📜 History

In late 2020, I was floored by the number of announcements, changes, re:Invent releases, and blog posts that AWS announces every week.

Then, I decided to automate part of my weekly routine to stay up to date. The idea was to get a digest email summary of what was going on. It was very helpful for my job as an Indie AWS Security Consultant.

A few weeks later, I decided to open my weekly digest to external subscribers as I believe it could interest folks in the same field. Here we are with the ASD Newsletter in January 2021.

⏭️ Fast forward in 2024

A few KPIs about AWS Security Digest in May 2024, the month I got acquired by Plerion - Simplify Cloud Security.

  • Issues: 159
  • Readers: 2700+
  • Open rate 52% (on avg)
  • ARR: 20k$ from sponsoring

💳 Why buy a newsletter?

Typically, companies are trying to gain visibility and build a solid brand awareness. They are creating new channels to reach new potential customers or to gain visibility for their new products/releases/webinars.

Starting a newsletter from scratch is a long journey. As we saw before, it takes a lot of effort and regularity to build a significant audience, and gaining trust from readers is even harder.

Buying an existing newsletter in your product’s field (Cloud Security) is an excellent investment for companies.

🛍️ Acquisition

I was contacted by Dan, the Chief Innovation Officer of Plerion AKA “Super serious internet guy” :), in May 2024, just when I started to pause the newsletter for a few weeks to let me re-engineer it with better content, new ideas, and an enhanced format. At that time, I also needed some rest after doing it every single week in a row since 1 5 9 weeks.

Dan has been running the newsletter well for a few weeks now with excellent new sections, more verbose content with valuable insights, and added his tone.

➡️ What’s next

Now it’s time for me to focus on my AWS consulting activities, my other products: unusd.cloud, and all other OSS AWS initiatives. I will also write more content on this blog from now.

That’s all folks!

zoph.