The Great Now I Know Transition of 2024

Hi!

Today’s Now I Know is a lot different than the rest. I was planning on telling you this on Friday but something came up, and it needs to happen sooner. 

This is going to be a big week for Now I Know, and if everything goes right, you won’t even notice! (Well, except for the fact that today’s email isn’t the typical “fun fact and a story behind it” email. That will happen again starting tomorrow!)

Here’s what’s happening, and why.

When I started Now I Know in June of 2010, I went with a platform called Mailchip to send the emails. Mailchimp has been great for the last 13.5 years, but it’s shifted to more of an e-commerce platform than a blog-as-newsletter platform. Other newsletter-sending services have emerged in recent years, and next week, I’m changing platforms. I’m moving the newsletter to beehiiv, a platform built for newsletters like mine. 

This has been an ENORMOUS undertaking for me. I considered making the move a year ago but couldn’t pull it off. Over the last few months, though, the beehiiv team and my friends at Media Mobilize have given me hours of support and assistance to get this going.

The reasons are numerous but can be summed up in one sentence: The beehiiv team has built a fantastic product that is geared to help newsletters like this one grow. I’m hoping that it works for Now I Know, and transparently, I’m optimistic. They have a more cost-friendly structure, a built-in patronage program for supporters, a built-in ad network, and a lot of user-friendly tools that I’m excited to learn. It’s all publisher-side stuff — so I think you’ll get virtually the same Now I Know experience as you always have. (I have to learn a whole new way of publishing. But let me worry about that!)

There’s only one thing I’d like you to do, and really, you don’t need to do it, because it should fix itself eventually. Starting next week, some of you may receive the newsletter from nowiknow@email.beehiiv.com, not my typical dan@nowiknow.com address. It should only last a few weeks but please whitelist that email address, too! It’s because of something called “email warm-up” which you can read more about here if you’re interested, but within a few weeks, it’ll switch to the usual email address. There’s nothing you need to do to keep getting Now I Know, but adding that nowiknow@email.beehiiv.com address to your address book couldn’t hurt. 

If you support Now I Know through Patreon, and you start seeing ads, please email me to let me know — it shouldn’t happen in the new system, but it was a very manual process and I may have missed a setting here or there. (And don’t worry about the “built-in patronage program” I referenced above — I’ll explain that later, there’s nothing you’ll need to do.)

That really should be it — everything else should be the same. I’m sure there will be a few glitches, so please bear with me over the next week or two. 

Thanks! I’ll be back tomorrow with a regular Now I Know email — coming to you via beehiiv, if everything goes right.

Dan