Lesson 13: Letting Randomness Work For You
Lesson of the Week:
The Role of Randomness
Louie and Chris internalized the role of randomness in our creative projects from Daniel Vassallo’s course “Portfolio of Small Bets.”
Most people assume that the world is predictable and that results are guaranteed if you follow a plan well enough. Daniel says that the real world is usually not like this.
Success is mostly randomly determined.
Power Laws and Pareto’s Law dominate in many creative fields and entrepreneurship. With such wide ranges in outcomes, the vast majority fail.
But the successes have huge upsides. The winners can pay for all the losses.
Venture Capital is a good example of this. Most businesses fail, so venture capitalists pepper their investments across many businesses; the few that succeed pay for all the losers. The film industry is another example. The studios may fund many films only to have a few make all their money. Venture Capitalists and Film studios don’t put all their eggs in one basket.
So what does randomness have to do with newsletters? Well, newsletters fall into that same type of creative work and business world that the VCs and Film Studios have figured out how to tame.
Instead of fighting randomness, let randomness work for you.
To give yourself as many opportunities as possible to succeed with newsletters and to take advantage of randomness:
Consistently publish every week.
Breaking up your newsletter into modules can give you multiple chances to succeed each week
Multiple shares within each module also create more opportunities.
Make your newsletter skimmable so that the losses can be skipped and your winners can pay for those losses. Have clear delineations between modules. If your reader is getting bored, make it easier for them to skip ahead than delete.
Keep the effort bar low - remember effort alone does not determine success. You can spend 10 hours writing your newsletter and it could still be a miss. Your modules should be on content that you regularly consume to reduce that effort and make it easy. Surprisingly this seems to increase your odds of producing hits.
Positive feedback tells you where to focus. When you are winning, it’s easy to double down, you need to get to some writing and some shares that are winners. Then you can figure out what works and take advantage and produce more of that.
The goal of any newsletter ought to be to provide something of value to your reader in every issue; by doing that, you will become top of mind to your readers and create opportunities for yourself.
A Little Shameless Self-Promotion
For those who are already convinced that a newsletter is valuable and want to start one or fairly recently started one, The Newsletter Launchpad Cohort 2 will start on September 13th. There are only two days left to sign up.
Our live course will go deeper on these concepts, and the goal will be to publish your newsletter weekly and get direct feedback from us and the community. You will get the content flywheel spinning and get the reps in. We will focus on removing the obstacles until publishing a newsletter is easy, and then we work on improving your newsletter.
Louie and Chris will give personal feedback on the first four editions of your newsletter. In the live classes, we will workshop your newsletters - suggestions on modules, highlight IPO-able ideas, and clarify your arguments.
You will also be a part of a community of people that want to succeed with newsletters long term.
Newsletter of the Week:
Josh Spector’s For the Interested, comes out every week on Saturday. He shares 5 pieces on content creation and 2 pieces of his own content (tweets or essays). He has another module that’s sponsored content, which is usually tools that he uses. And he ends with a quick final lesson.
On top of this weekly newsletter, he sends a daily email - one short share of useful or inspiring content. This is optional, you can opt-out of the daily. But it’s so short.
Josh Spector is increasing the chances of you finding something useful through him. And he makes it low cost, low downside. If you find one interesting thing a week out of all the items he’s shared, he will probably gain credibility with you.
His content is easily consumable and you can opt-out. It’s high upside, low downside. He’s letting randomness work for him.
Tip of the Week:
Form a newsletter mastermind group with other early newsletter creators. Not only can you share feedback, but you can all learn from the experiments the other members conduct.
Thank you for reading. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend or two.
Louie & Chris
P.S. you can respond directly to this email. We read every reply. We'd love to hear from you.