A requiem for TinyLetter
Yes, my first Substack post is mourning its dying rival. Among other losses.
Endings and beginnings
Is there one of those long, compound, incredibly specific German words for “the thing that you originally reported finally coming to pass”?
I started my Lady Business newsletter back in 2017, as I was reporting a feature about MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut. His company had purchased TinyLetter, a beloved digital newsletter platform for writers, six years earlier. And as I interviewed him about his future business plans, Chestnut told me that he planned to–eventually–fold TinyLetter into MailChimp.
After my article about TinyLetter was published, and its news widely mourned, Chestnut publicly offered a little more detail into his then-strategy. He reassured TinyLetter users that MailChimp wouldn’t shut it down within the next year, adding that “When we have a roadmap for the integration, you’ll hear it from us first, well in advance.”
So life, and business, went on. Startup Substack quickly overtook TinyLetter as the newsletter platform of choice for writers, paying some of them six-figure salaries. Intuit eventually bought MailChimp for a stunning $12 billion, turning Chestnut into a billionaire. And I stuck with TinyLetter, partially out of inertia, sending more than 150 Lady Business newsletters over the past six years–through a new job, a global pandemic, a wrenching personal tragedy.
Then, in late November, MailChimp dropped this email into my inbox:
The TinyLetter community’s needs have changed … with some customers moving to Mailchimp to scale and monetize their newsletters, and some moving to alternative services that cater specifically to writers. With all of that in mind, we’ve made the decision to close TinyLetter and focus on our core Mailchimp product.
On February 29, 2024, we will officially sunset the product and you’ll no longer be able to access your TinyLetter account or letter archive. You’ll still be able to log in and access your account until February 29.
“Sunset” is one of my least favorite bits of corporate jargon. In this case, it means that Intuit isn’t just shutting down TinyLetter–it’s salting the earth and nuking the archives. Including my archives. Come February 29, the original versions of the 150+ newsletters I’ve sent over more than half a decade will disappear from the public Internet. I’ve been able to move a copy of those newsletters over to this new platform, but some of the links and photos won’t work after February 29.
So yes, this is the end for the TinyLetter era of Lady Business. For the time being, I’ve moved it over to Substack, which has sent you this email. You can read and subscribe to future Lady Business issues, and still read versions of my old newsletters, over here.
But I’m weirdly emotional about the demise of TinyLetter, however long ago I helped foretell it. For some obvious reasons: Lady Business was co-founded by my late best friend, Stephanie Meyers. Losing the original public record of the thing that she inspired and championed, until her sudden death in 2021, makes me feel like I’m losing another piece of her.
I’ve already lost Steph’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, deactivated after her death, with all their photos of our joint adventures and the shared history of our professional lives together. At least her Instagram and Twitter still exist, as if she just stopped updating them in April 2021 and never bothered to return. And every once in a while I’ll go down a rabbit hole of re-reading our iMessages or Gchats, snort-laughing about how brilliant and funny she was and how much fun we had together. Reading our old conversations feels like temporarily bringing her back, like pressing a bruise that never heals, painful and joyful all at the same time. I’m grateful I can still revisit those records of our friendship–unless and until Apple or Google decides to “sunset” those products, or change the rules for accessing them.
But this is what it means to live and work online these days. 2023 was the year of vanishing, the year that made it painfully clear: We don’t own our digital lives, and we have very limited control over what the real owners do with our creations. Streaming platforms don’t just cancel TV series; they delete all the old seasons for tax write-offs. Publishers sell and shut down websites, often erasing years of work by all the journalists and writers who built those publications into influential businesses. Tech platforms that wooed writers by promising us more "control" over our writing and internet presence, like Substack, are also selling their services to Nazis. And after buying Twitter, which helped me and so many other journalists and writers carve out professional identities, Elon Musk continues turning it into a zombie.
(That’s another way in which I felt Steph’s loss this past year: She loved Twitter, with all its pre-Elon imperfections, and she would have absolutely loathed the X era.)
The internet is forever, the warning goes. You can’t really erase anything once you put it online; you can always be canceled by old Tweets or embarrassed by leaks of private photos. But here’s the flip side: Nothing gold can stay. Not everything digital does live forever, it turns out–especially once we’re no longer there to save it or move it from one tech platform to the next. And as our lives continue moving inexorably online, we have so little control about which parts of those lives outlast us. Or what disappears with each “sunset.”
So as TinyLetter withers, I’m moving Lady Business to the next tech platform. Substack isn’t a perfect home, by any means. But for a free newsletter with the same sort of functionality for writers, at least as a temporary stop, there don’t seem to be many better options right now. I’ll be keeping an eye out for one.
Thank you for reading, subscribing, and responding to the past six years of Lady Business. I hope to continue hearing from you on the other side of this sunset.