🔴 Integrity is a growth strategy

Today’s guest is Rachel Meade Smith, creator of the decade-old job listings newsletter Words of Mouth.

I’ve been subscribed for half of the newsletter’s lifetime, since a job hunt in 2020.

While I was searching for a job, at the most frustrating moments of my hunt, the newsletter gave me hope that I could find meaningful work; that I could live a meaningful life.

Long after landing a job, I kept opening the newsletter. Even today, though I no longer need the newsletter as a utility, I skim through each week to see the world through this optimistic lens — look at these wonderful opportunities, look at the world people are building.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts; watch here:

In this episode:

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

By Francis Zierer

On a years-long timeline, there are few greater advantages a media business can have than a strong, legible set of values. This is true at any point of scale; clear values build trust and blaze a path to scale, even encouraging word-of-mouth growth.

Rachel Meade Smith has been writing her newsletter, Words of Mouth, for a decade. Functionally, it’s a jobs newsletter sent every Monday evening. A recent issue included 31 job listings, six classified ads, and 26 “calls” for grant and incubator applications, residency applications, art and writing submissions.

An aggregation or curation product like this puts flesh to these functional bones through its communicated worldview; the strength of that flesh, the product’s ability to draw and retain an audience, is connected to the quality and clarity of that worldview.

The idea expressed through these emails, in Rachel’s words, is that “there are ways to live in this world that can pay you enough money and allow you to expand, connect, and ideally do something good for the world and humanity.” It’s that you do not have to “sell out” in order to survive.

Words of Mouth was born of Rachel’s personal job search at the start of 2016. During that search, she kept finding compelling jobs that weren't right for her but would be for her friends; it was only logical to collect and send them out. Working in design at the time, Rachel quickly landed on a name; Words of Mouth was born.

The first issue went out on January 25, 2016, after Rachel emailed around 50 friends and acquaintances to see if they’d be interested in receiving an email every week.

Growth has been steady since the beginning. She’s never run ads, never done any in-earnest marketing. Over time, other jobs roundup products have become a source of subscribers, and university art and design programs have increasingly listed the newsletter on their career resources pages.

The most recent issue went out to over 72,000 subscribers.

What kind of jobs form the core of this newsletter? Here are two from the Monday, March 9, 2026 edition:

Unsurprisingly, for a product that is both utilitarian and value-driven, engagement is high. Rachel shared an average open rate of 72% and a clicks-per-unique open rate of 22% (the percentage of unique openers who also clicked a link). She does not track more granular metrics.

Rachel does not claim to be a savvy businessperson; she admits the opposite.

These suggestions wrongly assume that she started Words of Mouth intending to make money. “Making money,” she says, was “a byproduct of the project.” Nonetheless, thanks to Words of Mouth, Rachel hasn’t held a full-time job since December 2019. (She maintains part-time, freelance engagements.)

Speaking about growing the audience, Rachel told me, “I’m so bad at running a business in this way, but it hasn't hurt me yet because it's just kind of doing its own work.” The same holds true for the newsletter’s revenue.

Words of Mouth brings in money in four ways:

Rachel fields around 20 submissions per week and asks each for a donation and a referral bonus if the newsletter sources the eventual hire, though the latter rarely materializes.

Employer donations are never required, but are delivered on a reliable basis. The submitting employer is more likely to donate if the organization is smaller or if the individual will be working closely with the role in question.

Classifieds are priced on a sliding scale: $65–$200 per listing. Rachel knows this is too low and will soon be raising the price. One reason is to increase revenue; another is to shorten the lead time — typically 6 to 8 weeks at the current rate — to serve folks looking for a faster turnaround. She’ll switch to a tiered pricing system.

Rachel has been working with a consultant to figure out how to price her new classified tiers and, among other details, how to increase her donating membership. The current free-to-Patreon conversion rate is around 0.4%. The goal is to increase the rate to 1% by the end of this year. Still “not a high bar,” but an important step towards finally, after a decade, turning Words of Mouth into a more sustainable business.

Rachel is a writer and editor — that’s the work she does for other people — and says she’s often asked why she doesn’t write content for the newsletter, or “curate editorial content about work and about job seeking and how to craft the perfect resumes?”

It’s not what she’s interested in; she’s interested in “critical examinations of work.” So, instead of launching a blog component, to celebrate a decade of sending Words of Mouth, Rachel put together a book.

Search Work: A Collective Inquiry Into the Job Hunt will be published this spring.

The book came together quickly. Rachel put out a call for submissions — essays, interviews, diaries, and more — at the start of 2025. By the time the window closed, she’d received around 1,100 pitches around the topic of looking for work.

She found four contributing editors to help with the book, all of them Words readers; they narrowed 1,100 pitches down to 20 and change.

Rachel paid for the book out of pocket — she paid her editors, paid her contributors. A fundraiser, through the newsletter, recouped some costs, and her publisher provided a small advance.

She went into the project expecting to lose money, though she now anticipates breaking even. It comes down to values; the passion is the point.

Subscribe to Words of Mouth.
Advertise in Words of Mouth.
Pre-order Search Work.

Is there a newsletter format as deceptively simple in execution as the links roundup? Whether the links are jobs, news items, videos, or whatever you’re collecting.

The curation newsletters (or social or video series) with deeply engaged audiences gain and sustain those audiences through strong, legible values expressed through a system of aggregation and curation.

The most effective curation-focused creators — like Rachel or past guests Casey Lewis and Suraj Kapoor — have a strong and specific point of view. To some extent, if you lack such a point of view on the subject you’re curating, you’re setting yourself up for failure. On the other hand, perspective is tempered by practice.

Aside from her values, Rachel told us precisely how she finds around 30 great job listings for every issue.

Rachel runs keyword alerts that hit her inbox continuously throughout the week. She also checks LinkedIn for jobs that exist only in informal posts and never make it to the formal listings section — think one-off "we're hiring!" announcements from team leads. Everything she deems worth saving goes into her Instapaper (a cross-platform bookmarking tool).

The key here is she’s not stopping to evaluate specifics — she’s looking for seemingly good fits to save, move on, and evaluate later.

To build a comparable sourcing infrastructure:

This step takes the longest. Rachel’s curation is completely intentional. On Fridays, she sits down to sift through everything she’s accumulated — direct submissions, saved alerts, LinkedIn finds — and starts making decisions.

She reads the listings more carefully, researches companies she doesn't recognize, and begins building a rough draft of the issue.

At this stage, the filter she's applying isn't solely about whether a role will resonate with any particular reader, but whether the organization behind it deserves to be in the newsletter at all. Does it support creative activity? Does it prioritize people over profit through design or technology? She lists these criteria on the Words website:

To replicate and adapt Rachel’s process:

By Monday morning, Rachel has a rough draft of the issue and half a day to finalize it. Then comes the evaluation: Are there too many senior-level roles? Too many New York listings? Too many communications jobs relative to design or operations?

She makes adjustments — swapping things out, going back to niche job boards to fill specific gaps.

For your own process: