Issue one went to 31 people, most of them related to me. Issue one hundred went to a little over eleven thousand.

The deadline is the product

Readers don't remember individual issues. They remember that it arrived every Thursday at seven. Consistency builds more trust than any single brilliant post.

Growth was boring

No viral thread did it. Each week a few people forwarded it to a friend. That's the whole strategy, repeated a hundred times.

Write the letter you would forward.