50 Newsletter Ideas Powered by My Own Network
1. The premise
I have 15,243 LinkedIn connections. 27% are founders or C-level. 911 CTOs, 147 VCs, 979 freelancers, 92 YC-backed company contacts, 67 Mistral people, 145 French cloud provider contacts, plus journalists at Sifted, Le Monde, Forbes France, POLITICO.
I am tired of free SaaS reviews. Selling a SaaS is slow. A newsletter is different: every issue is a reason to DM five new people, and every reply is a future issue.
So here are 50 newsletter ideas where the content comes straight from my network. No scraping, no paid research; just messages, replies, quotes.
Each idea includes:
- What it is in one line
- Who in my network powers it
- The first DM I would send
2. Rules I am giving myself
- Each newsletter must be launchable in one week.
- Each must have a first issue I can write before acquiring subscribers.
- Each must have a built-in monetization path (sponsor, paid tier, consulting funnel, SaaS funnel).
- No idea that requires me to become a full-time journalist. This is leverage, not a new job.
3. The 50 ideas
Group A: French tech insider
1. Les Coulisses du SaaS Français (Starter Story FR)
Starter Story does 4M pageviews/month on founder interview transcripts. Trends.co sold to Hubspot for ~$27M with a similar loop. France has no clean equivalent in text form; GDIY is a podcast and Maddyness is press, not operator content. Weekly FR interview with one French SaaS founder about the one decision that unlocked growth. Pull from the ~300 French SaaS founders in my network. First DM: "Je lance l'équivalent français de Starter Story. Chaque numéro = une décision qui a débloqué la croissance. La tienne m'intéresse. 20 min cette semaine ?"
2. Mistral Letter
Monthly. What people inside or next to Mistral actually use, think, ship. 67 Mistral contacts. First DM: "I am writing a short monthly on the Mistral ecosystem from the inside. One paragraph from you, no quote attribution if you prefer. What did you ship last month ?"
3. Scaleway + OVH Digest
French cloud delta vs AWS, written by people who run workloads on both. 145 contacts. Sponsor candidates: Clever Cloud, Scaleway itself.
4. Station F Weekly
Who launched, who raised, who pivoted, from founders inside Station F. My network has dozens of Station F alumni.
5. La Lettre des CTO (Lenny's FR for engineering leaders)
Lenny's Newsletter does $2M+ ARR from paid subs on a "one question, one operator" weekly. Pragmatic Engineer does similar, ~$3M ARR, engineering angle. Neither exists in French. 911 CTOs in my network. Each issue: one CTO answers one question ("your worst hire", "your best vendor", "your stack this year"). Format: Lenny, audience: French tech leads.
6. French YC Alumni
Short monthly. 92 YC-backed connections. What French YC founders ship, raise, say. Leverage: French press loves YC angle.
7. Paris VC Leaks (Axios Pro Rata / The Information for Paris)
Axios Pro Rata and Newcomer built paid tiers on VC-adjacent gossip. Sifted covers Europe broadly but softly. Paris specifically is an information vacuum you hear about only on Telegram. Anonymous weekly. 147 VCs in my network. One deal they passed on, one they regret. No names. Paid tier at €20/mo.
8. Les Engagés de Lemlist
Lemlist alumni diaspora: where they went, what they are building. Uses my lemlist angle; network is thick there.
9. Founders de Province
Every issue a founder outside Paris. I am from northern France; this is my bias and my story.
10. French Indie Hackers in EUR (MicroConf Digest FR)
Indie Hackers (acquired by Stripe) and MicroConf built whole conferences on MRR disclosures. Les Indépendants exists in France but it is founder stories, not numbers. Monthly MRR disclosures of French bootstrappers, voluntary. Rev not raises. I know most of them already.
Group B: Operator newsletters
11. One Hire, One Mistake
Weekly. One founder, one bad hire, what they learned. Founders love venting; readers love gossip.
12. Fractional Friday
979 freelancers in network. Rotating byline: one fractional CTO/CMO/CFO on a real client problem they solved this week. Funnels into a "hire a fractional" marketplace later.
13. The Pivot Post
Short interviews with founders mid-pivot. Network has several in motion right now.
14. First $10k MRR (Starter Story's core format)
Starter Story's single most-read format: "How I got to $X MRR". Bannerbear, TinySeed, SaaS Mantra all grew on the back of these posts. Exact playbook from the first 10k, one founder per issue. I already know 100+ founders past that line.
15. Last $10k of Runway
Darker twin of #14. Founders who almost died. Anonymous option.
16. Open Bookkeeping (Baremetrics OpenStartups in narrative form)
Baremetrics Open Startups and Buffer's transparent salary posts were their strongest growth engines ever. One founder per week opens their P&L in prose (not just a dashboard). Network has the transparency-friendly crowd.
17. The Co-founder Breakup
Interviews with people who split from their co-founder. Rare content, huge demand.
18. Exit Numbers
Every issue: one exited founder, real numbers, how they feel now. Network has a growing cohort of these.
19. B2B SaaS Pricing Letter (ProfitWell Recur in prose)
ProfitWell's Recur got acquired by Paddle partly on pricing content authority. Patrick Campbell's pricing threads still dominate LinkedIn. One founder per issue walks through their pricing page: what they charge, why, what broke. 200+ SaaS founders connected.
20. Cold Email Answers (Jason Levin's playbook, multi-author)
Jason Levin took this to $25K/month ghostwriting. Every "cold email teardown" thread on Twitter goes viral. A founder shares cold emails that landed a deal that month, full text, full thread. Lemlist crowd will eat this.
Group C: AI and infra
21. LLM Infra Monthly (SemiAnalysis for EU)
SemiAnalysis does $1M+ ARR at $500/seat on GPU and infra leaks. Dylan Patel's market is global but his European coverage is thin. What Mistral, HF, Scaleway, and the new GPU co-los actually run. Contacts at each.
22. The Anthropic / OpenAI / Mistral Diff
Three-column newsletter: same week, three labs, one question. Contacts at all three.
23. Voxtral + Whisper Ops
Narrow: production transcription stacks. I already wrote the Voxtral blog post, so I attract this audience.
24. Claude Code Shops
Weekly: one dev team using Claude Code in anger, what broke, what shipped. Easy DM magnet.
25. LLM Router Notes
Narrow. Every issue one router config, one cost delta. Funnels into router SaaS if I want.
26. AI for Law Firms (Paperclip Letter)
Reuses my Paperclip research. French and EU lawyers in network.
27. AI for Churches
Same angle, different vertical. Reuses research. Underserved audience.
28. AI for Newsrooms (Nieman Lab in newsletter form)
Nieman Lab, Press Gazette and Local News Lab serve this niche in the US and UK. France has CFJ content but nothing ongoing and operator-led. Journalists at Sifted, Le Monde, POLITICO, Forbes France in my network. Weekly: one newsroom AI workflow.
29. The EU AI Act Watch
Short weekly on enforcement. VCs and founders constantly ask about this.
30. GPU Broker
Connect my GPU-hungry contacts (AI founders) with my GPU-rich contacts (French cloud people). The newsletter is the pretext; the broker role is the business.
Group D: Niche but spicy
31. The Goat Farmer and Other Outliers
One weird profession per week, from my LinkedIn directory. The goat farmer is real; so is the boat captain, the monk, the MP.
32. Founders Who Vote FN / LFI
Politics + tech in France is taboo. I know both sides. Anonymous quotes. Likely niche viral.
33. La Droite Tech
French right-leaning tech founders, quietly. My network has them.
34. La Gauche Tech
Same, other side. Parity.
35. Founders Who Pray
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox, Buddhist founders on faith and work. My religion research fits; network has examples of each.
36. The Breton Tech Letter
Tech from Brittany. Dense cluster in my network. Regionalism sells in France.
37. Hauts-de-France Founders
My home. I know almost everyone.
38. Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille Rotating
One city per month. Same format as 36 and 37 but broader.
39. French Founders in SF
A few hundred of them. Most accepted my request.
40. London French Tech
Same template. Brexit + returns are still a story.
Group E: Reuses my research corpus directly
41. The Memelord Letter
Weekly: one brand doing memetic marketing right. I already wrote ~15 memelord reports; turn them into serialized issues.
42. The Indie Playbook Letter
Every issue: one research report from my /research, rewritten for a subscriber. 300+ reports = 6 years of content.
43. Rob Walling Digest
Repackage my Rob Walling playbooks into a weekly for SaaS bootstrappers. Pre-built content.
44. 99 Ideas Monthly
One drop per month, 20 startup ideas from my own corpus. I already have 500+ in /research.
45. YC Vertical Watch
Rotate YC-finance, YC-devtools, YC-education, YC-security. I already wrote each report.
46. Unknown Bloggers
My "next Nick Land" research is evergreen. Weekly: one obscure thinker worth reading.
47. The Niche Encyclopedia
Each issue an entry from a field guide that doesn't exist yet. I wrote the research plan already.
48. Old Websites
One lovingly captured old site per week. I have the archival skill (see hyperbulletin snapshot) and the taste.
49. French TV Ads Archive
Already researched. Weekly: one dead ad reborn. Sponsor candidate: nostalgia brands.
50. Forgotten French Thinkers
One per week. Already have the research. Underground academics will subscribe.
4. Bonus: what is currently working, transposed
A shorter reference table. These are real newsletters pulling real revenue right now, and the French (or French-speaking operator) version does not exist, or exists but is weak.
| Working model | MRR / signal | French gap | My angle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter Story | 4M pageviews/mo, founder interviews | No text equivalent; GDIY is podcast only | DM 10 French SaaS founders/week, #1 and #14 above |
| Lenny's Newsletter | $2M+ ARR, product/leadership | No French paid product newsletter exists | 911 CTOs + PMs in my network, #5 |
| Pragmatic Engineer | $3M ARR, eng leadership | Same gap | Same pool, different angle |
| TLDR | 1.5M subs, tech curation | No French TLDR; Bulletin is weekly corp | Daily 5-link TLDR FR, curation only, no interviews |
| Stratechery | $5M+ ARR, one-man analysis | No French strategic tech analysis | Post-Mistral, post-OpenAI, one deep essay/week |
| The Generalist | $1M+ ARR, fund mapping | No French fund mapping | 147 VCs, one fund breakdown/issue |
| Not Boring | Packy's ~$2M, narrative essays | Zero French equivalent at scale | My research corpus is the draft pool |
| SemiAnalysis | $1M+ ARR at $500/seat | EU coverage thin | Mistral + Scaleway leaks, #21 |
| Axios Pro Rata | Daily deal flow, paid | Sifted is free and softer | Paris-only, paid, #7 |
| Morning Brew | Sold $75M to Insider | Snowball is French finance but narrow | Too broad for me alone; skip |
| Chartr | Sold to Sherwood | No French data-viz daily | Skip, needs a designer co-founder |
| The Hustle | Sold $27M to HubSpot | Maddyness is press not digest | Only if I partner with a journalist |
| Workweek | Creator collective, $10M+ ARR | No French equivalent | Build once 3 of mine work, not before |
| IndieHackers interviews | Stripe-owned, still the best UGC format | "Les Indépendants" exists but thin | My #10 |
| MicroConf Shark Tank / State of Indie | Event-content flywheel | No French bootstrapper conference content | My #10 and #14 |
| ProfitWell Recur | Acquired by Paddle via content | No French SaaS pricing content at all | My #19 |
| Newcomer | $500K+ ARR, VC gossip paid | Zero in Paris | My #7 |
| SaaStr Daily | Jason Lemkin, huge | No French SaaStr | Too broad, skip |
| Lenny Rachitsky's "Operators" | Paid Slack + newsletter combo | No French operator community + letter | Eventual merge of #1 + #11 + #19 |
| Justin Welsh "Saturday Solopreneur" | $2M+ ARR solo | No French solo operator weekly | Build after one newsletter hits 2k subs |
| TrustMRR, OpenStartup.com | Transparency as distribution | No French ledger of MRR | My #10 merged with #16 |
| Sahil Bloom's "Curiosity Chronicle" | 700k subs | No curated "ideas + operators" FR letter | Not me, too self-help |
| The Rundown AI | 700k subs, daily AI | Multiple FR copies exist but weak (Digital Sweat, etc.) | Skip, red ocean |
| Ben's Bites | $5M+ ARR, AI daily | Same | Skip |
| Exploding Topics | Sold to Semrush | No French trend letter | Could scrape Google Trends FR + DM founders building in that trend |
| Trends.co (Hubspot-owned) | Paid newsletter, $299/yr | No French paid trends letter | Possible merger with #44 (99 Ideas Monthly) |
| Big Technology (Alex Kantrowitz) | Paid $1M+ ARR | No French Big Tech reporter-led letter | Would need a journalist co-author |
| Platformer (Casey Newton) | $1M+ ARR | Same | Same |
5. The outreach plan, compressed
Week 1: pick 3 ideas from this list. Not 50, not 10. Three.
Week 2: write first issue of each without asking anyone. Ship.
Week 3: DM 20 people per newsletter. Script:
"I launched a small weekly on [topic]. Issue one is here: [link]. You are one of ~10 people I want to interview this month. 20 min, your answers, no edits. Interested ?"
Week 4: merge the two that feel alive, kill the third.
6. Which 3 I would pick today
If I had to stop writing this and commit right now:
- #1 Les Coulisses du SaaS Français : biggest warm network, lowest friction, French press loves it.
- #11 One Hire, One Mistake : easiest DM in the world, every founder has the story ready.
- #42 The Indie Playbook Letter : I already own the content; it only needs a delivery channel.
The other 47 stay in this file as a reserve. When one of those three runs dry, the next is one DM away.