Publishing & Growth

Email marketing helps creators build an audience they actually own. Social reach can drop overnight. An email list gives you a direct line to readers, listeners, buyers, and fans. If you are comparing free email marketing tools, start with one simple rule. Pick the platform that fits your current stage, not the one with the […]

Newsletter product thinking gives publishers a better way to grow. Instead of treating a newsletter like a simple email blast, it treats it like a product that should earn attention, improve over time, and support the business behind it. That shift matters. News and media teams face more competition, tighter margins, and readers with less […]

The new CRE Daily website is live. This project gave us the chance to help a leading commercial real estate media brand refresh how it looks, reads, and earns revenue online. We worked closely with the CRE Daily team on a full redesign and rebrand built around their goals and their readers’ needs. From the […]

Newsrooms do not just publish stories anymore. They build digital products that readers use every day. That shift is why product thinking matters. Product thinking helps media teams move from a print-era mindset to a reader-focused one. Instead of only asking, “What story do we publish next?” teams also ask, “How does this story get […]

Our work with Stacked Marketer shows what happens when a growing media company gets the right technical partner. Over the past year, what started as help with a few urgent issues turned into an ongoing partnership focused on security, editorial speed, and site performance. Stopping Bot Attacks and Fake Sign-Ups One of the first problems […]

You can have great content and still lose subscribers. It happens when readers stop seeing the value, fall behind, or feel like your newsletter is not for them anymore. That’s subscription churn, and it quietly cuts revenue, reach, and referrals. Churn is rarely caused by one bad email. Most of the time it’s a slow […]

Building a scalable media publishing platform is not just an engineering problem. It is a product problem, too, because the signup flow, the landing page, and the subscriber experience decide whether growth sticks. Refact CEO Saeedreza Abbaspour joined the Sticky podcast to talk through the patterns we see across newsletter and media teams, from first […]

You can publish great work and still struggle to make money. Ads are unreliable, platforms change their rules, and sponsorships can disappear without warning. That’s why reader revenue models matter. They help newsletters, publishers, and media companies earn directly from the people who already value the content. This guide covers the main reader revenue models, […]

We’ve been thinking a lot about tech stack choices lately, and we’re not the only ones. Publishers and newsletter teams are taking a closer look at what they pay for, what they actually use, and what breaks when traffic spikes. If you’ve heard “audit your tech stack” a hundred times, this post puts real shape […]