Survival tips for your first year as a creator, from creators
The creator journey can feel daunting at times and liberating at others. It can also be lonely. It’s normal to struggle with issues like stress, self-doubt and imposter syndrome. But you can take steps to set yourself up for a smoother start.
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When you launch a newsletter, podcast or niche website, you’re putting yourself out there and working for yourself — often by yourself. Everything is on you. The journey can feel daunting at times and liberating at others. It can also be lonely. It’s normal to struggle with issues like stress, self-doubt, imposter syndrome or a feeling that you are speaking to an empty room. But you can take steps to set yourself up for a smoother start. We interviewed newsletter publishers Amanda Cua, JR Raphael, Kai Brach and Alicia Kennedy, as well as podcasters Pam Covarrubias, Leah Lemm and Patrick Cox, who told us what they wished they’d known when they were starting out. They offered survival tips to help you navigate your first year as a creator, avoid burnout and set yourself up for success.
Key takeaways include:
- Be patient and consistent. It takes time to build a following. Don’t expect a big splash at the beginning.
- Start small. It’s better to start with a simple product and expand your offerings later, rather than doing too much in the beginning, becoming overwhelmed, failing, and not meeting the expectations you set up for your subscribers.
- Don’t equate your self worth with your work and metrics like the number of new subscribers you’ve gained in a week. You are more than your newsletter or podcast. That’s easy to forget when you’re devoting so much effort to your work.
- You don’t have to go it alone. Find people to share your journey with — both your accomplishments and your challenges.
- Get to know your readers and listeners, especially your earliest fans.
Creator burnout is common. It’s also often misunderstood. It isn’t just about working too much. Burnout is defined by mental health experts as a condition that includes exhaustion, feelings of cynicism about work or a detachment from it, and a sense of ineffectiveness. In a recent survey, creators said they often burn out because of the pressure they feel to post content everywhere all the time, the emotional labor of having a personal brand, being unable to mentally disengage from work, content fatigue, the comparison culture, or a sense of feeling alone.
Getting rest, exercising, self reflection such as journaling, taking regular breaks, going on vacation, spending time with friends and family, and outsourcing work are all ways creators in the survey said they combat burnout. How you approach and manage your work when you are just starting out will also help you avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Amanda Cua left her job at a startup in the Philippines last year to create her own newsletter about technology and business in Southeast Asia called BackScoop. First published in August 2021, BackScoop strives to make technology and business news in the region easy to understand and fun to read. It began as a weekly newsletter, and is now published four times a week.
From the beginning, Cua saw herself as running a business. She pushed herself to write more, not compromise on quality, be efficient, and adhere to a set publishing schedule. “There are lots of tough times writing, especially if you’re the only writer, but you’ll only get to uncover the benefits if you really stick to it for the long haul,” Cua says.
Sometimes in the early days, she struggled with what to cover when it was a slow news day. The 20-year-old would sometimes work late into the night to finish a newsletter edition. A year later, people reach out to Cua for story tips and pitches. In November 2021, she landed her first investor. She hopes to soon hire someone to help her run her business.
“At the start, I would take three or four hours to write one article. That was excruciating,” Cua says. “But what’s interesting now is that as I’ve gotten busier and have more things to do, writing is actually the easiest part of my job. What used to take three to four hours now takes an hour or less. The process gets easier over time.”
Cua says developing an article structure that is the same for each newsletter edition helps her be efficient.
“It’s more than just telling yourself this is the format, and this is how it will look.The structure becomes ingrained in you. Then even when you consume other articles and social media content, you can already pick and choose in your head what you’re going to write about and highlight,” she says. “When you hit that blank page and you have a set format, the words just go so much faster than they did before.”
Cua also learned to set deadlines for herself each day. Her goal is to stop doing research or other tasks and start writing the next morning’s newsletter by 4 p.m. Sticking to that cutoff time means she won’t be working into the wee hours.
She also budgets time to connect with sources, read books related to the topics she covers, and visit news sites. “Everyone who writes a newsletter — or writes anything at all — should be consuming content regularly,” she says.
Treating her work as a business and following a schedule help Cua stay on track. “In your darkest moments, you need another source of motivation that is not yourself,” she says.
JR Raphael, founder of the newsletter Android Intelligence, says he used to cram as much information as possible into each newsletter because he felt it needed to be so substantial to provide value to readers.
“I learned over time that email really is its own unique medium,” Raphael says. “Something you might publish online or in other forms doesn’t necessarily translate directly to this platform. Android Intelligence is still fairly heavy in terms of the amount of information there, but I’ve pared it down a lot over the years, and I’ve figured out what elements work.”
Newsletter creators shouldn’t overlook email formatting. “Formatting really matters. It’s taken me a lot of experimentation to figure out what works while still balancing the need for relative simplicity and universal compatibility,” Raphael says. “The more you do, the more you risk not looking right to somebody, for example the person who’s opening the email on Yahoo Mail on a Windows Eight computer.”
According to a 2020 Nielson Norman Group eyetracking study, people still primarily scan online, rather than read.
Elements like fonts, spacing, and the visual look of the email all matter. “Big blocks of text are very hard to read in an email, in particular when you’re looking at it on a phone on a small screen,” Raphael says.
“When you can, break information up into small blocks that are easier to visually process. Use bullet points where possible, and use spacing so you don’t have a chunk of text that takes up the entire screen from top to bottom on a phone. That’s just visually overwhelming. Most people, the way they’re reading email, tend to get overwhelmed.”
Raphael used to receive feedback from readers that one of his newsletters felt too long. He recently reformatted the newsletter, making use of one sentence summaries and bullet points and eliminating giant blocks of text.
“I’m not changing anything with the way I write it or the amount of information that’s in there. It’s purely the presentation that has changed,” he says. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. People think he shortened the newsletter. “It was a really interesting realization for me that something as simple as spacing and bullet points and the way the newsletter looks, even with the exact same amount of content, makes it feel short, manageable, organized and easy to read, as opposed to being overwhelming,” he says.
Over the years, Raphael has switched email service providers twice. He says that can be a major headache. “The email service provider you use matters. Anyone getting started should think very carefully about which setup makes the most sense for them and why,” he says. “There are a lot of easy out-of-the-box solutions nowadays that might have some form of appeal, but also have a lot of drawbacks. I would also just look very carefully about where you think this might go in a year or two, and ask yourself if the easy approach right now is right for you or if there’s some other approach that would allow you more room for growth without possibly necessitating a major migration six months down the road.”
Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Substack, Revue, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and Ghost are just some of the choices when it comes to selecting an email service provider. The Membership Puzzle Project has a good list of things to look for in an email service provider, such as the ability to sign up new users from a form on your website, the ability to send automatically triggered emails such as welcome emails, and the ability to have a “paid subscribers only” segment of the newsletter.
Email expert Dan Oshinsky also looks at the pros and cons of four popular platforms in his email service provider guide.
“Automation and using technologies effectively gives indie makers superpowers,” says Kai Brach, founder of the popular newsletter Dense Discovery. “If you think about how many people were involved in selling simple classifieds just a few years ago — now it’s a spreadsheet connected to a form.”
Brach’s background is in design and building websites, so one way he has gotten a leg up in the newsletter world is to use these skills in a way that makes his work faster and easier. Zapier is a very powerful tool in that regard, he says. “Most of my ad sales rely on Zaps. I also use it to connect my membership management app to my newsletter list to synchronize subscribers.”
As a solo creator, you want to use tools like Zapier to make your life easier so that you can focus on the writing/publishing, Brach says. “That said, I do like to tinker with tools more generally,” he says. “As I wrote in my posts about DD, it’s all very hands-on with DD. I don’t like publishing tools that limit my creative freedom too much.”
Brach follows several other newsletters, blogs and Twitter accounts to collect ideas and recommendations for his newsletter. When he sees something useful or interesting, he saves it using Raindrop.io, his preferred bookmarking tool. “I have folders for each section of DD. I then consult those folders as I put together a new issue. Mondays are usually reserved for writing my introduction,” Brach says. “Tuesday morning is proof-reading and then publishing time.”
If you are a new newsletter creator — or are thinking about launching a newsletter — writer Alicia Kennedy says not to get stuck in the trap of overthinking things. Kennedy began her newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy about food and culture in 2020, just before the pandemic.
“My biggest tip for folks who are thinking about starting a newsletter is not to think so longterm that you psych yourself out, Kennedy says. “You also don’t have to do some big fancy launch, either: Start writing, give yourself a doable schedule, and see where it goes organically. You don’t even have to share your work at the start if you’re not ready.”
She also recommends that anyone who wants to be a successful newsletter writer reads lots of other newsletters. “People who want to pursue this, like any form of writing, should be big consumers of other people doing it,” she says. “Watch and learn. You can’t write an essay without having read an essay. It’s ideal to be an active consumer of the thing you claimed to want to do.”
Less is more, especially when you are just starting out with your new venture. It’s easy to forget that you are only one person, not a major media organization with a staff.
“A lot of people come in and think, hey, I’m going to send out a newsletter every single day and it’s going to have all this information.” Raphael says. “Starting small is key and you can always build up from there. It’s much more difficult to start large and scale back once people get used to what you’re offering, particularly if it’s something you’re doing not as a full-time job, but as a supplement to whatever else you’re doing. You can find yourself very quickly overwhelmed with the amount of work involved.”
Raphael says new newsletter writers realize quickly that sending out a newsletter involves a lot more than writing. “Depending on your setup, you may run into technical issues,” he says. “You find yourself being the IT guy, the marketing guy, the ad sales guy, and the account manager guy. It quickly turns into a lot of work.”
For newsletters in particular, Raphael notes that it is also important to work to find your voice. “There are a lot of newsletters out there now, and a lot of people and organizations are very good at doing this,” he says. “Unless you have a genuinely different perspective, a voice, or something you can bring to the table, you’re going to get lost in the shuffle.”
Cua says she notices that some people are afraid to get started because they agonize over what to cover, and become paralyzed. She agrees that starting small and increasing your publishing frequency is a good strategy. “You can alway add things or take things away in terms of coverage,” she says.
Leah Lemm, co-host and producer of the podcast Wisdom Continuum, advises new creators to manage their expectations early on. “I’ve noticed a lot of people expect a splash to happen right away,” Lemm says. “I just went on a really long hike. Sometimes I was hiking super slow because of the terrain or the incline. But one foot in front of the other is how you’re going to get to the next campsite. That’s how you’re going to get to the next podcast episode sometimes too. And then there are other days that are flat and easy. Tiny steps move you forward, along with consistency and patience.”
67% of full-time creators started more than three years ago, and just a quarter began growing an audience a decade or more ago.
Source: ConvertKit’s 2022 State of the Creator Economy Report
The first couple of months you might only have a few dozen listeners, then maybe 100 people after a year. “Things grow if you water them. I’m always surprised with other podcasts that I’ve done,” Lemm says. Another podcast she started, Native Lights, is now a weekly radio program too. “It was very stagnant for a while, but that was fine because it was only six episodes a year. Then the pandemic started. We decided to do the show every week. Now it’s a weekly half-hour radio show too, and it’s fun to see who listens from other parts of the world.”
Pam Covarrubias, host of the popular podcast Cafe con Pam, says one of the most important things a creator can do is to listen to and nurture the first five listeners or readers.
“Too often, people will focus on how to bring in the first thousand or hundreds of thousands of listeners. But really, what’s important is to make sure that the first five people who listen to you become so close to you that they tell everyone else,” Covarrubias says. “You are creating ambassadors who can spread the word.”
She had conversations with her early listeners and genuinely wanted to learn about their lives and interests. “I would care just as much about the people who gave me bad reviews in the beginning,” Covarrubias says. “There was one person who gave me a bad review who came back years later and was like, ‘you know what, I gave you a chance and I’m updating from my two-star review to five stars now.’ So it’s really about understanding that the work is beyond me, and it’s more to serve the greater good and see what people want. The only way to do that is to hear and listen.”
Cua recommends telling everyone in your circles about your newsletter when you launch. She messaged every single Facebook friend. “Some people wondered if I’d been hacked. But I felt like it was important to do and I would not change a thing from that process,” Cua says. “I was able to find a subgroup of people who actually really cared about the newsletter. The process helped me identify who the right people are to target, and understand a bit more about them. It was helpful for me to understand the initial readers very well, and I was able to find who the people I wanted to bring in. They shared it with their friends, or a relative who is working in technology in Singapore”
Patrick Cox, the producer and co-host of the language podcast Subtitle, recommends that new creators figure out what other complementary skills they have that they can capitalize on. Cox worked in radio for a long time before venturing out on his own to start his own podcast business. He realized he could capitalize on his industry contacts and sell radio stories on topics his podcast covers.
“I was producing lots of material through my podcasts, so it was a no-brainer. Not only would I make some money, but I’d be getting the word out about the podcast. It was this kind of secret sauce, that I could be on the radio as well as the new podcast. It’s really important to identify your other skills and how they can compliment your podcast or newsletter, if configured correctly,” Cox says.
“Maybe your skills are in something like how to launch and grow a business, for example. As you are transitioning and planning to leave your full time job, the more you can have other people help you identify those other skills and figure out how you can put them to use, the better.”
Brach thinks people don’t talk enough about aspects of being a creator that have nothing to do with the newsletter itself. He’s not talking about work-life balance or burnout. He’s talking about lifestyle choices. Dense Discovery is Brach’s main job, though he occasionally does some small web design jobs. He makes things work financially by living frugally, prioritizing certain things over others, being good at saving money, and living in a car-free environment.
“It has very little to do with the actual newsletter writing and a lot more to do with how one can adjust their life and plans to remove the need for long working hours,” he says. “I definitely haven’t figured it all out. It’s work in progress. And I don’t want to suggest that this life is perfect and a template for everyone — not to mention it requires a lot of privilege — but I think these ‘external’ factors don’t get talked about enough when we tell stories about ‘making a living’ with certain types of projects. Dense Discovery is the outcome of making certain decisions about my personal life several years ago that have nothing to do with the day-to-day running of a newsletter.”
A newsletter publisher has to think about a lot of other things beyond writing good content. “How many subscribers am I gaining every week? Am I on track to hit my goals? How long will this take for me to monetize? Will I get any ad partners? Are my investors happy? Are we picking the right distribution channels?” says Cua.
“I think these are part of the process people might not be thinking about when they start out,” Cua says. “It’s a lot of added stress for someone who is running something on their own. That’s where most of the stress and the difficulties come from.”
Cua says it’s very easy to get caught up in metrics. “There was a period of time when I equated my self worth with the number of subscribers I was getting,” she says. “But it doesn’t equate with your self worth.”
It’s not healthy to focus on metrics alone, and it’s also not a great long term business strategy to focus solely on getting subscribers and use gimmicks to do so.
“I’m very disciplined about where I try to get my subscribers now,” Cua says. She targets people in her main audience, and says creators should have a clear picture of who their audience is. “For example, I could drop off donuts at a college to get lots of students to subscribe to the newsletter, but barely any students are going to actually open it and read it,” she says.
Cua says it is tempting for creators to equate themselves with their products when they pour so much into creating. ‘It cannot be who you are entirely,” she says. “When you are an artist or a journalist or in any creative field, it’s very easy to say that this is me. It’s hard to separate from your work when you put so much into it to get it going and maintain it.”
She acknowledges that self-care can be challenging. As of late August, she hadn’t taken a vacation since she launched her newsletter BackScoop, and has had periods where she was moody because of a lack of sleep.
“That’s something I’m really trying to work on. I was dedicating my whole life to the newsletter. It’s okay for short periods of time, but when you do that for a very long time, it takes a really big toll on you. It blurs the line between who you are in the newsletter even more. You may not even know that it’s the reason your productivity falls off.”
Cua hopes to hire someone to work with her in the near future, and hope that will ease the load. She is looking to hire a generalist at this stage who can help her with the newsletter copy, selling ads, acquiring subscribers, and doing research.
Every creator needs a support system, Cua says. One of the times she felt the loneliest was when she had COVID. She couldn’t publish for a week, for the first time. “I was sad and I felt so bad,” she says. “I explained to readers, and people started emailing me saying I was doing a good job, and to get well soon.”
Cua just celebrated her newsletter’s first anniversary in August, and her inbox was so full of emails from supporters that it took her a few weeks to respond to them all. “Lean on your reader community, because they’re a source of emotional support when you’re beating yourself up,” she says. “They’re also just amazing people to get to know. You should reach out to the people who are reading and really get to know them anyway. I’ve done that from day one.”
Bulleted lists can save users time and help them scan content more quickly, but only when they’re used correctly. (video)
Having the right support system to make it through the highs and lows makes a difference. Peers going through similar struggles can relate and provide you with support. Lessons from Building a Peer Support Group at Google for Startups
Business coach Nathan Ingram recommends that creators spend more time on strategy to overcome feeling overwhelmed and to grow their businesses. His top tips:
- Turn off your screen
- Get out of your normal environment
- Get the ideas in your head on paper
- Pick the top three things that will have the biggest impact on your business and life
- Break goals into steps you can accomplish in two hours
This is one of six case studies — launched by J+, the professional development arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY — that aims to provide journalism creators building their own newsletters, podcasts, and other niche projects with in-depth analyses of what works and what doesn’t in the journalism creator ecosystem. This case study was supported by funding from the Meta Journalism Project and was written by Krystal Knapp, an Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program alumna.
