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What would you say to 16,000 people?

2 min read

A few weeks ago I heard about a little online project called The Listserve. Email mailing lists are one of the older forms of internet communication; everybody signs up to get the distribution, and when a post goes out, everybody gets it.

The idea of The Listserve is this: once the list hit 10,000 subscribers, the list moderators would pick one person per day to get to send a message to that list. A message about whatever the lucky person wants. The constraints: 400 words. No links or images. Just good old text.

I was intrigued. I signed up.

The Listserve hit 10,000 subscribers a couple of weeks ago and the messages started coming. They’ve been entertaining, but mostly on the self-helpy. encouragey, lifehackey side of things. Still, while dozens of unread emails get deleted from my inbox every day, the one from The Listserve always gets read.

Yesterday I got an unexpected email: “You’ve been selected”. I have until mid-day on Sunday to write 400 words that will be sent out to, at last check, more than 16,000 email inboxes. No pressure!

So what would you write if you could send an email to 16,000 people?

Originally published on by Chris Hubbs