If you want to start, you have to admit to yourself that you’re making excuses. You have to question these excuses and realize you are the only one actually holding yourself back.
Amazing read! first time i´ve had a read from your susbstack and I´m already looking all the way down of your archive to continue learning from you. Thank you for the great (and free) content.
you and tetra have bullied me into finally beginning
to be fair, i did use bowtiedsalesguy to tie down my job security
i'm in sales - and i was playing with the idea of doing something related to my job - i know many of the niches well - and perhaps this could even become a lead gen source - but it feels like it'd be smarter to do something completely different/separate from the w2
I got 2 kids under 4, full time job, and first startup company failed. I worked 5 years on that startup and ended up closing it down. Learned a lot, but couldnt scale it. Also, that was 5 years of working nights and weekends, 5 years of 70hr+ weeks, every week besides random vacation. It was not a wifi business.
Current company is wifi, I can scale, and stacking more skill sets. Shit is hard, no breaks fr
“Most business owners aren’t that smart” My 9-5 is being a Fractional CFO to small biz owners and I can confirm this. Ask anybody who volunteers for SCORE or is a bookkeeper too.
They aren’t stupid either. Some are borderline insane... But, as Opossum said - average intelligence is more than adequate.
Great read. My niche is educating PMHNPs & students. My idea is to build a newsletter through substack & go from there. The difficult part is maintaining realistic expectations & projections of what growth should look like in terms of new subscribers per day (it certainly isn't just up & to the right) as well as continuing to publish content while figuring out what that may look like. Any advice regarding how to view growth? or is it a lame metric early on & just focus on high quality content?
You're two months into your Substack. It's going to be hard (from a motivation standpoint) in the beginning. Two things that I noticed quickly that will help with that and your growth.
1. Keep a consistent posting schedule. Your schedule is all over the place. You don't have to publish immediately, you can have a backlog of posts for the times when you don't feel like writing.
2. Spend just as much time marketing as you do on writing (or more). You have to figure out where your audience hangs out and go to them. If it's Twitter, great. Spend more time tweeting and getting engagement and visibility to your newsletter. If it's not Twitter, go spend a bunch of time wherever your audience is.
It does you no good to push a new post every day or two if nobody knows you exist. Initially, forget your metrics of actual growth and focus on the metrics of getting exposure to your Substack.
Thanks, yeah initially schedule was all over the place because there really wasn’t one. I got started without a clear vision. But, now I’ve got a schedule down & happen to be sitting on 9 or so scheduled posts. Will continue to add to back log to ensure that I’m able to stick to schedule in future.
Thanks again for reply. Will spend more time on marketing for time being.
Amazing read! first time i´ve had a read from your susbstack and I´m already looking all the way down of your archive to continue learning from you. Thank you for the great (and free) content.
you and tetra have bullied me into finally beginning
to be fair, i did use bowtiedsalesguy to tie down my job security
i'm in sales - and i was playing with the idea of doing something related to my job - i know many of the niches well - and perhaps this could even become a lead gen source - but it feels like it'd be smarter to do something completely different/separate from the w2
The more you can work off your current skillset, the better.
Hey , quick question - wanted your recommendation for a Wordpress comparison table plugin for a Cards comparison site, launching one in India. Thanks
Thanks for the extra push.
I got 2 kids under 4, full time job, and first startup company failed. I worked 5 years on that startup and ended up closing it down. Learned a lot, but couldnt scale it. Also, that was 5 years of working nights and weekends, 5 years of 70hr+ weeks, every week besides random vacation. It was not a wifi business.
Current company is wifi, I can scale, and stacking more skill sets. Shit is hard, no breaks fr
“Most business owners aren’t that smart” My 9-5 is being a Fractional CFO to small biz owners and I can confirm this. Ask anybody who volunteers for SCORE or is a bookkeeper too.
They aren’t stupid either. Some are borderline insane... But, as Opossum said - average intelligence is more than adequate.
With a colicky baby, take advantage of the time pacing around rocking it.
Thinking about getting a dorky walking desk set-up solely for this purpose. Put baby in a baby backpack, walk, work.
You up any way
Colicky babies are the worst. My first one was colick for ever...
Great read. My niche is educating PMHNPs & students. My idea is to build a newsletter through substack & go from there. The difficult part is maintaining realistic expectations & projections of what growth should look like in terms of new subscribers per day (it certainly isn't just up & to the right) as well as continuing to publish content while figuring out what that may look like. Any advice regarding how to view growth? or is it a lame metric early on & just focus on high quality content?
You're two months into your Substack. It's going to be hard (from a motivation standpoint) in the beginning. Two things that I noticed quickly that will help with that and your growth.
1. Keep a consistent posting schedule. Your schedule is all over the place. You don't have to publish immediately, you can have a backlog of posts for the times when you don't feel like writing.
2. Spend just as much time marketing as you do on writing (or more). You have to figure out where your audience hangs out and go to them. If it's Twitter, great. Spend more time tweeting and getting engagement and visibility to your newsletter. If it's not Twitter, go spend a bunch of time wherever your audience is.
It does you no good to push a new post every day or two if nobody knows you exist. Initially, forget your metrics of actual growth and focus on the metrics of getting exposure to your Substack.
Thanks, yeah initially schedule was all over the place because there really wasn’t one. I got started without a clear vision. But, now I’ve got a schedule down & happen to be sitting on 9 or so scheduled posts. Will continue to add to back log to ensure that I’m able to stick to schedule in future.
Thanks again for reply. Will spend more time on marketing for time being.
You're welcome. And not just for the time being. Marketing is a never ending part of it.