10 Favorite Ideas from 2024

I hate picking favorites, especially when it comes to my own work. What makes an article “the best?” How many subscribers it generated? How many times it was shared? How many likes and comments it received? I’m sharing 10 of the most popular articles I’ve written on Please Hustle Responsibly this year that had a little bit of all of these, and why I think they were so impactful.

1) Apple Music's Unofficial Therapist

This article did well on several fronts: it received a lot of likes, comments, and a share. This was great validation pretty early in my newsletter writing journey that I could package an original idea and deliver on the promise in the title and subtitle. I’ll be the first to tell you to throw away any generic “top 50 best email newsletter subject line” lists because this and most other titles on this list will never be anywhere near those (and yet, they’re still very effective). This article is an example of a deep dive format that includes a curated news section. I paired this newsletter with a video I made about Zane Lowe and talked about his interview style in a way that didn’t feel redundant. In February, I did a lot of deep dives into creators. Looking back, even if I don’t always have a video to pair with them, they still receive a lot of engagement and I think people like being surprised by who I’ll profile next. Doechii’s Tiny Desk dropping the day after I wrote about her this week makes me feel like I have some magic wand, so you never know who I’ll be on the nose about next. I might iterate on this format and give people hints as to who the next creator profile will feature to see if they can guess ahead of time. 🤫😏

You can read the full article here.

2) The Double-Edged Sword of Content Creation

This article felt like a HUGE risk for me. I thought it was too niche. I thought it was so niche that it would alienate a part of my subscribers. But, it had the resounding opposite effect. This is my most liked newsletter to date, and it generated my first paid subscriber! This article is proof that if you write what you know intimately, you will write for the community of people you’re looking for. This article had a lot of my personality in it, and I think I’ve leaned into leveraging my unique voice at certain points to add levity to dense topics.

You can read the full article here.

3) What makes your soul sing?

This was my second event recap-style article of the year. It was a listicle-style article that was written almost as a photo blog. I think a casual, distilled list of my learnings and takeaways made the information easier to digest and gave my readers a break from the typical paragraph style I usually write in. The response to this style was great validation for me to keep trying this for future creator and industry events, and it’s worked really well.

You can read the full article here.

You’re probably noticing a pattern start to form. Writing a newsletter isn’t necessarily about creating a repeatable template, it’s about finding formats that work for different types of information, messages, and stories.

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