First Interview for Developer to CTO. Looking for feedback?

I haven't read the interview yet, but on a related note, I got your first newsletter email in my inbox this past week! (For those who didn't, you can see it here.)

Here's some feedback on your newsletter:

• The subject is "Developer to CTO: Newsletter #1", but I think it's worth spending 2 minutes being more catchy and creative than that! Tell people what they'll learn by opening the email, and you'll get higher open rates.
• Try to start off with a bang! The Hustle does a great job with this if you want inspiration. It's really easy to lose people if the first parts of the email are a little boring, because often people are just trying to clear their inbox while on the go and don't read very much.
• On a similar note, for the second section that starts "Q&A", maybe spice up that title a bit? And maybe just jump straight into your interesting excerpt from the interview. I think you might lose readers with unnecessary intro paragraphs.
• It's not immediately obvious that the red text is links. I'd keep links blue and underline them.

Other than that, looks great! I think it's a really useful newsletter, and I'm looking forward to reading the interview.

"I had experience with project management. I work with top notch people. Becoming the CTO was a dream come true. Amazing team. Love the team. My advice is to be humble and motivated to learn. I think AI is the future."

Pretty boring. I was left unsatisfied. Nothing new, no useful insights, nothing really spoke to me.

I am disappointed because I am very interested.

I may have an opportunity to become a team lead but I am scared shitless.

• How do I know I am good enough?
• What if the team does not like me?
• How do I get their respect?
• How are they going to evaluate me in the interview and in the job?
• Do I need to be better at coding than them as a team lead?
• What if my projects keep failing?
• What's a typical day like? I know nothing. Is it up to me to call meetings?
• Do I make decisions or ask the team?
• Do I ask for feedback? How much is too much?
• What if the team does not like a decision I made?
• What do new team leads/CTOs struggle with at the beginning? Later?

If you can give answers to my fears and doubts in your interviewers, these interviews are going to be reread several times before being bookmarked.

I'm writing one long answer to cover all three of your comments. In order to save time, we just made a SquareSpace site. I like the design of IH a lot more. Our primary goal for all the interviews is an audience of developers with 5 years of professional work experience or less. The suggested questions are great and we plan to crowdsource the questions as our audience gets bigger.

How do you conduct interviews for IH? At the moment, we ask questions on a Google Form and then tell the interviewee to give as detailed a response as possible. We don't really deep dive into the questions. Something we would like to do is eventually do AMAs in addition to interviews.

We have our second newsletter created for tomorrow, but I'm going to implement some of your feedback for the third one. The big trouble with newsletter feedback is that without a huge subscriber base, you don't know if a lot of the changes are successful. We are trying to focus on quality content for a niche audience (college CS students and software developers with <5 professional experience)

I think our content can get better and we want to release more content, but we are also affected by the amount of time we have available.

Adam (my partner) and I probably want to turn the site into something similar to Wall Street Oasis (www.wso.com), but think the best way to do that is build up the newsletter and then create a forum for career advice for software developers. In that forum, we can also get questions about the interviews and create AMAs.

What do you think?

Okay, making a second comment to talk about the content itself, not just your email. I think you should deep dive into the specifics a bit more, otherwise it's a bit "fluffy" and it's hard to come away having learned something insightful. For example:

A dream come true. I have never been, and will never be the best technical mind around. But what I am really good at is building a team and getting out of their way. I love my team.

That's great, but how did he become good at building a team and getting out of their way? And what does that even mean, really? I as a reader would like to get some deeper insight into how this process works, so that I could do it, too.

I don't hire on coding skill, I hire you if you are smart, technically minded, humble and motivated.

Same thing here. How does he determine if someone smart, technically minded, humble, and motivated? What are some basic tips?

Also, these two questions seem to be targeting two different audience — one that wants to be a CTO, and one that wants to get hired as an entry level dev. Very few people are worried about both of those problems at the same time. So it might help to pick a target reader and narrow your focus to asking questions that really strike them.