Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce. In each edition, we explore…

• The big picture: The newsletter is dead. Long live newsletters

• Job posts: The age of the retention marketer

• Trivia time: A teach company that makes $30M per employee

For any folks in LA, a final plug for on an incredible event that my publisher, Martech Record is throwing out in LA tomorrow.

“We are at the beginning of an era where the transaction layer of the Internet will become useful and beautiful.”

Tomorrow, the head of growth at SKIMS, the writer of the enormously popular LA Raver, the VP of commerce at Dotdash Meredith and many more will break down the existential implications of the quip above at legitimately the coolest event space in Los Angeles. Only three tickets remain; grab yours here or drop me a reply if you have any questions and I’ll get you to the right folks. Now, without further ado:

Email is eternal

The thing about writers is that our favorite thing to write about is people like ourselves. In that vein, the best way to get weirdo internet famous is to start a newsletter or newsletter platform that achieves any modicum of success.

It’s gotten out of control. There are more thinkpieces on Substack than Substacks at this point. Emily Sundberg—Substack’s newest star with Feed Me—is getting the full New York Times glamour treatment, pensive backseat Uber Black shot and all. Not to be outdone, Beehiiv founder & CEO Tyler Denk graced the December cover of Inc. with his…checks notes…jeans on in the ocean? At least he didn’t (visibly) wear socks to the beach I guess?

But here’s why I’m here writing one more newsletter on newsletters— for brands and creators alike, an owned audience is the only hedge against living at the whims of walled gardens. In that respect, Substack & Beehiiv are two of the most important businesses being built today for the future of the internet as we know it.

It’s funny how often the companies are compared to each other because they aren’t even building towards remotely similar visions. At the most basic level, Substack is fundamentally a media platform while Beehiiv is software. These are not direct competitors; in no way, shape or form is their respective success a zero-sum game.

I believe Substack’s somewhat confusing “social media platform for thinkbois” is the founders’ best attempt at marrying their original vision of creating a utopia for cerebral writers with the requisite scale of ambition necessitated by taking several rounds of venture capital. It very well may work and I hope it does.

That said, Beehiiv’s biggest advantage over Substack is that they aren’t besieged by any particular dogma other than relentless pursuit of product-market fit. I don’t believe the Beehiiv team has any particular reverence for great writing, at least not as an end in and of itself. They’ll go where the market takes them and will chase the most lucrative business opportunity.

And the most lucrative business opportunity is obvious. As CAC skyrockets and paid flywheels break, brands are going to invest a metric fuck ton of dollars in their owned media properties (read- newsletters). In the current zeitgeist where individuals trump institutions, they’ll bring these to market as “creator-led” projects, where the creator is often a brand’s founder or CEO. Beehiiv is perfectly positioned to capture both trends.

Beehiiv often gets called the Shopify of newsletters but this analogy is forced at best. Before Shopify, a small merchant needed to build the basic functionality of an eCommerce store from scratch. Before Beehiiv, you could build a newsletter on Mailchimp (or any other number of ESP 1.0s) in an hour and all the basic functionality sort of worked. It was like cooking on an electric stove— absolutely infuriating but you could make a good meal.

Remember, Intuit bought Mailchimp— a bootstrapped company— for $12 billion dollars. Email is just a gargantuan business.

Mailchimp could have built newsletter software for creators. Why didn’t they? I sense Mailchimp didn’t go after the individual creator market because the market size pales in comparison to the opportunity to building email software for both enterprise brands and the long tail of SMBs. Beehiiv pounced on this wedge to find initial product-market fit. But I’d be shocked if they are dogmatically tied to staying there.

“Unbundling” Mailchimp to build better vertical tools for constituencies like creators is a big, probably billion dollar opportunity. Building a better Mailchimp across business customers is a proven $10B+ opportunity.

Beehiiv is going to win the new wave of brands relaunching flagship newsletters and creator led B2B marketing for the simple reason that it's just a way better content marketing ESP. This is an easier game than Substack is playing. For better or worse, SaaS is just a better business than media.

Some of the first highfalutin brand newsletter products will launch on Substack for the cultural panache, but ultimately Substack just doesn’t have the right bones to capture this opportunity. Marketers need tools more purpose-built for hosting media “lite” products, not someone with their own social platform ambitions. Substack’s business model also makes things hard here— they fundamentally can’t make money unless people pay to subscribe to a brand’s newsletter. Is….anyone going to do that?

But what if there is a more existential threat on the horizon that will render this whole conversation moot? In Perpetual, Adam Ryan makes the case that a mass extinction event is coming for the newsletter-industrial complex as AI transforms the inbox.

I have no particular reverence for newsletters per se. As a writer, I simply view the newsletter as a distribution arbitrage for good thinking. That a cult of personality has formed around the medium rather than message has always been kind of strange to me. Yet again, I guess that McLuhan fella was on to something.

The reality is that email is and always has been a pretty shitty format for consuming complex information. The blog will always be the preferred medium of wordcels and I look forward to its renaissance. An internet where Medium had eschewed myriad pivots and just focused on being the best blogging infrastructure would be a better internet. 

Thinking first principles, the inbox is indeed an archaic utility format. It only really makes sense when viewed through the technological limitations of the Office Space era in which it became ubiquitous.

I view this as an analogous situation to LLMs & agentic commerce replacing conventional product search. The technology has already reached a point where Perplexity Shopping esque interfaces offer a far superior experience that muttering caveman phrases into search bars.

But there are a plethora os structural forces and fundamental user resistance to new formats that keep rectangle search bars and square product listings humming along as the primary medium of commerce.

In the same way, the humble email newsletter will be the cockroach that survives whatever nuclear winter AI wreaks on media. At the end of the day, email basically works for every use case that you need it to.

I expect to be in hospice care 70 years from now still sending emails with the good stuff causing through me. God willing, some of you will still read them. 

Director, Loyalty (+ 3 other retention roles!), AG1

Retention marketers are the hottest kids at the dance,

Supplements brands are always on the cutting edge of marketing and AG1 has essentially been a speedrun microcosm of commerce over the past decade. It’s a direct response marketing funnel that transformed itself into an iconic brand, early on every new wave of growth tactic along the way.

The question now—not just for AG1 but for all the brands built in its image— is does this pivot to retention represent the final step in building fundamentals that will empower the brand to survive for decades or is the simply the taking profits stage of a previous era’s acquisition arbitrage? Time will tell.

Growth Marketer, Spikeball

Lots of growth marketers read this newsletter. I greatly enjoy Spikeball. I would love if one of you landed this gig.

Also, this is a 10/10 job description eclipsed only by…….

Product Designer, 37 Signals

Impeccably written job posts are a running motif here at Zero Clicks and the team at 37 Signals is in a class by itself. If you’re opening a role in the near future, give this a read. This is perfection in crafting a JD that will bring the right people in the door.

The Dream Team, Headspace

If you’ve ever been accused of putting your colleagues to sleep at work, then have I got a job for you!

I was light on memespiration and we could all use a break from drinking so let’s try a trivia question this week:

Only one company that has eclipsed $1B in revenue currently makes $30M in revenue for every full-time employee on the payroll. Name that company.

Hit that reply with the correct answer and you’ll win…..the satisfaction of knowing you know things.