I launched a paid newsletter in October 2019, quickly racked up thousands of subscribers, and then took 18 months to run it into the ground. This is my cautionary tale, told in four parts. Part 1: Conversion Gold It all started, as almost nothing good does, in a hotel room in southern Florida. It was October of 2019, and I had recently left my long-term SEO gig at CBS Interactive (now ViacomCBS)....
Sometimes people believe that new businesses should act as-if – as-if you’ve already been there. As-if you’ve got thousands of happy customers around the world. By acting as-if, what you’re really trying to say is, “you can trust me because I’ve done this before.” The thing is that people trust your reputation more than your direct word. If you’ve really been there and done that – show me, don’t tell me....
One of the most repeated pieces of advice for startups is to do things that don’t scale. The halls of the startup hall of fame are adorned with examples: Airbnb founders personally took photos of the initial listings. CD Baby had no music recommendation engine, it was just founder Derek Sivers listening to everything that came in. Here’s a site with dozens of additional examples. What this means is that you should do things that surprise and delight your initial customers, regardless of the cost of doing so....
Money is often at the forefront of our thoughts. Most of us have dreamt of a number — how much money do we want before we retire? For some, this is the arbitrary trophy number that they’ve picked that allows them to stop trying and hang up their gloves (and often to be able to do something they really care about). For others, it could be more logical, like some function of retirement age, financial lifestyle requirements, and potential investment returns over a period of time....
They say that the only constant in life is change. On a human level, it certainly rings true: we seem always to be changing something about ourselves. Sometimes we come up with the changes ourselves, other times they’re pushed onto us by those who have authority over us. Both of these conduits of change are fed by culture. In many ways, it seems like we want to appear more average than we actually are....
If we look at how the average internet user spends their time, it probably looks something like this: Text and instant messages Social media status updates YouTube, Instagram, and other visual media Google/search engine queries Short form, low-text content has become the dominant way that we deploy our attention, and it’s displacing a lot of the long form ways in which we discover ideas and construct our thoughts....
Before we begin though, I should probably tell you that I disagree with the vast majority of productivity blogs and gurus. Also, this method isn’t backed by science, thousands of studies, or one weird trick. It’s pretty straightforward. Rule #1: Be aware of the incentives you create for yourself. Becoming really good at productivity often means becoming really good at completing large numbers of tasks. I don’t care about optimizing how many tasks I can get done in a day....
When it’s not outright crap, it’s shallow content regurgitated in hundreds of ways. I’ve spent close to a decade looking for the perfect productivity system. I’ve tried dozens of task list apps and project management systems, and I’ve read more books and articles than I can remember. I hate to say it but the vast majority of that time was wasted, misguided at best. Like so many others before me, I became obsessed with the system instead of the results....