Getting Paid to Share Interesting Facts

I’m Dan, and I’ve spent my career connecting with audiences online -- I built my first website in 1995 and never turned back. And I’m insatiably curious and love sharing fun facts I’ve learned. (Almost annoyingly so!)

In 2010 -- way, way before the current newsletter boom -- I stared Now I Know, a free daily email newsletter where I share a fun fact and the story behind it. 

Here are a few stories I’ve shared:

- Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service… and was fatally shot that same night. It’s true (but there’s more to the story, of course!).

- BBC Radio once banned a song from its airwaves because listeners clapped too much.

- “Genuine leather” sounds fancy, but it’s actually low quality.

- A guy in Arkansas was the target of a murder plot but was saved because his would-be assailant butt-dialed him when talking over the plans with a hitman.

Now I Know is an eclectic experience, you’ll learn something new every day!

In 2009, I joined a startup that was trying to build an email newsletter for sports fans. My job was to grow the list without much of a budget. I’ve always been good at building online audiences and had just done so for a long-gone sports blogging service I co-founded. And I failed miserably.

Building an audience for an email newsletter was so, so much different than anything I had done before, and it was also the first time I had tried to build an audience for someone else’s content. (I wasn’t writing for the sports newsletter.) That folded before the year was out and the failure stuck with me.

In June 2010, just a few months after starting a new job, I had tweeted some fun facts, got a few retweets, and appreciated the attention. The idea hit me that night -- I could turn this into an email newsletter, sharing a fact a day. The first one went out two days later to 20 friends and family (and a couple random people) and I haven’t stopped since. 

At first, it was a struggle -- a newish job, two kids with another on the way, etc. -- but I was motivated enough to push through. Wrote in bed, didn’t watch a ton of TV, etc. My commute was easy, and my hours weren’t terrible, so I had the time. Plus, I had been writing regularly for years; I could easily bang out 500 to 1,000 words in 30 minutes, tops.

It didn’t take long for me to build a routine that I could make work for me. As life got busier, I adapted. For example, we moved to the suburbs about a decade ago and my commute became pretty long, but most of it was on a train. I could write the next day’s newsletter even without Internet access during that trip and often did. When COVID hit, that changed, so I had to change my habits again. It’s really not about finding the time to write; it’s about being flexible as life throws changes at you.

I’m a feedback junkie. I started Now I Know because I love to learn new things and I love to share what I’ve learned -- not for the money. (It’s not even remotely close to something I can afford to do full-time, never has been, never will be.) Getting the replies, watching people subscribe, seeing the open rates… that motivates me.

The money is nice, too. 🙂

If the field is “fun facts,” well, that’s not much of one. I’m writing this in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble and the section of books on “fun facts” or “trivia” there’s not much there; it’s a sparsely populated lower half of a bookshelf under books about poker and bridge. Cookbooks, for example, have twelve jam-packed shelves -- there must be fifty cookbooks here for one trivia book. It’s not much of a niche.

If the field is “newsletters,” pick a niche that you know well and start writing. Ask friends and family to do you a favour and subscribe and send you feedback. That last part is key because subscriber totals are 100% a vanity number -- you want readers, not subscribers, and if they’re not reading, they don’t matter. (I mean, for your side hustle. Your friends and family matter in the other parts of your life!) Write your content yourself; that’s the product, and you need to own it. Be opportunistic about growth, saying “yes, and” wherever you can. Lots of things will fail but the wins will add up. And don’t get discouraged -- it’s going to be a slow build. Commit to doing it for at least six months. It all takes time.

You can subscribe to Now I Know here!

Hope you love it as much as I love writing it.