Looking for Wisdom
Philosophy by email: newsletter and education platform.
I've taught philosophy for two decades, in universities and in community settings. I've set up Looking for Wisdom as an experiment in informal education, offering ongoing philosophy courses by email.
Deciding that I wanted to move beyond the off-the-peg vector images for Looking for Wisdom, a couple of weeks back, I commissioned an illustrator friend to produce a new header image. I'm delighted with how it is looking.
This ties in with a slight change of direction at Looking for Wisdom. Informal feedback from readers suggested that the idea of paying for ongoing philosophy courses by subscription was, well... somewhat overwhelming. Potential subscribers told me they were afraid there would be too much to read and absorb.
So now I'm readjusting, making the membership tier more community based (with access to the discourse forum), and working towards offering one-off workshops, weekend courses etc., with more face-to-face interaction (with reductions for members).
Meanwhile, in terms of making the site pay, syndicating via Medium is keeping it bringing in a modest income, and also raising profile. I've got some great content coming up. Google stats are booming (tenfold increase in search impressions over the last two months), and with a few more tweaks, I'm pretty confident with the new direction.
About a week ago, I hit 300 subscribers. Growth has been pretty steady, boosted by a couple of widely-shared blogs on Reddit and Facebook. 300 subscribers feels like a solid milestone, and I've used it to make some behind-the-scenes changes. These include:
- Switched hosting to Ghost(Pro). I can spend hours dealing with server glitches and upgrades and so on, but I'd rather write. This has been a good move, and has freed me up to think about the project more broadly, rather than focussing on technical fire-fighting.
- Removed welcome emails. Yes, indeed. I realised I don't like welcome emails (and even less do I like welcome email sequences). So why subject my users to the?. Instead, new sign-ups are redirected to a friendly welcome page. This has also removed the need to use MailerLite, so Ghost now does all the work.
- General rethinking of strategy for the project. Some of my plans are waiting on Ghost's new "custom plans" feature, which will allow me to have membership tiers, and do some other interesting things.
I've just hit 200 subscribers with Looking for Wisdom. The soft launch of the project was in November, and the official launch in January of 2021, so I'm happy with how things are going.
The second season philosophy course (March-April 2021), this time on the Philosophy of Love is launching next week, on March 1st. And there's also an absolute belter of an interview on Maya philosophy coming up next week as well, so hoping that these two things together will increase traction a bit too.
One challenge is that my free and paid tiers for the newsletter are subtly different offerings. The free tier firmly within the territory of being a newsletter. But the paid tier is much more interactive, including community engagement, and a much stronger educational component. So I realised that as well as landing pages for subscribers, I needed a more complete landing page for those wanting to sign up for more serious study.
So here's my new landing page. It still needs some tweaks, but it sets out what the offering is right at the outset.
It's going to be a while before the newsletter can pay me anything like an income, but in the first ten days since the launch of my online newsletter course (on the paid membership tier), I've covered my hosting and management costs (mainly Digital Ocean hosting, Zapier integration etc.) for the first year.
After feedback from a new subscriber, I've decided I need to set up a simple landing page that can give visitors a clear, unambiguous idea of what Looking for Wisdom is, and a smooth path to signing up. The Ghost site is nice, but it foregrounds content rather than foregrounding a path to signing up.
So I've done a bit of work with Carrd, and set up a new landing page on a subdomain. It still feels a little wordy, so I'm going to cut it back, but it's shaping up okay.
Having launched earlier today, I now have my first two paid subscribers for my philosophy-by-email project, one a monthly subscriber, and one on the annual plan. It's a modest start, but it feels like a vote of confidence. And it covers (more or less) my hosting fees for first year.
Meanwhile, I've been setting up a community integration for the site, so paying members can join an ongoing study-group for deeper exploration of the course content.
Is it a newsletter? Is it a course?
I set up Looking for Wisdom to explore the possibility of offering email-based courses, with a supporting study-group for paying members.
The free tier of Looking for Wisdom offers weekly Philosopher Files by email every Thursday. But Subscribers have the option of levelling-up to become Members, joining a rolling, ongoing programme of courses by email
The courses are going to run for 7 weeks at a time, starting on the first Monday of every two months. The topics for 2021 are:
- Wisdom (Jan-Feb 2021)
- Love (Mar-Apr 2021)
- Work (May-Jun 2021)
- Friendship (Jul-Aug 2021)
- Home (Sep-Oct 2021)
- Friendship (Nov-Dec 2021)
I'm launching today, with the first lesson free to all Subscribers, and after that access to only paid subscribers. I'll update again to say how things are going. I'm interested to see how it works in this space between newsletters and online courses...
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 🧑🏼🎄🎄
After flirting with the idea of Substack for a while, ended up settling for a new site with Ghost on Digital Ocean.
Set up and designed site, added sample content, and generally tweaked it until it worked at least as a proof-of-concept. I decided that November - December would be a soft launch of the site, and I'd properly launch in 2021.
Put out news to my (relatively small) network, and got a healthy 70 signups for testing and initial feedback.
