Why people start newsletters
It’s not just about writing
You might be wondering why I write a newsletter.
Why I spend evenings drafting emails instead of watching Netflix.
And also why more and more people are doing the same.
Because this is clearly not just a personal obsession anymore.
Platforms like Substack keep growing, more creators are launching newsletters, and some of them are turning a simple email into a serious business.
So the real question is not “how do you start a newsletter”.
It’s: why do people do it at all?
The “new magazines” in a noisy world
Social feeds today are a mess: hot takes, drama, and tons of useless content pushing for one second of attention.
All this noise brought back an old need: curated content, with a clear voice, that feels more like a magazine than an endless feed.
A good newsletter is exactly that.
Recurring issues, a focused topic, and a person who selects what is worth your time, directly in your inbox instead of on a newsstand.
For readers, it is a way to step out of the algorithm and get signal instead of noise.
For writers, it is a place where you do not have to shout to be heard: you simply show up, consistently, in front of people who asked to listen.
The practical reasons
There is also a very practical side.
A newsletter helps people in at least three ways:
It sharpens your thinking.
Writing forces you to put order into your ideas.
You move from “I kind of get it” to “I can explain it”.It builds leverage.
One good article keeps bringing you opportunities (offers, collaborations, messages) long after the day you publish it.It opens career options.
Substack has passed 5 million paid subscriptions, and tens of thousands of writers get paid for what they publish.
At least 50 newsletters earn more than $500K per year, and the top creators together make over $40M a year in recurring revenue.
The Pragmatic Engineer, for example, has passed 1 million readers and became a serious business built on a simple mailing list.
Most people will never reach those numbers.
But they don’t need to.
Even a small newsletter can lead to:
more job offers
side projects that find their first users
consulting opportunities
or simply a much stronger professional identity.
The personal reason I write this newsletter
For me, the deepest reason is not money or audience size.
It is a person.
At University, I was far from the top student.
I came from a high school with very little maths, so Computer Science hit me hard. I was slower than others, and for a long time I did not feel “naturally suited” for this field.
My close friend was the opposite.
He was faster on the exercises, passed the exams I failed, and became the person I looked up to. He saw potential in me before I saw it in myself, and he often highlighted my strengths when I couldn’t.
We studied together.
He helped me, explained concepts, and pushed me when I slowed down.
He was my first real mentor.
Then, during our internship in the University lab, something broke on his side.
He was under pressure to prove his value, but he struggled to perform at the level he expected from himself. Instead of noticing what was behind it, the professors he was writing his thesis with reacted in a way that only increased his anxiety.
Little by little, that constant pressure pushed him into a kind of burnout.
He stopped believing in his own abilities, and what used to be passion turned into stress.
In the end, he decided not to continue with the Master’s degree.
Our academic paths split there: I went on with the Master’s, while he moved into a full‑time role that had very little to do with what he really wanted.
For about two years, he stayed in that job: no real programming, no joy in his day‑to‑day work.
Every time I saw him during that period, I could feel he was… switched off.
In the meantime, my path slowly changed direction.
Even if I had started as the “weaker” one, year after year I became more passionate about Software Engineering.
When I entered the job market, that growth accelerated.
In just a couple of years, I:
started in a consulting company
got promoted
moved to a product company like TheFork
got promoted again
and began receiving an impressive number of job proposals on LinkedIn, almost every day.
All this time, my friend was there, watching this progression from close range.
He kept asking me how I was doing it.
He told me I was good at “selling myself” on LinkedIn and said he wished he had the same ability.
The irony is that I never really felt “good at selling myself”.
I felt like I was just doing what seemed natural: taking care of my profile, answering messages, sharing small pieces of my journey.
So when he said those things, I mostly felt grateful — and almost guilty.
Grateful, because I knew exactly how far I had come from that insecure student who thought Computer Science was “too hard” for him.
Guilty, because I knew he had been one of the first to believe in me, and now he was stuck in a role where he couldn’t use his real strengths.
And he still hated the idea of “selling himself”.
That’s where the urgency came from.
I felt I could not just sit and watch anymore.
I was so thankful for everything that had happened in my career that it felt wrong not to try to use that experience to help him.
I knew I wasn’t doing anything magical. It was just a set of behaviours applied with consistency.
So helping him did not feel like a sacrifice.
It felt like the most natural thing you do for a friend: cheer for him, sit next to him, and show in practice that what you are doing is not out of his reach.
I invited him to my place and proposed a kind of “side project”:
every week, for as long as needed, we would:
fix his LinkedIn profile
do LeetCode together
go back to the basics of programming after years away from code
and work on how he talked about himself, even if he hated it.
This became our weekly ritual for about a year and a half.
At the beginning he had zero confidence.
He did not believe he could come back into the game, and anything that looked like self‑promotion made him feel sick.
Slowly, repetition did its job.
His coding skills slowly came back.
His LinkedIn started to look like the profile of a real engineer, not an accident.
He started interviewing again… and eventually he found a company where he could do what he is actually good at: programming.
Every time I write the sentence:
“Are you a Software Engineer who hates the idea of ‘selling yourself’?”
I have his face in mind.
But he is not the only one.
Some time later, I found myself doing something similar for another University mate — this time mostly through chats and calls, with much less intense “weekly sessions”.
She was also stuck in a role that did not reflect her skills, with the same mix of low confidence and resistance to visibility. We talked, I shared similar advice, we worked on her profile and mindset in small steps… and she, too, eventually found her way back to a job that fit her much better.
Seeing this happen more than once made something click.
If two people from my small circle were struggling like this almost in silence, it was clear there must be many more engineers out there in the same situation, just without someone next to them to go through LinkedIn, interviews, and mindset.
A newsletter felt like the most honest way I could try to reach those people: not by pretending to “save” anyone, but by writing down the same guidance I would give if we were sitting at the same desk, side by side.
That is the real root of this newsletter.
I write because I do not want more people like them to quietly leave the right path just because no one ever gave them the tools — and the push — to express their value.
Why people really do it
Some people start a newsletter for money.
Some for status.
Some to have a direct relationship with their audience.
But often, under the surface, the reason is much simpler.
You have something to say.
You are tired of waiting for someone to “discover” you.
You want to help the previous version of yourself not to disappear.
In my case, there is also a sense of fairness.
When you see a capable person, full of potential, slowly drift away from the career they deserved just because others misjudged them, it leaves a mark.
A newsletter can be a small act against that.
Not just content.
A way to make talent visible.
A way to give words to people who have value but struggle to show it.
And that is why, in the end, so many people start a newsletter.