Frequency-Content Fit

For a few weeks, I was sending five newsletters a week.

Five. Every weekday, like clockwork. I had convinced myself this was the right move. More sends means more ad slots. More ad slots means more revenue. More revenue means sustainable business.

Bulletproof logic...right?

Reality, as usual, had other plans.

Here's the honest take of how I was opening those emails: excited, but not for the right reasons. I wanted to see if the automation which sends the newsletter had done its job. Were the events formatted correctly? Was the personal intro I wrote the day before there as expecte? Was there anything broken? That kind of excited. Builder excited.

Reader excited? Not so much.

My local newsletter covers events happening around the city, plus some positive local news pulled from third-party sources. That's the gist of it. And when you think about that content type for a second, the problem becomes obvious. Events don't change overnight. The positive news isn't breaking anything. There's nothing in there that demands you check it every single morning or you'll miss something. After a few days it stops feeling like a newsletter and starts feeling like a chore.

I was reading it to quality-check. A real reader would have just stopped opening it.

On the flip side, the numbers weren't catastrophic. Open rates were sitting around 45%, which is fine for a local newsletter. But then one Monday edition came in at 37%, and I couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't a fluke. It was a preview.

So I asked myself the only question that actually matters: would I open this email every weekday for the next year?

No. Obviously no. At some point I'd be annoyed by it. And if I'm the most invested person in this whole project, and even I'm getting fatigued, what chance does a casual reader have?

I also started talking more directly with subscribers. At 200 people, the list was still small enough to actually have real conversations. Most of them were opening it because the whole thing felt new and exciting. The novelty of a local newsletter for the city was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I had a feeling that wouldn't last forever. One of those conversations was with my mom, who is both my most loyal reader and my most honest critic. She liked it. She was opening it. But even she admitted she didn't really need it five days a week.

When your mom is giving you hints about newsletter frequency, you listen.

So I had identified the problem. I just needed the words for it.

I ended up calling it Frequency-Content Fit. It's a simple idea: the cadence of your sends should match the nature of what you're actually sending. Not your monetization goals. Not some playbook you read about. The content itself should tell you how often to show up.

A daily stock market digest makes sense every day because the numbers change and decisions depend on them. A local newsletter built around events and city life? You don't need to know what's happening Thursday night on Monday morning. You probably want to know on Tuesday, when you're starting to plan the week, and on Friday, when the weekend is suddenly very real.

The content wasn't built for daily. I was forcing it into a daily container because I've started with a naive monetization mindset.

But hey, here's the thing: shipping daily wasn't all bad.

The feedback loop was great. Every morning I'd send an edition, read through it with fresh eyes, notice something I wanted to change, and have it fixed before the next one went out. In just a few weeks, the structure got sharper, the writing got cleaner, the format got more coherent. That kind of fast iteration is very hard to replicate when you're only publishing once a week. You have fewer chances to experiment, fewer data points, fewer opportunities to course-correct. Going daily was stressful, yes. But it also compressed months of learning into weeks.

I don't regret it. I would do it all over again.

Anyway, turns out I ended up switching to bi-weekly. Tuesday and Friday.

• Tuesday warms things up: positive local news, an overview of events for the week.
• Friday goes all-in on the weekend.

What surprised me after making the switch: the open rate climbed back above 45% almost immediately. Same subscriber base, same content, just better timing. People weren't tired of hearing from me. They were tired of hearing from me too often. Cutting the frequency made the people more eager to read it when it landed in their inbox.

Two issues a week still gives a decent feedback loop. Two chances a week to test something, see what resonates, try a new section. That's plenty when there are a hundred other things to figure out at the same time, such as growth and monetization. And now there's actually room to think about them.

Keep shipping,
Michele