Joel Hansen

Tweets on marketing & startups. Building @northhouseee. Investing @loiventure. Training Founders @loiaccelerator. Writing

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

booked out a cafe for our baby shower, made it an open bar and invited all of our friends

turned out to be one of our favourite days of the year

steal our idea if you hate boring baby showers

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Cool! Kudos to @bchesky. https://t.co/ffA4ZQcaYI

[Henry Shi @henrythe9ths]

Something strange is happening in tech.

CTOs of billion dollar companies are quitting to take IC roles at Anthropic.

Workday CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026)
You[.]com CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026)
Instagram CTO -> MTS (Jan 2026)
Box CTO -> MTS (Dec 2025)
Super[.]com CTO -> MTS (July 2025)
Adept AI CTO -> MTS (Jan 2025)

The mission is that real.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Cold emails are a great way to land a job.

Here's what I've learned:

∙ Email the CEO directly.
∙ Show that you're unique.
∙ Be specific.
∙ Make a bold request.
∙ Have a clear call-to-action.
∙ Don't be humble. This isn't the time to be modest.

Now... make magic happen.

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@niraj Love this

[Ben Lang @benln]

Worth a daily reminder:

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@rowancheung love this

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

Top 5 learnings growing The Rundown to 3.5M total active subscribers and 55%+ open rate:

1. Email is its own platform, treat it like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter

Super readers (open every email, click ads, and stick around for years) genuinely like email as a medium. We have millions of readers who don’t use social media. Best way to acquire them is through other newsletters, referrals, or being the reason they stop using social media.

Barely anyone is building for this audience. I’m more bullish on email than any other platform (long-form YouTube is a close second).

2. The newsletter industry lacks innovation

Look at mobile apps, ecom, edtech. Custom quiz onboarding, a landing page for every ad, hundreds of new creatives a day. Meanwhile most newsletters, including some of the biggest in the world, have a basic landing page and standard onboarding.

We built an onboarding quiz funnel that, at one point, got us close to negative CAC with hundreds of thousands a month in ad spend. That’s what let us scale aggressively and outbid competitors.

With AI coding and platforms like beehiiv, there’s no excuse not to build new experiences for your readers. The opportunity here is wide open :)

3. Newsletter sales is mostly an education problem

We still run social partnerships at a significantly higher CPM than our newsletters, yet the newsletters convert better and get way more clicks.

A lot of advertisers don’t understand newsletters as they do with influencer marketing, so at scale it becomes an education game.

Once advertisers get it, they stay. We’ve been booked out at multiple ads a day for the last 3 years, months in advance.

4. Stay lean, fast, aggressive

Other newsletters have built large sales and content teams. I think it’s better to stay small and pay high-quality people to do very good work.

Revenue can increase with more employees, but the opportunity cost of not moving fast in the AI era is a long-term net negative.

For example, we constantly test new growth experiments and new forms of media. Most don’t work and that’s fine. The point is we can pivot the same day because we're lean.

5. Lastly, don’t listen to people who say email is dead or that you shouldn’t run paid ads. That’s ignorance and lowkey skill issue.

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace. - @naval

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

print this out and put it on your fridge. great flag @harleyf and @tferriss.

[delian @zebulgar]

From 2011 - 2014, the Thiel Fellowship gave out 40 $100k fellowships to entrepreneurs

That were all under 20 years old at the time...

13 unicorns have since been built by those 40 fellows

4 of those 40 fellows are also now billionaires

Absolutely insane hit rate

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@jaskirat @unscr1pt3d_dev @ar1111 @jionganmu can't go wrong with revolver

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@harleyf @lululemon this is a big one. love seeing more vancouver based brands on the shopify app. well done @harleyf

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@JustinTse say more

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

What's a product under $250 that has genuinely improved your life?

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@N_Sportelli nothing wrong w/ that

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

@denk_tweets love this

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

could overthinking and just launch your idea in your next Uber ride

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

thanks for the swag top up @rkhazzam and @float_financial fam ☕️🧦

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

introducing muse wonder

our new frontier model. state-of-the-art at personal agents and professional agents.

our largest and most capable model yet—rivals the big bois

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

Love this line by Shane Parrish:

"One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.

You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them.

Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one."