Category: WorkCategory: Work

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.

I was on Cody Cook-Parrott’s WITNESSING PRACTICE, “a three-hour workshop on writing as a contemplative practice—and turning that writing into newsletters, zines, and books.”

The core idea was that so many of us are already doing the work – writing, producing, doodling, dreaming, collecting – and it only takes a few steps to bring it to life. Whether that’s a newsletter, a website, an offering – it’s right there.

On a recent MINI ESCAPE POD Q&A video call, one of our members was looking to start teaching online. They’re a musician with knowledge and skill and talent and a warm heart.

At the moment, though, they’re wrestling with the logistics: finding the right people and communicating with them. Building an offering. Getting paid.

So much of that is just machinery: payment systems, email segments, sales pages, pricing. It can be daunting, and there’s so many different ways to make it all work.

But, as I tell almost a lot of my Email Guidance clients, they’ve already done the hard part.

The folks I meet sometimes have decades of experience in their field. Degrees, awards, careers. The technical stuff is easy in comparison – I can show you how to set up an email segment over coffee!

But you can’t just set up a sales page and a funnel without the hard work of really knowing your shit, and being known as someone who knows what the heck they’re talking about.

I’m so grateful for the work that Cody is doing. Making space for the immense creativity and knowledge and passion of so many people, and helping guide them towards clarity and calm. So much of this technical stuff is just noise, I promise.

Cody has sold out classes with sales pages made out of a Google Doc.

I know someone else who launched their career with a Word Doc and PayPal link.

Build trust and reputation, gain knowledge. The rest is just technical bits that we can figure out together.

Veronique put out this wonderful zine, “full of tiny ways to share your zines without using social media.”

There are so many places for us to share our work outside of social media! They might not go “viral,” or be seen by thousands of people, but that’s okay! Social media sold us on the idea that vanity metrics mattered, but as we’re learning they really don’t. Just look at all those people with six-figure follower counts on Instagram with just 19 likes on their posts. It’s rigged!

See all Veronique’s zines here.

A musician with some impressive Spotify numbers wrote me for a bit of Email Guidance, asking how to get people from streaming music platforms to a paid Substack or Patreon. Here’s part of my reply (lightly edited):

Open a Substack account TONIGHT and start filling it up with stories. Give your fans a place to DIVE INTO. You can build a real website later.

Get 10 posts up there. Twenty.

Buy a domain name at Hover.com, point that domain to the Substack.

Stop using LinkTree. Stop driving everyone to platforms where you can’t reach them. 

Get them to your Substack, where you can still embed all your music, and your videos. And that’s where everyone can SUBSCRIBE to your email list. Be RUTHLESS about it.

Get people to YOUR SITE FIRST. That is your mission.

Then go play shows. Have a clipboard and a pen to get people on your email list. Hand it out before your third song to someone in the crowd so people sign it while you’re playing (inspired by this story from Jes).

Send a newsletter once a week, or twice a month. Subscribe to other musicians on Substack and see how they do it. “Steal like an artist,” like Austin Kleon says, and develop your own rhythm and style.

Make your newsletter something that someone wants to open, and not just “hey I’m playing somewhere next week,” or “listen to my new song.”

There’s lots of shortcuts in the online music world, but that just means that everyone is taking them, too. You gotta be where they can’t be, and that’s strumming a guitar in front of 15 people on a Tuesday night. 

Community is your unfair advantage. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a photographer, whatever – you need other people in your corner. You need fans and friends more than you need funnels and lead magnets.

Yes, you can play the streaming music lottery and maybe hit it big. That’s because the casino has to pay out on occasion, otherwise people stop going to the casino.

The choice is yours; keep playing the lottery, or make better bets.

“It’s absurd how we’ve come to think that reaching thousands of random people will be more impactful to our lives more than meeting a handful of people with whom we share interests and goals.”

That’s from Matilda Lucy (from ‘What do you measure when the metrics don’t matter?’), and it’s spot on – meeting a few people every week and pulling them into your creative orbit is what’s going to build the foundation for your work for the decade ahead.

That reply above was just a snippet. I usually write 1,000 words to folks reaching out for Email Guidance. I’m not saying I got all the answers, but I can put you on the path to finding them. The first email is free, too.