The Saturday-Only Newsletter Behind a Full-Time Director Role
The Story
Tom built Marketing Ideas to 44,000+ subscribers while working full-time as Director of Growth Marketing at Wiz (Source 1).
His writing rule: “I work Monday to Friday, and then on Saturdays I write the newsletter. I dedicate one day per week, the Saturday, for the newsletter and that’s it. I think if I had more than one day, I would have just stretched it to forever.” (Source 1).
The constraint is only on writing, not thinking: “I physically write the newsletter one day a week, but I think about the newsletter and try to grow it every single waking moment, every time I’m breathing and not asleep.” (Source 1).
The day job became the content laboratory. As a marketing director, Tom tested tactics during the week and wrote about the ones that worked on Saturday: “Without my full-time job, I would have never succeeded in my newsletter because all of those experiments and the marketing ideas and the tactics and strategies that I come up with and send people every Friday, I do all of those myself in the full-time job that I have.” (Source 1).
In his own framing: “I remain a marketer first, newsletter writer second. 🧪 I’m more focused on running marketing experiments with Wiz (where I’m Director of Growth Marketing), advising friends, and testing ideas with my own newsletter - than actually writing about them. If I only wrote about marketing ideas without actually implementing them → this newsletter would have a 0% success rate.” (Source 2).
His advice to other creators: “Always prioritize your profession first, writing second. Expertise above all else.” (Source 2).
Lesson for Creators
Two ideas working together. First, time constraints prevent perfectionism. A whole week of “available time” gets filled with one issue; one Saturday gets the same issue shipped. Parkinson’s Law isn’t a curse, it’s a tool you can use. Second, the day job isn’t competition for your newsletter, it’s the source material. Most creators try to quit their job to write full-time and then run out of fresh experience to write about. Tom’s model says: stay in the field, run real experiments, write only what you’ve actually done. The newsletter compounds because the source never dries up.
Related
- The 120-Word Post That Outperformed Everything — the writing discipline that pairs with the time constraint
- The Wiz Drops Playbook — the day-job experiments that fed the newsletter
- Sixty-Five Thousand Dollars in Year One — Lenny Rachitsky: contrast - went all-in to monetize, Tom kept the day job
- Learning Growth at The Hustle Before Building His Own — Alex Garcia: same “use the job to learn” pattern
- I’d Rather Lose Every Other Channel Than Lose My Newsletter — Jesse J. Anderson: another “newsletter as the irreplaceable core asset” framing