The Newsletter We Didn't Mean to Start
Discord kept calling our News Blast a newsletter, so we finally made one. Here's why owning your inbox beats renting the algorithm.
When we first started the KDCC Discord, we wanted to make a Creator Weekly Update because YouTube is always experimenting and/or adding new features. That was what it was called originally.
On Discord, if you have an announcement-type channel, users can follow the channel and get any updates you publish to their specific channel. And perhaps because of that feature, a lot of people would often tell us that they love our "newsletter"... even though we didn't have one at the time.
We'd post the Creator Weekly Update in Discord, and people kept treating it like an email. We even got people outside of the Discord asking how they could sign up for the newsletter.
It became a pattern that we noticed, so Andrew and I talked about it. If people wanted a newsletter, then we might as well launch a real one.
Sometimes, the best product decisions are just listening to what your audience keeps calling the thing you already built.
Owning the inbox beats renting the algorithm
Your YouTube channel, your social media accounts... all of it lives on platforms you don't control. Algorithms shift, feeds get reshuffled, and reach you had yesterday isn't guaranteed tomorrow.
Your email list doesn't work that way. When someone subscribers to the newsletter, that relationship is yours. No algorithm decides whether you show up in their inbox. That's the whole case for owning a channel instead of renting one.
If your favorite platform disappeared tomorrow, how would you reach the audience you built there? If the honest answer is "I wouldn't," an email list is the fix.
What actually lands in your inbox
The Kan Do Newsletter is real YouTube growth tactics from Andrew Kan and Ike, along with YouTube updates and how you can use it to your advantage.
If you've seen the Discord News Blast, you've seen a version of what goes in the newsletter, but the email version is longer and includes images we simply can't post (in a structured manner) on Discord. Same voice, more room to actually show you what we're talking about.
Join now and you'll also get our free YouTube SEO Checklist with no extra steps.
