vol. 5 issue 14
Greetings,
First, thank you for being here – whether you are a paid or unpaid subscriber, you are investing time in what I have to say, and your time matters. I value that, so thank you.
I’ve been working on some new content ideas and now I’d like to share them with you. I would also like to help make navigating and sharing my work as easy as possible, because I am in a growth phase.
‘See what sticks!’
As many regular readers are aware, earlier this year, after submitting the content of docu-mental as the “job” at which I wanted to excel, I was awarded a scholarship to an online “mini-MBA” program at an innovative continuing business education program founded by NYU Stern professor, Scott Galloway. You might be familiar with “Prof G” if you listen to Pivot, the podcast he co-hosts with New York Times tech columnist, Kara Swisher. Pre-writers’ strike, he was also a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher.
This week, I completed Prof G’s Trillion Dollar Algorithm business strategy class. When I met with my TA to review what I have determined is the best strategy for growing this publication, on the plus side, I told her that even without any meaningful attempts at marketing or publicity, and with a downturn here and there, I have managed to grow my subscription list to about 1,500.
My podcasts, in the aggregate across all available platforms, have tens of thousands of downloads. I therefore conclude my content is compelling.
But, is it good enough to overcome what I fear are the potential weak spots of my strategy?
My TA told me: stop planning and start doing. See what sticks!
Busted! Historically, I have come up with many plans for marketing this publication. Reams and reams of elaborate plans…and then I never engage them. Or, I engage them only partially.
I have resisted monetizing my mind, but um, duh. I am in business. While making a trillion dollars is not my intention, making a living is. And since I was actually given an opportunity to study business with the best, it’d be stupid and ungrateful to waste it.
What’s a ‘rundle’?
Of the four business strategies we studied, I chose a “rundle”. It might sound like something a Hobbit would serve at second breakfast, but it’s actually just a portmanteau of “recurring” and “bundle”. It’s also, admittedly, cutesy-pie jargon, but we’ll go with it.
Rundles are groups of things, delivered on a schedule, that customers are willing to pay for because the rundle, in theory, makes life easier, or even better in some way.
I’m all about policy without the wonk, so, if I do my rundles correctly, they will help achieve a deeper understanding of your role in democracy at a personal, intimate level. If not making your life immediately easier, that is at least making your life better, I think.
Regardless, rundles should not make your life tedious and irritating because they are too complicated to use or understand.
I chose a rundle over the other more manufacturing-oriented strategies because a) I am not a manufacturer in the classic sense, and b) over the past 5 years, I have generated enough content to create thematic packages, including books and workshops.
The form this all takes is still under development, but I will indeed try many things to “see what sticks”!
Meanwhile, there are two parts to my growth strategy that are a bit more iffy, so I need your help.
Risky bit #1: sell what’s free
The first risky bit is that I would like to grow my paid subscriber list while not denying non-paid subscribers access to my weekly content.
Currently, of ~1,500 who subscribe to my content, less than 10% pay for a subscription. My podcasts, distributed across multiple platforms, have had tens of thousands of downloads.
In theory, then, I should have way more subscribers.
At one point, my conversion rate from free to paid was as high as 75%, which was so astounding, I was given a Substack grant to keep going. I kept up the regular content, but I didn’t sustain the momentum of growth. I couldn’t. I was too busy trying to manage and hide the chaos in my life at the time, and I was unwilling to promote what I was doing with any gusto.
Not anymore. That’s why I sought a business education.
My goal now is to hit 10,000 total subscribers within a year. That’s actually an arbitrary and ambitious number. What is not arbitrary is that within the next year, I would like to reach and maintain a 10% or higher paid annual subscription rate, whatever my actual subscriber number. Still ambitious, but I believe possible.
Asking you to pay for this content that is made freely given is counterintuitive.
What is “this content” anyway? Well, much of this journey has been about exploring the correlation between increased rates of poor public mental health outcomes, decreased personal agency, and dramatic increases in corporate and/or governmental power.
Now, I am beginning to focus on our interior process, to discover how the prescriptive thinking and manipulative policies superimposed upon our psyches have dulled our respective capacities of discernment, and how we can recover from that diminishment.
I suspect democracy needs us to get very quiet, to stop equating good citizenship with the emotionally dysregulated VOTE OR DIE noise surrounding us. “Vote your conscience” is more like it, but that requires self-knowledge.
If that appeals to you, and especially if you find what is here to be unique, then here is what the subscription page currently looks like.
Notice there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles listed. I am still figuring those out.
Getting personal
I have been advised to make my “best” content free and offer more “personal” things to my paying subscribers.
But why on earth would I ever intentionally subject anyone to writing that wasn’t “my best” or at least worthwhile? That sounds like indulgence. Blech.
Which causes me to reflect: there are nuances to what “personal” means. When I was a reporter, especially when I did a lot of video shoots, I thought I was supposed to demonstrate how I had it all together, and so therefore you should trust me.
The net result was that I made myself part of the story. I cringe when I consider how annoying this must have been to my editors and colleagues alike. May they forgive me. I hope I’ve outgrown that.
Still, this idea that it is my personal life that will drive paid subscriptions is tricky for me. First of all, who cares about what happens in my life? And, do I really want strangers to know about the darker or less solid parts? Would you trust me less?
On the other hand, as I’ve implied, I don’t just publish, I craft what I write. Everything for me here is personal. When I hear my voice in my head as it transmits through my fingers and onto the screen, I am listening intently to an interior, inchoate place where artifice can’t root. I trust you too are listening with intention when you hear my words in your head.
We are in conversation. We meet regularly. In that way, we are not strangers. We are companions on a journey. That inspires me to use the personal as a lens on what is universal so you can relate in your own way.
If you’d like to help carry the costs of these weekly adventures together, the subscription rates are amortized according to what I need to cover the cost of my time. Annual payments are especially helpful, as they make it possible to essentially plan a salary
As for the bundled, themed content when I begin offering it, I promise it will in no way be inferior to the free materials.
Risky bit #2: dropping social media
Rundles are supposedly the hardest business strategy to sell to investors because they usually involve dropping something “known” in order to focus on something that is unknown.
As my investor, either by way of your money or your time, or both, you might blanche when I tell you that what I am really anxious about and could use your support for is my intention to grow docu-mental without posting on social media.
That might sound just outright stupid – why not use what is free and reaches the masses? – so I will explain.
Long ago, with the occasional exception of LinkedIn, I quit posting on social media. I even canceled my Twitter(X) account, the one that I had had since the first week the now bedraggled social media platform actually began, the time in the mid 2000’s when I believed the Digital Age would be a liberating one (it still can be).
I believe social media is a direct threat to democracy. It certainly is a distraction and I resent it. As I have covered in here before (a potential rundle!), when we are unwittingly turned into the product as well as the consumer, as is the case with the big digital platforms, we are not free. We are digital slaves.
Meta et al use us to populate their platforms with content that attracts attention, which can then be packaged and sold without our expressed permission, to unseen others, often reprobates who are doing evil, as we saw with Cambridge Analytica.
Because Facebook is often the only way I can contact someone (because, monopoly), I am occasionally forced into using it. This is the only reason I still have an account. Ditto that for Instagram and What’s app.
LinkedIn has also leveraged its monopoly status into becoming like a utility; it is essentially an online requirement to establish legitimacy in business.
Since I also run a freelance editorial business, I keep my LinkedIn account active, too.
Substack, however, is not evil. As one of its first users, I believed in its vision from the start and even bought stock in it when it was offered (that is a disclosure). In my view, over time, Substack has only gotten better and more aligned with its content creators and their respective audiences. It does not serve unseen investors and advertisers.
The model is such that when independent publishers succeed, Substack succeeds. That is why they constantly innovate on behalf of independent publishers such as myself, and why when data is collected, it is put in the hands of those whose content drove that data to exist in the first place.
I believe in Substack’s capacity to bring me enough subscribers to thrive, without demanding I compromise my ethics or give up control over my content.
By cutting social media from my production process, I believe I will achieve and sustain simplicity without sacrificing quality.
Will doing so retard growth? Yes. At first. But I have not ever leaned into any promotional efforts, and Substack offers plenty of tools. I want to try those first.
If I fail at this, then I will reconsider (See what sticks!), but I want to give it a try.
My misgivings could mean I end up at least using LinkedIn, which is the least evil of all the platforms, in my experience.
There are lots of paid and nonpaying ways you can help me with this experimental part of my strategy.
‘Note’ and ‘re-stack’ me
If you haven’t already, you can start using Substack’s Notes and Re-stack features to share my content when you like it and think others will too.
These features are Substack’s equivalents of tweets and re-tweets or whatever one does with Xs.
Here’s what that it all looks like on a laptop dashboard, and in the Substack app:
However, if you want to post my materials on social media, Substack makes it easy for you to do so.
I appreciate your gesture, and it will definitely have a positive impact on growth, but I am not asking you to do so. Regardless, I can’t stop my work from appearing on these platforms.
Use the ‘Share’ and ‘Gift’ buttons
No matter what, please do keep sharing what you like! Use the “Share” button, which I will try my damndest to always remember to include when I post. But also, if you are inclined to share this publication with others, please consider buying them a gift subscription.
‘Recommend’ docu-mental
One of the ways Substack helps me grow my subscriptions is to allow you to help promote my content by using the “Recommend” feature. If you haven’t already, please consider doing so. Several publications recommend me already, and it really makes a difference. About 20% of my subscribers come from recommendations.
Cross post
Especially if you are a writer/publisher, and you think something I have published will resonate with your audience, please consider cross-posting it to them:
Speak up!
If you have a thought about what I have written or a podcast that I air, please add them to the comments section. These three scribbly yellow circles are, in order, how you would “like” a post, “comment” on a post, and “re-stack” a post.
If you’d like to make a suggestion, feel free to leave it in the comments section, or if you’d rather send it to me privately, reply to the email in which the content is delivered to you. I read everything and I try to respond within a few days at most.
If I don’t respond to you, chances are nearly 100% I somehow didn’t see what you wrote, so feel free to re-send it.
What comes after kookoo
In the spirit of “See what sticks!”, you can expect that I will be trying out a variety of formats, different days and times for posting, and of course, the different rundling themes.
That said, I am proud that despite all the kookoo Bananaville things I have been through, on top of all the rest of the kookoo Bananaville things we all have gone through in this world of late, I have kept a regular weekly production schedule.
I hope you will enjoy the process of creation as it unfolds, and will stick by me as I do, that you will offer your own thoughts and suggestions, and that you delight in the content. However…
If you don’t like what you see, lose interest, or just don’t seem to get around to opening and reading what I send, I wonder if maybe that’s a hard truth waiting to be faced. Face it! And that is, you’re just not that into me.
Please unsubscribe if what I send is just clutter to you. I do not want to be a waste of your time.
The place to do that is at the very bottom of the email you receive. Or, in your Substack app, go to the homepage for docu-mental, and choose from the three dots in the upper right hand corner, Manage Subscription:
And then, you will see something like this:
And you can go from there.
For future reference
I hope this was worth your time. You might even decide to keep this post on hand for reference. If you read other Substack publications, these instructions are the same for those as well. Hopefully this will make all your time spent reading what you love to read on Substack even more fulfilling because now it’s easier to share the love!
New podcast coming soon
Coming this weekend, another update, this time on the juicy podcast I have lined up for you. If you are swimming in debt and despairing as to how to get out without declaring bankruptcy, this is a podcast you will listen to and share with others. More on that this weekend…
Enjoy the full moon and I look forward to rundling with you soon!
Peace,
Whitney
Oh, Ali. Thank you!!! You have no idea how much this helps me. Plus, it made me feel less wobbly. Some days are white knucklers. Thank you!!🥰
I knew you were taking a business course, but didn't realize it was with Prof G! Congrats on that! I listen to Pivot and subscribe to "No Mercy, No Malice" and have occasionally listened to his Prof G pod. All of this sounds like you've set yourself up with some excellent marching orders. And you have inspired me to spend a little more time exploring Substack, as I too, am pretty much horrified by the awfulness of most of social media, particularly X. All the best with your business plan. And we greatly appreciate your honesty about what a shit show life can be. We've all been through those dark nights of the soul periods and your determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other is inspiring. I also personally appreciate how you've been so willing to say no to the shit that just ain't workin' and left one path for another. Those are the really tough and scary decisions. Bravo! Jane