Let Go and Haul: One year of this email, quant and qual!
Week 8, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Gen did some research on funny words last year pre-TRASH, and this article was just published on it! (guaranteed 😂)
We are very much still hiring for a product designer and iOS engineer, contract to FT in NYC, Gahd it’s so hard to find good people! What a full time job hiring is! On top of all the other things! Haaaalp.
If you know anyone who might know someone, have access to an internal job board, Slack group, or newsletter, please please please hit fwd to that person or reply! ❤️❤️
This was a good week! The team is growing and it’s starting to feel like we’ve worked over a hump of communication and ‘good habits’ hurdles recently and are starting to get better at executing which is a damn good thing, because that is one of our Q1 goals.
Journal: what I learned
It’s been a year of this email experiment! Here’s an excerpt from the first one on 2/19/2018:
Hello and welcome to Hannah's Newsletter Experiment. If you're getting this, you helped me get to this prototype. Thank you for your thoughts and inspiration! You can definitely unsubscribe at any time ;-)
My goal this is to:
1. Share! I've been longing to share more about this bonkers "journey" of entrepreneurship, but have struggled to find a format that wasn't too public for some of the things I want to talk about. Hence, yer inbox. I think it's really important to give back to the communities we come from, and this is a stab at that.
2. Connect! Running a company can be pretty lonely. Working at Vine was one of the loneliest periods in my life, and it doesn't have to be that way with TRASH 🙂🙃 I especially miss my friends that live in other timezones and I hope this can be a bit of glue for us and maybe you'll even reply with your life!
3. Practice. One day, I'd really like to write the book I wish I'd had when I was starting my career. I've got a long way to go.
Quantitative learnings
That original email went to 10 friends I signed up to this thing and 100% of them opened it. Thanks friends!
I have literally not promoted this thing at all, it remains a pretty exclusive Sunday night internet club of dreams and insanity that goes to ~300 people with a 60% open rate.
I am not an expert on email, and have never seen anyone share stats with me about the emails I read so maybe you’re not supposed to do this, ha. If we were sitting in a cafe chatting, we would both leave knowing how long we’d been there and who’d done most of the talking and things like that. It’s weird not to know in this virtual world. It's also weird to know too much, or only certain things – like our follower counts. I like how Uber Conference tells me who talked the most on a call after. I always look at those stats and mentally clock if the people who spoke the most were dudes. Just cuz, dudes dominating meetings, you know, we’re all hella over it. (But I digress!)
I did some quick Googling (that is my job now, Googling things). The internet tells me this is a very good open rate. The internet also tells me more of you would read these emails if I send them on Tuesday after 12pm. I have frequently received feedback that late on Sunday night is a dumb time to send email but honestly, it’s kind of a miracle I can do it at all some weeks so I don’t care. The internet also tells me the main reason people open email is because of the sender name! That is pretty cool, because one of the main goals was to feel less lonely and like we were regularly keeping in touch :)
Qualitative learnings
For the most part, I feel less lonely. I love love love the feeling of being able to instantly connect with people I care about in other cities and we’re already on a page about what’s been happening. It’s the best connection hack ever. I can spend time hearing about your life and don’t have to recount mine (which is going at like a million miles per minute right now). I also love it when people rely or these emails spark conversations.
On the flip side though, here is a weird thing: people check in with me less. I guess I should have expected this, because well, people know what’s going on, but it is a strange side effect... In a weird but cool way it has forced me to face some of my deepest vulnerabilities, which I suppose is a good thing if sometimes uncomfortable.
I got a lot better at writing fast! At first this took me an hour or more. Now this is like a 30 min max thing. I got a lot better at note taking, thinking critically about my week, and planning.
Tinyletter must be woefully under-resourced, which makes me a little sad. Some weekends there is a lot of refreshing involved in getting this to work. And for formatting! Forget it! It is what it is haha! I feel I am in an intimate relationship with its quirks and bugs and I should probably move this to something less frustrating.
What now
Do you like this format? Is there anything you would chop or change? What about the length? I hear you like the GIFs. I think most of you are here for this personal section. I should probably look at the click through rates on things. When I have some uh, free time I'll do that. Would you be sad if this email went away? THAT is something I would very much like to know the answer to. Tell me!
Next week I’m going to write about some hot takes on long form, audio in video (oh yes), habits (including sunscreen maybe) and I want to ask you about your mornings.
Jams:
Last night I saw J Rocc with my friend Roya! Absolute epic shit. His turntablism is an absolute art. It’s so rare to see people DJ with records and I love it so much. He was pulling out all kinds of vinyl including 45s and some of that stuff was not just insanely rare but actually exclusive.
Soulection recently put out an interview with him playing Dilla tributes and he talks about the importance of keeping these records exclusive, as well as what it was like record shopping with Dilla in LA and the whole thing is just… amazing. I’ve actually listened to it 3x so I think it is a good candidate for this section.
(Sidebar: on the way out I ran into someone I know with a major job at a major record label and got to explain to them J Rocc and Dilla’s relationship… that just goes to show how we’re always learning and I so appreciated this person’s no-ego approach to seeking knowledge. If only more people could be like that!)
Ok what else! I’ve finally got round to reading the Habit book and duh, it’s really useful.
Ela found this Tweet this week that is v TRASH.