I just committed to writing 624 newsletters...
...and i'm feeling anxious! ;)
This week, I came across and wrote about the concept of measuring your work in time commitment, rather than growth metrics or traditional "success metrics". Serious time commitment, like, dedicating years regardless of success.
It's a scary thought, and I'm scared even thinking about it, but it also opens you up tremendously. When you're not worried about your business or product doing well this or next month, or even this quarter or this year, you're free to just keep working.
And sure, maybe it's a waste of time. Maybe you SHOULD give up because it's not working. In fact, I guarantee that at some point it's probably better to give up on some ideas than others.
But by committing for a locked in period of time, there's nothing to do but to keep going. To put one foot in front of the other regardless of if you have 3 subscribers or 300,000 subscribers. You've cut out other options, and the only way forward is to do the work that's needed one step at a time.
So I committed to writing 1 newsletter every week, for the next 7 years. We'll see how it goes.
What do you think about this approach? Stupid? Brilliant? I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts! If you want to read the full post, it comes out on my newsletter on Monday. You can get it at https://gritlist.co
Keep on grinding IH!
Very good to rely on a goal you can measure and dictate. You can also step on the gas pedal faster by doing a daily newsletter.
624 Editions is:
Originally I set out to make 100 videos for Better Sheets. It's been an awesome motivating factor to work each week on it.
I'm sending 5x a week for [Better Sheets}(http://bettersheets.substack.com/) and a couple of criticisms have been that it's too much. So I say, sub to the youtube channel or check the archives anytime you want, at your own pace.
And I'm considering going to 7x a week if I can figure out how to vary the tips and newsletters. 5 tips a week, plus a roundup, plus a different style: Like a conversation/podcast.
Very cool! And makes sense to figure out different ways to leverage the content. How's growth been so far for you?
Sales are good, growth is slower than I had before. I'm not promoting it as much as I can.
624 newsletters would be 1 per week for 12 years
Eek–I have no idea how I messed up my math haha, thanks for calling me out. I just fixed my post (and I'm committing to 10 years, because, what's another 3 years :D).
Yes, 12 years, I concur. That's a huge commitment. I can barely focus on something for a week.
@elijahmurray - did you promise 7 years or 624 newsletters because there is a 5 year difference depending on which wording you used.
Also curious about what are you doing to physically send the emails? I am building something around email right now and curious about your approach. I am using Mailjet personally but just started today so I cannot comment much on it yet.
I meant to do 7 years (now 10), and just completely goofed the math.
I currently am setup using Ghost. The platform is simple and clean, and with their 3.0 release they added in the ability to have Members, Newsletters, and even paid subscriptions/paywalls.
I basically designed it as a substack clone:
For the actual mailing of the newsletter, I'm using Ghost's built in platform. It's definitely very feature lacking, so I might swap over to @buttondown 's platform. Pretty slick and great pricing. TBD.
Also, if you're technical and want to use ghost for free + AWS hosting, I wrote a looooong post on how to do it here.
Keep me posted on how it goes! I've never used Mailjet before.
Thanks for sharing your stack! My understanding is ghost is premium service and primarily for blogging, but those are some thoughtful features from them. I imagine you plan to send uniquely crafted newsletters?
My use case is to send daily email to N people. I'm also on a very tight budget LOL. I have a fixed template but the content is populated from data that changes daily. I started building yesterday and I now have a functioning system in place. I have signed myself up and will see how it goes 🤞
I found out this about using Mailjet
Overall it was a quite a challange to build what I built but I eventually got it done so hope it works as I will start testing the experience. If you want to automate some of the steps or emails, Mailjet is a good option to use, at least based on my experiences so far. Budget version of sendgrid basically. They also show details statistics about open rates etc. which should be very useful.
Ghost is bad at describing themselves 😂. It's a free, open source blogging platform. If you want them to handle the hosting, then you pay (same setup with Wordpress.org vs Wordpress.com).
And yup, I'm using it almost entirely as a newsletter with their new features, since it's not just pigeon-holed to blogging!
Ghost uses Mailgun which is a transactional email based platform similar to Mailjet, and relatively cheap too (free for up to 5K emails/mo).
Best of luck with the project! Will keep my eyes open for your post in here when you "launch" :D
Inspired. It sounds like a lot but overtime you'll definitely look back and be surprised at how quick it happened
Precisely my thinking–and everything worth while compounds over time!
Also, a strange thing that's kinda happened as a byproduct is that I don't have to worry about if it's being successful, so I'm not too worried with growth (my typical worries when starting something new). :D
Now this sounds like it’d be a great episode for the Newsletter Crew podcast. Let me know if you’re interested!
Heck yes! Sign me up Yaro! :D
7 years seems like a crazy long time. A lot can happen in 7 years!
Very true and that's part of the scariness of it, but I think that just like compound interest with investing, the more time you commit to doing something, the better the ROI in the long run.
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Haha, I appreciate the honesty Juris! I do agree it's pretty crazy. And to be fair, I do plan on changing (I should hope so!) and growing with it as I stick with it.
I'm also not necessarily holding myself to a strict form; my goal is mainly the consistency of writing every week, but I want to remain flexible to adapt as I grow (and hopefully the newsletter grows).
But that's all irrelevant right now–all that I need to do today, is write 1 post this week. And then again next week. ;)