I pay over $230/month for Mailchimp so I can keep sending you emails. But this cost (the most I pay for monthly software by a lot) is worth it because it’s doubly profitable: Mailchimp makes enough money from me so they don’t have any need to sell my or my subscribers’ data. And I make enough money from my products by sending emails on their platform to cover the costs and not have to resort to ever selling data from my subscribers either. So it’s a win-win-win!
For over a year now I’ve been treating this very site as many treat newsletters. I’ve long since lost count of a rigid X posts per day publishing schedule, or post quantities for the week. The linked list is nearly dead, getting only the occasional updates from what I would once tweet out. I keep a weekly cadence where I try to do two things: a member post which I write on Saturday morning and edit on Sunday morning to publish on Monday. And one more post to be published on Thursdays which isn’t behind a paywall. These aren’t hard deadlines for me and rather they set a cadence for my writing.
And my Member posts have long dissapated from being iPad focused to being a culmination of what I am thinking about. I look at it as: this is what I would have tweeted over the week, but now I have thought deeply about it all week and taken time to try and put it coherently together. And removed the trite bullshit you normally would have seen. (Kind of, I’m still me.)
That’s what I write for the members on Monday’s. Thursday’s are all about reviewing some good shit though.
And the reward has been a more stable member base, which means stable income. This allows me to buy things to test and report on, and stay incentivized to write every morning of the weekend and several evenings during the weekdays. I don’t do a newsletter because the format isn’t easily updated to fix typos are inaccuracies. But this blog can be. And you can sign up to get an email when I do post something.
You can scroll down a touch more and sign up to be a member if you’re interested.