Chris DonnellyChris Donnelly on scaling businesses and building an audience, drawn from building and selling companies at eight and nine figures.
Curated by Navid Moazzez·Updated Sept 29, 2026·1 min read·Navid.me is reader-supported. When you buy through links on this site, I may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.Step by Step covers business growth, personal branding, and social strategy, with the credibility of someone who has actually run and sold the companies he is describing.
The format does what the name suggests — ideas get broken into sequences you can follow rather than principles you have to translate.
Strongest on the intersection of the two: using a personal audience to grow a company, which is the thing he has done most recently and writes about most convincingly.
Navid Moazzez
AI business strategist
Navid Moazzez helps creators and founders master AI and build their own AI Operating System (AI OS) to automate their business and life.
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Navid Moazzez on the AI OS, discipline and health, written for people building something of their own.
AI research and industry news, covered in more depth than the daily roundups manage.
Practical AI tutorials and interviews for busy people, from a product leader who left the job to write full time.
Property investing strategy, deal analysis and market data from the largest real estate community online.
The mindset shifts and systems behind scaling a consumer brand to a billion-dollar exit.
Mental models and decision-making frameworks, drawn from history, philosophy and cognitive science.
Buying boring businesses as a path to wealth, argued against the conventional advice.
Marketing for handmade and product businesses, from someone running one.
Big ideas on growth, wealth and decision-making, broken into usable pieces.
Business strategy and digital trends from a repeat Inc. 5000 founder, aimed at people who question defaults.
Essays on AI, business and how work is changing, from a writers' collective.
One documented system per week for building a personal brand as a founder.
by Navid Moazzez
Navid Insider is the personal one. It covers the AI operating system I run my own work on, plus the parts most business newsletters leave out: discipline, health, and the decisions underneath the tactics.
The filter is what is actually working, not what is trending. That means fewer tool announcements and more on the systems that survive contact with a real week.
If you want the tactical creator and AI material instead, AI Creator Insider is the other one.
AI Breakfast sits a level deeper than the daily AI roundups. It covers research, funding and industry moves with enough context to understand why each one matters.
Three issues a week rather than daily, which suits material that does not need same-day turnaround.
Free to read, with a paid tier for the fuller analysis.
by Peter Yang
Behind the Craft is practical AI writing rather than AI news. Tutorials you can follow, and interviews with people actually building the tools.
Peter Yang led products at Roblox, Reddit, Amazon and Meta for over a decade before leaving Roblox in June 2026 to do this full time, so the product judgement behind the AI material is real rather than borrowed.
It was called Creator Economy by Peter Yang until 2025 and kept the same domain through the rename, so older links still work. There is a paid membership at behindthecraft.com, which is a separate property from the newsletter.
BiggerPockets is the biggest real estate investing community in the US, and the newsletter is its distilled output: deal analysis, financing strategy and market data.
The strength is volume of real cases. Very little of it is theoretical.
Free, with paid membership tools behind it.
by Tom Bilyeu
Billion Dollar Principles leans more on mindset than tactics. Bilyeu's argument is that the constraint on most founders is how they think about scale, not what they know about operations.
That makes it a different read from a growth newsletter. You get frameworks for decision-making and risk rather than channel breakdowns.
Works best as a complement to something more tactical. On its own it is philosophy with a business application.
by Shane Parrish
Brain Food is about the quality of your thinking rather than the quantity of your output. Each issue works through mental models, decision frameworks, and where judgement usually goes wrong.
Parrish draws on history and cognitive science rather than business anecdote, which gives it a longer shelf life than most.
There is a paid membership with deeper material. The free issue alone is worth the subscription if decisions are the expensive part of your work.
by Codie Sanchez
Contrarian Thinking is built on a single premise: the reliable route to financial independence is buying an existing profitable business, not launching a startup.
The newsletter works that thesis through real deals — laundromats, car washes, service businesses — with the mechanics of how they were financed and what they return.
It is opinionated by design, and the framing is deliberately against the grain. Read it for the deal breakdowns; the wealth-building rhetoric is the wrapper, not the substance.
by Mei Pak
Creative Hive is aimed at makers and product sellers rather than at digital creators, which makes it unusual in this list.
Mei Pak runs a handmade jewellery business alongside it, so the advice is tested against real inventory and real margins.
Free, with paid courses behind it.
by Sahil Bloom
Curiosity Chronicle takes a large idea and reduces it without hollowing it out. Topics run across personal growth, wealth building and mental models.
The framing is that curiosity compounds, and the issues are built to leave you with one thing you did not know how to articulate before.
Broad by design, which is the appeal if you do not want a newsletter locked to a single subject.
by Ryan Levesque
The Digital Contrarian is aimed at entrepreneurs who want to understand why something works before adopting it. Levesque has built and sold multiple companies and made the Inc. 5000 repeatedly, and the writing is analytical to match.
Topics range across strategy, market positioning, and shifts in how digital businesses acquire customers.
Better for people already running something than for those getting started — it assumes context.
Every publishes long-form essays from a bundle of writers, covering AI, business strategy and the practice of knowledge work.
It reads more like a magazine than a newsletter, and the pieces are built to last past the week.
Free issues with a paid subscription for the full archive and columns.
by Matt Gray
Founder OS arrives every Saturday with a single system: a repeatable process for content, distribution, or audience growth, written out in enough detail to run yourself.
The systems framing is what separates it. Rather than "post consistently," you get the actual operating procedure — cadence, formats, and the decisions behind them.
Best suited to founders treating their own audience as a serious channel. If you want inspiration rather than process, look elsewhere.
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