StoryCareer Editorial
Published Aug 3, 2026 · 1 min read
I started a weekly newsletter about marketing experiments. Two years later it pays a meaningful part of my income — and it taught me more than any job.
I began writing a newsletter while working a marketing job because I wanted a place to publish everything I learned from running ads and campaigns. For the first six months, almost nobody read it.
Keeping up the consistency was brutal. Publishing every week with no readers felt pointless, and I nearly quit twice because the numbers were so discouraging.
I stopped optimizing for growth and started optimizing for usefulness. I wrote about the failures as much as the successes, made every issue solve one concrete problem, and asked readers what they wanted next. The growth followed once the content became reliably valuable.
Most of my week is spent studying campaign results and talking to other marketers. On writing day I block the whole morning, draft the issue, and spend the afternoon editing it down to the essentials.
Pick a narrow topic and write for six months before you judge anything. The audience you need is small, and it will find you through useful, consistent work — not through clever growth hacks.
After eight years in corporate jobs, I left to build a small software product. It failed twice before I found something people were willing to pay for.
I moved from a retail job into security analysis through free labs, homelab practice, and a first role that paid less than my old job but taught me everything.
My first product was a two-person build with an eight-week deadline. I learned that writing the spec was the easy part — the hard part was saying no.