#91 What is the Daily Concept?

Thanks for reading the Daily Concept. If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a friend. If someone forwarded you this email, click here to subscribe.

Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

Today is a special day: it’s the first birthday of the Daily Concept newsletter! 

Just over a year ago, I published a newsletter about the Spanish Civil War for about 25 friends and family:

Since then, I’ve published over 90 newsletters and the subscriber list has grown to 2,000+ readers from around the world. 

I wanted to take this opportunity to:

• thank you all for reading my newsletter

• give you a bit of background on the Concept

• highlight future plans I have for the upcoming year

• outline my goals for the Daily Concept

Thank you: I appreciate all the time that you spend reading the Concept.

There are so many things that we could be reading or looking at on our phones, and I am grateful that so many interesting and intellectually curious people have subscribed to the newsletter.

P.S. feel free to write to me if you have any questions or just want to introduce yourself. I always reply.

Daily Concept Origin Story: In summer 2021, I was finishing my Ph.D. I began writing a newsletter called the Inside Daily Brief as part of a new job.

The Daily Brief was a daily politics newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers. I wrote it for 2.5 years.

I wrote over 600 newsletters and learned a lot about newsletter writing during that time.

Ultimately, I decided to start my own newsletter.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could write the best newsletter possible: what could I do that would provide the most value to readers in a short, concise, and creative format?

After playing around with a few ideas, I came up with the Daily Concept.

Now that I’ve been writing it for a year, I am extremely pleased with how the newsletter has turned out.

The topics are interesting, the writing is tight and information-packed, and readers love it.

I’ve also learned how to do some basic graphic design and how to edit videos. On that note…

Future plans: In addition to writing the newsletter, I’ve started an Instagram page where I post informative and (hopefully) funny content.

Most importantly, I’m going to start recording podcast-style video interviews with intellectuals, experts, and other interesting people.

I will share those videos in the email, so keep an eye out!

P.S. Follow my YouTube channel, because I will post the videos there. Here’s a teaser video from my first interview.

My goals for the Daily Concept: I wanted to share my long-term plans for the Daily Concept with you all.

Ultimately, I would like to make a living from the Daily Concept while keeping it completely free.

To help me achieve this goal, I will begin offering readers the chance to support the Daily Concept with a $5 monthly subscription later this month.

The newsletter will always be free, but readers who want to support me and the publication can help out for just the price of a cup of coffee every month. ☕

I believe that we are moving beyond a world of mass corporate media (which has a negative homogenizing effect on our culture) toward one in which people build relationships with individual creators and niche media brands that cater to their individual interests.

For this to happen, we need to move beyond the standard advertisement-based model that our current media system is built on.

Individual subscriptions to creators and small media companies (through platforms like Patreon) make this possible, and I hope that you will consider supporting the Concept as I continue to build the newsletter into a media company.

The more paid subscribers I get means there’s more time I can spend on the Concept.

And there is nothing I would love more than being able to work on the Concept full-time.

I love writing this newsletter and I am so happy that you are all enjoying it.

Here’s to another great year. 🥂

Sincerely,
Dr. Daniel Smith
Daily Concept Media

ART OF THE DAY