During the Christmas break, I discovered that we were in the top 5% of all newsletters, possibly even 1%.
During the Christmas break, I discovered our newsletter, The Automated, was in the top 5% of all newsletters, possibly even 1%. Why? Because we had published more than 21 posts. Far more.
We wrote over 47K words, served over 131 daily posts, which is essentially half of the 2023 working year, and served almost 1 million impressions in the process!
Not only that — we scaled to OVER 18k subscribers from 0!
How did we get there, starting from 0 subscribers? There have been a few important factors and focuses throughout.
We have a decentralized team operating between Asia, Africa, and the UK, so we operate on Whatsapp and conduct small conversations constantly. I find it necessary to keep the flow of conversations flowing so that we have multiple micro-interactions everyday. In my experience with small team leadership, these micro-interactions is what makes a team trust each other, like an intricate spider web connecting us all.
This is one of my primary responsibilities as part of the team. I think of myself as the creative guy or the “Chief Breaker of Things”, and my job is to find ways to stretch or break the existing mould.
For example, I had alerted the team of possibly ghost-writing a newsletter for a Pullitzer prize winning journalist friend of mine. Even though we haven’t executed this plan, I want to keep that flow of good and fresh ideas going so that there’s always something new that we can converse around.
What we then do is have a weekly call where we check status in and discuss what happened in the business in the week. We prioritize this as a face to face call, since this is…