“I want For Starters to be a moment in someone’s week.”

The TPF Q&A with Danny Giacopelli

Danny Giacopelli is a starter in his own right. He founded For Starters, a “weekly newsletter for starting the small business of your dreams.” The publication is thoughtful and helpful, tightly curated yet expansive, a resource and a community. An excellent read, dropped into your inbox every Friday morning.

Danny thinking about starters.

For Starters is also Danny’s after-hours job. He spends his days working in editorial at Mailchimp. He ended up there after getting an MA in War Studies at King’s College London, launching Monocle’s first business podcast, and rising to editorial director of Courier Media. An excellent path.

On a Friday morning, we talked about day jobs versus side hustles, building media companies, and not listening to podcasts.

Three Point Four Media: Do you consider yourself a starter?

Daniel Giacopelli: I do, yeah. I mean, I haven’t yet tried to make any money from For Starters (I guess it depends on what your definition of a business is!), but I’m not the first business to not make any money in the beginning.

I’m living and breathing what I’m teaching people about how to build an audience and build a community. At some point in the not too distant future, I’m going to flip a switch and For Starters is going to become something bigger and more useful.

Was that always the plan?

I’ve always wanted to build something on my own that I could control. With For Starters, I’m telling the types of stories that I want to tell. Ever since Courier closed down a couple years ago, I’ve wanted to fill that gap of small business-focused stories, stories about really inspiring businesses that aren’t AI unicorns or other billion dollar businesses.

Starters are creating the world’s most interesting businesses, and I want to get their stories into the world.

Where do you find them? I’m amazed at the depth and breadth of businesses in each newsletter. And it’s such a nice mix of your curatorial sensibility and your original reporting.

Everybody has their own crazy process to do things that make sense to them and no one else. When I’m out and about in the world, I’m observing, looking, and listening, collecting things that might go in the newsletter. Once a week, I’ll do a deep dive through all of my ”sources.” I have a list of hundreds of places: media companies, Instagram accounts, newspapers, Substacks, etc. I spend quite a while going through everything manually, which is a very tedious but a very necessary process. The interviews are planned out two or three weeks in advance.

I get a lot of inbound tips as well. I have friends and spies in a lot of corners of the world. They’ll send me stuff from their city or another neighborhood. Once a week, I sit down, I make sense of it all, and I plan the thing.

Danny shooting.

It feels like something that takes a lot of time to do. It’s thoughtful, with each item there intentionally.

I get so many newsletters myself, and I don’t want to spam people with a shit product that will waste their time. I want For Starters to be a moment in someone’s week. Friday morning is For Starters, where people anticipate it or look out for it.

My email is free at the moment. I could have loaded it up with ads to make money every week on it. I haven’t because I want to test the product. Will people actually open this? What do people want? What do people not want? Once I have a sense of that, it could become something more of an actual business.

Switching gears a bit, what does the day job at Mailchimp entail?

I work on thought leadership, customer stories, and all of those really juicy research, data, and survey-led reports that you often see B2B companies put out. Stuff like a really in-depth State of Email Marketing white paper.

We did a really big holiday report recently where we worked with a research partner to figure out the different shopping moments of the holiday season. We do sophisticated thought leadership.

In a media diet interview, you said you listen to “Shockingly few podcasts, given my former work. Almost none.” As someone who also doesn’t listen to many podcasts, I’m interested in why not.

I don’t know. I hosted one for seven years at Monocle and a couple at Courier. When I have free time, I would rather be sitting with a magazine on my couch, and not listening. I don’t drive in London. If I drove, maybe I would listen to podcasts on my commute. Or if I worked at an office, maybe I’d listen on the Tube. But I generally work from home.

During the pandemic, I listened to How Long Gone every day to hear what those two guys were up to and to get a dose of culture and fun. Podcasting is a great medium and it’s really personal, but we can’t have every medium in our faces all the time. I prioritize email newsletters and print media over podcasts for now.

That’s my answer, too. There are spaces in people’s lives where podcasts make sense, like commuting, working out, or cooking. I don’t commute, I don’t like to listen to things when I run, and I’m a terrible cook. For me, it’s less a resistance to the genre and more that I would much rather be reading.

Who has the time for everything? Sometimes I want to tune out completely. I just want to go for a walk with my camera. I don’t always need to have screens or stimuli in my ears or in my eyes.

I’ve tried to do other things while listening to a podcast, and I can’t. I just end up doing both things poorly. I have a respect for people who multitask in that way, but I just want to do one thing at once. Last question, I saw you started reading When We Cease to Understand the World. That book blew my mind. Thoughts?

I haven’t finished it! I have a pile of books behind me that I’m halfway through reading. I’m one of those people who are reading six books at once.

A starter when it comes to books, too.

Ha. Exactly.