Newsletter #50: lessons learned from writing 50 newsletters
6 minutes reading time. Thoughts on startups, growth, and technology 🚀
Welcome to another edition of the Struggle.
The Struggle is a bi-weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts and learnings from running a fast-growing startup in Southeast Asia.
When I started writing this newsletter, I was frustrated with posting on LinkedIn, Medium, and Quora. Although I experienced moderate success at such platforms, you need to follow the algorithm changes constantly. Over time it took away my joy of sharing interesting insights as I needed to pay more attention to the algorithm rather than the quality of my content.
When writing on social media platforms, most of the upside goes to the platform rather than to you. If you decide to leave one day, say LinkedIn, you will need to start from the bottom on another platform.
Early in 2020, I moved to Substack and set a new year resolution, and wrote one newsletter per week until the end of the year.
It all started as an experiment to see where my creativity will take me, what I will learn, and what opportunities will come my way. Today, I have completed 50 newsletters, one for (almost) every week of the year. I thought it would be interesting to share a few of my lessons of maintaining consistency in writing throughout 2020.
Writing weekly is challenging; ideating new topics, looking for ways to improve, growing the subscriber base, and maintaining consistency is hard.
But it does come with many benefits; as Patrick O'Shaughnessy points out in his tweet below, it does help you learn new things, attract business opportunities, and even serve as your resume.
And while there are many newsletters out there, and it may feel like you are late to the game, we are still in the early days with online content.
Many people look at newsletters and find it weird why suddenly there is so much hype when such a communication format has existed for a long time. My two cents on the topic are:
Incentives are aligned - you write for the readers, not for advertisers.
Newsletters build trust and communities.
Top 5 lessons learned from writing 50 newsletters
1. Ideas lead to more ideas
Writing weekly forces you to make connections between unexpected things, helping you find inspiration not only for writing but in your work quite frequently.
In the beginning, coming up with topics where you have something to share is hard. But the more you do it, the easier it gets.
It’s like exercising a muscle. At some point, the ideas come naturally in all kinds of circumstances.
2. Consistency builds trust
Consistency is not optional. Once you commit to writing, not sending must be unthinkable. People appreciate that mindset. If I am late in sending a newsletter, people tend to reach out and ask if everything is fine with me.
3. Clarity of thought
Writing weekly essays forces you to research complex topics and then work on simplifying them. In turn, that’s a great tool to teach yourself how to do something new. In the process of writing it, you are learning as much as the readers.
4. People prefer shorter forms of content
As the internet reaches every corner of the world, people who want to improve face the problem of information overload continuously. Longer forms of content like books, online courses, and traditional education, are time-consuming. To top it all, you do not even know if long forms of content will deliver the desired outcome. Whereas newsletters, podcasts, and short videos force the creator to simplify and communicate better, in turn, more and more people prefer to consume such content.
5. Writing unlocks opportunities
I do not write, so I start a career as a writer, but writing does unlock a lot of opportunities, to name a few:
Prospective clients connect with you
Events invite you to be a speaker
Media publications ask you to contribute with your writing
Your team understands you better - it’s easier to sell complex ideas internally if you educate the team on the benefits
You nurture relationships with important partners by giving them exposure through your publication
Recruiters offer you jobs and many more
Creating content is such a powerful engine of learning, growing, and connecting with like-minded people. Yet, writing is not for everyone; if you prefer speaking, perhaps video or podcasts are better formats. In my case, I prefer to have time to think and refine my writing, thus writing seems like a better solution.
We are still in the early days of the internet, and there are many opportunities for content creation or curation.
To continue improving my writing, I have decided to continue this experiment and write in 2021. However, instead of publishing weekly, I will start writing bi-weekly to give myself more time to research and improve my content.
Stay tuned for more, or reach out with ideas of what I can do better and what topics you would like to learn more about.