How I Find Surprising Content For My Newsletter

I got this really nice compliment on my Austin newsletter from Jason Scharf this week 👇

This was a big deal for me for two reasons:

• Jason runs the AustinNext podcast. He knows everyone here in town and is super tapped-in (a.k.a hard to surprise)
• My entire “growth plan” so far has been to focus on making the content so good people like Jason talk about it

This was a really nice indication that the process is working, so this week, I thought I’d write about what that process looks like at a high level each week, and the five tools that are crucial to my work right now.

This isn’t just for local newsletters…

It’s more universal, and should be useful no matter what kind of newsletter or community you’re building. A lot of it, I learned at The Hustle, then brought with me to Hampton (where our weekly active members stayed between 85-90%).

Now I’m using it in Austin too, because it works.

You’ll recognize the names of all five tools, but I use them in ways you might not expect (that’s literally the only reason I thought this might be worth writing).

We’ll get into them in a second, but first…

Let’s Talk About Mindset

The tools I use are less important than the mindset. And the mindset is centered about community-building.

I want people to think of the newsletter as something they’re a part of, and want to interact with each week.

What are people looking for in a professional community? There are a lot of things, but generally, you can boil them down to these three must-haves:

• To meet someone interesting
• To learn something interesting
• To feel like they contribute

Whether you’re building online or in-person, it’s always the same. Miss any one of these for too long, and people will drop off.

I’ve talked before about how to write stuff no one else can. The main point of that piece was that you can cultivate an information advantage as a writer, simply by talking to people who are often overlooked.

This piece takes that one step further, with a few tips that’ll help you put yourself at the center of an information web that’s hard for anyone else to replicate, and helps deliver on the three must-haves above.

So let’s get into that…

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

I pay $100 a month for a membership to LinkedIn Sales Navigator just because it makes it easy for me to find interesting people to follow online based on criteria that I want.

For example, here in Austin, I’m building a business newsletter that shares events and insights from fascinating people around town.

The process is pretty simple – find fascinating people, and follow them, curating the best insights they share, and adding some personal opinions and research on top.

Not just the famous people in Austin (remember, one of our goals is to introduce readers to interesting people). We have to get off the beaten path.

Sales Nav makes this easy.

Not only can I pull a list of local founders in seconds, but I can also see from the dashboard who’s actively posting on LinkedIn and might be worth following. The list stays updated too, so as people either relocate here, or change their info the match my search, I see ‘em.

So what I do is I keep this list, and when I have spare time throughout the week, I peruse it looking for new voices worth following.

I go deeper than you might expect. If someone appears here but doesn’t publish on LinkedIn, I’ll check for them on Twitter, or look for a personal blog.

I check out their company site too.

I think of this as a process of ongoing discovery – continually finding new things to be interested in and write about. So don’t rush it. You’re never really done.

2. Twitter Lists

For god’s sake, don’t use the native Twitter feed if you’re trying to get any work done. It’s a hellscape of distractions.

Instead, pick the people you want to pay attention to, and put them in a list. Then save a link to that list in your bookmarks bar so you can get to it without ever going to the Twitter homepage.

Not only do you avoid the distractions of trending topics and recommended posts. But you’ll get to scroll everyone’s tweets sequentially – no algorithm filtering. So it’s much better from a content-curation standpoint, because you can be confident you’re actually seeing everything people are saying week to week.

Bonus Tip: I also install the Tweet Hunter X plugin, which does two great things:

• It automatically surfaces the most popular tweets for any profile you land on
• It blocks the “Trending Topic” sidebar – you have no idea how good this is for your brain

3. My RSS Reader: Feedly

Even if someone publishes on LinkedIn or Twitter, they’ll often share more in-depth ideas on a blog or newsletter, and so I use Feedly to keep up with those.

If you don’t know what RSS readers are, good! The modern media industry would basically wither and die if readers ever caught onto how great RSS is.

Okay, fine… I’ll tell you. It’s basically a custom social media feed.

You can subscribe to newsletters, blogs, social media channels, and more, and have all posts pushed to one central location, organized, even highlighted or summarized with new AI features.

Basically, you get all the info you want without the attention-grabbing algorithms or incentives of big social. It’s also easier to unsubscribe from stuff, because you just nuke the individual feed for that source, rather than hoping they take you off their list.

So anyways, RSS is great.

I keep two different lists. One is for official publications here in Austin (newspapers, culture magazines, that kind of thing). The other is for personal blogs and newsletters of specific people in town.

Pro Tip: Often, when someone signs up for the newsletter, I’ll check to see if they publish stuff online. If they do, and it’s a fit for the newsletter, I’ll add them to my RSS feed and keep an eye on their work.

I like to shout readers out as often as I can. It’s fun, and also helps give them the sense of contribution I talked about earlier.

Every morning, I get up early and my first 1-2 hours looks like this:

• Go through Feedly skimming new articles
• Scroll the last 24 hours on my Twitter list
• Scroll my LinkedIn Feed

Because I continually add to all three of these whenever I find new sources worth following, the quality of the stuff I’m able to surface continues to improve over time as the “information web” gets more and more unique.

4. The Drop File

I talked about this in my community newsletter playbook, but one of the most important tools I have is a simple, ugly, Google Doc that sits in my bookmarks bar.

As I sit down each morning, and throughout the day, if I come across anything that might be an interesting fit for the newsletter, it gets dropped in here.

Then, when it’s time to write, I open this file up, review what I’ve got, and pick from there.

Shout out to Steph Smith who taught me this

There are a lot of little things that go into writing a business newsletter week after week. You can’t reference the same person too often or the content becomes too obvious and easy. You want to have a good mix of men and women highlighted. A good mix of industries too.

It’s hard to just sit down and write that off the cuff.

Having the drop file makes it easier to pick from a buffet of ideas and get the kind of blend that I’m looking for each week. It also lets me develop longer stories over several weeks, collecting material passively until I feel I have enough to write something.

5. Time

The final tool – this stuff takes time. I probably spend 10-15 hours each week just reviewing these feeds, exploring, and being curious. And I think that’s kind of the main advantage I have in finding things that surprise people.

It’s possible to make something people enjoy reading in less time. But it’s hard to build deep knowledge of a topic, and that’s my real goal here.

So many people are trying to shortcut the writing process these days. They look at an article like this, and their first thought is how to use AI to replicate what I’m doing in a fraction of the time.

I don’t worry about them at all.

To whatever extent I’m able to set myself apart from competitors, it’s largely because I’m quite happy to spend the time doing the thing that we’re here to do. The newsletter isn’t a path to something else.

If you feel the same way about your work, I think you’ll be just fine, as long as you know how to monetize well.

Quick Wrap-Up

Okay, so to review, there are three things that great content and communities need to offer:

• New people
• New ideas
• A chance to contribute

I use tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Feedly to continually surface new people and ideas to share with readers.

I also use those same tools to follow my readers, so their work sometimes ends up in the newsletter, which gives them a sense of contribution.

The drop file keeps everything trapped in one spot so it’s ready for me when it’s time to write.

And time is the secret ingredient that allows me to dig deeper than readers or competitors could on their own. It takes everything above, and dials it up to 11.