Timi Odueso is a content strategist who’s spent the past decade helping media and arts companies across Africa craft, manage and grow compelling narratives. When he isn’t obsessing over content or growth questions, Timi can be found writing fiction and playing League of Legends. Coincidentally, and purely so, he’s been writing/editing TC Daily since 2021 and is partly responsible for all bad puns since.
Explain your job to a five-year-old.
Imagine you have a big box of colourful storybooks, and you want to share them with friends. My job is to help find those friends, make sure they know the storybooks exist, and get them excited to read them every time a new one comes out. I also help make the storybooks fun, easy to read, and interesting, so all our friends keep coming back for more stories!
You studied law. What drew you to media products?
At first I was afraid, it was part of my job as a journalist.
And then, it offered me the opportunity to learn a lot of things and learn them fast. There’s product management, yes, but there’s also front-end development, UX/UI design, performance marketing, and content strategy. I’ve even done a couple of expense sheets.
Plus law and products are similar in the sense that you can do both in any sector and any company.
What’s one major lesson you’ve learned from running a newsletter that most people wouldn’t expect?
One key lesson I’ve learned is that the best newsletters have a face—or a voice. You know exactly who’s behind the words.
For example, I remember Casey Newton’s newsletter before I remember that it’s called The Platformer. When I read Morning Brew, I can vividly picture Dan Toomey delivering the news in a TikTok-style rundown, and with Jay Acunzo, it’s like I’m listening to his podcast all over again.
Great newsletters work because email is inherently personal. Unlike social media, where reactions are visible to everyone, your response to a newsletter is private—just between you and the writer(s)—even when, like Morning Brew, it’s a bunch of people. When that voice feels right, it’s like getting a note from a friend. And that’s why they succeed.
What makes a great newsletter stand out from the noise in today’s crowded media space where readers have options?
Like everything creative, people can smell the inauthenticity miles away. So make your newsletter authentic. Look, if you’re going to stand out, you need to have your voice, and be intentional with writing/creating things that matter to you.
How do you measure the success of a newsletter—beyond just open rates?
It depends on the objective of the newsletter. For a newsletter with an objective to redirect leads or readers outside the product itself, the metric of success is not an open rate but a click-through rate. The value here is not how many people open, it’s how many people click.
Open rates are super critical; I’d say they’re the primary measure of success but look, they’re just percentages, and percentages can be misunderstood.
For example, a newsletter recording an increase in open rates from 35% in January to 40% in June is not necessarily a good thing. In January, the newsletter may have had 100,000 readers which would mean a 35% open rate is 35,000 active readers. In June, they may have dropped to 80,000 which means just 32,000 active subs at a 40% open rate. The percentage increased, sure, but the real numbers tell us that numbers are dropping.
That’s why it’s essential to go beyond percentages and focus on the actual numbers, whether it’s clicks, conversions, or another metric, to truly measure your newsletter’s success.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone launching a newsletter in 2025, what would it be?
Be consistent—this is the hardest part. I always like to say that newsletters are hungry-hungry babies. They require consistent attention or they will fester away into irrelevance.
Crafting newsletter products for Africans comes with its peculiarities. Can you share some of these peculiarities and how you’ve navigated them?
The biggest is that we’re still navigating is email literacy.
Over the past five years, across every company I’ve worked with, we’ve consistently found that our target audiences aren’t as email-literate or email-conscious as we’d like. This gap makes growth tougher by limiting the number of high-quality leads we can generate. For example, you might run an ad and capture 4,000 leads, but only around 400 of them will consistently read the product—many might not even remember clicking the sign-up link.
To address this, we’ve tightened our sign-up process with a double opt-in. This ensures that only genuinely interested readers subscribe, even if it means a narrower funnel. The funnel is so thin it only reinforces my theory on email literacy. I think we continue to grossly overestimate just how many people use email for their day-to-day tasks.
Can anybody make a long-term career out of building newsletters and products for media companies? Is this something you see yourself doing for a long time?
I’ll let you know the answer to the first in ten years, haha.
On a more serious note, I follow several media product leaders from Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew to the Heads of Newsletters at The Economist, The Telegraph and others. There is a long-term career out there given that media companies, over the past decade, have realised that email is the only social space they can actually own. And it’s not just newsletters, media companies build products out of podcasts, videos, games (hello Wordle), even webpages; it’s why the NYT, Washington Post and a few others have their own apps. If it’s consistent, has a defined audience and is monetisable, then it’s a product.
I like to do interesting stuff (even when they get monotonous), and building products in less funded sectors like media and arts means I often have to wear many hats and do different tasks. It keeps me engaged so yes, I am here for a good time.
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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