How to Start a Newsletter (Step-by-Step, 2026)

The Four Tabs I Had Open Before I Wrote a Single Word

In 2023, while I was still convinced Clickly — my Bitly-style URL shortener — would make me rich, I decided to start a newsletter. And like a good broken engineer, I did the exact wrong thing first: I opened four browser tabs, one per platform, and spent an entire evening comparing free-tier limits I would not hit for two years. Subscriber caps. Send limits. Referral features. I made a spreadsheet. For a list I had not started, sending emails I had not written, to subscribers who did not exist.

That’s the disease this whole site is about. I optimize the tool before the thing the tool is for even exists.

Here’s the punchline I paid an evening to learn: the platform barely mattered. What mattered was that I eventually closed the tabs, picked one, and sent something to the eleven people who’d trickled in. (I told the fuller story of that first ridiculous issue — and, more usefully, what to actually put in a newsletter — in newsletter ideas for broke founders. This post is the other half: the plain, ordered how. Where that one is the what-to-write, this is the how-to-start.)

So let me give you the getting-started guide I wish someone had handed me before I built the spreadsheet.

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First, Why Bother at All

Quick reframe, because it’s the only reason this is worth your time.

Every other channel you grind on is rented. You post on Twitter and hope the algorithm serves it. You write a blog and pray Google indexes it before six million AI-generated articles bury you. You’re a tenant, and the landlord can change the locks whenever it wants.

A newsletter is land you own. Someone hands you their email, and from then on reaching them is a subject line and a send button — no middleman deciding whether the message gets through. It’s the one audience that moves with you: kill your product and start a different one tomorrow, and those subscribers come along. Your followers on a platform might not even notice you left.

That’s the entire pitch. Not “newsletters are trendy.” It’s the piece of distribution nobody can take from you — and I made the longer case for that in the distribution playbook. Now let’s actually build one.

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Step 1: Pick a Platform (Then Stop Comparing)

You have two genuinely different jobs, and reaching for the wrong tool is how you overpay. If you’re building a real publication — a signup page, an archive, growth features — you want a newsletter platform. Here’s the honest 2026 lay of the land for the free tiers, because that’s all a broke founder should touch to start.

Platform	Free tier	Best for	The catch
beehiiv	Up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited sends	Growth-minded newsletters (referrals, recommendations, a real website)	Cross 2,500 and the free plan stops taking new signups; paid jumps to $49/mo
Kit (ex-ConvertKit)	Up to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited sends	The biggest free runway; doubles as your onboarding automation tool	One automation, one form, and Kit branding on the free plan
Substack	Free to publish and send, forever	Pure writing, plus a discovery network that hands you subscribers	10% of any paid-subscription revenue, plus Stripe fees; you own the design less
MailerLite	250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/mo	Honestly? Skip it to start	They gutted the free plan in June 2026 — it was 500 subs and 12,000 sends

My take: start on beehiiv if you want the growth machinery baked in, or Kit if you want the most generous free ceiling and plan to reuse it for your welcome email too. Pick Substack if you genuinely just want to write and don’t care about owning the design — that built-in discovery is real, and free is free. And skip MailerLite for now; it used to be the default free pick and isn’t anymore.

The second job is different. If all you want is to blast your existing app users — a “we shipped a thing” update to people already in your database — you don’t need a publishing platform at all. A marketing email tool like SendPulse (list-based pricing, unlimited sends, ~15,000 emails a month free) does that job. But that’s a product-update blast, not a newsletter. This whole guide is about the newsletter — the thing strangers subscribe to. The difference between those two jobs, and why you never mix them, is the entire point of the complete email guide.

Now close the other three tabs. I mean it.

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Step 2: The Boring Plumbing (Your Platform Does Most of It)

This is the part people either skip or drown in. The good news for a beginner: if you send from the platform’s own domain to start, they’ve already done the hard part for you. beehiiv, Substack, and Kit send from infrastructure they’ve warmed up over years, so your first issue lands in inboxes without you touching a DNS record.

The moment you want the newsletter to come from your own domain — you@yourbrand.com instead of a platform address, which you should eventually do because it’s your brand — you inherit three DNS records: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They’re the boring lines that tell Gmail “yes, this mail is really from me.” Every platform walks you through adding them; it’s copy-paste into your domain registrar, not code. Skip them and your beautiful first issue lands in spam, and you’ll never know it did.

Two things worth knowing in 2026, because the rules got stricter. Gmail and Yahoo now require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for anyone sending real volume (5,000+ a day), plus a working one-click unsubscribe and a spam-complaint rate under 0.3%. You’re nowhere near that volume at eleven subscribers — but set the records up right the first time and you never think about it again. The full deliverability sermon, including why you keep marketing and transactional mail on separate reputations, is in the email guide. For now: send from the platform’s domain, add the three records when you move to your own, done.

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Step 3: Write and Send Issue #1 — Yes, to Eleven People

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, and where most people quit before they start.

My first issue went out to eleven subscribers. Nine were people I already knew. One was me, testing. So — one stranger. Writing an email to eleven people, most of whom had my phone number, felt like performing on a stage for my own family. I almost didn’t send the second one.

Send it anyway. This is the Broken Engineer take, and it’s the whole thing: those eleven addresses were the only distribution I actually owned, and the only way to get to a hundred was to send badly to eleven first. There is no version of this where you skip the embarrassing part. Everyone with a big list started with a small one and felt ridiculous doing it.

A few practical rules for that first issue so you don’t stall:

• Don’t write a manifesto. A “welcome, here’s what to expect, here’s the one thing I learned this week” is plenty. Set expectations in the first issue — how often you’ll write, what it’s about — and you prevent a shocking number of future unsubscribes.
• Pick one honest idea and write it. You do not need a clever niche or a beautiful template. Narrate your week, tear something apart, or share five links you found useful. I laid out seven of these — the exact ideas that work when you’re a nobody — in newsletter ideas, so I won’t repeat the menu here. Just pick one and go.
• Plain text beats the glossy template. A three-sentence email from your own name gets replies; a logo-header, eight-button design gets glanced at and ignored. I learned this the hard way with the welcome email I over-designed — same lesson applies to issue one.

Then hit send. The first issue being small isn’t a problem to fix. It’s the correct starting point.

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The One Habit That Actually Decides This

If you take one thing from this guide, take this: the platform, the design, the topic — none of it matters as much as showing up again.

I’ve watched founders launch a gorgeous weekly newsletter, burn out in three weeks, and vanish. Twelve issues sent every month without fail will build more of an audience than forty issues crammed into a hot streak that dies by spring. The compounding only works if you don’t disappear.

So pick a cadence you can sustain on your worst week, not your most motivated one. Monthly is completely fine. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar so it’s a commitment, not a vibe. And if you can, write two or three issues ahead and sit on them — that buffer is what carries you through the week you’re slammed and would otherwise ghost your list.

The newsletter you actually send beats the perfect one still sitting in your drafts. Boring and alive wins.

Because the thing that actually kills newsletters isn’t a boring topic. It’s the six-week gap where subscribers forget who you are and mark your comeback issue as spam.

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How to Grow the List Without Selling Your Soul

You’ve sent issue one. Now, slowly, honestly, you grow. There’s no growth hack here, just plumbing that compounds:

• Put the signup link everywhere you already are. Your email signature, your Twitter bio, the footer of every blog post, your product’s dashboard. Most subscribers come from a link someone was one click away from anyway.
• One clear call-to-action per blog post. If you write content — and you should, per the distribution playbook — end each post with a single “subscribe to get the next one” line. Not a popup that ambushes people on arrival. One honest ask.
• Ask for the forward and the reply. “If this was useful, forward it to one person who’d like it” grows a list for free. And a newsletter that gets replies quietly teaches Gmail your mail is the kind people engage with, which protects your deliverability.
• Never, ever buy a list. A purchased list is dead weight that tanks your sender reputation and lands your real mail in spam. Eleven people who asked to hear from you beat 10,000 who didn’t, every time. This is the one corner I won’t let you cut.

Eleven becomes fifty becomes a few hundred over months, not days. That’s normal. The free tiers above give you thousands of subscribers of runway precisely because getting there takes a while.

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Just Start at Eleven

I wasted an evening comparing platforms for a newsletter that didn’t exist, then almost quit after sending it to eleven people who mostly had my number. If I’d stopped there, I’d have learned nothing. Instead I kept sending — badly, inconsistently at first — and slowly figured out that the list was the one asset I was building that no platform could take from me. Every reel and tweet from that era is gone. The emails are still mine.

So: pick beehiiv or Kit, add your SPF and DKIM when you’re ready to send from your own domain, write one honest issue, and send it to whoever’s there. Then send the next one next month. Feel ridiculous doing it — that feeling is just proof you started before you were ready, which is the only time anyone ever does. (And when you’re wiring the rest of the cheap stack around it, the broke solopreneur’s survival guide is the bigger map.)

This is the Broken Engineer Guide — I over-optimize the tools, fumble the discipline, and write down what I learn so you skip the wasted evening. Now go send the ugly first issue.