HOW TO LAUNCH A BUSINESS NEWSLETTER

The editor of Wealthsimple’s magazine wanted to offer useful news to engage existing and future clients

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In the fall of 2021, Devin Friedman, editor-in-chief of Wealthsimple's magazine, met with the fintech company's co-founder Rudy Adler to talk about starting a newsletter.

Friedman wanted to create educational, newsworthy and entertaining content for both readers who are knowledgeable about finance and those with less experience. "The better people understand what they should be doing with their money, the better the company's going to do," Friedman says. "We saw the newsletter as a way to keep in communication with our clients and hopefully reach a new group too." The newsletter would curate content from around the web for subscribers and package stories about the financial news of the week so readers wouldn't have to hunt around online.

Developing the newsletter happened quickly. One of Wealthsimple's mottoes is "ship it, then improve it," which Friedman explains is about executing an idea first, then figuring out what needs to be tweaked after. He hired one person dedicated to managing the newsletter-a former magazine writer and editor-then tapped his magazine's existing contributors to write it. They named the newsletter TLDR, after the internet-slang acronym for "too long, didn't read," hinting at the brevity they wanted to achieve.