A Note From Management: Seeking Your Input

What can I do to make this a better product?

For some reason, around New Year’s Day, I started receiving all sorts of Substack newsletters I couldn’t remember signing up for. Part of this was probably authors realizing they had created a Substack and had never actually posted to it, then wanting to squeeze something out by the end of the year. (I have a co-worker who decided to start a Substack newsletter, and when she went to sign up, she realized she had forgotten that she had already previously created three other Substacks.)

But some of the ones I received, I am certain I never signed up for. People had just started adding my email to their list in the hopes that I was too lazy to unsubscribe. I am vigilant in keeping my inbox clean of nuisances, however, and I buckled down to do a mass cleansing of unwanted newsletters.

Nonetheless, this got me thinking about how I can grow my readership. I will never add people who don’t ask for it, but I want to be more vigilant in putting out a product that people actually really want to read. (Or at least that they want to read more than the 300 newsletters that are about to be started by former Washington Post employees.)

So I want to hear from you - what are you looking for out of this newsletter? How can I make it better? What will incentivize you to suggest it to friends-slash-share it online?

Here are a few questions you can answer anonymously. I’ll keep the voting open for a week.

Next question:

And:

For example, I recorded a brief summary of my last National Review column:

And:

And:

Finally:

I’ll leave the comments section open, so feel free to chime in on other things you’re looking for that can aid you in obtaining Complete World Knowledge. And please, no more questions about how to tell me and Idris Elba apart - he’s the one with the British accent.