TLDR: Most people subscribe to a dozen newsletters and read none. This is the shorter, honest list of retention, growth, and customer-success newsletters actually worth your inbox in 2026, grouped by what each is good for:
- Strategy & growth: Lenny's Newsletter, Growth Unhinged (Kyle Poyar), Elena Verna
- Customer success: Sixteen Ventures (Lincoln Murphy)
- Metrics & real data: ChartMogul, ProfitWell/Paddle, Baremetrics
- Founder voice: The Bootstrapped Founder, SaaStr Daily
Two or three newsletters you actually open beats fifteen you archive on sight. Pick one strategic, one tactical, and stop there.
Which newsletter should you subscribe to for your role?
Different jobs need different newsletters. Here is the quick map before the detail, so you can subscribe to the two that fit you and skip the rest.
Strategy and growth newsletters
- Lenny's Newsletter is the default for product and growth. Retention shows up constantly because Lenny treats it as the engine of growth, not a footnote. The headline essays are free; the archive and community are paid. Best all-round pick for founders and PMs.
- Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar (formerly of OpenView) is the sharpest free newsletter on PLG, pricing, and expansion. If you liked OpenView's old PLG reports, this is where that thinking lives now.
- Elena Verna writes bluntly about growth loops, activation, and monetization from years running growth at scale. Great counterweight to theory: she has actually shipped this stuff.
- Andrew Chen is less frequent now but the archive on network effects, retention, and the "leaky bucket" is foundational reading.
Customer success newsletters
- Sixteen Ventures by Lincoln Murphy is the old-school customer-success canon, heavy on the idea that engineered customer success drives retention. Dated design, durable ideas.
- Gainsight and ChurnZero both run CS newsletters. Genuinely useful playbook content, but read them knowing the conclusion usually points at buying their category. If you are shopping, pair with our Gainsight alternatives and ChurnZero alternatives.
Metrics and real-data newsletters
- ChartMogul sends concrete, numbers-first writing on cohorts and retention curves. Underrated because it teaches from data, not takes. See ChartMogul alternatives if you are evaluating the tool.
- ProfitWell / Paddle is the source of many churn and pricing benchmarks everyone quotes. Best free benchmark content in the category. Compare in ProfitWell alternatives.
- Baremetrics built its brand on radical transparency and the newsletter carries that: real MRR teardowns and honest numbers. See Baremetrics alternatives.
Founder-voice newsletters
- The Bootstrapped Founder by Arvid Kahl is retention-adjacent (audience, product, churn) from a bootstrapper's seat. Good for solo and small-team founders.
- SaaStr Daily is Jason Lemkin's firehose. High volume, uneven depth, but the NRR and retention posts are blunt and benchmark-heavy in a useful way.
- First Round Review is less a newsletter than a publication you get by email: long operator interviews, occasionally on retention, always from someone who did it.
Newsletters compared at a glance
| Newsletter | Best for | Free / paid |
|---|---|---|
| Lenny's Newsletter | Product & growth strategy | Free + paid tier |
| Growth Unhinged | PLG, pricing, expansion | Free |
| Elena Verna | Growth loops, activation | Free + paid |
| Sixteen Ventures | Customer success philosophy | Free |
| ChartMogul | Cohorts & metrics | Free |
| ProfitWell / Paddle | Benchmarks & pricing data | Free |
| Baremetrics | Transparent real numbers | Free |
| The Bootstrapped Founder | Solo/bootstrapped founders | Free |
Reading is not the work. These newsletters are worth a few hours a month to keep a mental model current. After that, the return on a fifteenth newsletter is far lower than the return on shipping one retention experiment.
If you only subscribe to three
- Lenny's Newsletter for the strategic frame, so you do not optimize a save flow while ignoring the activation problem underneath it.
- Growth Unhinged for the PLG, pricing, and expansion tactics you can actually run.
- One data source (ChartMogul or ProfitWell/Paddle) so your instincts stay anchored to real benchmarks.
Where to start once you have read enough
If you want the broader list of blogs and data sources, not just newsletters, see the 20 best churn and retention resources. And when you are ready to stop reading and act, the fastest next step is to find your own weakest retention lever: take the Churn Health Check. It scores your setup in about 60 seconds and tells you what to fix first, which usually beats one more newsletter.