Today marks seven years of writing a newsletter for me. 🥳

In honor of this, I have a few subscription offers! It will be a rare instance for me to run discounts, as I don’t like them that much, and creative work is already devalued enough these days.

The below discounts stop at the end of this year.

🥳 20% off an annual paid subscription plan ($50 value):

Get 20% off for 1 year

🥳 10% off for a monthly paid subscription plan ($5/month value) for one year:

Get 10% off for 1 year

🥳 30-day free trial (normally, it’s a 7-day free trial):

Get 30 day free trial

My very first newsletter send was on December 9, 2015 on the TinyLetter platform. It was under the name Coffee Marketing, and I moved over to Revue six months later. The first issue send was very short and to maybe a dozen people at most. In the beginning, I would write a blog post, then link out to it from my newsletter. Somewhere online, I read that linking to your site kept the view counts up and helped with your ranking in search results. Newsletters would just sit in inboxes or spam and wouldn’t be revisited. These days, I believe newsletter reading has changed a bit and being on the Substack platform also means that posts can still be accessed online. Plus, it’s still on my domain, so I’m not too worried.

It took me a while to get consistent with writing newsletters. What worked for me was telling people what and when to expect the emails, which I wrote about in staying motivated as a solo person. I also identified a niche: coffee marketing. Not much was happening here, and I saw an opportunity to offer resources to those who couldn’t afford or weren’t ready for my services.

But, interests change, and in line with listening to my gut, I’ve started to write and share more of what drives me, and it’s not always marketing.

I’ve invested more time and energy into writing here, which I hope you see reflected in my posts. As much as I love to see a big change, I’m hesitant to do it myself, which is why December is my tryout month.

If you are still here, thanks for sticking with me—I appreciate all who read and support my work. Despite what a potential client remarked to me, this is not an avenue for me to push my services. It’s a creative outlet, and for every post I write, I consider it a success if it affects one person (yes, just one).

Coincidentally, today is also the one-year anniversary of the Starbucks workers at the Buffalo location voting to unionize. It was a significant event in the history of coffee unions and, as we all know, kicked off an incredible wave of locations unionizing. For further reading, I recommend 's review of this in .

BOSS BARISTA

Starbucks Is Acting Like They're Too Big To Fail

Last longform piece, last request to consider switching your subscription from free to paid. 2022 was a big year, and I’d like to work to make 2023 more sustainable, which is where you come in. The single biggest thing you can do to keep this newsletter viable is changing your subscription to a paid model…

2 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Ashley Rodriguez

December: Following the footsteps of year-end reviews like Spotify Wrapped—where December seems to be some sort of purgatory month of "do whatever," I am testing new features in tanJennts. Formatting, sections, and cadence may change. Free subscribers will still receive at least two posts, and paid subscribers will still have at least four posts overall. If you enjoy any of the content this month, I would appreciate feedback!

Happy 7 years of newsletter writing