A seasonal newsletter offers just the right size audience
Rega Jha had a problem. Namely that in 2020, Stripe wouldn’t work in India, where she’s based. This meant that it wasn’t going to be possible to set up recurring payments for the newsletter she’d decided to launch.
Jha, the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed India and a longtime freelance writer, was ready for a new project. Needing to have a new opinion every week for her column for the Times of India was wearing her down, and freelancing didn’t pay well.
But newsletters intrigued her. This was when “Substack was making millionaires in America,” Jha said. Over the years, starting with her work at BuzzFeed she’d built a loyal audience on Instagram — more than 100,000 followers — and she suspected that if she launched a newsletter, her audience might be willing to pay for it. A paid newsletter seemed like the perfect solution — until she ran into the issue with Stripe.