Good. Short sections, concrete numbered guidance, vivid concrete imagery, and a clear structural arc. The explicit permission to be weird and to ignore metrics reads as accommodating to people for whom conventional performance signals are actively harmful. - **Representation.** Weak and worth naming. Every named exemplar — Ferriss, Thompson, Clear, Johnson — is a white man, three of them contemporary American tech-adjacent figures. In a piece about who gets read, an all-male, near-monocultural example set is a conspicuous omission, particularly since the underlying claim is about attention distribution, and attention is not distributed neutrally. - **The unexamined assumption.** "Don't look at your numbers for six months" and "write what you can't stop writing about" presuppose that writing is not load-bearing income. That is a materially privileged position, and the essay never acknowledges it. For someone who needs writing to pay, ignoring metrics for half a year is not discipline, it is not an available option. - **Psychological safety.** Mixed. Strong on normalizing failure and removing shame from low readership. Against that, the opening ("nobody gives a shit") and the pig-trough framing are harsh enough that some readers will not reach the constructive turn — which is a real cost, since the constructive turn is where the value is. ## ✅ Logical Validity **Strong reasoning** - **The central inversion is genuinely sound and is the essay's contribution.** Given high attrition, the effective competitive set is much smaller than the entrant count. This follows deductively and does not depend on the precise attrition figure. - **Naming the internal competitor is a real insight.** Treating one's own instinct to quit as part of the competitive field correctly locates the binding constraint. - **The reference-class diagnosis is accurate and specific** — comparing a third issue to a staffed operation with a million subscribers is a nameable, fixable error rather than vague discouragement. - **The obscurity-as-permission argument is well-constructed** and non-obvious: low stakes genuinely do raise risk tolerance, and this is the inverse of a well-attested constraint on established creators. - **The advice is internally coherent.** Intrinsic topic selection and metric-hiding reinforce each other; they are one strategy expressed twice. - **The closing motive is disclosed.** They state they want more competition, which is unusual candor about self-interest. **Fallacies** 1. **Survivorship bias — the central flaw.** *Location: precedents segment.* Ferriss, Thompson and Clear are selected on outcome. The far larger population of writers who persisted and remained unread is invisible. This is a serious defect in an essay whose thesis is *about* who survives. **Fix:** report base rates among persisters, or state plainly that persistence is necessary but not sufficient. 2. **A hearsay figure adopted on vibe.** *Location: opening.* Worth stating precisely, because it is milder than it first looks: the 99%/90-day figure is explicitly attributed to hearsay and hedged — "Someone told me last week… and that feels directionally accurate." That is more honest than most essays manage, and "feels directionally accurate" is still an assessment of an uncited number with no stated definition of failure. The Substack top-1%/90% figure is the weaker case, presented flatly as fact under "some of the numbers are tough to ignore." **Fix:** cite the Substack figure; drop or verify the hearsay one rather than certifying it by intuition. 3. **False comfort from an equivocation on "competition."** *Location: the inversion.* The competition that matters for reaching an audience in a power-law market is the entrenched top 1%, not the ten fellow persisters. Surviving the attrition puts you in a smaller pool, and it does not follow that it moves you toward the attention. The inversion is true and does less work than it appears to. 4. **Appeal to an unrepresentative historical case.** *Location: Johnson.* Johnson is remembered because he is the exception; his forgotten contemporaries are the base rate the argument needs and cannot access. This is the same sampling error at historical distance. 5. **Unfalsifiable advice.** *Location: throughout.* No condition is offered under which one should not start, and "don't look at your numbers" removes the feedback that could disconfirm the recommendation. Advice immunized from its own evidence. 6. **Suppressed premise about material circumstances.** *Location: guidance segment.* Ignoring metrics for six months presumes writing is not needed for income. Unstated, and it determines whether the advice is usable. **Tone of voice.** Deliberately abrasive at the open, warm by the close — a calculated structure that trades some readers for credibility with those who stay. Profanity is used as emphasis rather than filler. The register is peer-to-peer rather than guru, and the closing request for competition is a genuinely disarming move that undercuts the usual incentive structure of advice-from-a-successful-writer. ## 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - **Deny** — Not applicable to this source. No accusation is in play; the essay is advisory. - **Attack** — **Present in a limited, non-DARVO form.** The creator economy is characterized as "a pig trough constituted of 50% shit and 50% swill," and the opening dismisses the reader's premise. But this targets a market and a mindset, not a person or a critic, and it is not deployed to deflect any charge against the author. - **Reverse victim and offender** — Not applicable to this source. No reversal; if anything the author positions herself as inviting rivals rather than as an injured party. **Assessment.** DARVO is not present. The abrasiveness is a rhetorical strategy aimed at the reader's expectations rather than a deflection, and it is recorded here only to note the distinction between adversarial *tone* and the specific deflective *structure* DARVO names. ## 🎯 Conclusion **Bottom line.** One good idea, honestly delivered, resting on evidence it does not need and should not have used. The good idea: in a field with severe attrition, persistence is the selection mechanism, so your effective competition is the small cohort that stays rather than the large cohort that enters. Counting entrants overstates the field by an order of magnitude. That reframe is deductively sound, portable to open source, side projects, and speaking, and worth keeping. The supporting reasons to write — writing clarifies thinking, public writing imposes a rigor private notes don't, an archive compensates for memory — are well-put and not novel. The practical advice reduces to two connected moves: choose a topic on intrinsic motivation, and hide the metrics that would erode it. The flaws are real and specific. Both headline statistics are uncited. The success examples are sampled on the outcome, and so is Samuel Johnson — which is a strange error in an essay about survivorship, and it means the piece never confronts the population it most needs to: people who did exactly this for years and remained unread. There is also an equivocation worth catching: surviving attrition puts you in a smaller pool of persisters, which is not the same as moving toward the entrenched 1% who hold the attention. And the advice quietly assumes writing isn't paying your rent. None of that sinks it, because the arithmetic at the center doesn't depend on any of it. **Next steps.** 1. Take the attrition reframe; leave the statistics. 2. Test "don't look at the numbers for six months" against courtneyr.dev publishing cadence as an actual experiment rather than a maxim. 3. Connect to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Writing Is Thinking Made Visible]] — this is a practitioner statement of that note. 4. Find real newsletter survival data; the empirical gap here is the interesting open question. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### 📚 Literature Split Pad - Purpose: stage Konik CEE units that become per-source Literature notes. - Split level: **H3**. ### [H1] Attrition, not entry, determines the effective competitive set > [!quote] > you don't actually have to compete with most of them **Where:** the inversion segment. **Why it matters:** the essay's one genuinely portable analytical idea. Given high attrition, persistence is the selection mechanism and the real field is a fraction of the apparent one. Applies to maintainers, speakers, side projects. `#xref` `#articleseed` ### [H2] Writing in public imposes a rigor private writing does not > [!quote] > We write to think; both in private…and in public when our words reach total strangers who can mirror them back to us. **Where:** three-reasons segment. **Why it matters:** the mechanism behind the vault's own Permanent-note discipline — an atom written for a reader is checked differently from a captured highlight. `#xref` ### [H2] Obscurity is a permission structure for experimentation **Where:** freedom-of-being-unread segment; "The weird is a good place to be." **Why it matters:** inverts a real constraint on established creators — low stakes raise risk tolerance, and that window closes as audience grows. `#bmf` ### [H3] Quitting is caused by reference-class error, not incapacity **Where:** why-writers-quit segment; the third issue versus a million subscribers and ten staff. **Why it matters:** a nameable, correctable discouragement mechanism rather than vague morale advice. `#xref` ### [H3] The examples are sampled on the outcome **Where:** precedents and Johnson segments. **Why it matters:** the essay's own thesis is about survivorship, and it never surfaces the population of persisters who stayed unread. Carry the flaw with the claim. `#addendum` ### 🔖 Atomic Split Pad #### [Z1] In high-attrition fields, persistence is the selection mechanism, so effective competition is far smaller than nominal competition - Scope/condition: holds where attrition is high and entry is cheap; **breaks in power-law markets where incumbency rather than persistence controls the outcome** — surviving puts you in a smaller pool without moving you toward the top. - Pointer: the inversion segment. - **CREATE candidate.** Nearest existing: [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Active Installs Reward Existing Winners]] (incumbency — this is the counterweight and the two should be written against each other) and [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Maintainer Attention Is the Scarce Resource in Open Source]]. Verify neither already covers it. #### [Z2] Writing for a reader disciplines thinking in a way private writing does not - Pointer: three-reasons segment. - **CONNECT, do not create.** Captured by [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Writing Is Thinking Made Visible]] and [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Reading Without Writing Is Consumption Without Comprehension]]. This is a practitioner's statement of both; add to Evidence rather than duplicating. #### [Z3] Low stakes raise risk tolerance, so obscurity buys experimentation - Scope/condition: the window closes as audience grows; the asset is temporary and unrecoverable. - Pointer: freedom-of-being-unread segment. - **CREATE candidate**, lower confidence. Check [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Default-Off Feature Flags Decouple Shipping Speed From Production Risk]] (structural analogue — decoupling experimentation from consequence) before writing. #### [Z4] Metrics visibility can erode the intrinsic motivation a practice depends on - Pointer: "don't look at your numbers for the first six months." - **CONNECT** to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Metric Is Vanity Only Against Your Own Outcome Data]] and [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Rewarding AI Usage Manufactures Usage Not Value]] — same family: a measured signal displacing the thing it was meant to track. ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - [F1] Find real newsletter survival-curve data; the 99%/90-day figure is uncited and load-bearing for the setup. - [F2] Check whether [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Active Installs Reward Existing Winners]] already covers the incumbency counterweight to [Z1]. - [F3] Run "don't look at the numbers" as an actual experiment on courtneyr.dev rather than adopting it as a maxim. - [F4] Note the all-male, near-monocultural example set — conspicuous in a piece about who gets attention. - [F5] The unstated premise that writing isn't income — worth naming if this is ever cited onward. - [F6] Write up the formation-versus-delivery distinction on metrics; it is the useful general form of the "hide your numbers" advice. <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write It Anyway..md|Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write It Anyway. by Joan Westenberg]] ## Highlights - Someone told me last week that 99% of newsletters fail in their first 90 days, and that feels directionally accurate. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyzjeb5r2mg9p0bmj33amntp)) - Note: SOURCING FLAG — the load-bearing setup statistic is openly hearsay, hedged as "feels directionally accurate." More honest framing than most essays manage, and still an uncited number with no stated definition of "fail." Don't carry it forward. - Tags: epistemics, sourcing-caveat - But the good news: if 500+ newsletters launch today, and 490+ of them are functionally dead inside of 6 months, you don’t actually have to compete with most of them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyzje23vnt19hq4nsjr0xyzm)) - Note: PERMANENT CANDIDATE — in high-attrition fields, persistence IS the selection mechanism, so effective competition is far smaller than nominal. Deductive, doesn't depend on the exact figure. BREAKS in power-law markets where incumbency not persistence controls outcome. Write against "Active Installs Reward Existing Winners." - Tags: atom/atomic/z1, attrition, persistence - It’s not all bad, even if the silence is deafening. Low attention means you have a higher risk threshold to try things. You can throw shit at a wall and see what sticks; you can experiment, and mess with the form, and do the unexpected. When you’re small enough to have a sandbox to play in, you have a degree of freedom some writers would envy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyzjekhz0m5rbm91q6mqap34)) - Note: Obscurity as a permission structure — low stakes raise risk tolerance, and the window closes as audience grows. Structural analogue to default-off feature flags: decoupling experimentation from consequence. - Tags: experimentation, obscurity, atom/atomic/z3