![]() ![]() Letterhead is explicitly a hosted software solution that you pay for your organization to use, not an open-source project like Ghost. On the spectrum of email newsletter products, Letterhead’s focus on revenues and team collaboration places it adjacent to Substack’s focus on the individual writer, and to other products like Lede designed specifically around subscription news organizations. We’re seeing demand for that not just from traditional media publishers, but also from marketers, nonprofits, universities, professional associations - all these folks who have engaged communities and want to deepen those relationships and bring in revenue through that engagement.” “The bigger vision is to create a set of tools and services that feed into each other in one easy place, and help all of those revenue streams grow, eventually branching out from email. “Sponsorships and ads were we heard about most, so that’s where we started,” co-founder and COO Rebekah Monson said by email. ![]() ![]() Sopher says that its five city newsletters are comfortably profitable via ads overall - having recovered from a pandemic dip earlier this year - and are continuing to grow.īut the new focus is on Letterhead’s tools, including the ad system, a new paid subscription feature that lets you do things like add paywalled subsections of emails, easy-to-use text editing and template formatting, and soon, analytics. Today, WhereBy.Us is one of the few success stories from a catastrophic decade in local news. “We’d tell people that we used our own internal tools and they’d say ‘oh, can we use those, too? And we’d say ‘no, that’s not what we’re doing.’ Eventually, we said no enough that we looked at each other and said, ‘we should figure out how to get to yes on this.’ And that’s where Letterhead came from.” (Those tools, in this author’s experience, generally include a combination of Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Sailthru, together with your main web publishing CMS like WordPress, your separate subscription software like Piano and however you are managing ads.) ![]() “People would reach out to us and say ‘I love this newsletter, what tools do you use?’ because it was such a pain to produce emails with all of the different tools out there,” Sopher explains. Through this process, it has continued to improve the tool itself. With this business model and technology as a foundation, it launched or acquired newsletters in Seattle, Portland, Orlando and Pittsburgh. The publication became a rare success in online local news, once it focused on the email newsletter format. Letterhead is actually a product spinout of a community publisher in Miami called WhereBy.Us that began life in 2014 by launching a local media site, The New Tropic. Its viewpoints on the future of newsletters - and its customer base so far - are intriguingly different from your typical SaaS startup in Silicon Valley. Instead, it puts all ad sales, paid subscriptions and newsletter content management into a single, streamlined product. Letterhead is slicing through the vast market of existing email SaaS products, betting that a cross-section of revenue and collaboration needs are not being met properly for newsletter creators of all types. What if you want to make money from the newsletter content itself? The problem is that the tools you have available are probably too generic, or are built specifically for marketers. Maybe email is even your focus now, because you got burned by Facebook, Google or other closed platforms during the past decade. You’re probably investing in an email newsletter these days, whether you’re an international brand, a nonprofit or a local news publisher. ![]()
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