BEST TECH NEWSLETTERS 2017 FREE

Substack, founded in 2017 by Chris Best (former chief technology officer of the Canadian messaging app Kik) and developer Jairaj Sethi, as well as the former journalist and Tesla alum Hamish McKenzie, is at the head of a pack of new email-newsletter start-ups-a surprising sentence mostly because it’s hard to think of anything less thrilling, from a venture-capital perspective, than email, a decades-old technology that essentially everyone is accustomed to using for free, all the time, rarely for fun.īut Andreessen Horowitz led a $15.3 million round of funding for the company this summer, with general partner Andrew Chen taking a seat on the board. I’m making it sound like I have portraits of her tattooed on my thighs and talk to them every night before I go to bed, but only to make a point: This is the type of relationship that newsletter innovators cherish, want to see multiply, and need to encourage if they are to pay back investors.

BEST TECH NEWSLETTERS 2017 FREE

I did not hesitate to fork over $5 a month when she migrated “That Wet Look” over from TinyLetter’s free service to the short-lived platform Double Bounce (founded by her brother Alex Carusillo) in 2017, beholden as I was by extreme loyalty. I read her newsletter, I sent her a message on Twitter, and soon enough we were friends-I wrote about her in my newsletter and she wrote about me in hers, which is called synergy. “I joke that my dream job is to be an E! News correspondent.”Ĭarusillo is, like Taylor Swift, a keen observer of the human condition and a shrewd businesswoman. “I’ve never really been hoping for mass appeal, and whether that’s disingenuous for me to say … I’d probably have to examine that further,” she told me. The TinyLetter had a recurring yogurt-review segment done solely in GIFs and called, for reasons I don’t think were ever explained, “Bear Bear’s Big Skyr Country.” Carusillo would share sincere-ish thoughts on whether to shell out $20 for some buzzy new lip gloss and then give herself a facial with pimento cheese the emails had subject lines like “Vaseline my teeth up,” “Water made exciting,” and “an amazing story please click i’m laughing to myself so much.” It was deeply weird, and obviously meant for a niche audience. It was half “off-label” product advice, half an absurdist performance of the type of consumerism practiced by upwardly mobile Manhattan white ladies.

Peppermint oil, face spackle, Glossier girls, the physical indignities of “William DeBlasio’s New York”-these were the subjects of Claire Carusillo’s email newsletter, My Second or Third Skin, later renamed That Wet Look. It’s unclear to me whether anyone has ever fallen in love over email, but it’s true that the only friendship I’ve ever succeeded in initiating via the internet started in my inbox.

Best tech newsletters 2017