Hello Friend,

2020 has been quite a decade-like-year for everyone, as it comes to an end we wish you a happy holiday!

For us at Cloout, it’s been a year of experiments. Here are 5 things we’ve tried out this year.

• We started the year with the decision to cut down the number of stories from 10 to 5 stories and then later to 3, in the spirit of ‘less is more’. In hindsight, it’s one of the reasons the newsletter always showed up, one story per writer was mostly doable.

• We also stopped doing non-African stories because focusing on Africa just felt right. We’re still trying to break out of the cycle of most stories being about Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa. It’d be a tough cycle to break out of because the truth is although Africa has 54 countries, all countries aren’t equal.

• We courted the idea of increasing the frequency of the newsletter from once a week, but when we asked, we heard mostly “No, don’t increase it” from subscribers, so we shelved the idea.

• Moving from Mailchimp to Substack was a decision that involved making a lot of painful compromises -- less customization, less control over how the newsletter looked, but it made the newsletter easier to create.

• Longer writeups and interviews were nice ideas but just didn’t work out the way we expected. We’ve also started ditching core politics news to focus more on business news. Politics and Business are relatives so it doesn’t feel like much is changing.

We’d keep trying out new things and tweaking in the coming year. 2020 has 53 weeks and 52 Saturdays, we’re glad we showed every Saturday! 

Thank you, everyone, who read, commented or shared our newsletter. You’re the reason we write this newsletter.

See you on the 16th of January 2021. 

Goodbye from Daniel, Bright, Dami and the rest of the team at Cloout 💙