What if you wrote five blog posts for every newsletter you send?

Most people won’t see your blog post, while the newsletter gets delivered to inboxes.

The blog is practice. The newsletter is performance.

A comic works new material, but first they write without an audience.

Some takeaways from today’s ALL EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDERS SUCK Focus Pod, where ten of us got together on a Zoom call and talked about our experiences with multiple email tools like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Squarespace, and more.

1. No one is really “doing email wrong.” A lot of people talking about their setups made it clear that the communal frustration is real. So many platforms, so many quirks, all with the usual pain points.
2. Platform vibes, not feature lists. The back and forth gave us more insight than a comparison chart or watching 12 more YouTube videos. Adult content restrictions, WordPress file upload weirdness, support loops that go nowhere, analytic blind spots… all these things come to light when get together and compare notes in real time.
3. Growth stories sound very different when told out loud. Viral posts, recommendation engines, and big numbers looked way less awesome once folks shared what actually happened afterwards, which was usually low engagement, zero paid conversions, and high churn. This felt good as it helped recalibrate what “big growth” really means.
4. Simplicity wins (for lots of different reasons). Some folks valued simple tools because they reduce tinkering and messing around with designs. Others because they reduce anxiety. Hearing those reasons side by side helped people name what they actually need from a platform, not what they think they should want.

This was a group of smart people thinking out loud together, testing assumptions, talking trash, and helping each other feel less alone in all the messy decisions we’re trying to make.

This sort of collective sense-making doesn’t translate in a recap post like this – you sort of had to be there, so consider becoming a member today!

Today I discovered dominosugarfactory.com, a site built by photographer Noah Kalina. The site features his film photographs of the Domino Sugar Factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from 2008-2013, along with his current photos when he visits his old neighborhood.

I also found rekall via Rodrigo Ghedin, which he describes as “a fairly dose of cyberpunk aesthetics.” Upon further investigation, the rekall site has been updated every night by Steve Gaynor since 2010.

I made a “Website Walk” video based on the new Gourmet Magazine, too, which I found out about via Kottke. Turns out Condé Nast didn’t renew the trademark on the magazine title, so some foodie writers bought it up and relaunched it.

This isn’t a matter of “what’s old is new again,” but rather “what worked, worked.”

Keep your domain name current, and pay your hosting bill every year, and your work survives when a platform goes down, kicks you off, locks you out, or gets bought by Yahoo (we all know how that goes).

One way to get people to subscribe to your email newsletter is to get current subscribers to share it. This is what I told Greg Nichols of Onward Industries during one of my free “BREAK UP 💔 WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” 15 minute Zoom calls.

I suggested he could interview cool people he already knows that subscribed to his newsletter. Then, when their interviews lands in their inbox, they’re probably going to FWD it to some people. It’s not guaranteed you’ll get 100 new subscribers, but hey, we’re not playing the inflated social media vanity metrics game anymore, are we?

You don’t need 100 new subscribers every month, you need 10 who give a damn.

So upon talking about this with Greg, he asked if he could interview me, and I said heck yes!

“Throughout our conversation, I asked Seth to join me in a small exercise: making tiny handmade zines as we spoke. It was a quirky way to slow down, to craft meaning, and to pull our work out of the abstraction of ideas and back into our hands. That little parallel exercise ended up being deeply rewarding—less “arts & crafts” and more re-orienting to what matters.”

Watch the full interview (along with lots of quotes and commentary from Greg) here.

Had the honor of being included in Lex Roman’s ‘Should you quit social? 7 entrepreneurs on their social media free strategies‘ article to talk about escaping social media and having a website:

Websites are overlooked as an important foundation for your work according to Seth Werkheiser. “Give them something to devour,” he said, explaining that once someone does learn about you—in whatever way that happens—you want to let them dig into your work as far as they want to go. Without a web presence that you control and with low or no social activity, they’ll hit a dead end too fast.

Let people discover new videos on your website, not just on YouTube. Your newsletter is delivery truck, so deliver your newsletter readers to your website and give your fans room to explore.

Read the full piece here.

DIRECT CONNECTION: “Speaking of RSS, I’m using it more than ever. Every newsletter I subscribe to goes into my feeds now and I made major progress unsubscribing from most newsletters that were coming into my email inbox. In 2025 I added 74 new feeds, bringing the total number of sites in Feedbin to 3,651.” Brad Barrish

CONSIDER:  “A question worth asking yourself: How would you act if you could ONLY reach the people you’ve already reached? No one new. It’s probably different than how you’re acting now… and maybe it’s better, too.” Jay Clouse

WORTH A WATCH: Via B. Paraseltzer: “I just watched this very timely interview with Chris Gethard in which he discussed getting back to independent/DIY creative movements, and getting away from platforms and social media.”

UPCOMING ESCAPE PODS!

◾ CO-WORK ESCAPE POD
Update your website, prepare for book club, clean out your inbox, or whatever else – come hang with the Social Media Escape Club and get some work done!
Tuesday, January 27
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST
REGISTER: https://luma.com/82r8ujm9

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From a recent Email Guidance exchange, helping someone clarify what their paid offering actually is. What’s the thing they want to put into the world and invite people to support?

The big thing I feel with a lot of us creative people is we think we have this OFFER than people will want, and if we just word it the right way, or promote it enough, people will flock to it and pay us for it. Even if we’re good at it! We can do this stuff, hire me!

What I’ve found is instead leaning into the thing that’s ridiculously easy for us that could be the beacon that shines for the right sort of people that need what we offer.

Rather than turn ourselves into round pegs to fit into square holes, what if we doubled down on what comes natural?

I believe when we work from a space of almost supernatural flow we’re bound to attract the right sort of clients, co-conspirators, and allies.

From my talk with copywriter & strategist Jen Baxter, where we definitely talked about going deeper with our existing audience instead of seeking more.

Instead of 10 posts, what if you just talked to 10 people? Have 10 Zoom calls with people. It’s scary—you don’t know who you might be talking to. But you can select who those 10 people are. If someone’s always commenting on your stuff, that’s probably a good person to DM and say, “Hey, can we hop on a Zoom call?”

Build that group of people to figure out and think about and knock ideas around with, instead of constantly publish, publish, publish and hope something sticks.

Watch the full interview here.