A small magazine, sent each weekday morning · Brooklyn, since April 2019
Maya Okafor and David Lin started ResourceADay in a fourth-floor walk-up in Williamsburg six years ago this April. They are still the only two owners.
What follows is the colophon — who reads it, who picks the links, the four rules every edition is held to, and the small list of places that have been kind enough to write about us.
On a Tuesday in April 2019, in the back room of a coffee shop on North 6th Street, Maya Okafor — then a product lead at a now-defunct fintech — read three newsletters before her second espresso and closed all of them without finishing any. David Lin, an engineer at a search startup two blocks east, had independently started keeping a shared Notion document of links he didn't want to lose, organised only by the day he'd found them.
The newsletter they sent the next morning was three paragraphs long. The first edition linked to a Ben Thompson essay on aggregation theory; the second, the following Monday, linked to a single Postgres tutorial that Maya had personally rewritten the opening paragraph of. There was no logo, no growth team, no Series A deck in a drawer. There was only a rule the two of them argued about for an hour and a half at the coffee shop: one link per day, hand-picked, with a reason attached.
Six years later, the rule has not changed. The team is six full-time curators and fourteen contributing editors; the publication is profitable; the same two co-founders own every share. We still meet on Tuesdays. The espresso is worse.
The four rules
Four lines we hold every edition to. They are short on purpose — short enough that a reader could quote them back to us.
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I
One link, deeply considered.
Every weekday at 6am ET we send exactly one resource — a tool, essay, dataset, or conversation. Never a roundup. Never a thread. If we cannot defend a link as the single best thing to read that morning, we hold it for another day.
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II
No algorithms, no AI summarisers.
Every edition is read end-to-end by a human editor before it is sent. Our 94% open rate is the result of that attention, not of a subject-line generator.
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III
Always a reason.
Every edition ends with a short "Why it matters" note from the editor — context, the argument, the bit the link itself does not say out loud. A link without a reason is a bookmark; we send ideas.
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IV
Read in five minutes, kept forever.
Our average reading time is four minutes twelve seconds. The archive is searchable, fully indexed, and free to browse back to edition one.
The masthead
Six full-time curators, fourteen contributing editors, two owners. The previous outlets are listed because they are the part of this we are proudest of.
Plus fourteen contributing editors, listed by name in the colophon of every Sunday edition.
Press & mentions
A short bibliography, in the order it was written.
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The Browser
"The 50 Best Newsletters on the Internet" — 2022 and 2024 editions
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The New York Times
"How We Work" column, March 2023
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Nieman Lab
"Best of Newsletters 2023," curated by the Nieman editorial team
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Shorty Awards
Winner, 2024 — Best in Email Newsletters, Culture & Education
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ProductHunt
"#1 Productivity Newsletter," two years running (2023 and 2024)
By the numbers, as of Q1 2025
The shape of the publication, in four figures. None of them animated.
- 1,847
- daily editions published since launch, with zero missed days
- 243,847
- active free subscribers reading each weekday morning
- 94%
- average open rate across the last eighteen months (LiveIntent)
- 19 mo
- average reader tenure — top 3% of retention in the media industry (Chartbeat, 2024)
Bootstrapped and profitable since year two. Operating independently with no outside investors. Owned entirely by Maya Okafor and David Lin.