“I finally got back to my computer on Monday and I opened up my email and there were zero people who messaged me like Hey where's the newsletter”

Stop overestimating your readers attention to you

You think 300 subscribers are refreshing their inbox waiting on you. They aren't. The fear of disappointing readers, changing format, or inserting ads — it's almost always a story you invented. Ship the experiment; the silence on the other end is your evidence that the fear was bigger than the reality.