It’s Friday! I’m writing this at 5:37am and I’m not going to lie, I’m looking forward to taking a break from publishing the next couple days (though I’m going to keep writing to build a backlog). Thanks for reading, and would love any thoughts you might have so far. Have a great weekend!
I started this newsletter a week ago as an experiment in creating a paid daily email publication. One of my principles that I try to live by is that doing the wrong thing is usually better than doing nothing at all, and the last week has been a perfect example of that. I’m pretty sure that I’ve already started off on the wrong track with this, but I also wouldn’t have realized it without just getting started.
What I thought this was
I had a few original goals with this newsletter:
Get back in the habit of writing and publishing daily, at least for awhile
Be able to write about whatever I want in the moment
Share some of my experience as a freelancer / entrepreneur / marketer
Build a paid email publication
It’s obvious in retrospect, but #2 and #4 are incompatible. As I said yesterday, once you take someone’s money, there’s an expectation that you’ll be delivering something of a certain quality on a certain timeline. That’s fine, but it does kind of put a crimp in my ability to feel free to write whatever I want.
So the plan that’s gradually emerging in my mind is to create two different newsletters, one free and one paid.
This newsletter will remain free
This email newsletter you’re reading now will remain free and published daily, and I’ll continuing exploring whatever ideas or topics I feel like writing about. If people don’t like it, that’s OK, because the goal is to cover the first two objectives above. It’s mainly for me.
In addition to having more freedom to write about what I want every day, there’s another benefit to keeping this publication free: every day’s writing has the potential to be shared more widely and bring in new readers. In my experience, it’s rare that a piece of writing catches fire, but when it does it can reach a huge number of people. It’s really hard to predict what’s going to snare people’s attention enough for them to share it widely, but putting your work behind a paywall guarantees it won’t go viral.
New paid publication
In addition to this free daily publication, I’ll be launching a new paid email publication that is specifically about freelancing. It’ll be released either biweekly or monthly, paid from day 1, long-form and actionable, and much more polished. In short, it’ll be the opposite of this.
I’m really excited about this plan. I’ve got a huge list of tens of thousands of freelancers to market this to already, and I’ve been wanting to write a book on freelancing for some time. With this approach, I’ll be researching and writing that book in serial fashion, with a topic being written and released periodically to a paying subscriber base. At some point, I’ll package those lessons up into a book, course(s), etc.
Next steps are to plan out the first year of topics, write editions #0 and #1 (edition #0 will be a free sample), pick a publication name, and do an early preview with a small group of readers. My current plan is to launch the first edition in early July, and I’ll continue to share the behind-the-scenes details here.
Much love,
Ryan
PS - a lot of my thinking on paid newsletters over the past few weeks has been influenced by conversations I’ve had at IndieMailer, things I’ve read in Not a Newsletter, and things linked to from this edition of trends.vc. I’m not sure if paid newsletters will continue rising in popularity, but as a writer the model is hard to beat if you can figure out how to make it work for you.