Thoughts after writing 300 newsletters
On November 9th I sent the 300th issue of the Weekly Thing. I sent the very 1st issue on May 13, 2017. It took 7 years 5 months 3 weeks and 6 days to get to 300.
So, what have I learned from sending 300 newsletters? What insights have I gleaned? In no particular order…
- Structure and process is key. There is no way I could do this for 30 issues much less 300 without having robust automation and process to make it easier. It is still very similar to what I wrote in 2023 at How I Find Links for the Weekly Thing, Task Management for the Weekly Thing, and How I Build the Weekly Thing.
- Breaks in summer and winter. For the first while I didn’t do this and then I read how James Whatley of Five Things on Friday takes a break and decided I should do that too. I’ve taken July and August off of the newsletter for a summer break as well as Dec 15 to Jan 15. This works really well since we often take a vacation and have very busy summers in July and August, and the winter break covers Christmas, New Years, and my birthday. Without these breaks I’m pretty sure I would have burned out by now.
- Fun to play and experiment. I started sending the newsletter to learn and experiment. I’ve continued that. Sections have changed over time. I created the Weekly Thing Forum which isn’t busy but is meaningful. I just started Supporting Memberships to raise money for digital non-profits. I’m playing with Straw Polls as a new section. I want to keep this evolution.
- People unsubscribe and that’s okay. Most every week people unsubscribe after I send a new issue. On the whole, a few people sign up each week and about half of that unsubscribe each week. It is just human nature but the unsubscribe signal at half the volume is more impactful to me than the subscribe signal at twice the volume. I mostly ignore unsubscribes.
- I am so glad I don’t know what you click on. I’ve written on audience capture before and I couldn’t be happier that I’m completely ignorant if you click on anything in the Weekly Thing. In case you are not aware most email newsletters track every link that is in the email and track when you click them. This would completely mess with my brain and I no matter how much I try I know I would start including links because I might think they would get clicks. I have no idea what or even if anything is popular with you.
- Writing the intro can be challenging. It may surprise people but I often find the intro to be the hardest thing for me to write. Covering the links is topical. Currently is pretty obvious. The Journal is my blog syndicated. But the intro? That is only for the newsletter and I often find myself looking at a blinking cursor thinking “Huh?”.
- People like blend of personal and professional. One of the things I consistently hear from people about the Weekly Thing is that they love the blend of professional and personal. The fact that there are links about super technical topics, and then a Journal post about picking Apples or something. Many people have commented that the Weekly Thing is the only newsletter that does that and they like it. Perhaps there are folks that dislike it? 🤷♂️
- Buck most trends of growing newsletter. I’ve ignored a ton of advice on how to grow, grow, grow the popularity of the Weekly Thing. It is much longer than most would suggest it should be. It has a ton of links which Gmail doesn’t like it probably puts it in the promotions or junk. I don’t have a topic that I focus on and instead meander around. I’m okay with this.
With those thoughts… where might the Weekly Thing go in the future? I have two ideas that have persisted long enough that I feel they will happen when the time is right.
- Weekly Thing Podcast. I’ve pondered a podcast to go along with the Weekly Thing for more than a couple years now. I’ve taken this one a ways actually. I’ve worked through the structure and approach. I already have automation built to help me create the outline of each issue. There are two barriers for me on this one. First, getting comfortable with audio versus writing. I’ve been told I have a good voice for it, but I’m not super comfortable on the microphone. Second, the time required. Recording and editing a podcast takes a good chunk of time. And I ultimately would like to have guests on as well. So, this will wait for a while.
- Yearly Thing. I keep thinking about taking each year of the Weekly Thing and creating an ebook and maybe even a printed book that captures the content from that year. It could be in part almanac? I’m not sure. The idea would be to publish one a year.
You can find me on the web.
So much chatter lately on leaving social platform this to go to social platform that.
The new thing.
The better thing?
What is everyone chasing?
I’ll be right here on the web.
Same place I was before.
Same place I’ll be in the future.
Tammy and I went to the sold out 7 Nights in the Entry at the Parkway Theater, part of the Sound Unseen 25th Annual Film festival. Chris Strouth of Twin/Tone, Greg Norton of Hüsker Dü, and Rick Fuller introduced it. This was only the seond showing ever!
RIP @thingles
The steps…
- I deleted my tweet history in 2016. I didn’t want my archive on a site that I didn’t control.
- I left Twitter in 2017. Micro.blog showed up and I knew I wanted to only write on my own site.
- Twitter was a failed company.
- I removed all my connections, destroying my “network” on Twitter.
- I thanked Elon when he dropped the Twitter brand and made it X. I have no brand affinity to X.
When I joined Twitter in December 2006 as user 82,903 it was fun and new. It was an open platform with a lot of experimentation. Twitter clients were super innovative. I remember posting via SMS! The creation of “retweets” by the community before the platform figured it out.
But the fun turned sour over years. I don’t believe there is a good form of social media. It isn’t the logo on the front or who is running it. It is the fundamental thing. It is addictive software patterns and amplification of engaging content with no regard for our health or wellbeing.
I honestly can’t think of an innovative new thing to come from social media in the last several years. It isn’t about the product anymore, it is just marketing.
So in November 2024, it was time to cut the last vestige of social media I had. It was time to delete my Twitter X profile. I had destroyed everything else I had on that site but had left my profile there. The only utility of that was to hold my username. But I don’t want any connection to these networks. It isn’t about the brand. I believe they all end up in the same place. There is no healthy cigarette. No good form of gambling.
By way of this post please be aware that any content or information that may appear on X is absolutely not from me.
I had some fun with ChatGPT and the image this conjured up for me.
How I’m handling Twitter embeds from deleted accounts
I’m seeing a lot of people that I was connected with on Twitter X deleting their profiles. This actually ends up having an impact on my blog because of embeddings. When I left Twitter years ago I exported my archive and imported it into my blog. Over the years I’ve merged that content in as “native” as I can. The reality is that Twitter status updates are often very different than a blog post.
There were a number of retweets that I did that I also migrated. When I did those I used Hugo’s ability to embed a Tweet using a shortcode. That results though in build errors if those Tweets become unavailable. I get an error that looks like this (I anonymized the identifiers).
Error: ERROR Failed to get JSON resource "https://publish.twitter.com/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456": Failed to retrieve remote file: Forbidden, body: "{\"error\":\"Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.\",\"request\":\"\\/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456\"}"
I debated how to approach this and decided that I would delete my references to these as well. That seems like the best way to honor the original authors intent. They deleted that content themselves. The result is that I’ve deleted several historical posts on my blog in recent days as people have deleted their accounts on X. Mostly those posts had no meaningful content from me.
Tammy and I went to A Real Pain tonight. I thought it was fine and a bit boring. The reviews say it is “powerfully funny” which I didn’t get at all. It also seemed odd that [Kieran Culkin](Kieran Culkin)’s character behavior seemed so similar to Roman Roy. 🤷♂️
Dig the cool display design for the Minnesota Tekne Awards stage. Fun to see the displays in a non-traditional layout that is connected to the imagery.
Wrapping up Growth Summit #TeamSPS did a Give Back event where we assembled 1,000 SolarBuddy lights. Impact 4 Good led the team through the exercise. The lights were pretty simple to assemble yet cool to see how they functioned.
Incredible morning building connections at SPS Growth Summit! Incredible keynote from Riaz Meghji! So much great energy and talent as we continue to grow the world’s retail network.#TeamSPS
Last night we finished watching Season 7 of Young Sheldon. We watched this show mostly as a family, except Mazie mostly being off to college. It didn’t warm to me right away, which is true for most TV shows. But over time I came to really like it. Will miss these characters!
Went out for a walk and claimed the Veterans Day Challenge badge in Apple Health.
We saw Tina Schlieske’s Birthday Show at The Dakota and it was incredible! She was joined by her sister Laura and they hit a ton of great songs and pulled in a bunch of covers too. It got so fired up by the end that people were standing up and dancing, at a jazz club, and she sang from a table! 🔥
Things 4 Good Four Year Impact
We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser for four years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $22,739 for non-profits! Thank you so much. ❤️
Opening the sale to the public via the Mt. Olivet Holiday Boutique was a great way to get to a lot of new people with a nearly 50% jump in candle sales this year!
Organizations that we’ve supported over these four years include Constellation Fund, Free Bikes 4 Kidz, Appetite for Change, Feed My Starving Children, United Help Ukraine, Agate Housing + Services, Save the Snakes, Free Guitars 4 Kids, American Prairie, Heart to Care Tanzania, Food Recovery Network, Oceanites, SynGAP Research Fund, Water to Thrive, Sprint to Cité Soleil, and World Central Kitchen.
Things 4 Good 2024 Fall Fundraiser Insights
We had a great time hosting our 4th annual Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser. We raised $7,010 in donations for our four non-profits. I also like to take a look at the data from the sale to learn more for next year.
We made 252 candles in preparation for the sale. We had 72 Winter Wonderland, 36 Old Fashioned, and 24 of the other six scents. We really had no idea what to do for inventory since this was the first year we sold to the public at the Mt. Olivet Holiday Boutique.
We had 78 candle purchases which is a huge 42% jump from last year. On average people purchased 3 candles, down from 4 last year. However averages don’t tell the story. Most people got one candle, and there are a smaller number of people that get a large number — usually as gifts for the holidays. We had 5 transactions for more than 8 candles, accounting for a whopping 76 candles, 30% of our inventory.
This year we had eight different scents, the exact same as last year. We renamed Plain Jane to Just Crackle, and it was similarly popular for folks wanting an unscented candle. We did fine tune the scents though and increased the scent load on some of them. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.
Some observations:
- You can see the early inventory trend drops quick which is a reflection of preorders that folk sent in.
- True North was the first scent to sell out and sold just as fast as Winter Wonderland until they were all gone.
- Just Crackle was popular with people buying many candles as gifts.
- Old Fashioned had more than other scents but still sold out quickly.
- Apple of My Eye underperformed and was the least popular scent until the end when there wasn’t as many options.
- Winter Wonderland seems to sell faster when it is on display and people can see there are so many of them. On Saturday we kept 5 of each candle on the table and added more as they were sold. The rate of sales were slower. On Sunday there were 30+ of them on the table. Do people buy more when they see there are so many?
- We sold out! Inventory went negative? Indeed we ran out of candles and I sent an email to let folks know if they were still planning to come. We did have a few people show up after we were out and I realized I had a couple dozen candles downstairs I had poured for myself. I brought them up and we kept raising more money for our causes!
We offer folks a number of ways to donate and again Venmo was by far the most popular method, 3.5 times more popular than cash. More people knew what Zelle was this year. I continue to be surprised at how few people have Apple Pay setup. Three checks! I did not offer a method to pay via crypto this year. We’ve only ever had one candle sale in all the years we’ve done it using Bitcoin Lightning.
We are already keeping notes for things we want to do to make next year’s Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser even better. Send us an email if you have any suggestions!
Also see 2024 Fall Fundraiser Results.
Things 4 Good 2024 Fall Fundraiser Results
We completed our annual candle sale raising $7,010 for the four organizations we picked! That is a 21.8% increase from 2023, double the growth of previous years at 9.7% and 10.3%. A huge thank you to the 78 folks from this community who made this possible by purchasing a wooden wick candle made with love!
As in previous years, we asked people which organizations they would like to support. People could pick any or all of the organizations. We even have some folks request specific allocations versus dividing it equally. We also donated $260.25 for Mount Olivet as a portion of all sales that were made at the Holiday Boutique on Saturday.
Tyler and Mazie enjoy a friendly competition trying to get their organization the most. 🤩
A little more about each organization…
SynGAP Research Fund supported by Tyler
I was first introduced to this condition by one of my favorite YouTubers UFDTech. His son has SynGAP1 which is a rare genetic disorder caused by a variant on the SynGAP1 gene. His son experiences a wide range of symptoms including Epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, Autism, Ataxia, and has about 100 seizures a day. My non-profit researchers this condition and is committed to giving support systems to make the lives of these patients and families easier.
Water to Thrive supported by Mazie
A cool glass of water is something that I take for granted almost every day, without considering that 48% of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to this privilege. Women and children walk up to 6 hours each day just to get water, only to have children dying of waterborne disease every 90 seconds. Water to Thrive is a nonprofit that works directly with organizers and communities in sub-Saharan Africa to build wells that have ensured clean, safe water for over 900,000 people since their founding. The educational, economic, and health benefits of even a single well are vast, and Water to Thrive is careful to respect the unique needs and desires of every community they work with. With your donation, we have the potential to fund a well that could serve over 500 people for 20 years! Let’s make water a right, not a privilege!
Sprint to Cité Soleil supported by Tammy
Sprint to Cité Soleil is a non-profit in Haiti that inspires and empowers kids through basketball, mentorship, and a meal. Cité Soleil, Haiti is known for extreme poverty and gang violence, but community leaders know that this can change over time with sustainable, long term programs that build community and peace. This is where Sprint to Cité Soleil comes in, providing a weekly basketball program for over 150 kids. Harnessing the knowledge and wisdom of local people to fuel change in their community, they also employ 10 local Haitians as coaches and 4 as cooks. Sprint to Cité Soleil was founded in 2016 by a teenager in our neighborhood and his friend after they visited Haiti, where his brother is from, and witnessed the needs first hand.
World Central Kitchen supported by Jamie
I first heard of this organization when they were bringing meals to people in Ukraine after Russia’s attacks started. They also are on the ground in Palestine helping people. Most recently they were one of the first organizations after hurricanes hit helping people here in the US. I’ve been very impressed with Chef José Andrés and the impact World Central Kitchen is having.
Also see 2024 Fall Fundraiser Insights for more details from this year. Additionally see results from 2023, 2022, and 2021.
Waited until it was cold enough before swapping this light out. New light should prohibit access by hornets attempting to build nests again.
This morning Weekly Thing 300 went out and a couple hours later my cellphone rang. It was Rajiv Pant calling out of the blue to congratulate me on the milestone. That was so great. Not a text. Not an email. A real telephone call from someone I haven’t talked to in many years. Thanks Rajiv! 🙏