I understand that there is too much material for me to read and I know that discovery is a problem, but if you're concerned about customer acquisition, you need to prove to me that your solution is better than my solution. Therein lies my point about paying attention to fundamentals.
Sorry to pick on one writer, but one of your mailing lists is advertised as, "a collection of new tech ventures that are worthwhile watching." Another is described as "News from accelerator world." Not only do those contain pretty severe grammatical errors, but they don't exactly make for a compelling call to action. Why would I subscribe to lists curated by people who can't even craft compelling intros? I know that writing intros is hard, but poor intros don't exactly fill me with trust about the quality of the links I will receive!
If this project does what I think it does, you're going to run head on into a chicken or egg problem. Nobody will subscribe unless you have amazing content to send out. But nobody smart enough to consistently send out amazing content will spend time crafting amazing content unless there are users there.
Once again, focus on the absolute basics before you start thinking too far outside of the box. In this case, you need some extremely compelling content on your first page and that content needs to be so good that I can't imagine leaving without signing up.