Dan Frommer runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer, which discusses topics on technology and consumer brands. Beginning his career at Forbes, Dan has a long history in the technology field. His extensive experience includes Editor in Chief at Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news publication, and technology editor at Quartz. He also spent years building up Business Insider as its second employee. In this episode, Dan discusses how email is the most effective way to reach influential people, explaining how he leverages his newsletter, The New Consumer, in a way that will capture the attention of CEOs, board members, and investors.Dan shares newsletter insights, including:
Important questions to ask yourself about newsletter tools.
Avoiding the optimization trap.
How he creates a quality experience for his readers.
Links and Resources
Forbes
Recode
Vox
Quartz
Business Insider
Stratechery
Hodinkee
Benedict Evans
Dan Frommer Links
Dan’s Newsletter: The New Consumer

Dan’s Website: FromeDome

Dan’s Other Website: Points Party

Twitter: @fromedome

Episode Transcript:Nathan: [00:00:00] In this episode I talk to Dan Frommer. He runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer. He’s had a long career in tech, tech journalism, he started at Forbes and then he was at Quartz and Recode and was basically employee number two at Business Insider, and worked to build that whole business for a long time.And he’s always had this one-man-band sort of style, which really resonates with me. That’s basically where you learn to, design code, you know, put together plugins, build out your site, as well as writing and publishing and being a journalist and all this other stuff. So he’s done something really impressive and going from the editor in chief of Recode, which is a publication owned by Vox, which is quite large and popular, to running The New Consumer, which he’s had for two years now.It’s more than paying his bills. He’s earning a full-time living from it and he gets to control his own destiny. I love it. We dive into all kinds of interesting topics. We talked about why he has only an annual subscription, rather than going for just monthly, like most people do with paid newsletter, his tech stack, what he thinks about free versus paid subscribers and so much more. Let’s dive in.Dan, Welcome to the show.Dan: [00:05:00] Thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:05:02] So I want to go back a little bit, as we talked about in the intro, you’ve got all kinds of history and journalism and everything else. Now you’re running your own newsletter, so when you got into journalism, where did you think that that career would end?What was the pinnacle? You know, like, as we go through the, the years, like. Was it ending with editor and chief of, of Recode? Like how far ahead did you, did you think? And,sand what did success look like when you were just starting out?Dan: [00:05:31] Yeah. I’m from Chicago originally. I, you know, my background is both in, creating websites, web design. I started doing web design and, and building websites when I was in middle school, in the nineties, and then I went to journalism school at Medill at Northwestern. So my background and my interests have always kind of been at the intersection of.Journalism like real ethical. proper journalism, but also creating new things on the internet. So new media brands and building websites, building audiences, and I’ve always kind of, I guess, optimize my career for both of those things. so that’s, that’s one way to say, like, I never really sat back and was like, Oh man, I really need to work at the New York times or the wall street journal or something like that. snothing against those places. It’d be cool to perhaps, you know, contribute there one day or something like that. But there wasn’t some bucket list where I was like, I must work for. A big network or a big newspaper or something like that. I, you know, I actually started my career interning at,sthe public radio sta