Should founders write a newsletter?
When I heard Kylie Jenner reportedly looked at Substack, it cut straight through the usual assumption that newsletters are for people who haven't made it yet. Reach and ownership solve two completely different problems, and most people only ever build one of them.
When I heard Kylie Jenner reportedly looked at Substack, it cut straight through the usual assumption that newsletters are for people who haven't made it yet. Reach and ownership solve two completely different problems, and most people only ever build one of them.
Yes, and not for the reason most people assume. A newsletter isn't a growth hack or a feed you have to keep feeding. It's a way to get back three things a platform never hands out: who sees your work, when they see it, and whether it's still there tomorrow if the platform changes how it ranks content.
Most people think a newsletter is something you start when you're small, a foothold you build before an algorithm notices you. That assumption falls apart the moment you look at someone with real reach choosing to build one anyway. If someone with millions of followers across every platform still wants a newsletter, the interesting question isn't why they'd bother. It's what a newsletter gives them that the following doesn't.
What does a newsletter give you that reach doesn't?
An Instagram post lives or dies by a feed. Something decides whether it shows up, when, and to how many people, and that something isn't you. An email lands in an inbox. There's no ranking system standing in between you and the person who subscribed. That gap is the whole point.
Reach and ownership feel like the same thing from the outside, but they solve two completely different problems. You can spend years growing a following and still own nothing that lasts, because the thing you built sits on someone else's server and plays by someone else's rules. A newsletter is the one format where the list and the archive are actually yours.
The archive part is the piece people miss. A newsletter isn't only a way to send something out, it's a record. Every edition sits there, searchable and linkable, long after a social post has been buried under the next scroll. Social platforms are built to surface what's new. They were never built to preserve what's good. The feed does its job, which is distribution, and then it moves on, and the work you did goes with it unless you've put a copy of it somewhere you actually control.
What does this look like in my own publishing?
I write on a newsletter for exactly this reason, even though it sits apart from everything else I publish. It's a slower, separate space, and I've made peace with that, because its job is different from the rest of my content. It's not chasing the next bit of reach. It's the place the writing doesn't expire the week after it goes out.
In practice, most of what I publish runs through one connected pipeline. I film footage, it gets edited into reels, carousels, captions and a blog article, and that one piece of raw material turns into formats across several platforms without me rebuilding anything from scratch for each one. The newsletter doesn't plug into that loop. It's genuinely a separate funnel. I write there, and the writing and audio stay apart from the short-form repurposing that drives the rest of my output.
When a platform changes its ranking rules or restructures its feed, that writing doesn't vanish, because it was never sitting on someone else's server to begin with. It was always mine.
Does this mean social media doesn't matter?
No, and I'd be overstating it if I said otherwise. Social platforms are genuinely good at one job: getting something in front of people who haven't found you yet. A newsletter doesn't replace that. Nobody discovers you cold through an email list, because nobody subscribes to something they've never heard of.
The honest limitation is that a newsletter is an extra step, not a solved one. It doesn't flow neatly into everything else I do. I have to write for it separately, and it moves slower than the rest of my content because it isn't built to be repurposed the same way. I keep it anyway, because what it protects is worth the friction, but I wouldn't pretend it's effortless or that it should be the first thing a founder builds.
How do you decide if a newsletter is worth building?
Four honest questions before you commit to one:
1. Do you already have some reach somewhere, even a small one? A newsletter works best as a second layer on top of existing distribution, not as your only channel from day one.
2. Would it bother you if a platform reshuffled tomorrow and your best posts disappeared from view? If the answer is genuinely no, you may not need the extra step yet.
3. Are you willing to write something separately, on a slower rhythm, rather than repurposing what you've already made for social? A newsletter that's just a copy-paste of your captions rarely holds attention.
4. Do you actually want an archive, something a reader or a search engine can find months later, or are you only trying to grow faster right now? Those are different goals and they call for different tools.
If most of those point toward 'yes', the newsletter earns its place. If you're still building initial reach, it's fine to leave it for later. A platform change is only a crisis if the platform was holding the only copy of your work.
Where does this fit with everything else I publish?
The same instinct that made me keep a newsletter despite the friction is the instinct behind building The Culo Village. A newsletter solves this for the writing you do specifically for it. But most of what a founder publishes still happens across Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, and that work needs the same thing a newsletter gives an email: a permanent, searchable home that doesn't disappear when a feed stops surfacing it. The Village takes existing posts, reels and captions and gives each one its own findable webpage, so the archive problem a newsletter solves for your writing gets solved for the rest of your content too.
If you're deciding whether to start one, don't start it to chase growth. Start it because you want at least one thing you've written to still exist, fully yours and fully findable, regardless of what any platform does next.
Join the Culo Village to republish the posts you have already distributed as individual web articles, then use Culo Creatives in Canva in one repeatable, sustainable workflow.