The Unlikely Rise of the Newsletter Platform That’s Taking Over the Internet
45 years after the first-ever email newsletter

The first-ever email blast was sent out in 1978 by a guy named Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, to about 400 Arpanet advertising machines. This one email blast generated $13 million in sales, according to Brafton.
As you can tell, newsletters were a big deal right from the get-go.
Fast forward 39 years, and a small email-driven, writer-focused project saw the light of day.
Its name? Substack.
And nobody could have predicted the success this newsletter platform would see back then.
From Silicon Valley Dream to Side Hustle
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