Letterstack

Curated Resources for Newsletter Creators to Help Build, Grow and Monetize Your Newsletter

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Monday Musings: The Youtube mass bans, and what you could do about it.

In case you missed this over the extended weekend, there has been a huge furore on X with YT creators fuming over AI-reviewed mass channel bans.

Channels with thousands of followers and millions of views.

Let that sink in.

You built a content creator career, and the platform decides to wipe it out overnight.

Naturally, the story piqued my curiosity and I had to cover it in the last weekend's @LetterstackCo newsletter issue, with a solution on how to avert such bans, if you are a content creator or are planning to become one.

You know where to sign up - link in the comments.

Attached: One example of the Youtube mass ban conversations from Twitter.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Tuesday Trials: My mind is blown.

I am a movie nerd, as most of you who have worked with me before can attest.

I got introduced to @michaeljburry's work through 'The Big Short'. And since then, I have been following with my interest piqued everytime his X handle came up for air and tweeted about something.

As we all know, Michael usually archives his tweets shortly after, so at any time he does post, I usually take note of it before it gets wiped off my timeline.

So this time, when he announced his paid newsletter on Substack, it was as if my personal and professional worlds at @LetterstackCo had collided.

My happiness is short-lived however to find out that it is a $380/year subscription. 😭

My mind is torn between taking up Lenny's annual offer and this one. I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I am sharing what he had opined about recently on his AI company thesis by citing Bloomberg's infographic.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Sign up for more: https://t.co/NybtspPm0v

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Monday Musings: Freedom is the other side of discipline. I know this quote from Aristotle and popularized by former Navy Seal Jocko Willink for a while, but I did not take it seriously until I got onto a newsletter writing streak.

I have been writing 3000-4000 words a day every day for the past 5 years before ChatGPT erupted into the scene (weird flex, I know). This was for myself and a number of my collaborators in public (a simple Google Search might reveal the body of work).

Am I proud of everything I put out? Hardly.

Would I stand by it if I am up against the wall? You bet I will.

Because for me, writing is about getting all the bad acts out of my system, so that the good juices can flow well. And when you double it up with a weekly cadence to put out work, it can be a great unclogging mechanism for your mind.

So when I decided to get serious about posting every Saturday on @LetterstackCo, I put in the discipline with a risk-reward system, that you get to hurl your brickbats at me the week I miss sending this out. So where's the freedom? The freedom lies in coming out of the negative patterns of procrastination and laziness (i.e. me) and being accountable to my future self in public.

The result: 24 weeks of a newsletter posting streak on @LetterstackCo. And believe it or not, I am only getting warmed up about that for 2026.

So go ahead try the freedom-is-the-other-side-of-discipline track once. Your future self would thank you.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Tuesday Trials: You catch me live, you catch me alive!

I love in-person discussions. My Friday 1:1s with absolute strangers all across the globe on LinkedIn DMs is evidence to that claim (and I am hoping, they agree too)

On the other hand, I am struggling to put a lid on going live on LinkedIn for my clients, as you would have seen me admit on last Thu's post on LinkedIn: What on earth is going on with LinkedIn Live events?

So to make the twain meet, I am thinking I will put myself to the test and livestream my Friday 1:1s as a group therapy sessions, to solve two problems.

1. I want to verify if the StreamYard <> LinkedIn marriage can survive a live event crisis.

2. I want to see if I can expand helping a large group of people in public beyond the 1:1s I have every Friday.

Format: It would be an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on:

1. Building products

2. Audience development and Anushka Ventures

3. Course creation and marketing

4. Building digital businesses with AI

5. Newsletters and @LetterstackCo (bwahaha shameless plug)

The best part about AMAs is you get to ask me anything, while I squirm uncomfortably and admit I don't know much about any of these 5 topics.

So what times on Friday work for everyone out here? 2-4 pm India time?

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Wednesday Wham: "Who are you behind the badge?"

As I talked about a few weeks earlier, the number of my mutuals being let go from the corporate workforce is far too many to count. And they all have a common challenge to deal with: they had no identity beyond what they worked on in their corporate roles.

On probing deeper, I found that the bigger issue that lurks within: they might be bonafide experts in their respective fields with decades of work in the trenches, but they cannot talk one bit about what they did at work, on LinkedIn.

Why? Well, for starters:

NDAs.
Performance Theatre with the org leadership.
Office Turf Wars.

One colleague had so much lived experiences in Javascript, he had gone onto to build his own Youtube channel, which got monetized at a velocity I have not seen before. His joy was short-lived though, because the leadership asked him to stop posting content, or <you know the drill>

So what's the way out?

Funny, you should ask. You know what I am leading you folks to: @LetterstackCo, of course, and newsletters.

I urge you to come build your experience with a coveted group of subscribers, who would benefit from your lived experiences, and you get to keep the list discreet, away from the perils of being public on socials.

Share the word discreetly with whomever you help in consultation calls or mentor sessions.

Build your expertise on the side.

Create the personal brand that you have always wanted for that optionality, you have always aspired in life, but never knew how to go get it.

And if you don't have a clue on how to create it? DM me to know more.

P.S. I may not be Shah Rukh Khan, but I do have amazing dimples (wife-approved) and I will guarantee that I will pull you up onto the train I am on.

Source: Trust me. Evidence attached 😅

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Tuesday Trials: My Body Clock.

"So how do you start your day early despite being a nocturnal guy?"

TLDR: I don't 😂

That's it. That's the post.

I know. I am grateful to have a family which supports it.

But on a serious note, if you are as nocturnal as I am, do you lose sleep over having to wake up early? How do you do it?

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Monday Musings: I got schooled this weekend by one of my collaborators how wrong I was in going about my own marketing approach for @LetterstackCo .

How wrong was I? VERY wrong.

You see when I help out early stage founding teams figure out their first 10,000 customers (like I said before, what the cool kids call as 'GTM'), I usually get to show them something they had blinders on, all the time. I tend to call it being 'too close to the product'.

Turns out, I was at the receiving end this time when she (will talk about her in a separate post too) opened up all the blind spots I had in my own marketing efforts, and how I could let loose all of these limiting beliefs, especially when it came to video.

So naturally, I ate shit and let her carve up what she thought was the right way to go about marketing LetterStack.

You may not be able to see a lot of what was written on the whiteboard, but you will definitely witness ALL of it spin into action as we manifest it in the real world in the coming weeks and months.

More unhinged content coming up from the @LetterstackCo side of the house - stay tuned.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Friday Real Talk: "He makes a living doing WHAT now?"

That weird reaction on people's faces when you tell them what you do for a living never goes away, especially when you work in tech remotely building a marketing agency (Anushka Ventures) while also setting up a small-ish media brand (@LetterstackCo ).

It gets 2x weirder, when you have to explain it to family.

So I keep switching up the versions of what might make it unhinged to dial up the reaction too:

"I help people part with their wallets with a smile buying software they don't really want" (wait what)

"I get paid to talk to ChatGPT all day" (no way!)

"I convince people that yapping on LinkedIn is 10x more valuable for your business than s__tposting on Twitter" (the jury is out on this one)

A lot of what goes on behind the scenes is literally going through every nook and cranny of the digital business with my collaborators, to understand where they might be losing money on the table, and then tightening each screw as I see it. (like I have been doing with Ellie McIntyre this week, as she prepares for a splendid launch for her AI business bundle - go check out her work and Youtube, she's amazing!)

But that doesn't make for good conversation at a family event.

Hamming it up does.

Ergo, here's me hamming it up drinking an Aperol Spritz after gobbling up some amazing gnochhi.

How do you folks describe your job to friends and family?

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Monday Musings: What does AI in movie-making look like?

I am a full-time movie geek. So it follows naturally when I learnt there is an AI Movie festival in town, I had to go check the rumors for real.

I have this theory (which I shared briefly before in the @LetterstackCo newsletter issues) that when we drop the 'AI' in the movie creation process and make it just ubiquitous throughout the process, and the audience just considers it a movie, not an 'AI' movie, that's when you would know that it has truly arrived.

So I attended this AI Film Festival hosted by @localhosthq in Mumbai to find out, and it did not disappoint. They brought together several AI x movie enthusiasts together in a splendid-looking location (the recently restored Royal Opera House Mumbai). The 13 short stories that they screened did not disappoint either.

Having said that, it is still knee-deep in the uncanny valley, and still has some way to go before we consider them truly cinema-immersive. But this space is moving so fast, so I will be tracking and reporting from the trenches.

Enjoy the venue and photos from the wonderful panel of Tanmay Bhatt, Shakun Bata, and Karan Anshuman discussing AI in Indian cinema.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Wednesday Wham: Media Market Maps vs the humble newsletter creator?

I am a fan of TBPN programming. John Coogan and Jordi Hays make wonderful conversation, and they bring up the best guests on board.

So when they released a Media Market Map on X, naturally my interest was piqued. I was hoping to discover the who's who in the newsletter 'new media' world that I am not aware of.

My hope was short-lived, when I realized that there was an absolute dearth of newsletter operators or brands in the list. Sure, it has Colossus and Stripe Press, but Morning Brew and Every was nowhere to be found.

Naturally all the newsletter operator folks I admire like Austin Rief and Dan Shipper were livid in the comments section.

I wrote about what this means for new and aspiring newsletter creators as they build out their brand in the coming years.

Link in the comments.

P.S. It looks like TBPN revised their stance on the initial Media Market Map and acknowledged that there's work to be done here.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Tuesday Trials: I love making money.

What I don't love though is all the mandatory stuff that comes along with making money, as an entrepreneur running multiple businesses Anushka Ventures and @LetterstackCo.

Company registration and compliance.
Taxes.
Payroll.
Business Debt.
Managing Cash Flow.

I will confess, I have always delegated to agencies, and products. I have implemented the 'Profit first' approach to my business (thanks Mike M!) and have benefitted from the unlearning and shifting my mindset to making money.

But part of me is always thinking about the 4-5 topics mentioned above in the last 7-10 days of every month.

I am not big enough to completely delegate it to a full-time or fractional hire.

So question to my X Fam: How do you folks manage this, and take it out of my background thinking?

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Monday Musings: "So how do you get to post every day like clockwork?"

It's simple. I just extort my colleague @muthukumar1724 at @LetterstackCo on our daily sync to get me to post something here, else I wouldn't let him speak about our daily updates and let him move on with his daily routine 🤣 🤣 🤣

I know, and he knows. I may be vying for the titular role in Horrible Bosses 3.

Of course he can just refuse to do it. But he's a nice guy, and we both know we are locked into X for the foreseeable future.

So there's the secret sauce. We both cannot continue with our lives as normal until we have posted something here.

And that silly habit has kept us consistent here, and (us in business too).

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Now please go do something useful (like subscribing to @LetterstackCo)

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Wednesday Wham: I am delighted to announce I have gained back my body weight in 2 days, that I spent the last 3 years getting rid of.

TBH, when I decided to lock-in like all the cool kids at the start of September, I had no idea Diwali will come around and put a spanner in the works.

X Fam, this is the most vulnerable I have been, and I promise I would do better going forward.

In the interim, as consolation, here is a photo of the leadership team at Anushka Ventures and @LetterstackCo.

Happy Diwali from ours to yours!

I will be getting back to working out as soon as I revive from the food coma.

Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.

P.S. Don't mind the water all over my shirt. It was raining on this fine Diwali evening, but that did not stop folks from going all out on fireworks!

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Friday Real Talk: I have always wanted to be an actor.

Not an extra walking-talking-NPC in the scene behind the protagonist.

A world-class Shakespearean gives-Gary-Oldman-chills kind of actor.

I wanted people to watch me, laugh, cry, get annoyed, and be afraid.

Turns out I have achieved all these goals ahead of time, with just 5 videos on Youtube 😂

I have lost track of the number of times my friends (who, in their defense, have never seen me speak on video) have cracked up listening to me speak on Youtube.

They get afraid and antsy that

1. I might be in a mid-life crisis (they are not entirely wrong though) and

2. I might end up making an ass of myself, and

3. have told me (in good faith) that I should at least look my age and color my hair (whatever that means at 41)

And you know what? All that is only getting me warmed up 🙃

Gary Vaynerchuk talked about the monetization of random content this week on LinkedIn. He did not have me in mind when he said that, but I might end up proving him right, for the sheer acts of randomness that the @LetterstackCo podcast is about.

So if I may, if these random acts on video have led to a flurry of reactions, you have no clue what's coming up in 2026.

Consider this a fair warning. You may want to buckle up for this ride!

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Thursday Travails: Tipi-tipi-top-top, which LinkedIn/X AI writer would you choose?

I have been observing, documenting, and also spending an inordinate amount of dollars trying out various tools that look like they are doing quick work of repurposing long-form brain dumps (my brain, in particular) into LinkedIn and X content.

Do I use AI for writing on LinkedIn or X? Absolutely not. AI has nothing on my unhinged writing yet. (Although I have a nagging feeling, this post is going to age like milk in the coming months)

Do I use AI for getting the sauce on what content works for my client's LinkedIn audience? I may or may not have used AI for that one.

But clearly with the flurry of these one-point-solving tools (Spiral from @every, Kleo from Jake Ward and Lara Acosta), along with social media tools adding AI writing capabilities (Taplio, Gamma, Canva) makes me think LinkedIn and X might be sitting this one out on the sidelines.

Or maybe LinkedIn and X are onto something? Can't wait to find out if the OGs pull up a magic card from their sleeves, when we are not looking.

In my early trials, I think Kleo has got a great initial iteration going. Jake Ward has always gotten his build sensibilities right (first Byword, then Mentions, and now Kleo), and now with Lara, they might have just built the product that could give the right tools to empower LI creators.

Not affiliated, just a happy tinkerer.

Will be watching this space closely and document on @LetterstackCo.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Friday Real Talk: You think LinkedIn sucks, and you wouldn't be caught dead posting there?

Good for me, then 😂

TBH, yes the content slop here is real, but its as much as you tolerate on any other network.

I know, it doesn't help with the AI bots commenting and liking every post, and every comment that you make on anyone else's post.

But everyone you have ever wanted as a customer/partner/peer?

They are there. And they are not hiding behind a pseudo 'ladiesman217' handle (you are in my inner circle, if you know which movie is this from 🤣 )

They are here. And they are watching you...show up everyday.

So even if you think the cringe is not going away, for your own brand, just SHOW UP. everyday. for the next 12 months.

I have not even been that consistent over the last 5 years. But a huge part of my clientele is 100% inbound on LinkedIn.

No ads.
No big splash on PR campaigns.
No public speaking.

Try it out. Or stay out of it. Either way works for me and @LetterstackCo 🙃

Btw, who guessed the handle and movie name above?

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Thursday Travails: Have you heard about the Hollywood Triple Threat? (Not to be confused with Triple H, lol)

The Triple Threat is a moniker given to entertainers who excel at three things:

Acting, Singing, and Dancing.

Being a movie and tech geek combined, I always wondered about the equivalent to that: Tech Triple Threat.

One who understands code and data.
One who knows how to build a product.
One who knows how to market it to hell.

Am I a Tech Triple Threat yet? Absolutely not.

I am not even a fully formed threat.

A fractional triple threat at best, if you will.

But even being a fractionally capable guy at all three fields takes a lot of work. Honestly, you are in no-mans-land, where the powers-that-be in each field would ensure that they remind you about that every single time, that you do not belong here.

So if you are working at the intersection of being an engineer-turned PM-turned marketer, and you find yourself regularly on the crossroads, let's talk.

And I will show how you could atleast become a fractional triple threat, and how those turns in your journey can actually be rewarding.

P.S. This is where I first learnt about the Hollywood Triple Threat: at Boston Comic Con 2015 ,while waiting in line for 2 hours for a photo with the legend Stan Lee.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Wednesday Wham: We may be thinking about AI vibe-coding a*s-back-wards.

I was talking to @justinkistner from @CopyClubAI .ai yesterday, and we both were venting about how there is a massive deficit of understanding how people are duct-taping AI solutions.

At a point in time, we both came to one conclusion: we cannot think about building AI agents, the same way we build apps.

In the days of yore i.e. pre-ChatGPT-2023, when you typically build apps, the lifecycle to build and launch the app is so protracted, because you are building it for a target audience of thousands, if not millions, of prospective customers.

But when you are building an AI agent or an AI workflow (yes, there is a difference), you are typically scratching an itch for yourself. And if the itch is ...ahem...well scratched, you may later find "hmm - you know, this might be helpful for someone else too, as an audience of one"

What Justin and I agreed on, is that, solving for the audience of one-ses is also a lucrative market, a market which might not have been feasible to build for, up until now.

In typical Shrek-donkey-fashion, the question is: Are we there yet? Not quite.

But atleast the fails would look glorious, like the attached GIF from Tenet (where we flip backwards - see what I did there 😛 )

More such brain dumps from yours truly on the weekly newsletter at @LetterstackCo - you know where to sign up.

[Renga @ringaringarenga]

Tuesday Trials: My nerves? I put my nerves on trial this weekend - let me elaborate.

I always get nervous going to a huge event. And it doesn't get better when the target audience in the event is easily half your age.

So when @canva sent invites to their Canva world tour community event, I was a bundle of nerves up until the point I arrived at the venue.

But the crowd's enthusiasm took me over, and I gladly became part of the 14-25-year-olds who took me in warmly and made me a part of their team building events.

As my @growthinreverse community would attest, I also showed off a few Canva Bulk Create tricks to a bunch of folks, which I had up my sleeve from building at @LetterstackCo, and it felt like they discovered fire 😂 😂 😂

So I am definitely going to get my kiddo to the next one, so she could become one of these talented kids too!