Ep. 103: Building a newsletter to fight the algorithm ft. Matt Kiser

About this episode

Matt Kiser discusses his journey in building a successful political news newsletter and the lessons learned along the way.

Matt Kiser is the creator and editor WTF Just Happened Today, a political news newsletter with over 200,000 subscribers built entirely on a pay-what-you-want membership model. In this episode Matt breaks down how he grew from zero to 100,000 subscribers in six months, the editorial philosophy behind curating the news every day for nine years, and the biggest mistakes he made along the way. Read the newsletter: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/profiles __ Matt Kiser Newsletter LinkedIn Bluesky GitHub __ Timestamps 00:00 Introducing Matt Kiser 01:18 Zero to 100k in six months 11:06 Building the skill of aggregation and curation 17:41 The death of objectivity 18:37 From 100k to 200k subscribers 20:36 Don’t hate the media, become the media 29:18 Transparency with the revenue model 35:40 The AI podcast controversy 46:46 Biggest mistakes and learning moments 50:23 A deeper connection with the audience

People in this episode

Host: Creator Spotlight

Guest: Matt Kiser

Topics covered

• newsletter growth
• media transparency
• news curation
• subscriber engagement
• membership model

Keywords

• newsletter
• subscribers
• aggregation
• curation
• media

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: WTF Just Happened Today, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub

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