Category: CommunityCategory: Community

It’s “Not My Business” season again.

A year ago Olivia Rafferty declared that some things were not her business:

Things That, As A Substacker, Are Not My Business

1. How many subscribers I have? NOT MY BUSINESS
2. The current state of my header/footer? NOT MY BUSINESS
3. Whatever is happening on my welcome page? NOT MY BUSINESS
4. The growing pile of unread newsletters in my inbox? NOT MY BUSINESS
5. How many emojis I use? NOT MY BUSINESS
6. The leaderboard for Culture? NOT MY BUSINESS
7. Substack Chat? NOT MY BUSINESS
8. My Notion database for future post ideas? NOT MY BUSINESS
9. My open rate? NOT MY BUSINESS

Social media, and lately the newsletter busy-ness industrial complex, has us spinning our wheels on so many things that are not our business.

Things like open rates, deliverability, A/B testing headlines, churn, soft bounces and hard bounces, email lists spread across multiple CSV files – really, it never fucking ends, and most of us ain’t making enough to sweat all the finer details.

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Start DM’ing with five like-minded folks about the work you do and you won’t need to go viral.

“Here’s the thing about small, quality audiences: you never know which conversation will start the chain reaction. Which episode will reach the one person who changes everything… in the age of infinite content, finite and intentional might be the most radical choice,” Yancey Strickler

A great example of this is the story Joi Katskee told in one of our Escape Pod Zoom calls:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Get seven people to a show on a Tuesday night and watch the magic unfold.

Some good thoughts on working in collaboration with other people.

“Community is such a source of nourishment. Sometimes we may believe that we are creatively blocked, but really we’re just cut off from the nourishment of community,” Giselle Buchanan

“Our laptop wants you to work on your music alone. And the (usually exaggerated) hype around a lot of records is that they were done all alone by somebody in their bedroom. That’s fine for some people. But most musicians seem to do their best work in collaboration with other musicians, each one bringing their own strengths to the game. Embrace collaboration if you can,” Dan Wilson

“The creative status quo has made us lonely content machines. Pressured to post with unnatural quantity and frequency. To pursue our livelihoods and express our work. We play someone else’s game,” New Creative Era

This can be sending an email and asking for feedback, calling a friend to think through a problem, or getting on a Zoom call with some like-minded folks to talk through a challenge.

I did this recently with an email I was trying to write. I sent it off to two people, and their feedback got me unstuck.

Expand your work and possibilities by pulling people into your creative orbit.

“Direct access to your audience is so important, and very much worth the time and energy,” Seth Werkheiser

It takes time to build an email list because there is friction. Social media gives you the illusion of speed in this matter, as it’s very easy to for someone to just hit the follow button.

It’s hard work getting people to do anything on the internet, especially hand over their email address! But it’s worth it.

Read more in ‘How I grew my Substack by 7,000% in less than 3 years without burning out‘ by Alex Lewis over at HubSpot!

Great line from Skyr0 at about the 1:20 mark:

“Social media just completely broke me, rewired my brain, and changed me for the worse. I’ve had multiple times of burnout, and I guess that’s kind of just the nature of short-form content. But honestly, at this point, I feel like my future fans—wherever they are—they aren’t on these apps, and it’s just not the place to be anymore for me.”

It’s possible your future fans aren’t on social media.