The Method · Since April 2019
Six humans pick every link. No model, no algorithm, no shortcut.
ResourceADay is curated by a small editorial team in Brooklyn. Every weekday morning at 6am ET, one of us — by hand, after a long argument — selects a single tool, essay, dataset, or conversation, and writes the note that runs beneath it. This page is the long version of what that actually means.
The workflow
A resource is a six-stage editorial decision, not a link in a queue.
On a normal Wednesday, between forty and seventy nominations land in our shared inbox. By the time Friday's edition goes out, perhaps five of them have survived. The work is mostly subtraction.
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01
Nomination & Triage
Lead Curator — Maya Okafor
Anything sent to [email protected] is read by a human within 24 hours. Each Tuesday, Maya triages the week's submissions into a private spreadsheet: roughly seventy candidates, sorted by topic, with a one-line note on what each is arguing. About a third are dropped here, for being derivative, promotional, or already covered.
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02
The Editorial Debate
All six curators — Wednesday afternoon, 90 minutes
The surviving twenty-or-so links go into a closed Zoom where the full team argues for and against each one. The test is simple but unforgiving: would we send this to a friend we respected, and feel slightly embarrassed if it turned out to be trivial? Roughly half the candidates are killed in this meeting, often by the person who nominated them.
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03
Decision & The Editor's Note
Assigning editor — rotates weekly
The week's editor picks one survivor and writes the Why it matters note — the 80-to-140-word paragraph that runs beneath the link. The note is the hardest part of the job. It has to do three things at once: summarise the resource, place it in a longer conversation the reader is already having, and disagree — gently — with the loudest take in the piece.
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04
Send & The Morning After
David Lin, with a final read by Maya
At 5:55am ET, David schedules the edition in Substack. At 6:00am, it lands in 243,000 inboxes. By 9am, the editor who wrote the note has read every reply, sorted them into a "things we got wrong" document, and begun the nominations for the next morning. The cycle restarts before breakfast is finished.
On the editor's note
The note is the product. The link is the excuse.
Anyone can forward you a link. The reason our readers open us at 6am — and the reason 94% of them open us at all, more than four times the newsletter industry median — is that the link arrives inside a small piece of writing they did not have to find on their own.
The Why it matters note is built around three sentences a curator is required to write before a link goes out. First, the context: what this piece is actually arguing, in plain language, without the author's own framing. Second, the counter-argument: the strongest objection a smart reader would raise, and why we think the resource survives it anyway. Third, the second-order read: what this link lets you do, or stop doing, on Monday morning at work.
This is the part that cannot be delegated. It is why a model is not, and will not be, doing it. A language model is excellent at summarising what an article says; it is unremarkable at noticing that an article is arguing with the wrong interlocutor, or that the most useful thing about a dataset is the third column nobody is talking about. That is the editorial work, and it is the only thing on this page worth charging for — except we don't charge for it, because the work is its own reward and the archive pays the rent.
The note is also why an edition takes four to five minutes to read, not four to five seconds. If you wanted the link, the link is in the first line. The remaining hundred words are the part our readers tell us, in reply after reply, is the reason they keep subscribing.
By the numbers, as of Q1 2025
Four figures that make the editorial process feel worth trusting.
- Daily editions published
- 1,847
- Full-time curators on staff
- 6
- Average reader tenure
- 19mo
- Average open rate, 18 months
- 94%
Zero missed days since launch, April 2019.
Plus 14 contributing editors on rotation.
Top 3% of retention in media, per Chartbeat 2024.
Verified by LiveIntent. Industry median: 21%.
Where our editors came from
A small bench with a long résumé.
Before ResourceADay, our curators edited and wrote at some of the publications that taught us what an inbox is for.
- Stratechery Ben Thompson's weekly on the tech industry — where our founding editor cut her teeth.
- The Atlantic Two of our six curators previously edited long-form features and the technology channel.
- Aeon Magazine Ideas essays with a 200,000-word reading list — the standard we hold our notes to.
- Nieman Lab Reporting on the future of journalism, where one of our curators was a 2021 fellow.
Who reads us at work
Trusted daily by teams that take their mornings seriously.
A partial list of companies whose operators and founders have subscribed to the free edition, with their permission or in the public record.
- Stripe
- Figma
- Linear
- Notion
- Vercel
Featured in The Browser's "50 Best Newsletters on the Internet" (2022 & 2024), The New York Times' "How We Work" column (March 2023), and the 2024 Shorty Awards for Best Email Newsletter in Culture & Education.
Plain answers
Four questions a skeptical operator asks before subscribing.
- How is this free? What's the catch?
- ResourceADay is bootstrapped and has been profitable since 2020. We do not run sponsored editions, accept paid placements, or sell the list. The newsletter is free because a paid wall would shrink the archive, and the archive — 1,800+ past editions, fully searchable — is the long-form asset that pays the salaries. There is no catch, and there is no upsell screen waiting for you in week three.
- Is any AI involved in picking the links?
- No. A human reads every nominated link; a human writes every editor's note; a human schedules every edition at 5:55am. We use Substack for delivery and the occasional spreadsheet for triage, and nothing else. We have said no, repeatedly, to partnerships that would have required an algorithmic feed. If we ever change our mind on this, it will be on the front page, not buried in the footer.
- Who actually decides what goes in the newsletter?
- The decision is made, every Wednesday, by all six full-time curators in a 90-minute editorial meeting. The week's assigning editor — the role rotates — casts the tiebreaker if the room is genuinely split. Maya Okafor (co-founder, former product lead) and David Lin (co-founder, former software engineer) do not have final editorial veto; the meeting does. It has overruled both of us, often, and that is by design.
- How do I unsubscribe, and what happens to my data?
- Every edition has a one-click unsubscribe at the bottom, powered by Substack, with no exit survey and no "are you sure" page. Your email is stored on Substack's servers, never shared with a third party, and never used for anything other than sending you the newsletter. We do not have a marketing list to remove you from, because we do not have a marketing list.
If that sounds like a morning you could use — it's free, and tomorrow's edition is already being argued over.