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One of our most popular episodes last year was about Mindstream, a daily newsletter acquired by HubSpot only 17 months after sending their first issue.
For that episode, we spoke the newsletter’s growth lead and one of two co-founders, Adam Biddlecombe. On the heels of their 1,000th issue, we spoke to the newsletter’s editorial lead and fellow co-founder, Matt Village, alongside first employee and editorial partner Maria Gharib.
In this episode:
🔁 The systems that built a 230,000-subscriber newsletter
🌍 The tech stack behind a two-person editorial engine
📅 Writing a daily newsletter for 1,000 consecutive issues
Listen wherever you get your podcasts; watch below; and scroll down to read our profile.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
1,000 issues
Mindstream, a daily newsletter covering developments in tech and AI, sent their first issue on June 1, 2023. They’ve not missed a single day since — weekends and holidays included.
They hit 1,000 consecutive issues in February; as we publish this story, they are preparing issue 1,048.
But only five days into sending, they almost broke the streak.
Matt Village, the newsletter’s co-founder and editorial lead, was going to Glastonbury, the famous English music festival. His cofounder and business lead, Adam Biddlecombe (who we interviewed last year), asked if they should just skip sending during those few days.
“I laid the gauntlet down and said, look, we said it's going out every day. If we skip one this early on, that opens the door to doing it again.”
Adam, for the first and last time, wrote the newsletter while Matt was out. They only had around 20 people on the list, mostly friends and family, but, as Matt put it, “We can't skip, we've committed to it. The discipline is what's important.”
In September 2023, around 100 issues in, Mindstream had around 5,000 subscribers and was growing faster than either Matt or Adam had expected. Adam quit his job to focus on the newsletter full-time; two weeks later, Matt followed.
By January 2024, it was time to bring in a second writer — Maria Gharib. Living in Beirut, she’d recently been laid off amidst one of the worst hyperinflation crises in Lebanon's modern history. The day she applied to Mindstream, she also applied to 80 other jobs.
English is Maria’s third language after Arabic and French, and she'd spent her career writing for Arab audiences. Matt and Adam helped her get up to speed by reading and then emulating the style of The Hustle, a popular business newsletter that had been acquired by HubSpot three years earlier.
The Mindstream team describes their tone and style as their unique advantage in the otherwise crowded AI-focused newsletter market. Where competitors often lean towards more technical, dense language, they frame their product around approachability for broader audiences, though still with a substantive core.
Less than a year after Maria joined, in October 2024, HubSpot acquired Mindstream, too. They’d sent around 503 issues over 17 months. Matt and Adam had kept quiet about the acquisition until it closed — they were then able to tell Maria she’d be joining HubSpot, too, and could relocate to any office the company had. She moved to the UK to be close to the team.
Together — plus a small bench of freelancers handling some of the longer, often evergreen weekend pieces — they run the most prolific newsletter in the HubSpot Media network — none of the network’s other properties send this frequently.
Mindstream now reaches 230,000 subscribers. And they have no plans to stop sending every day.
For the full story, listen to our podcast with Matt and Maria.
To hear more about the business side of Mindstream, listen to our podcast with Adam Biddlecombe.
To learn more about the strategy behind the HubSpot Media network, listen to our podcast with Jonathan Hunt.
Connect with Matt and Maria on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to Mindstream.
Two techniques for your newsletter
From Natalia Pérez-González — a couple of ideas that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:
Build a welcome sequence that tells your origin story — across multiple emails, from multiple perspectives.
Mindstream's welcome sequence goes beyond a single email, walking new subscribers through the newsletter's story from three different voices: Matt's, Maria's, and Adam's. Each email adds another layer. By the time it's done, the reader knows who's behind the newsletter, why they built it, and what they're trying to do.
To see this welcome sequence in action, subscribe to Mindstream.
It's a deliberate strategy to get readers emotionally invested before the novelty of a new subscription wears off. People are less likely to unsubscribe from a publication when they feel connected to the creators.
Run a re-engagement automation with a hard exit at the end.
Mindstream's re-engagement threshold is 55 days of inactivity. Any subscriber who crosses that mark enters a short automated sequence — a few emails that essentially ask, in different ways, ‘Hey, are you still there?’ Anyone who opens or clicks gets routed back to the main list. Anyone who reaches the end of the sequence without engaging gets removed entirely. No exceptions.
The salvage rate runs about 10–15%, meaning the other 85–90% were already gone; they just hadn't officially unsubscribed. A lapsed subscriber drags your deliverability, distorts your engagement data, and makes your list look healthier than it actually is.
We need your vote
Creator Spotlight is nominated for two Webby awards — Best Writing and Entertainment & Culture Website. We're in the running but not winning yet, and the audience choice award is entirely down to whose audience shows up in support.
Will you help us win? It takes 10 seconds.
Thank you. We write for your readership; your support here means everything.
— Francis Zierer & Natalia Pérez-González
