I was recently interviewed about the weekly Recomendo newsletter I write with my Cool Tools colleagues, Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson. Here's an excerpt:
What is the goal of your newsletter?
To give our readers a weekly list of 6 things we love — travel tips, books, TV shows, clothes, tools, websites, podcasts, and so on. We want people to be able to read the entire newsletter in 90 seconds or less, with no fluff or wheel spinning.
How do you create your newsletter?
We have a shared Google Doc where the three of us write brief reviews of things we like. Once a week, Claudia goes in and selects six items from the doc (two from each of us) and puts them into the weekly newsletter, which gets sent out on Sunday morning.
Speaking of the creation process, Recomendo always has super cool and useful recommendations. How do you go about selecting what goes into the newsletter?
Speaking for myself (this is Mark), whenever I become aware that I am really appreciative of something (like a phone service, a useful app, a good snack to travel with) I add it to a running list I maintain on workflowy.com. Once a week or so, I will go through that list and write brief recommendations of a few of the items on the list.
How many subscribers do you have?
As of 29 June 2017, we have published 49 weekly issues and have 11,528 subscribers. Once a month or so, we mention the newsletter on our personal social media accounts, on Cool Tools, and on Boing Boing.
Since the interview, our subscriber count has increased to 12,358. Check out Recomendo here.
