Curating the best newsletter for startups and entrepreneurs: Startup Digest

It's been almost a month since we started running the Startup Digest newsletter in Barcelona, but we wanted to make it official to everyone.

As you might already know, we have been organising Startup Grind in Barcelona since April 2014. Startup Grind is a monthly event that aims to connect, inspire and educate entrepreneurs, and it happens in more than 200 cities in over 80 different countries.

For every edition of our monthly event in Barcelona, we send out the event details to over 40 different communication channels so they spread the word to their communities. These communities include - but are not limited to - Barcinno, Makers of Barcelona, Barcelona Activa and other entities, such as universities, business schools, coworking spaces, news platforms or Facebook groups.

One of these platforms happened to be Startup Digest. I religiously submitted the event every month to Startup Digest but found out that for over a year, no one was in charge of curating it and sending it out to thousands of subscribers in our city.

What is Startup Digest?

Startup Digest is the personalised insider newsletter for all things startup in your city and around the world. In every city, there's one individual, or a group of them, curating events and content that gets send out weekly to thousands of entrepreneurs.

Some cities are more active than others, and have a higher frequency, while other areas or regions might just do fine with a monthly edition of the newsletter.

Others, on the other hand, also send a content-only edition of the newsletter, as a digest of the best content of the week, but completely separated from the events newsletter. This happens, for instance, in the Silicon Valley Startup Digest newsletter.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks like from the inside!

As you can see, there's an introductory test, telling people how to submit their events, some sponsored content, a personal note (written by yours truly every week!) and the list of events.

Why are we sending Startup Digest?

At MarsBased, we're deeply involved with the startup community in Barcelona. Not only do we organise Startup Grind BCN, have developed the BCN Startup Map and curate a Slack community for entrepreneurs & startups in Barcelona, mentor at many events and genuinely help here and there when we're needed. We actively collaborate with most institutions in the Barcelona startup ecosystem regularly in order to take Barcelona to the next level.

Therefore, it made sense that we stepped up and stood up to the challenge of being in charge of the most well-known startups newsletter for the city. After all, it had been abandoned for over a year.

Moreover, we have been involved in the startup scene for quite some time now, and we can say we're right in the epicentre of the community. We're happy to strive for excellence once more, now with Startup Digest.

How can I submit events to Startup Digest?

Startup Digest is an open platform for everyone to post their events.

If you want to submit your events, you can do it through the form on the Startup Digest website or else send us your Meetup's RSS so we can add the events automagically.

Startup Digest has got an internal tool that reads RSS of events, so they get automatically pulled for us to review them, so you don't have to send the event every week.

All events are cherry-picked and carefully reviewed before they are published in the newsletter. Just make sure you send them before the deadline of Thursday 11:59PM so they can be scheduled for Monday morning.

In Barcelona, Startup Digest is sent on Monday at 08:00AM every week to over 6000 subscribers.

If we can do anything else to help your startup, just reach out to us through our contact form and we'll get back to you in less than 24h!