Raymond Weekly is a Traditional Chinese newsletter run by Raymond Hou about digital work and technology in everyday life. It is sent weekly or every other week. Launched in 2020, it became one of Raymond’s core publishing channels as he moved from employment to running a business of one. Together with the podcast, blog, and paid membership service, it forms part of the Raymond Thirty brand’s content ecosystem. It is both a long-term home for Raymond’s writing and an entry point for readers and source of advertising revenue for the brand.
Origins and Positioning
Raymond sees the newsletter as a way to resist algorithms. He built an audience through writing on Medium, but later observed that when reading is dominated by social algorithms and becomes passive consumption, content creators struggle to maintain stable relationships with readers. He therefore set up a self-hosted WordPress website, bought a domain, and moved his content into “his own digital garden,” using a newsletter to reach readers directly. In his introduction, Raymond explains that the value of a newsletter lies in the trust threshold readers cross when they share their email addresses. It is not affected by fluctuations in social-media algorithms; as long as readers keep opening, clicking, and replying, the relationship between them can continue to grow.
In terms of content, Raymond positions each issue as a record “written for himself,” rather than top-down instruction. He advocates writing in a voice one would use for oneself, avoiding content made to chase performance metrics. He describes himself as “a student who loves learning and sharing,” rather than a teacher speaking from above. This writing stance aligns with his Super Individual (Super Individual) position: honestly record personal learning, tool experiments, and setbacks so readers can benefit alongside him.
Growth and Scale
When the newsletter started in 2020, it had only about 100 subscribers in its first month. By 2023, it had published more than 150 issues and surpassed 30,000 subscribers. Its average open rate over the latest ten issues was about 56%, well above the 20%–30% common across the newsletter industry. 1 Raymond later cleaned and pruned the subscriber list, shifting the focus from scale to activity and stabilizing the metrics. By 2025, Raymond Weekly had more than 25,000 subscribers and an open rate above 65%. The sending cadence, initially more frequent, gradually shifted to primarily every other week to fit Raymond’s travel, courses, and other projects.
Each issue generally includes reflections on current life and creative work, recommendations for digital tools and AI applications, brand and course announcements, and one advertising placement. The day before sending, the same content is published as a blog post on the website, capturing long-tail search traffic and keeping the article permanently available. This creates two complementary distribution channels: newsletter and blog.
Reader Profile and Advertising Model
The audience profile Raymond has published shows readers mainly consist of professionals interested in lifelong learning and improving work effectiveness. A significant proportion are business owners, managers, and professionals such as engineers and designers. This highly educated audience, with influence over purchasing decisions, makes the newsletter a channel for digital-tool and hardware brands seeking promotion.
Advertising takes the form of one exclusive placement per issue, with additional exposure through the blog and social media. Raymond has clear rules for sponsorships: he first uses a product for 7 to 10 days before evaluating it, recommends only tools he finds genuinely useful, and avoids misleading promotion. If the experience does not meet expectations, he gives honest feedback and returns the product. He insists on writing promotional copy himself and including personal stories and real experience, even when the sponsor provides complete materials; he does not directly use a template or have AI write the copy. He once called this insistence “the last human stronghold,” arguing that a recommendation’s value comes from a real person’s perspective, rather than content that can be generated in bulk.
Platform Migration: ConvertKit to Kit
The newsletter used ConvertKit as its sending platform for a long time. In August 2024, Raymond moved the system to Kit, the platform’s renamed service, continuing the existing mechanisms for sending, list management, and subscription forms. He later automated the process of turning WordPress articles into newsletter drafts, reducing the friction of regular publishing. This automation was later documented as a reusable internal workflow and is an example of Raymond using tools and Automation (automation) to support individual creative work.
Role in the Brand
Raymond Weekly is long-term infrastructure for the trust relationship between Raymond Thirty and its audience. It gathers readers dispersed across platforms into an email list that can be reached directly. It is both an entry point to Lifehacker Premium and online courses, and an advertising channel. In his early-2026 reflection on six years of paid subscriptions, Raymond redefined the brand’s core value as “people,” rather than simply ongoing content updates. 2 The shift also appears in his view of the newsletter: instead of pursuing larger subscriber numbers, he values the depth of the relationship represented by readers who keep opening, replying, and exchanging ideas.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Issue 170: Reflections on Six Years of Paid Subscriptions,” WordPress, 2026-01-10. View original ↩