"People are signed up because they want everything from you in one place." How Jessica DeFino built The Unpublishable into a 6-figure newsletter.

Jessica's newsletter has nearly 100K subscribers. We talk about how she did it.

Content People’s back for Season 3. And this is one of our best interviews yet.

In S3E1 I talked to Jessica DeFino.

🗣️ The Sunday Herald called her “the woman the beauty industry fears.”

🗣️ HuffPost described her work as “yanking consumers out of the matrix made by the beauty industry.”

🗣️ I would call her a content powerhouse.

She’s a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Sunday Times, and Vogue. She also has a weekly column called Ask Ugly at The Guardian.

And, perhaps most famously, Jessica’s the woman behind The Unpublishable newsletter (right here on Substack), which has close to 100K subscribers and generates 6 figures of revenue per year.

The Unpublishable stats as of November of 2023:

📈 90,022 free monthly subscribers. 

💌 4,441 paid monthly subscribers.

💸 Paid subscriptions are approximately $5/month.

Here are 7 of Jessica’s Dos and Don’ts for building a successful newsletter. Check out the full interview wherever you get your podcasts or find it here.

Jessica says: “Don’t brand so hard into having a Substack - just widen it into having a newsletter. Whenever I talk about it myself, I say, ‘I have a newsletter. I have an email newsletter.’ Because I don't want to get caught up in the branding and the politics of what is essentially a corporation that's providing a service … I don't want to brand alongside them. I'm an independent reporter. I'm not like a shill for Substack.” 

“I think ultimately it is a distraction if you're spending a lot of time on notes rather than a lot of time writing your newsletter.

Of my 90, 000 subscribers, 97 percent of them open my stories from email and 3 percent open from the app. So it's 3 percent of my readers are on the app. Why am I going to let myself get sucked into that? The pool is so small. I don't think it's worth getting distracted and spending a ton of time there.”

“There is no content schedule. If I don't send something out to people for two weeks - I don't care because I've never promised them anything in terms of … what to expect for me at this certain day or at this certain time.”

“I'm still experimenting and I think what I've learned is that it actually doesn't matter. I've never sent something out at a funky time and had it bomb in performance. With an email newsletter, it lands in people's inbox and then they read it when they read it.”

“People are signed up because they want everything from you in one place. If you're writing a freelance article for Vogue, you should be sending it out through the newsletter. If you're on a podcast, you should be sending it out through the newsletter. Previously, I hadn't done that because it felt like cheating.”

“Look for ways to position yourself as an expert outside of your own newsletter. You can use social media to do this, but you don't have to use social media to do this.”

“One thing I've noticed is that quotes work really well. If I quote a source and I put it in quotation marks in the subject line, those get consistently like five, six percent more opens than other subject lines. A big mistake I see a lot of newsletter writers make is to write a subject line that is very emotional or personal to them - but who's going to click on that? You have to think ‘Is this compelling enough to make somebody click?’ if they're getting 100 emails an hour, which many of us are.”

Jess, thank you! I loved talking with you.

xo, Meredith

PS. Stay tuned for our next episode - we talk to the wonderful Liza Belmonte of Every Body Gets Dressed. It’s another great, info-packed episode and I can’t wait to share it.