Twenty-seven businesses hand us their weekly letter. We pick the thing that matters, write the draft on Tuesday, cut it to sixty percent on Wednesday, and send it at nine-oh-four on Thursday morning. Every week. Without fail. Not yours to do.
Real titles, real authors, real send times. Nothing on this page is invented — except the clients, who are, but the voices are the ones we'd write for them.
Every newsletter we ship follows the same four-day rhythm. If it's not done by Thursday, we don't send a second-best. We send what we'd want to read.
The lead writer reads the week's notes — customer replies, product updates, what the founder posted on LinkedIn — and picks the one thing the letter is actually about. No committee.
First full draft by noon. No outline phase. The draft is the outline. If we can't write it in one sitting, it wasn't the right thing to write about.
The draft gets cut to sixty percent of its original length. The part that stays is the part that matters. Everything else was the writer thinking, not the reader reading.
Nine-oh-four AM ET. Subject line locked (last), preview text checked, dark mode rendered, delivery tested in nine clients. Then out. Same time, every week.
The letter doesn't sound like Mailelse — it sounds like your brand. These are excerpts from three current client newsletters, each unmistakably itself.
"I stopped by the casting at the new venue last Saturday, and I watched a stylist pick up a sample, turn it inside out, read the label, set it down, pick it up again. I left without saying a word. I was in no state to stand at the table behind her."
"The ruling, notwithstanding some analyst takes circulating this week, does not create a new liability category for directors. It clarifies a jurisdictional question the Circuit had ducked for twelve years. That clarification is useful. It is not seismic."
"The best writing I did this year was the stuff I didn't publish. I keep a folder called drafts-that-survived and one called drafts-I-killed, and by the end of every quarter the second one is three times the size of the first. I think that's the job."
A monthly newsletter is a quarterly newsletter with aspirations. If you can't commit to weekly, pick a different service. We do weekly.
The first draft is always too long. The second draft is usually still too long. The third draft is about right. Most newsletters need a third draft. Most don't get one.
Every letter is addressed to a specific person — usually a composite of three or four real subscribers we've read replies from. Writing to that person reads as intimate. Writing to the whole list reads as a brochure.
You can't write the subject line before the letter, because you don't yet know what the letter is about. We write it five minutes before send, and rewrite it twice.
The clients we write for send on Thursday morning because that's when their readers actually open email. 9:04 specifically, because it reads as human (a person pressing send) rather than automated (a cron job firing).
Hand off your newsletter to the studio. We'll have a first issue in the calendar within a week of kickoff. You'll approve the draft. Then you'll forget about it. That's the point.