Intro Email
Dear ,
we are a diverse group of Newsletter publishers who have connected through our membership of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's NessLabs Community. We come from all corners of the globe and span a broad age and niche spectrum but are united in our wish to publish excellent content and enrich the lives of our subscribers through our newsletters.
Once a month we invite a seasoned newsletter professional to address us for about 45-60 minutes and to tell us their newsletter story, their learnings and any wisdom they can share with us in an informal Q&A format. You topped our recent poll for our favourite guest speaker, so I am reaching out to ask if you would accept our invitation at a date to suit you? We would be honoured to have you address us.
We convene via Zoom every week at 11:00 am ET, but if your schedule requires us to move that I am sure we can accommodate you.
We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully to have you share your story with us soon.
Best wishes
Follow Up Email with details of NessLabs Mastermind Group
Good afternoon ,
I promised to reach out to you after you kindly agreed to follow the invitation of a perfect stranger to subject yourself to a Q&A session with our MasterMind Group of Newsletter publishers on the DATE. Thank you for agreeing to join us - we are very excited to have you talk with us.
Some background information:
NessLabs is a website launched in 2019 by Anne-Laure Le Cunff who writes:"I create science-based content to answer the question: “How can we make the most of our lives without sacrificing our mental health?”This page shares my best posts about creativity, productivity, mental wellness, and more. You will find articles about mental models, learning how to learn, the science of curiosity, how to manage your fear of failure, your time anxiety and your impostor syndrome, the joy of missing out, or how to build your own mental gym."She has created a following of over 23K readers of her Newsletter as well as a paid members community which I believe currently has over 1,700 members. The community is hosted on Circle and is very active and self-organising around various and overlapping creative special interests.
Newsletter MasterMind in Nesslabs. The Newsletter group within NessLabs was started by LA Design expert and Newsletter publisher Nate Kadlac and myself, a 30-year business investment veteran with a background in finance grafted onto an education in literature, who publishes a long-form newsletter essay every week for no other discernible reason other than the joy of writing it. We started the group within NessLabs in the summer of 2020 as a forum to exchange ideas and encourage each other, were quickly joined by a handful of like-minded publishers and began meeting on Wed. lunchtime ET for an hour to riff on relevant topics to our practice. We host our calls on Zoom and have an active Twitter Group which is where we share insights, tech tips and nonsense as it comes...We also run a Notion website which is a rapidly expanding library of our content and connections. Please feel free to browse it.
Our Q&A sessions We decided fairly early on that we would like to invite guests who actually know what they are talking about to share their experience of building a newsletter audience and anything that they would like to divulge to us about their journey, motivation, purpose, wins and challenges or just stories from their world. We have been privileged to host Paul Jarvis, Rosie Sherry, Anne Laure Le Cunff, and Steph Smith so far with each of our Q&A sessions garnering increasing interest and attendance within the community. We usually have somewhere between 20 and 40 attendees on the calls.
Our process Our call format is fairly simple. We publish the event about a fortnight before the date and send out a few reminders to our invitee list in the days running up to the event. During the call, one of us takes responsibility for our guest (in your case that would be me) and will introduce them in glowing terms before handing over the mike to them. Usually, our guests will just take the ball and run, telling us about their publication, why and when they started it (we love to hear about beginnings) before going on to purpose, lessons learned from growing the subscriber base, formats chosen, pivots and platforms. We want our sessions to be interactive and encourage our community to submit questions beforehand so that we have some Qs for you to A in our quiver. Nate is responsible for curating and collecting those. We also have a live chat thread during the call which we monitor to capture questions and encourage people to ask theirs directly. We aim to close punctually on the hour to be respectful of your time and I am quite ruthless at bringing the meeting to a conclusion on time. Years of chairing board meetings has to have brought some benefits.
What I would like from you: If you have some biographical material for me over and above that which I can find on your "WEBSITE" and your [LinkedIn profile], please mail it to me here. Please let me know if there is any aspect of your life and work that you would like me to highlight specifically when I introduce you or any aspects of your publication that you would like me to prompt you to talk about.Otherwise, I look forward to meeting you in person (sort of) prior to the call on Wed. 17th at 12;00 ET, if you can manage to be in the Zoom room (see link). I have also sent you an invitation directly from our calendar.
Very best wishes