1 May, 2026

Ten years ago, in April 2016, we sent out an email to a short list of clients. For a few months, Amanda had been sharing a Friday afternoon round up of “five interesting things to take you into the weekend”, which everyone on the team loved, and over a Friday beer, the idea of sharing it with an external audience emerged.

The first Friday 5 went to 204 people. 41% opened it, and some of those people continue to read it to this day. Today, the distribution list is over 2,000 people with another 3,000 accessing the content through our LinkedIn newsletter. Our open rates remain extremely high, which we don’t take for granted in a world where everyone has more than enough content to consume. We’ve published nearly 500 editions (while we used to only take a week off at Christmas, we now take a short summer break as well) and 2,500 stories covering topics from autopiloted parsnips to the growing Japanese trend of renting relatives (you can return them and are encouraged to do so).

Reading that first edition ten years later, it still feels relevant. We covered a project that was using pigeons to raise awareness of air pollution in London, Fast Company’s ten world-changing ideas of 2016 (which now feels both highly relevant and oddly nostalgic), research showing that the new and innovative world of smartphone agents had a tendency to misogyny, the UK supermarkets’ shift to wonky veg (lots of work still to do there, with an estimated 25-40% of UK-grown fruit and veg still rejected for imperfections) and the expanding world of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as we made our own shift from goodbusiness.co.uk to good.business (though you can still reach us on the old domain).

Friday 5 is a true team endeavour. Selecting the stories each week from the list of ideas is always a lively and inspiring conversation on a Tuesday afternoon. Everyone on the team takes turns to write stories and manage the process of getting it into the email template and uploading the stories to the website (pro tip: there’s a searchable archive!) so that it’s in readers’ inboxes at 8am on a Friday.

Thank you to all our readers. We love the feedback, and the engagement, and we really really love it when you send us story ideas. We signed off ten years ago asking readers “Like what you read? Share the good news”. And ten years on, that’s still true: if you know of someone who’d like to receive this newsletter, send this on to them or share the sign up link.

By Claire Jost