The 20SomethingNewsletter

Life in your twenties can sometimes feel like tiptoeing carefully around a dark room.

That's the first line of The 20 Something Newsletter's About page, and it alludes to the promise I wanted to make with the publication: if you're figuring adulthood out in the dark, this newsletter will be a flashlight.

What began in 2022 as a space for me to write honestly about being a young adult has grown into a 15,000+ subscriber publication, with readers across 140 countries who read, share, reply to, and engage with the work.

Of everything I've built, this is the project that has taught me the most about writing, audience psychology, and distribution.

For years, I made other people's content travel. Eventually, I felt an itch.

I wanted to know what would happen if I ran the entire machine myself.

The 20 Something Newsletter became my personal playground for figuring out what makes people tick. With each issue, I've explored questions like:

• What makes a person click on an opinion piece?
• What makes one idea more attractive than another?
• Can an audience built around good writing become commercially valuable?

The more I wrote, the more I realised that the first challenge isn't writing the piece.

It's deciding which idea deserves to become a piece in the first place.

My audience consists mainly of people in their twenties, and over time, I've learned that they respond particularly strongly to questions around identity, relationships, and the strange experience of becoming an adult.

Three pieces illustrate the range:

• Be the Leading Lady of Your Life — 2,166 likes · 391 restacks
• Should You Sleep With Your Friends? — 1,282 likes · 237 restacks
• Curiosity Is a Form of Love — 918 likes · 237 restacks

The topics are different, but the underlying question is usually the same: what is the more interesting question hiding underneath the obvious one?

That has become an important part of my editorial instinct — finding the tension, curiosity, or contradiction that makes someone think, I hadn't thought about it that way before.

Writing something good isn't enough if nobody sees it.

I built the newsletter as a small media ecosystem, giving each platform a different job:

• Substack is where the deepest relationship lives: the long-form essays and notes.
• Instagram and TikTok turn the newsletter into visual excerpts, helping new readers discover the publication.
• LinkedIn gives career and work-related pieces a natural home among people already thinking about those subjects.

I don't copy and paste the same content everywhere. I think about what each platform is good at, then adapt the idea accordingly.

The newsletter became an experiment not just in writing, but in how an idea moves from one person to another.

Subscriber growth tells me that people are discovering the newsletter. Engagement tells me whether they care. When a reader replies to tell me a piece changed how they thought about something, or restacks an essay because they want their own audience to see it, it proves impact beyond just likes and follower count.

Those responses have become one of my favourite ways of measuring the work. Numbers tell me that something travelled. A reader telling me why it mattered tells me something much more interesting.

Once there was an audience, I wanted to see whether it could create commercial value without losing the thing that made people care in the first place: the writing.

The newsletter has since attracted partnerships with brands and organisations including Zikoko, Inclusively Remote, and Lagos Model United Nations, with sponsored editions reaching thousands of readers while maintaining the publication's editorial voice.

A few examples:

• A Guide to Job Hunting in Your Twenties — Inclusively Remote · 5,860 recipients · 39% opened
• You Need Identity Capital — Lagos Model United Nations · 6,700 recipients · 41% opened
• Serendipity Farming — Zikoko · 10,753 recipients · 41.39% opened

Beyond a deep passion for helping young people live fuller lives, building The 20 Something Newsletter has made me a much sharper writer and editor.

I've learned to find the tension in an idea, figure out what an audience needs, turn that insight into something worth reading, and pull it in front of the right people.

Ultimately, the newsletter has become my own laboratory for understanding why people pay attention to things — and what makes them care enough to come back. And this is knowledge I now bring to every brand, campaign and content problem I work on.