Mike Huseby founded TIL Partners, a boutique that helps people launch investment funds. Over two years he grew a weekly newsletter to 7,000 subscribers, and it now brings his firm more new business than anything else he does. He walked us through how he built it, including the four months in year one when the subscriber count refused to move and he came close to quitting:
Give away all the secrets. Mike publishes step-by-step walkthroughs of securities filings, fund structures, and the mechanics most firms guard. His reasoning: nobody who reads a detailed guide on raising $200 million for a private equity fund is going to go do it alone. They still need a lawyer. Publishing the knowledge proves he can do the work without costing him any of the work. In most niches the first firm willing to share openly takes an outsized share of the attention and the trust.
Tie the newsletter to something bigger and you’ll never run out of topics (or waste energy). Mike did not set out to write a newsletter. He set out to write a book about investment funds, and the newsletter became a chapter-by-chapter serialization of it. Sixteen chapters bought him sixteen weeks before he had to invent a single new idea. A newsletter that falls out of a project you are already building is far easier to sustain than one that needs feeding every Wednesday.
Plan in series, write in batches. Scrambling for a topic each week was Mike’s worst operational mistake in year one. Batching fixed it. TIL Partners recently wrapped a 30-article series, and Mike outlined all 30 in about two focused days. For a lawyer whose billable work competes for the same hours, batching decides whether the streak survives past month three.
Turn dense structures into pictures. Mike builds flowcharts in Canva with a design-capable teammate. He makes a rough version, the teammate polishes it. Fund structures resist plain prose because the money moves in ways sentences handle badly, and a diagram carries it in one glance. Every graphic he builds for the newsletter goes onto LinkedIn with no extra writing.
Use the archive as a client service tool. When a client asks something Mike has already written about, he sends the link instead of composing a fresh answer. A 30-minute reply became a 10-second one. Those clients then forward the article to colleagues, which grows the list without a minute of outbound work.
Nothing grows until you post on social. Mike’s subscriber count sat flat from June to October of his first year. Growth turned linear only after he started posting on LinkedIn every week. His system: write the article, excerpt it into several LinkedIn posts, reuse the graphic. One article yields four posts.
Shorter wins. Mike’s early articles ran 1,500 to 2,000 words and cost him two to three hours each. He now targets 500 words and spends about 20 minutes. He drafts with AI and edits every line before it goes out. Publishing 500 words every week beats publishing 2,000 words whenever you happen to have the time.
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More quick tips from our conversation with Mike:
Map your first 16 weeks of content to a book, a course, or a structured series before you publish issue one.
Two focused days of outlining can produce six months of topics.
Find someone on your team who will hold the streak when you want to quit. Mike credits his colleague Alfredo with saving the newsletter more than once.
Build every flowchart for two places at once: the newsletter and LinkedIn.
Hold articles to 500 words once you find your rhythm. Readers finish short posts and abandon long ones.
Draft with AI from long-form material you already have, then edit hard before it goes out.
Protect your sender reputation. Dump a batch of cold contacts onto your list, collect enough spam complaints, and every email you send after that lands in junk.
Start from your existing contacts, but only the ones who actually know you.
Treat each article as a permanent library entry you can send clients for years.
Expect flat growth for the first several months. The compounding starts once you layer social posting on top.
What’s new this week inside HeyCounsel?
🚀 New website is live: Jeffrey Ye announced the rebuilt heycounsel.com. Same link, new look, and a much clearer story about what membership gets you. Announcement →
📈 Masterminds are getting an upgrade: the rebuilt program starts in October and it’s free for members. It’s designed to take groups of 4 to 5 lawyers through a 6-month operational and biz dev transformation. Details →
☕ Community highlight: Shahrzad Kojouri and Matthew Sumner got talking to a stranger in a Philly coffee shop, worked out they were both lawyers, then worked out they were both in HeyCounsel. Most-loved post of the week. Thread →
🤖 Hot topic, who do you hire to build your AI? A member wants automation consultants who know the work and price for a tiny firm instead of biglaw. His worry: that his own vibe-coded workflows are “terrible in ways I don’t really understand.” Thread →
🛠 Also trending: which Zapier-style automation platform holds up when privilege and HIPAA are on the line. Thread →
📄 #practice-ec_vc got technical: One EC/VC lawyer laid out both sides of filing a Form D for SAFEs. Blue sky preemption on one side, SEC guidance that skipping the filing does not void the exemption on the other. Thread →
💼 #11-firm-hiring is heating up: seven firms posted roles this week. An EC/VC & M&A associate, a senior NY labor & employment attorney, a head of ops / chief of staff at $150K plus profit share, a flextime M&A lawyer, fintech associates at $150–210K with a $2,500 referral bonus, a part-time corporate contractor, and a paralegal.
🤝 #04-ask-a-lawyer was busy: referral requests spanning California mass arbitration, Canadian immigration, Apple/Google-caliber patent prosecution, crypto payment acceptance, BIS export controls, Washington traffic, healthcare provider licensing, and Spanish/Portuguese contract translation.
💼 Referral Opportunities: 12 new opportunities posted this week are still live and accepting bids. Check them out on the dashboard.
📆 HeyCounsel’s Upcoming Events
Fri, Aug 28 → The Silent Guest: AI Has Entered Your Client Meeting (presented by William Love). Normally $199, free for members via NBI — https://nbi-sems.com/products/102695
Tues, Sep 1 → Demo and Q&A with DemandBird — https://luma.com/heycou-zskg
Thurs, Sep 3 → Under Pressure: How High-Functioning Anxiety Leads to Ethical Blind Spots (presented by Lauren Turner). Normally $199, free for members via NBI — https://nbi-sems.com/products/102687
Fri, Sep 11 → The Big Bad B Word - Bankruptcy (presented by Patrick Patino) — https://luma.com/heycou-00aa
Thurs, Sep 17 → AZ ABS Model Primer: How Lawyers Got a Monopoly, and How Arizona Gave It Back (presented by Taylor Bell) — https://luma.com/heycou-4ns4
Tues, Sep 22 → Demo and Q&A with Praxis — https://luma.com/heycou-siq9
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- Brian Scherer, Co-Founder & CEO