Osmosis

I'm so tired of digging through the Substation theme for Ghost and hacking everything to the way I want it that when I'm finally at the point where I think it's presentable, I tell the team... fuck it, let's just start sharing this thing. We can start with our colleagues and past clients.

I've been in a few private Slack groups the last few weeks as well, and I share there too: https://megamaker.co/, https://www.honeycopy.com/a-team-pending, https://indieworldwide.co/

So we share the first summary: https://www.osmosis.dev/deep-work/

And in the first 24 hours, we got 22 subscribers and 2 paying subs! We're at $10MRR! Ready to take over the world!

So months ago, Joseph had did a lot of the technical stuff for Osmosis. Our stack is Ghost, ConvertKit and Stripe. Super simple, as the microsub was meant to be. But we all know the difference between plans and real life. God laughs.

I start digging into Ghost and the Substation theme. It's 70% there. I have only ever used Wordpress in my life. Why is everything hardcoded into the theme? Why is there a minCSS in addition to the other CSS file? Why is dark mode going off?

Oh wait - I still have to write copy too. Yes, I'm a copywriter, but writing copy for your own product (your first one, to add pressure)... is infinitely hard. I spend four hours on Sunday evening writing the CTA and opt-in page copy. (Only to completely change it again after).

I join the Ghost Circle, the Ghost Forum and if there had been a Slack, I would've joined that too. I harass people on the coding, the theme, the weird little portal button, the newsletter function.

The team spends HOURS to get Zapier to talk to ConvertKit so that when you subscribe on Ghost, it also goes to ConvertKit. We hit nothing but dead ends and we simply give up. Everything will be on Ghost. We'll pull people into ConvertKit in the future when we have mini product launches or whatever. Screw this compatibility stuff.

Kayti has become my de facto editor at Osmosis. She gave me tons of feedback in the past two weeks on my Deep Work book summary. There's a lot of back-and-forth and edits and revisions and all those writerly things that every writer hates but knows will make their end product better.

The final draft of our first book summary is done.

The first draft of our first book summary (Cal Newport's Deep Work) is finally done. I took way too much time on this... or maybe just the right amount of time. I mean, it's the first one of what will eventually be a MONTHLY thing... so if there was anytime to work out the kinks in the product creation process... now is the time. I won't have the same amount of luxury for future book summaries. I'll be on a conveyor belt of summary launches every. single. month.

Joseph, by the way, has over 15 years of branding and design experience. He's worked for clients like IBM, Amazon, Radeon, AT&T, Honeywell & HP. So I knew naming this microsub would be in his court and if I touched it, I'd come up with something dumb.

And of course, Joseph hits a home run here: Osmosis.

It's something you can see on a t-shirt or mug. It tells you what we're trying to do without saying it explicitly. It sounds cool.

Finally finished transferring all my highlights, marginalia, dog eared pages and notes in Deep Work from the analogue physical book to Roam Research. Because this is the first "product" in a series of products for the microsub, I'm being extra careful, making sure I'm thorough.

Joseph and I get on Zoom to hash out our ideas. We're both excited about this microsub idea. We start talking about what books we'll summarize first. Which ones will be free, which ones will be behind the paywall. We talk about the content stream, how often we'll mail the list, what that content will look like. We settle down on our first few books to summarize. We think we should launch when we have four summaries in the bag, so we're not always catching up and we have leeway if we need it.

(Spoiler alert: none of these plans happen the way we planned it.)

So with that list in mind: low-effort and something I'm going to do anyway, $5-10/mo. price point, builds an audience, and solve problems... I come up with four potential ideas for this microsub idea:

1. Tarotnomics = where every day, I pull a tarot spread and translate that into what's going on in the stock market. I didn't love this idea because while I've done a lot of work in financial publishing... I would want to hire or partner with a real Wall Street expert to make it more legitimate. So that's out.

2. Tarot Frame Weekly = We own tarotframe.com and that's still a product we want to put out.... so I thought maybe if I did a journal every week, where I read a tarot spread and translate it to what's happening in the world via politics and economics and etc... that would build a list? I eventually shot down this idea myself, because in this climate, being explicitly political is not something I want to draw attention. Also - who would get value out of something like that?

3. Spiritual/Occult Book Summaries = Exactly what it says on the tin. This was in head-to-head competition with what would win out, which is...

4. Business Book Summaries for Creatives = The original proposal was for creative freelancers. On my proposal: "reading practical, useful marketing, business and productivity books aimed at 'creatives'. Basically people who suck at business, but are people we feel a special affinity for."

We like #4 because we also have a freelancing course in the works. This would be a natural upsell for that list.

We're two months in after incorporating at Plural Press. The plan was (and is): do agency work to fund our own info-products (courses/workshops), then roll those customers into SaaS/Apps... drive up MRR and never do freelance agency work again. We're a team of marketing consultants and copywriters in the direct response space if you care: www.pluralcopy.com

So here we are brainstorming product ideas. We realize we've never launched a course before, even though we've done it hundreds of times for our clients in our 50+ years of combined experience... and frankly we're crushed by the overwhelm of it all. Maybe it's imposter syndrome, maybe it's just scary as fuck, or maybe... we all now appreciate all the different plates our clients spin at the same time (payment, tech, design, copy, prod dev, list management, etc. etc.)

We need something that's not as scary. Something small and easy and we can launch fast. That's when Joseph brings up something he came across the past week... something called micro-memberships. I forget who the guru was, but the parameters were inspiring:

• Low effort or something you were going to do anyway
• $5-$10/month - so it’s no-brainer and they won’t worry about it on the CC bill
• Builds an audience, builds a list.
• MUST solve a problem

I look at this list and go, we can do this. Let's come up with ideas. This sounds like something that doesn't need 6-7 modules before we launch. Or coding. Or crazy amounts of prep. And we can flex this little muscle and build on it before we tackle courses and web apps and the things that will make us rich.