Start Your Email List Before You Need It

Scriling ran for years on borrowed ground. Every month, traffic came from Google search and Facebook shares. It worked, until I started asking myself what would happen if any of it stopped. The answer was uncomfortable: I would lose my audience overnight, because I had no way to reach them directly.

In September 2025, Nepal banned 26 social media platforms overnight. A huge share of the country’s attention went dark in a single day. Publishers who depended on Facebook and TikTok for traffic watched their numbers fall off a cliff. That ban taught every media owner in Nepal the same lesson I had been avoiding for years: if someone else controls the channel, you do not own your audience. You rent it.

The cheapest way to fix that is an email list. Not a fancy one. Not a 10,000-subscriber one. Just a list of people who agreed to hear from you, that no platform can take away. I never built one for Scriling, and it is one of my biggest regrets. This is the playbook I wish someone had handed me back in 2019.

I built on rented land

Let me be honest about how Scriling grew. From 2019 to its peak, it was a two-channel business: search brought readers, social amplified them. At the peak we were earning around $13,000 a month, all from advertising, all of it downstream of traffic I did not control.

It felt fine while the traffic flowed. Google’s algorithm changes and Facebook’s feed shifts were just weather. I watched the numbers, adjusted headlines, and kept publishing. But the whole structure had one point of failure: the platforms. If Google had de-ranked us or Facebook had throttled us, the revenue would have gone with them. I knew this. I still did nothing about it.

That is the trap of rented land. While it pays, building your own channel feels like a luxury. It is not. It is insurance. And insurance is only useful if you buy it before the fire.

The September 2025 ban was the fire. Twenty-six platforms, switched off. If you had an email list of even a few thousand readers that day, you could still reach them. If you did not, you started from zero.

Why email still wins in Nepal

People keep declaring email dead. In Nepal it was never the star, but that is exactly the point. Email is boring, and boring is durable. Nobody can ban your email list. No algorithm decides whether your readers see your message. You write, you send, it lands in their inbox.

A few reasons it works especially well for Nepali publishers and creators:

Internet access here is mobile-first and spotty. A newsletter that arrives in the inbox gets read when the reader has time, not when the algorithm decides.
WhatsApp groups are where Nepal actually reads the news, but groups are chaotic and you do not own them. An email list is the calm, owned version.
English and Nepali both work. You do not need fancy design. A simple text email with one good idea gets opened.

I learned the value of the calm version while building Sisnoo. The Sisnoo Daily, a short morning briefing, turned out to be the most habit-forming part of the product. People came back to it every morning. That is what email does: it turns a stream into a habit.

What I would do: the simple setup

If I were starting Scriling again today, the email list would be live before the tenth article. Here is the simple version.

Step 1: Pick one free tool and stop researching

Do not spend a week comparing email providers. Pick any reputable free tier, create an account, and make one list. The tool does not matter at this stage. What matters is that you have somewhere to collect addresses. I have seen founders lose months to tool comparisons while collecting zero subscribers.

Step 2: Put the signup box where readers already are

One form at the end of every article. One line explaining what the reader gets: “One short email every Sunday with the week’s best stories, no spam.” That is it. No popups on day one, no exit-intent tricks. Popups before you have content worth subscribing to just annoy people.

The end of the article is the best spot because the reader just finished something of yours. They are warm. Ask while they are warm.

Step 3: Promise a schedule you can keep

Pick a rhythm and keep it. Weekly is the sweet spot for most publishers: frequent enough to build a habit, rare enough that you do not burn out. I would promise one email every Sunday morning and treat it like a publishing deadline, the same way my newsroom treated its daily slots. Rhythm beats ambition. A weekly email you actually send beats a daily one you abandon in a month.

Step 4: Make the first email worth it

Your first email to a new subscriber sets the tone. Keep it short: who you are, what you will send, and one genuinely useful thing. Not a sales pitch. Not a long introduction. One useful thing. If the first email is good, the second one gets opened.

Step 5: Grow it the slow, honest way

There is no trick. Mention the list in your articles. Mention it on your social profiles. If you run a business, ask customers at checkout. Every hundred subscribers matters more than you think, because these are people who chose you. A list of 500 engaged readers beats 50,000 followers you cannot reach.

What to actually send

This is where most lists die. People sign up, get three emails, then silence. The fix is a simple template you can repeat forever:

One thing you published this week, and why it matters.
One thing you noticed or learned, in two or three sentences.
One link worth their time, with one line on why.

That is a newsletter. It takes an hour to write. It does not need graphics or sections or branding. Plain text with one good idea outperforms a beautiful template with nothing to say, every time.

When I look at what makes The Sisnoo Daily work, it is the same formula: short, regular, useful. Habits are built on repetition, not production value.

The ban-proof test

Here is the test I now apply to everything I build. Ask yourself: if every platform banned me tomorrow, who could I still reach?

If the answer is “nobody,” you are fully on rented land. Start the list this week.
If the answer is “my email subscribers,” you have a floor. Keep growing it.
If the answer is “my subscribers plus my own website’s direct traffic,” you are in good shape.

Scriling failed this test completely. Niguro will not. The lesson cost me years of leverage. It does not have to cost you.

Your 7-step checklist

Create a free account with one email provider today.
Make a single list and write a one-line promise for it.
Add the signup form to the end of every article or page.
Pick a schedule (weekly is fine) and put it in writing.
Write the welcome email: short, personal, one useful thing.
Send the first issue this week, even to five people.
Mention the list in every new piece of content you publish.

Start before you need it

The best time to start an email list was when you launched. The second best time is today, while the platforms are still working. Nobody starts a list during a crisis. They start one after, when it is too late to matter.

I built Scriling to $13,000 a month on traffic I did not own. It was a great business and a fragile one. The fragility was a choice, made by skipping the boring work of collecting email addresses. Do not make my version of that choice. A list of a thousand people who asked to hear from you is worth more than a million views you cannot repeat.