When I re-read that title I thought “Hey now, big boy. What are you suggesting?” Nope, not here to judge. Just do your thing people! :-)
Anyhoo.
I’ve also spent part of my Saturday morning rereading some old emails I’ve sent you.
I’m disgusted at the number of typos and grammatically errors, but then remembered that it’s just me. I’m not some marketing company with an army of people behind me creating and editing content.
It’s just me and you. So sorry if you’ve been put off by my inability to edit. I just crank things out and hit send.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t care, it means that I have ideas that I need to get on paper and I want to share them with you before I forget. Like writing to a friend.
Letters from outer space.
I had this crazy idea a few years back about starting a service that would send notes to people. There would be two targets:
People that just wanted to hear from someone.
Busy people that wanted to send notes to their associates, friends, and family.
I kicked it off and ran some tests and it ended up doing OK but my heart wasn’t in it.
I do think it’s an incredibly awesome idea for someone that want’s to niche down and find a few hundred or more people that would love to read notes written by someone - either imaginary or real.
Some thoughts:
Romance anyone? Love letters from an amorous distant partner.
Travel? Letters from outer space, international travel, on safari, camping, touring the U.S.
It would be a great way to build a free email list, maybe even here on Substack, and eventually turn some of your writing into products.
Over the past year this one has really been rattling around in me head. The number of people that have stayed in isolation, craving human contact, but have to turn to social media instead.
Social media is a shit show, I try to stay away from FB and Twitter now, and have really been careful to be aware when someone I don’t even know or like tries to pull me down a rat hole.
Making people feel good about themselves.
It’s all I want to do at this point. I’ve spent a lot of years working on things and had no idea why I was doing it other than to make money. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but sometime within the past 5 years or so I realized that all I want to do is make people feel good about themselves.
I do it at my day job (I’m a software product manager in the real world) and my night job where I spend my time blogging and creating things.
When I stopped treating people at work like resources and started treating them family things changed.
When I started creating products and services that brought people joy things changed.
Stop worry about money and deadlines and all the shit that is piling up around you.
Focus on you, what makes you feel good, and try to bring that to the world.
Create value, give it away, and you will eventually be rewarded. It just works that way for some reason.
I wish I knew that 30 years ago, but better late than never.
Medium
I wrote a story for Medium called I Keep Losing My Best Employees and published it on April 15th. It was selected for distribution (curated) but just laid there on the deck like a dead fish for weeks. Then yesterday I noticed a spike. I guess you never know.
But that’s a decent reminder.
Create things you like, and that (at least you think) delivers value to someone that might need it.
Create value, release it to the world, and you will eventually be rewarded.
Thank You!
As always thank you so much for being a subscriber, and tons of love to my paid subscribers because you are keeping my dream alive.
I hope things are going well for you, please reach out if I can ever be of assistance. I read and respond to every email (eventually).
Have a great weekend,
Travis