This post is based on a conversation I had with Tyler Crowley from Mahalo and Open Angel Fourm. Bio is below:

Tyler Crowley is the Director of Corporate Strategy at Mahalo and Producer of Open Angel Forum (OAF). OAF is a high quality private investor pitch forum for founders to meet quality Angels. They are looking for operational startups only, but there is no fee of any kind to pitch or apply. He can be reached @steepdecline.

I’ll start with the conclusion: Email is far from dead.

How could this be? We’ve all read articles, reports, and blog posts telling us email is dead. The truth is though that not only is email not dead, it’s growing fast along with the social media channels that are supposedly replacing it as a communications channel.

Many people believe that Twitter is the biggest threat to email. It’s a very efficient communications channel, it’s easily mobile, you only get Direct Messages from people you want, and the messages are short. But at the same time, Twitter is also a very limited communications channel. It’s very hard to efficiently schedule meetings, make introductions, and send long form content.

Our own StartupDigest newsletter is tangible evidence that email is not getting replaced by social channels. It has grown from just 22 subscribers to over 60,000 in just 6 months. Our subscribers are the most technologically savvy people in the world (developers + founders creating new technology) and yet still love getting StartupDigest weekly in their inbox. Being the early adopters they are, they subject themselves to the most amount of noise through new social channels but enjoy StartupDigest as a rare break from the clutter and noise every other channel is producing.

And email is only getting more powerful. There are companies like Rapportive that give you social context to emails, Mingly that is becoming the social CRM for personal relationships, SailThru that allows your newsletters to have behavioral targeting, RapLeaf that gives you social data based on email addresses, and MailChimp’s Social Pro that gives you real demographic analysis on your email list.

Watch out for an email renaissance coming to your inbox and new startups that extend your inbox to a socially powerful communications tool.

Over the weekend I received a cold phone call from a guy named Sebastian who is a subscriber to StartupDigest. He was calling because he had read our case studies on email newsletters here, here, Jason’s case studies here and here, and the recent Hacker News discussions about email, so he wanted to start his own email newsletter business.

He lives in NYC and has the idea of doing a newsletter of the best fashion events in NYC for the fashion community. He was calling to ask about my experience in starting StartupDigest, what he should do first, what software to use, what tools to use, and the story of our first 3 months in operation.

Here is a rough transcription of what I told him:

Let’s ask the most important question:  what content are you delivering and what market are you serving?

If you want to reach the fashion community in NYC, what content are you going to send them? Is it event info, videos , news, or analysis? What resonates most with the fashion community? For StartupDigest our audience is the startup ecosystem and we are sending them the best events once a week.  When I started this company there was no comprehensive events guide for founders and hackers and it was a big need in the marketplace.

First you need to figure out exactly what content you will be serving and exactly the community you want to reach. You need to be uniquely passionate about this community of people.

When I started StartupDigest I had just moved to Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) and was working for an investment fund/incubator at the time. I was going to events and conferences to meet people, make friends, and meet the startup community and I was originally compiling “the digest” just for myself so I knew what events to go to and not to go to.  I actually attend the events featued in StartupDigest and I deeply care about the startup community.

Do you deepy care for and want to meet the fashion community in NYC? If not then you shouldn’t start a fashion email newsletter of the best fashion events for NYC. Honestly I am not very fashionable, I don’t know anyone in the fashion industry, nor do I care about getting into that community. I would be the worst person to start this fashion newsletter company.

If and only if you have found your niche and type of content then you are ready to do your first newsletter. Our first “StartupDigest” issue was sent do 22 of my friends in November 2009 through Gmail (not recommended) and I managed the email list using an Excel spreadsheet (also not recommended). We didn’t start off with any special software, or any special tools, the most important part was figuring out what our unique content was and niche was. Everything else will follow.

For Advanced users:
Now that we serve over 60,000 subscribers, we don’t use Gmail and Excel anymore. We use Mailchimp to send emails, Wufoo on our front page for email collection, WordPress for the website, and ReturnPath for deliverability.