Shortly after I quit my corporate job, I hopped on a plane to Miami for my friend’s bachelorette party.

I remember staring out the window at the clouds, feeling so free (hence the name of this newsletter).

After years of wanting to leave my job and complaining to friends, I FINALLY took real action!

I made it a mission to start writing consistently.

(here’s the first post where I shared what I was looking to do at the time, if you want to take a trip down memory lane)

I had no idea what I would write about (I had never written a newsletter) or how long I could keep it up.

And after admittedly too many hours looking into email platforms, I signed up for beehiiv* because Reddit said it was the place for newsletters and better than Substack when it came to automations.

It really is a true email platform with more robust segmentation, but after a full year of writing every week, my growth seemed pretty slow.

I shared the newsletter on LinkedIn each week, by the end of 2025, I had 530 subscribers.

The newsletter itself would take hours to write, too. I got great feedback on it, but I wondered what I could do to reach more people.

So…9 months ago, I started experimenting with Substack.

I set up a “zap” with Zapier* that automatically added anyone who found me through Substack to my email list on beehiiv.

I posted about it on LinkedIn here, and found out I was not the only person with this question! The post reached 15K people (normally my posts do 1-3K impressions) and a bunch of people commented wanting to try the same thing, too.

But 9 long months of re-posting my newsletter to Substack and occasionally writing notes didn’t get me too far.

Up until last week, I had 90 people subscribed to my Substack (and some were duplicates of people already subscribed on beehiiv).

In this newsletter, I’ll go over:

^{*I’ve included affiliate links to software I use where I can earn a small payout at no cost to you if you decide to try it.}