The First Fifty Days of Thinking Ahead: Behind the Scenes
Reflections on the first fifty days of this newsletter. Numbers! Graphs!
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always liked posts/articles/newsletters that give you a sense of the nuts and bolts of a blog/publication/and so on.
How many people actually read it? Is it growing? Where are the readers coming from?
The likes and comments that all readers can see can give you an idea, but they’re proxies at best.
So, here’s a glimpse behind the scenes of Thinking Ahead. Why now? For no other reason than ‘I liked the alliteration of first and fifty’.
Subscribers
89 at the time of writing. The neurotic voice in my head is slightly annoyed it’s not 100, which would have been 2/day. 89 is a (very) far cry from the tens of thousands of subscribers for some of Substack’s most popular newsletters. Comparison is the thief of joy, isn’t it? Fifty days, on the other hand, isn’t a very long time. Each and every subscriber is highly appreciated.
It’s heart-warming that 89 people (so far?) take time out of their day to read what I write. (Two people have unsubscribed over the course of these fifty days.) It’s especially pleasant to see that the opening rate for this newsletter sits comfortably between 50 and 70%. I have no clear benchmark I’m aiming for, but I’m pretty happy with that. Also, many of you are quick on the trigger. You check your e-mails regularly, I think. Traffic spikes each time I send something your way.
Sources
There are a few surprises here.
By far most of my views come from ‘direct’. That makes sense, that’s the e-mail readers and people who go straight to Thinking Ahead from their browser. It’s also nice to see that that’s where most of my subscribers came from, although I don’t know how non-subscribers get an e-mail to subscribe in the first place. Except that some subscribers might have shared it (if that’s you: thanks!). Direct also includes people coming here straight from their browsers. Again, I don’t really know how they know about Thinking Ahead, but happy to see it nonetheless.
Nice thing number two: a lot of people landed here via my Medium writing. (Hello, Medium people. Thanks for stopping by!) This is even number two in terms of new subscribers.
LinkedIn is a slightly unexpected source of visitors. This could either be due to a few newsletter posts about branding and productivity, or because there are a few active groups on LinkedIn where I’ve linked to a post or two.
People come from Twitter too. In contrast to other ‘Substack insight things’ I’ve read where people state that a lot of their subscribers come from Elon Musk’s new blue bird, not a lot of Twitter visitors subscribe to Thinking Ahead. Am I doing Twitter wrong? Should I push Thinking Ahead harder/less hard on there? I don’t know, you tell me.
Feed it back
If I would have been more marketing-minded, this is where I would list ‘the top lessons I’ve learned from running a newsletter’. But I don’t think I’ve earned such a grandiose section title yet. Thinking Ahead is, by all possible metrics, a baby newsletter. So far, it’s been mostly random things I thought about and/or found interesting.
I wonder if it’s worthwhile to bring more structure into it? Something like recurrent topics (along the lines of the monthly nuggets I do now)? Whaddaya think?
Also, frequency-wise, this is about the best I can manage on top of all kinds of other stuff. Oh, and a day job. Then again, I don’t think more is necessarily better. One newsletter/week seems like a decent compromise. I'm not making big commitments, though, that would only give me more stress I don’t need.
I’m also struggling a bit with how to get more eyes on Thinking Ahead. It would be disingenuous to say that that doesn’t matter. People start a newsletter to have it read, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Yet, I can’t help but feel (too?) pushy when adding share, subscribe, or comment buttons, or when posting about Thinking Ahead on other platforms. Maybe that’s just me. Any tips would be welcome here…
As always, thanks for reading.
On to the next 50.
I like that "comparison" quote :)
I have a PhD in cognitive psycho physiology. I’ve very much enjoyed your article on personality. I look forward to reading more. Your five factor personality test makes more sense than Myers’s Briggs, hmm I’m INT/FP splitting on thinking feeling characteristic.
I’ll be back for more. I found you on Medium.