First 100 subscribers

It's a modest start, but a pleasing one. I'm launching formally in January 2021, and 100 subscribers was a pre-launch goal. So today I passed 100 free subscribers (and one paid!)

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working on getting word out about the project, setting up social media accounts (mainly Twitter and Facebook), getting up to speed on how to get the word out whilst being non-annoying, and making connections with people working on other similar projects.

Newsletters as an educational tool.

I'm thinking quite a lot about newsletters as an educational tool, and delivery of classes by email. Having written highly-rated philosophy classes for Highbrow/Listenable (one with 1135 students completing the course and 100% satisfaction), I know the model can work.

Currently Looking for Wisdom has a free tier for SUBSCRIBERS with weekly newsletters and/or Philosopher Files (each one focussing on a specific philosopher). This is supplemented by a paid tier for MEMBERS, on the following pattern:

• Weekly lessons in 7-week seasons (lesson 1 free to all, the next six for only paying members) starting January 2021.
• A thematic focus (wisdom / love / death /friendship etc. etc.) for each season
• community features: I see this as a kind of ongoing study-group. Currently I'm going to be using cove.chat for community functions. But possibly upgrading to Discourse in the next year or so if the community grows enough, and if I can get Ghost to play nicely with Discourse.

Up next

I've got about 6 months of Philosopher Files already written. However, still to do in the next week or so are the following things:

• Sort out some glitches with Convertkit workflow to get some nice-looking landing pages set up (and hoping to hear back from Convertkit about the weird Zapier bug)
• Test out cove to see how it works.
• Finish writing the first season of paid classes
• Resolve some questions about the structure of content on my Ghost site early on. There's not a huge amount of content there at the moment, but as the site grows, it will get harder to wrestle it into shape. So I need to get pencil and paper out, and plan out how channels / tags etc. are going to work best.
• Draw up a wish-list of contemporary philosophers to talk to and occasionally feature in the Philosopher Files (this is the fun bit: the idea is to have contemporary philosophers talking about their philosophical crushes: why I love Plato / Hannah Arendt / Mencius etc.)
• Think about promotion (non-annoyingly) for the launch on January 4th.
• Take time off for Christmas 🧑🏼‍🎄🎄