Oskar Lindqvist sends an email at six on Thursday mornings. It goes to 4,100 people, runs about 300 words, and usually contains a photograph of something unfinished on his bench. The last one mentioned, in the fourth paragraph, that nineteen paring knives would go up at noon. They were gone by 12:40. Lindqvist’s website has no shop link on it. If you have ever seen one of his product pages, it is because an email sent you there.
This is not a funnel with a newsletter bolted to the top of it. The list is the business — the window, the counter, and the person behind the counter who remembers what you bought last time. Everything else with Lindqvist’s name on it exists to get people onto the list and is then, by design, neglected.
The rented room problem
The founders doing this are not romantic about email. They are unsentimental about everything else. The case they make is that every other channel is a room someone else owns, and the landlord can reprice it on a Tuesday without telling you. The Brackett Group, which surveys around 900 consumer companies under $10M in revenue, found the median firm’s organic reach on its largest social platform fell 43% between 2022 and 2025 while its follower count grew 31%. More audience, less audience. That is a rent increase written in a language with no numbers in it.
Email’s figures are duller and, so far, they hold. Brackett puts the median open rate for small-company lists at 38% and says it has moved less than three points in five years. Nobody finds this exciting. That is roughly the point — the appeal of a boring channel is that you can plan against it.
I spent a year making things that photographed well and sold badly. The algorithm liked the blue handles. Nobody liked the blue handles.
What it costs to run a shop out of an inbox
The switch is cheap to make and expensive to keep. The companies that have held it for more than two years look similar from the inside:
- The list is earned, never bought. Every founder who bought one described the same result — a big number, a collapsing open rate, and a deliverability problem that took nine months to dig out of.
- It goes out on a schedule a person could set a watch by. Thursday means Thursday, including the Thursdays with nothing to sell.
- It must be worth reading on the weeks nothing is for sale, which is most weeks. This is the whole discipline and it cannot be delegated to someone who doesn’t make the product.
- One person writes it, in their own voice, badly if necessary. The moment a draft goes round for approval it starts sounding like a company.
- The file gets exported monthly and kept somewhere the email provider can’t reach. The channel is only unrented if you can leave.
The failure mode is almost always volume. A founder sees the numbers, hires someone whose job title contains the word growth, and Thursday becomes Tuesday-Thursday-Sunday. Brackett’s data on this is blunt: firms that moved from weekly to more-than-weekly saw unsubscribes rise 2.6x and revenue per send fall by roughly half within two quarters. The list did not get smaller because the emails were bad. It got smaller because there were more of them, and the thing being sold — the sense that a person you sort of know is telling you something — does not survive being scheduled.
Lindqvist’s arithmetic is unglamorous and easy to check. Four thousand-odd subscribers produced about $390,000 last year, which is roughly $95 a head. He spends $71 a month on the sending software and nothing at all on advertising, having tried it once in 2023 and acquired, he says, eleven customers and a lasting sense of having been robbed politely.
The uncomfortable part is what this rules out. A list of 4,100 is not a growth curve, and there is no version of Thursday morning that gets Lindqvist to fifty thousand people without turning the email into content and the shop back into a shop. He knows. He has a waiting list of 600 and no intention of doing anything about it, which is either an insight about distribution or, more likely, a man who likes his Thursdays.