My name is Grace. For my 10 subscribers, thank you for your blind leap of faith and for subscribing to my newsletter. This is the first issue. Let’s go!
If you remember, I said this would be a weekly newsletter - Sorry, I lied. I write very slowly. A monthly cadence will allow me to understand fully a lot of things that happened, and share with you the best I can.
So what is in my newsletter? I will share my trials and errors, learnings, progress, and results as a creator.
Medium
I published 4 articles on Medium in late August and September.
The best-performing article is Is Running A Job Board Really Worth it? It is a deep dive into the job board business, in both financially and operationally.
I was very interested in it at the beginning because this business could have high profit margins. I even created a prototype - a job board for data scientists and machine learning engineers - and showed it to a fellow creator on Twitter (Thanks Pauline!) and asked her for feedback. But eventually, I realized, I was just not interested in running this business yet. There was no intrinsic motivation.
I even bought a domain for this potential job board business - ilovedata.io, but currently, I’m parking this domain until I stumble upon an idea I would love to pursue. If you have a better idea and are willing to take over the domain, let me know.
The article Going From a Software Engineer To a Project Lead was originally a book idea. But I wanted to see whether this topic was a book-worthy one. I wrote an article to test out the market. Honestly, its performance is better than I thought.
From the above, you may notice that it had almost no view for the first 2 weeks, despite the Medium curators distributing it. It only shot up 2 weeks after that.
An editor from a publication found this article and asked me whether I would like to publish in their publication with over 185k engineers. Of course yes! I would love that.
So you see, sometimes if you read too much from the early signals, you may give up too soon. Or, a lot of successes are just the products of one-off luck like this. Keep sowing seeds, and increase the possibility of getting struck by luck.
A lot of readers added this article to their lists. It is very interesting. Maybe they think this article has value to revisit from time to time?
So, is this article book worthy? I think, yes. Based on the open rates, claps, and other engagements, it looks like filling a gap that is not being talked about.
TallyCoin - An iOS app for tracking chores and rewards
If you’ve followed me for a while on Twitter, you know I have been building this app for a while … for my kids, really. Then my friends started to use it.
My kids and I use it every day, to keep track of their rewards for being diligent little helpers at home. Because I’m very close to the users (me and my kids), this creates a very short feedback cycle. This enables me to improve them frequently.
This app is free. I had the In-App Purchase code ready in my git branch, but I hesitated to turn it on.
My best friend in China loves this app, so she told all her colleagues at work. They all downloaded. The other day, she did a poll with them: what they thought about paying for this app. They all said, please don’t charge it. 😅 They love the free app as it is.
I’m also open to other monetization ideas, but I hate ads.
Redac - a macOS app for making Redacting Info In Images Easier
Redac was a “small bet” of mine: I built it in 3 days and put it on Gumroad. How it went viral was a pleasant surprise to me.
I first posted on the Small Bets community, and some people gave me a lot of valuable feedback.
I posted on Reddit r/SideProject, and people were congratulating me for building this. This was a surprise, 😅. Redditors are usually direct with criticism.
3 days later, someone paid $1. I tweeted about the $1. The first dollar, to creators, is a big deal.
Then, a follower with a lot of followers retweeted the first tweet. The original tweet gained social proof instantly. That morning, I was shopping with my husband at a Walmart. I looked at the notification count on Twitter, turned to my husband, and said “Something went viral on me“.
That tweet was hot for a few days after that.
This was an amazing experience. I gained many followers. A few people paid $1. Some people paid $5. One person paid $10. A lot of people provide feedback on functionalities, security, versioning, etc.
I still have some critical features that I’m working on. I will keep it posted on Twitter.
Learnings
The Small Bets Community provides valuable talks. In September, I went to a few talks and got to learn the secret of some prolific creators -
Publishing books on Amazon
Publishing on Medium
Building an audience on LinkedIn
Being able to access these people in this community is another huge benefit.
Reading
I dug out my husband’s old textbook in college - The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. This book was published in 1918, but to this day, there is great advice for writing well. It is a tiny book, but so precious.
I’m also in the middle of reading Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It narrates what happened on Wall Street and inside the government during the 2008 Finacial Crisis. It has been fascinating to read.
One interesting fact I learned is many officials in the Treasury department were actually Wall Street veterans. What does it mean? Go figure. 😄
I left the corporate world in early September. I did a lot of life adjustments in the past month: slowing down the pace, exercising more, and spending more time with family and friends.
A mental shift has been the biggest. I found happiness is so short-lived. Happiness needs to be pursued. It is so easy for us to chase after goalposts (for example, climbing corporate ladders, gaining followers, or getting more sales) one after another to sustain happiness.
Instead, joy is what I need and I can simply have: just simple contentment. This keeps me grounded every day.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about the first issue of this newsletter. Happy to answer any questions. See you in a month! 🙂
Finding out I am one of the first 10 subscribers is exciting!
Is the "10" number in this article even a dynamic one? In other words, if yet another person subscribed, would it become 11? Also I wondered, when the first subscriber came in, did he/she see the singular form of the countable noun "subscriber"? :-D
I came here from your medium post on inflation. Infrequent but high quality, curiosity-driven content is *the best*. There are no shortage of hot takes on the Internet!