How Polina Pompliano reinvented The Profile

"I realized I had never done the thing I love most — write original profiles for a newsletter literally called 'The Profile.'”

Author

Brad Wolverton
February 17, 2025

👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can borrow for your newsletter.

This week, I’m showing how Polina Pompliano reimagined The Profile, her newsletter highlighting the best profiles on the internet. Reading time: 3 minutes.

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🤟 Follow your passion

I first met Polina in March 2020, when she had just left a cush job at Fortune—in the early days of the pandemic, no less—to try to build a business around The Profile.

Her idea was simple: curate the week’s best profiles in one place. And she was great at it, surfacing irresistible headlines week after week👇️ 

She wasn’t just interested in building a business; she seemed called to it. “There’s no better feeling than reading a well-reported profile that captures a person’s character and leaves the reader with a sense of understanding and empathy,” she wrote in May 2020.

In an interview that year with Dan Shipper, she shared more about what drew her to profile writing:

That passion for profiles would inspire her as she built out different offerings for her audience.

How she built it

Here’s a snapshot of The Profile from spring 2020:

She started each issue with a short essay, then linked to the week’s best profiles:

Then she broke down each of those stories in more detail:

Over time, that format hasn’t changed much. But Polina has curated additional content for paying members, including:

  • A curated list of audio recommendations (podcasts, audio books, etc.)

  • A curated list of video recommendations (documentaries, video interviews, etc.)

  • A weekly “Profile Dossier” (deep dives on prominent people like Malcolm Gladwell)👇️ 

I share, you share

One of the things I love the most about The Profile is how well Polina weaves her personal entrepreneurship story into her newsletter.

As a business journalist, she gravitates to stories of builders:

And she innately understands that her audience will find her own journey worthy of reading about.

Three months after leaving Fortune, she shared 10 things she had learned so far in building her newsletter business:

She described the “sacred vow” she had made with readers: “…the only way you can earn people’s trust is by consistently keeping your word and delivering on what you’e promised.”

And she talked about how she built value for her audience, including some pretty creative approaches:

At the end of 2021, she asked her audience to share one lesson they had learned from the newsletter in the past year, further reinforcing the value of her work:

A few months later, she invited readers to ask her questions about how she had built her newsletter, and wrote about some other tactics she used to grow it:

Over the years, she has grown her X following to 130k+ followers, using it as a springboard for growth.

She tagged famous people when she wrote about them, which sometimes prompted them to respond.

Here’s one of the four tweets Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson sent in response to her Profile Dossier of him:

Do the thing you love

But it wasn’t until this year—eight years after starting The Profile—that Polina had the lightbulb moment that led to her newsletter’s recent transformation.

She recalled how a conversation with her husband, Anthony Pompliano—himself a prolific newsletter writer—helped her imagine a new path:

For her first piece, on Wall Street veteran Anthony Scaramucci, she dug out her reporter’s notebook and interviewed dozens of people, including the financier’s childhood friends, critics, and even an old college professor.

Like many of the pieces she has curated over the years, the story tells the tale of a complex, flawed individual who, in her words, has an “uncanny ability to bounce back stronger after every implosion.”

The change reminds readers that Polina doesn’t just curate the internet’s best profiles—she writes some of the best ones herself.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. See ya next week!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Let me know what you thought about today’s issue—hit reply and tell me, or click the links at the bottom!🙏 

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