How Together Letters Helps You Stay Connected Without Social Media ~ 1035

Tim Villegas: Adam Walker and Sanjay Park, welcome to Think Inclusive.

Adam Walker: Hey, thanks. Good to be here.

Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for having us.

Tim Villegas: If you’re listening to this, you’re tuning into a very special bonus episode of Think Inclusive. I’m so happy to have my friends Adam and Sanjay on to talk about Together Letters. If you’ve listened to Think Inclusive over the last few months, you’ll recognize that name—Together Letters is a sponsor of the podcast. I learned about it… I don’t know exactly how—Adam probably told me about it.

Adam Walker: I’m in the habit. Anybody I talk to, it’s like, “Hey, I’m Adam. It’s nice to meet you. Have you heard of togetherletters.com?” That’s the order of things.

Sanjay Parekh: He even throws in the “.com” because he likes to do the old-school website pitch.

Adam Walker: I don’t want people to have to Google it when they can go straight there. Going to Google is step one, and then togetherletters.com is step two. No, just go straight to the website.

Sanjay Parekh: But you’ve seen people type togetherletters.com into Google instead of just going to the address bar. You haven’t saved them anything—you just made them type more.

Tim Villegas: You could ask Siri, right? Or use voice text. You could say “togetherletters.com” and it would type it.

Adam Walker: Let’s do that.

Sanjay Parekh: You could, but looking at our website through voice-to-text isn’t going to be great. You’ll want to go to the site.

Tim Villegas: Fair point. I wanted to have you on to tell the story about Together Letters. I know a little bit about it, but the people listening probably don’t. So maybe start with what Together Letters is and why people might use it, then tell the story. Does that work?

Adam Walker: I’m perfectly fine with that. Sanjay, do you want to jump in or should I start?

Sanjay Parekh: You start.

Adam Walker: I’ll start with why people might use Together Letters. Personally, I use it because I got burned out on Facebook, LinkedIn, and social media in general. But I still have people I want to connect with regularly. Together Letters is my way of doing that. I have a group I want to stay in touch with once a month. I get an email from Together Letters asking for my update. I click a button, give a quick update, and two days later I get an email summarizing everyone’s updates. It’s a collaborative mass email newsletter. I can keep up with everyone without being on a social media platform they may or may not use. If someone can use email, they can stay connected via Together Letters.

I use it for book clubs, family, extended family, old classmates from high school—people I care about. It’s been great. Sanjay, what did I miss?

Sanjay Parekh: A couple of things are important to point out. When we built and designed Together Letters, we thought about maintaining connections without increasing your workload. One key feature is that there’s no way to do a reply-all. We’ve all been in those reply-all hells when someone sends a mass email and people start replying all with “take me off this list.” With Together Letters, you can’t reply all. But you can click on someone’s update and reply just to them with their update quoted. That helps build one-on-one relationships, which is really the crux of Together Letters.

Tim Villegas: Hold up. I didn’t even know that.

Adam Walker: You didn’t know, right? It’s not a new feature, but it’s new to you. We’re announcing it today.

Sanjay Parekh: It’s been around for a while. If you click on someone’s name in the newsletter email, it opens a new email to that person with their update quoted. You can reply directly to them.

Adam Walker: It improves communication quite a bit.

Tim Villegas: My mind is literally blown right now.

Sanjay Parekh: It was a bit of work to make that happen. The HTML is messy, but it works. We haven’t publicized it much—it’s one of those features you stumble upon. Hover over someone’s name and click. We kind of like it that way, but we’ll probably make it more obvious in the future.

The point is to build community and keep groups together. The challenge with Slack or social media is that it’s up to users to post. A lot of people just lurk. With Together Letters, we actively push an email asking for your update. Group owners can choose not to send the newsletter to people who don’t participate. That encourages engagement—even if someone has no update, they’ll still submit something to get the newsletter. That shows they care and are engaged.

Like Adam, I use this across alumni groups, friends, business school contacts. It keeps people in touch in a way that Facebook doesn’t. If they posted the same updates on Facebook, I probably wouldn’t see them. But in Together Letters, I know the group and the updates make sense together.

Adam Walker: And related to that, one more use case I’d like to mention is that it’s great for internal company or department newsletters—just to know what everyone’s actively working on. I use this for a nonprofit board I’m on. Once a month, I get the Together Letter and it asks, “What have you done for this nonprofit this month?” I give a quick update, and then I see what everyone else is working on. It improves collaboration and helps break down silos within an organization.

Sanjay Parekh: And I think we’ve missed one of the most important features of Together Letters: these updates and newsletters are never published to the internet. They’re only available via email. A lot of people share things in Together Letters groups that they’d never share on social media. It gives you privacy and a sense of community that doesn’t exist elsewhere.

We do have access to those updates on our backend, but we’re rolling out an update that gives group owners the option to delete old updates. Once the email is sent, we’ll delete them from our database. We won’t just mark them as deleted—we’ll actually delete them. Unlike Twitter, where deleted tweets reappear, we’re not doing that.

Tim Villegas: Do group owners have the option to look back at previous updates?

Adam Walker: Not currently. You’d need to search your email right now. Just archive everything.

Sanjay Parekh: One thing we’ve talked about but don’t have yet is showing your previous update when you’re submitting a new one. Like, “Last time you said this…” It helps remind you what you talked about. I have this problem when I’m in multiple groups—what did I say in which group?

Adam Walker: I have that same problem all the time.

Sanjay Parekh: That’s the great thing about dogfooding—using our own product. We see these problems and try to solve them.

Adam Walker: Also worth mentioning: groups of 10 or fewer are free forever. If you’ve got five people you want to stay in touch with, there’s no cost. Even above 10, it’s $60 a year—just $5 a month.

Tim Villegas: And if you’re listening, go to togetherletters.com and sign up for a free group. Check it out. For our listeners—mostly educators like teachers, principals, and administrators—I think this could be powerful for school teams or grade-level teams.

Adam Walker: Oh yeah, it’d be amazing. With Slack or Microsoft Teams, you have to get on the platform, search through, curate, and figure out what’s what.

Tim Villegas: I created a Slack group for podcasters to network. People don’t know how to use Slack.

Adam Walker: I’m in a Slack community for marketers with thousands of people, and no one posts. If you’re prompted, it helps you be thoughtful—what do I need to share? What did I do this month?

Sanjay Parekh: With Together Letters, you can set the update frequency—weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly. For educators, a ninth-grade teacher could connect with other ninth-grade teachers in different schools. Share what’s going right or wrong. It helps everyone improve and learn from each other.

Adam Walker: Departments within schools could use it too. Put everyone in a department into one Together Letter and do a weekly or biweekly check-in.

Sanjay Parekh: Principals don’t often get to talk to one another. A check-in helps build a support system and visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

Tim Villegas: Speaking of social media—Adam, you mentioned feeling burnt out. Are y’all on everything?

Adam Walker: Depends on how you define “on.” I have a Facebook account, but I check it maybe twice a month. I look through the feed once every month or two. I’m on Instagram every couple of days—it’s more interesting and less stressful. TikTok is entertaining, so I’m on it daily. I’m not on Twitter—it’s a disaster. I want to engage on my terms, not the platform’s terms. I should be on LinkedIn, but I’m not.

Sanjay Parekh: I chose wrong. I went all in on Twitter and built a decent following. Last year, I quit. I don’t post, log in, or have the app. I haven’t replaced it with anything. I have LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram—but I barely check them. I tried posting on LinkedIn, but it’s not the same. I’ve broken the habit. Social media doesn’t have the allure anymore. I’m spending time getting other stuff done.

Adam Walker: Maybe breaking the habit is good. I’d rather spend time writing or creating thoughtful things than doomscrolling on Facebook. There are good alternatives.

Tim Villegas: I’m still on everything—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. But even when I started, it was a means to an end—networking and professional learning, especially as a teacher. I looked for hashtags and people doing similar things. That still happens. Social media is toxic, but you have to throttle it.

One contrast with Together Letters is that I spend a lot of time curating on social media. I go through my Facebook feed and unfollow people. With Together Letters, you have a group and you always want their updates because you chose to be in it.

Adam Walker: Exactly. That’s the benefit. If you’re thoughtful and choose the five or fifteen people you genuinely want to connect with, it’s a very different experience than randomly connecting on Facebook or liking strangers’ posts on Instagram.

Sanjay Parekh: It feels like a more authentic connection—one that could lead to something useful. The random person you like on social media? You’ll probably never meet them.

Adam Walker: Unless you’re getting good hacks. There are some good ones on social—some dumb ones too—but I’ve used some good hacks.

Tim Villegas: Any additional updates to Together Letters or future plans?

Sanjay Parekh: We’ve got a lot in the works. Updates and fixes we’re trying to implement. One thing on the list is integrating with Zapier so people can automatically create groups for their networks. We’ve also talked about read-only groups—some people write and receive the newsletter, others just read it. That could be useful for companies or interest groups.

Adam Walker: We’re also exploring sending update requests via text message to make the process easier. That’s on the horizon.

Tim Villegas: Fantastic. Anything else you want to plug? Tech Talk Y’all? Edgewise?

Adam Walker: Tech Talk Y’all is the funniest tech news podcast in the land. Everyone should subscribe. We cover tech news, AI, and more.

Sanjay Parekh: We recently launched a subscriber level with mini podcast episodes for subscribers only. But you can still listen to our regular weekly episodes. We’ve been doing it for six years—about 240 episodes. Some listeners have heard every single one. It’s impressive.

Adam Walker: If you want help launching a podcast, check out Edgewise Media at edgewise.media. We help with everything—soup to nuts. We love podcasts and talking to folks.

Tim Villegas: It’s super fun. Thank you, Adam Walker and Sanjay Parekh, for being on Think Inclusive. Go sign up for your free Together Letters account, y’all.