#009: Polina Marinova Pompliano — Growing Your Newsletter, Dealing With Self-Doubt and Criticism & the Future of Media

2022-05-21

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How might we launch our newsletter and build a loyal following for our writing? How can we monetize our newsletter to six figures and beyond? In this episode, we interview Polina Marinova Pompliano who quit her job at Fortune in 2020 to focus on building her weekly Substack newsletter The Profile, where she profiles interesting figures like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans of New York. We talk about tactics for growing a loyal and paying readership, how she develops ideas for her newsletter and the importance of feedback to imp...

Polina Marinova is a former Fortune Magazine editor and writer, and founder of newsletter The Profile where she studies the world's most successful people & companies. She’s written for CNN, CNN Travel, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, Boston Herald, Food & Wine Magazine, Odyssey, The Hustle and more. Polina is part of an emerging trend of writers who are looking ahead to the future of media and content and considering what it might take to start a media company on their own terms.

SHOW NOTES

[02:39] Polina shares what gave her the courage to quit her job at The Fortune and dedicate her time to The Profile despite the pandemic and why you only need 100 true fans

[06:42] Polina shares how she's become good at time management over the years, and how she stays productive

[09:06] The importance of sharing your work with the public and opening yourself up to criticism and feedback as a writer

[11:56] How Polina deals with feedback today versus how she dealt with it in the past

[13:00] What Polina learned from writing articles and getting feedback, and how she used them to get more readers

[15:33] Polina talks about her relationship dynamic with her husband who's also a writer, and how their differences help her get a business perspective for her newsletter

[21:07] Polina shares the tools and systems that have helped her to be better at writing

[27:42] The challenges Polina encounters in writing newsletters and what keeps her writing

[29:15] Polina shares some newsletters that inspired her, including James Clear's blog

[30:51] The business side of The Profile: how Polina grew her newsletter, and how she focused on quality content

[31:58] Monetizing The Profile, and what made Polina’s readers convert to a paid subscription

[34:09] Polina shares some of the ways she earns from The Profile

[37:07] Why you don't need a massive following to monetize your work

[37:33] Polina talks about her future goal of building a human interest company

[38:32] The future of newsletters and why it's the perfect time to be a writer right now

[41:30] On dealing with self-doubt and criticisms, and why patience and consistency is important if you want to start a newsletter

QUOTES:

“So I think a lot of times people think they need this massive, massive following to monetize anything. It's not true. As long as you can prove that the audience is really high quality and really engaged and they actually click and they actually open, and they actually read it.”

“The best piece of advice I heard was from Kat Cole, who's the president of Focus Brands. She said that every time you get a piece of feedback, the first thing you should do before you reject it—before you think it’s stupid is accept it and try and be like, okay, if this is true, then what can I do about it?...Accept it as truth before you outright dismiss it. Because after a while, that was not the only email I got like that. I got a number of them that were very critical, but it made me have thicker skin. It made me evolve in my writing. And by the end of my time there, I'd like to think that my voice, my tone, how I wrote, [the] people really liked because it was me and I wasn't trying to be somebody else.”

RESOURCES

The Profile

Fortune Magazine - an American multinational business magazine
The Messy Middle by Scott The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
Maria Popova - Bulgarian writer
Chefs Table - Grant Achatz Episode
Single Supplement newsletter - Nikola Slawson
NFTs and a Thousand True Fans - Article from a16z.com (Andreessen Horowitz’s website)
Sara Blakely - Founder of Spanx
Shane Parrish - Author, founder of Farnam Street
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Josh Wolfe - Investor, founder of Lux Capital
Business Insider - American news website
The Hustle - Newsletter
Bessemer Venture Partners - American venture capital firm
The Washington Post - American daily newspaper
The New York Times - American daily newspaper
The Wall Street Journal - American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper
Brandon Stanton - Author of Humans of New York