I always wanted to have my own personal newsletter. Not sure why. Probably to feel closer to my community. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks feel great, and you get a lot of feedback from them, but there is nothing that gets more of my attention than emails.
My friend Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, started to send some very good emails summarizing what he wrote and found interesting, I enjoy reading them and Reid is one of the friends I actually do not want to miss anything from. If you rely only on social networks, you miss things either because you were just not paying attention when it was published, you were not there, or it did not show up in your Facebook feed. I want all of Reid updates.
Product Hunt is a huge success (and inspiration for me) and was launched off an email experiment.
McKinsey reported that email is actually 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter for reaching people according to Nuzzel, who has just launched a new kind of newsletter (I don't use it though, I prefer creating my own personal content). Newsletters became one of BuzzFeed's top sources of traffic. Emails are personal and according to Harvard Business Review the email newsletter is making a triumphant return.
Seven years ago when I launched Seesmic I was telling my community and friends how we progressed publishing a daily video, Seesmic du jour which gave me incredible feedback.
Today. I'm working on a new startup; what a better occasion to start my own personal newsletter and report on a weekly basis or so on my progress. It's an experiment to move a little the conversations from social networks to personal emails. I'm using my own personal email to send it from.
I posted on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ about my experiment and 500 friends registered in less than an hour and it's growing as I write this.
This is also great pressure for me to start building again!
If you want to hear about my new startup, here it is.