July 15, 2022

<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing: A “Dry Run”

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For the least couple of years I’ve had the urge to start a newsletter. The consistency, writing portfolio, audience-building skills, and topic-specific knowledge that I’d gain from a newsletter are pretty attractive to me. They’ve had their moment the last few years, and maybe they’ve peaked, but it’s on my mind.

Well, in the spirit of what I’ve outlined in a couple of my previous posts, I’m going to push through and make it happen this time. I’ll be publishing the first edition of a newsletter in August 2022.

So, what’s it about?

I don’t just want to write my random musings—I’m not a good enough writer for something like that. Even if I was, it should at least have a theme. I need to lean on a specific niche. A narrow topic makes it easier to 1) find passionate readers and 2) keep my writing focused.

I’ve had a few newsletter ideas over the years. One that’s stuck for awhile is a How I Built This-style interview newsletter where I’d chat with the owners and founders of small-to-medium sized businesses. Another was a round-up of startup ideas offered up by various people on social media.

After that, a few of the recurring ideas are around building cities.

One idea is under the working title “Seed to City”. I’ll get into it more in a later post, but I think there is a movement for building new towns and cities from scratch that is going to grow into real life. New towns and cities are going to get built in the next few decades. Some projects are starting today: Telosa, Praxis Society, CityDAO. Peter Theil has a whole VC firm for the concept. There’s a new book out today by Balaji Srinivasan about this concept scaled up into a country. There could/should be a newsletter that writes about this world as it grows.

There’s a second, related idea I’ve been calling “How to Build a Town”. The concept is writing about the actual logistics and choices that someone might make if they were starting a town, and how they’d actually go about that. It would be less focused on the current projects in the space and more about hypothetical others (though it would touch on some current ones).

My plan is to merge the two and create a newsletter that’s one part original writing on topics around building in small towns and “new cities”, and one part links/articles about the “new city” world.

What’s it going to look like?

There are a few newsletters that I’d like to emulate while I go on this journey.

Perhaps the biggest is The Prepared, a well-organized, engineering-focused newsletter about the built world. It has multiple regular writers, a growing but specialized audience, and a great format. I’d love to be like this.

Another that needs a mention is the staple of the last two years: Not Boring. Not Boring does deep dives into specific companies and also semi-related muses about the startup world and Web3. The inspiration here is less the format or topic, but more the writing style and impact.

In terms of pure format, Ben Evans maybe does it best. Most begin with a short, punchy piece of writing (unless he really has something to say) and then it splits into consistent, well-curated sections of news from other sources. Ben is an amazing writer and nails the newsletter.

So, in “How to Build a City” (working title 🤖), I’m hoping to begin with some original thinking and writing on an important topic, and then go into that week’s news with curated and highly consistent groups of links on a few topics.

Why would I read it?

Well, you’d read it if you care about the space. If you don’t, that’s ok. Maybe there aren’t enough people for even a well-executed newsletter with this concept!