Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write it Anyway.

The Case for Screaming Into the Void

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

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I’m broadly aware that the numbers aren’t great.

Someone told me last week that 99% of newsletters fail in their first 90 days, and that feels directionally accurate.

They’re easier to produce than podcasts (which have a famously high quit rate) but most still won’t make it past their first month, let alone their 10th issue.

The ugliest read is this: there is no market, no niche, no audience, and no subculture, subcategory, or Substack community waiting for your hot take.

Nobody asked you to write a newsletter; and as a baseline, nobody gives a shit whether you do or you don’t.

But in my fairly qualified opinion, you should go ahead and write on anyway. Write it how you want, write it where you want, and publish it no matter how much it might feel like screaming into the void.

Because the best newsletters in the world were written by folks with a bone to pick and an itch to scratch, who had no actual evidence that the world wanted it.

And they did it anyway.

The Brutality of Math

I’m not a fan of the art // science // vocation of mathematics. My Dad was a math teacher.

We don’t talk.

You do the…well.

That being said, some of the numbers are tough to ignore. Substack has 35 million registered accounts, and the top 1% of their newsletters capture roughly 90% of the attention, revenue, and readership.

And Substack isn’t the only fish in the pond. There’s Ghost, Beehiive, Medium, MailChimp, Patreon, LinkedIn Newsletters (for some God-forsaken reason), and something new launching somewhere new every week. The competition grows, whether any of us like it or not. The creator economy isn’t a zero-sum game, but it often feels like a pig trough constituted of 50% shit and 50% swill, with all of us fighting for the few scraps of protein that found their way into the muck.

If you do get past your first 10 issues, your growth is going to be flat for months; sometimes, years.

“Build it and they will come” was always a delusional myth, but it’s worse and harder now than ever before.

That’s the bad news.

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.

Your actual competition is:

1. The 10 or so newsletters out of every 500 that don’t throw in the towel, and

2. Your own instinct to throw in the towel

Why you should start anyway

If your only reason to pursue writing is fame, financial freedom, and the loving embrace of an audience, your “writing journey” is very likely to end in utter and complete misery. That’s the breaks.

But we don’t write for that - do we?

Outside of the grifters generating blog posts for an audience of unwitting slop-consuming subscribers, most writers write for a different reason entirely.

We write to think; both in private, in the sanctity of whatever app we choose, alone with our thoughts, and in public when our words reach total strangers who can mirror them back to us and help us see things we’ve missed.

That’s quite a wonderful exchange.

It’s one of the main reasons I ever sit down at a keyboard or pick up a pen; the other being connection. I write so that I might not be alone in the world. I don’t think anyone can argue with the value of that.

A newsletter forces me - and will force you - to find the clarity we won’t get from a private note, or a locked diary. To sort the firehose of nonsense that comes from my brain into something a single other human being can make sense of takes an enormous amount of effort; and it only happens through brutal editing, harsh re-reading, and the act of being entirely honest with my own thoughts, about my own thoughts.

I am convinced my future self will thank me for the archive, and I suspect yours will too. Yes, memory is the diary we all carry with us - and thank you for the reminder, Oscar - but my memory is a fucking sieve. A public blog is the best patch for it.

And while the silence may be hard to face, even the smallest audience compounds. 100 true fans will always be superior to 10,000 casual scrollers who delete your email as soon as it lands in your inbox, or 20,000 assholes who immediately forget signing up and angrily email you to lay blame for their own inability to navigate the internet like an adult with agency and a functioning brain cell.

You’re not writing for today’s audience of one, two, three people + your cats and your favorite parent. You’re writing for the audience you’ll only build in 2 years if you stick with it, and you’re writing for yourself.

The Real Reason You’ll Quit

Writers don’t quit because they’re actually defeated in any measurable way. They don’t quit because they lose the ability to put words onto a page. They quit because they expected X amount of growth in 30 days, and they never built the resilience it takes to handle the rejection of their own self-set metrics.

They quit because they compared their third issue of a newsletter they’d barely started - with a voice they’d barely defined - to issue several hundred by a Substacker with 1m subscribers, for whom Substacking is a full-time job, supported by a staff of 10+ people and a snack budget.

They quit because they treated their newsletter like a one-and-done product launch that either sinks or swims; when in reality, it’s a brutal, grueling, painstaking practice that takes time to grow.

The easiest analogy is a kid who gives up on their vegetable garden because a prize-winning tomato failed to grow overnight.

(It was me; I was literally that kid.)

Surely, we’ve more guts, and we’re at least slightly more realistic than that.

What Does “Nobody Wants This Actually” Mean?

The market isn’t owed your work, and you’re not owed the market’s attention. That’s as good a place to start as any.

But where to, from there?

If you don’t start a prairie fire with your first missive, it doesn’t actually mean you’re wrong, your blog sucks, and you should go fuck yourself. Sometimes, it just means you’re early.

And even if it does suck - you have permission to suck. For as long as it takes to get better; for as long as it takes to find a voice you love.

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.

The best voices sounded weird as all hell before they became so well known that we took them as Gospel. The weird is a good place to be. Enjoy it.

Tim Ferriss’ first blog posts had comments and readership in the single digits. Ben Thompson of Stratechery fame wrote for years before it became a career. James Clear blogged without a book deal for years before our habits became variously atomic.

They didn’t wait for permission or for proof. They wrote through the void.

They treated writing as a craft, and a joy, a challenge, and an outlet.

And so can you.

How to Write When Nobody is Watching

Pick a schedule and stick to it. Exceptions are fine as an exception, but consistency is your only edge.

Write about something you can’t stop writing about. Don’t waste your energy chasing analytics, trends, or wherever the influencers think the puck is going to go. The influencers are idiots. I should know; that’s what people call me.

If you can resist it, don’t even look at your numbers for the first six months. Pretend they don’t exist. Pretend they’ve never been invented. Write, ship and repeat without post-gaming. It’s liberating, and you’ll skip the pressure, the self-doubt and the anxiety.

Read widely. Read often. Read every day. Read people you love, and read people you hate. Read books, blogs, magazines and shitty AI-slop posts on LinkedIn that make you just mad enough to serve as fuel.

But read.

Finally - publish. You can’t grow if you don’t post. You can’t think in public if you hide in the dark. Your work might be impossibly mid, compared to whoever you’re following. But if you publish it, and you don’t rage-quit, you can take solace in knowing it’ll also be impossibly mid compared to your own work in six months.

Samuel Johnson Went There First.

Samuel Johnson, writing in the 1700s, published The Rambler to a tiny audience, in a crowded market of London Circulars, in an era where most folks couldn’t actually read in the first place. He wrote, no matter how daunting it might’ve seemed. And we remember his name, while a good many of his competitors and contemporaries lie in forgotten graves.

You have distribution channels he could never have imagined. You have tools beyond his wildest dreams. You have access to more inspiration, to more of the written word than anyone, anywhere, at any point in human history.

If the odds feel stacked against you, I’d encourage you to look for the balance. It’s there, if you want to see it.

Take one thing away from this:

I want you to write.

I want to have more competition. I want more folks filling up my inbox, as long as they’re writing from a place of genuine passion; as long as they actually give a shit.

I want you to write a newsletter.

Even if nobody else does.