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I’d Rather Lose Every Other Channel Than Lose My Newsletter

The Story

By May 2023, Jesse Anderson was running Extra Focus at 59,000 subscribers, plus a presence on X (the channel that had originally driven most of his growth), Instagram, YouTube, two podcasts (ADHD Nerds and The Weekly Build), and a forthcoming book (Source 1).

Asked how he started building his audience and where the newsletter fit in, he answered with a single ranking: “I’m really lucky that I started my newsletter basically at the beginning of my journey. It is BY FAR the most important piece of the puzzle.” (Source 1).

The quote underneath that, set as a pull-quote in the interview: “I’d rather lose all of my followers in every other channel than lose my newsletter community.” (Source 1).

He had immediate evidence for why. “It used to be X. I loved using X and it was an effective place to grow my newsletter. It’s where the majority of my subscribers have come from. That’s unfortunately changed a lot in the past 6 months. I find myself using X less and less, and the engagement has dropped to a fraction of what it was previously.” (Source 1).

The platform-risk framing extends to the email service provider too. He likes Substack but explicitly notes the portability of the underlying customer relationship: “since it all goes through Stripe, I can technically move to another platform and keep those subscriptions active.” (Source 1).

His ranking of secondary channels in 2023 was clear: “I also get some incoming growth from Instagram and YouTube, but those are much smaller channels for newsletter growth.” (Source 1). And he was watching new platforms — Bluesky, Substack Notes — to see if they would matter (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

The ranking has a built-in test. If your reaction to losing a platform is “that would hurt but I’d rebuild,” it’s a channel. If your reaction is “that would end the project,” it’s the asset. For most creators that asset is the email list, because email is the only channel where the relationship is portable, the recipient is identifiable, and no algorithm sits in front of the message. Jesse’s X engagement collapse is the case study: the channel that drove most of his subscribers cratered in six months, and the newsletter business kept compounding because the subscribers had already moved into the owned column. Treat every social platform as a top-of-funnel and every email as a deposit into the only account you control.

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