Hey - just an idea.

I know a girl who runs ‘mindfulness drawing classes’. Essentially, it’s a class for people who draw leaves of plants, they pick out the shapes they see, and maybe focus on a particular aspect. There’s no right or wrong, good or bad, it’s just about being present and drawing plants.

But (maybe surprisingly) - it’s really popular! People love taking the time to be calm, look at plants and in your case - sip a coffee. It seems to be particularly popular with young arty students as well as middle-aged women.

On each table there are a couple of plants, who knows, maybe if the person likes their picture, they may even want to buy the plant they drew it of too.

Good luck with it - I really hope you can make it work.

Yes, it is similar to substack - which is what I previously used.

Substack was good for most things, especially the ‘Notes’ section, which Beehiiv doesn’t have. The premise of notes is for newsletter content writers to read each other’s work and connect with each other, which I like.

I moved to Beehiiv after I realised that my side project was growing, and I had the opportunity to monetise it. This was in the form of boosts, ads, paid subscriptions, sponsorships, referrals, etc. The dashboard tells me everything I need to know, I can easily manage ad requests, boosts and so on.

For paid subscriptions, it’s paid and processed through Stripe (who take a small transaction fee).

Love this - congrats to you both!

So I use a platform called Beehiiv, which I have found to be the best platform both in terms of ease of use and audience building.

There are then 3 ways I find that people sign up:

1. Subscribers sharing with their friends/colleagues. Beehiiv works well here because they have a built-in referral system, which makes it easy and rewards people for sharing your newsletter.
2. Using X and Facebook for both organic growth and paid ads. Generally, I’ve found X to be the best platform. Content is easily visible. For paid ads, it works out to be around 1.15 I pay per sub.
3. Using Boosts on Beehiiv where you can pay for similar newsletters to promote yours on theirs. This is good because their audience already has an interest in newsletters in general, and the subject you talk about. So typically have a high open rate in return. More importantly, you set how much you’d like to pay for each referral, starting from 0.50 for each.

Other than that, post consistently, be engaged with your audience and enjoy it. I’ve got a lot of enjoyment out of doing mine and the opportunities are great.

I’m running an email newsletter for people interested in e-commerce and online businesses. It mainly focussed on trends, industry news and AI. It’s called Hustlers Outpost

I started it as a side hobby but am really surprised by how many people signed up. So just seeing where it takes me :)