← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
From 0 to 100K: The Science of Writing, Learning & Experimentation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff
00:44:55
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- [00:00]
Ann Laura Lecompf
They feel like they need to be the experts before they start writing their newsletter. When in reality, you can use your newsletter as a way to learn, as a way to explore. You start becoming better and better at finding intersection in between what you enjoy creating and what your audience enjoys consuming.
- [00:19]
Host
That was Ann Laura Lecompf, a neuroscience researcher who also writes an incredibly insightful newsletter. And her growth journey is just as impressive. I wrote a full deep dive on an Laura's growth back in 2023 after hearing about her incred incredible journey. I recorded a full video walkthrough of that that you can listen to below. But in her first 100 days of writing her newsletter, she hit 6,000 email subscribers and had over 250,000 visitors to her website. Her Make Her Mind newsletter Now has over 100,000 subscribers as well as a community generating more than six figures every year. Since writing that Deep dive, Ann Lore has continued to impress. She has since received her PhD in neuroscience, is a neuroscientist at King's College in London, and most recently published a book called Tiny Experiments, which live everywhere. You get your books now. In this episode, Ann Laura takes us behind the scenes of her growth journey, sharing all about the 100 Day Writing Challenge and what led to that first 6,000 subscribers, the power of building in public her scientific learnings about quality versus quantity and which one you should focus on. Hint, it's not what you think and what Tiny Experiments is all about and how you can apply it to your content creation. And now let's get into this conversation with An Lore Anlore. Welcome to the show.
- [01:35]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:37]
Host
We're excited to have you, I guess to just kind of jump right into it. When I wrote the Deep dive back in 2023, I believe it was you had around 50 something thousand subscribers at the time and you had really launched the newsletter on the back of this challenge that you wrote 100 articles in a hundred days. And I was just fascinated by that. And so I'm kind of curious to jump into it. How did you plan this out and what was your goal with the whole challenge?
- [02:05]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, I actually didn't really have a goal, which was interesting for me because before then I had been very goal driven. But for this one, the only commitment I made was to show up and to write a hundred articles in 100 days. But I didn't have any aim or milestone I was trying to get to in terms of number of subscribers, fibers. It was really focused on my output. Um, so I, yeah, I said a hundred articles in a hundred days. And then we'll see what happens. We'll see if people like it and we'll see if, if I liked it.
- [02:39]
Co-Host
That's important. So with, with a hundred articles, like, did you talk us through, like, how you came up with the ideas and what you're gonna write out? Because in my head I'm like, I can't just think of hopping onto my computer in the morning and being like, okay, I'm gonna hammer out a new article, but I'm not sure what to talk about. So how did you kind of strategize and plan around that?
- [02:57]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, it was an interesting phase. So just for context, before that, I was working at Google. I left and then I worked on a startup that didn't work out and I found myself being completely lost. I decided to go back to the drawing board and just to explore something I was actually curious about. And in my case, that was the brain. I had always been curious about how the brain works and how we think and how we feel. So I was in my late 20s and I decided to go back to university and study neuroscience, which a lot of people around me were like, what are you doing? You don't become a neuroscientist at that age. It's a little bit late to get started with this. But again, I. I didn't really have a goal of becoming a neuroscientist. I just wanted to have that space for exploration. And in my studies, I discovered that thing called the generation effects that shows that by creating your own version of something you're studying, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And I felt like, that's pretty neat. I. I want to use that generation effect. And so that was the inspiration for the newsletter. And in terms of topics, that was also the mechanism for finding topics. I would generally just pay attention to things I thought were interesting, either in my neuroscientific studies or conversations with people or podcasts, or sometimes it was a tweet that I would see that would prompt something and I would all of those little data points, those nodes, put them in my note taking system. And when it was time to sit down and write the newsletter, I had this almost like a treasure trove of ideas where the difficulty was more to decide what was the one I was actually going to expand on for the newsletter versus starting from a blank page.
- [04:37]
Co-Host
That's a nice problem to have.
- [04:40]
Host
I love this because I think there's something to be said about having a natural curiosity towards something. And I Know you, you are big on curiosity. But I think when people even just starting a new newsletter or a new anything, they're just like, I don't know what to write about, I don't know what to talk about. And I'm seeing like a similarity in what you've done and what I've done and even what Dylan has done in terms of just find something you're interested in, research it a little bit, and like, publish something about it, and you start to learn and, like, go down a path that you might not have seen otherwise before doing that research. So I think there's definitely something to be said about the curiosity there.
- [05:15]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah. And the. I love what you just said about the using almost your newsletter as a way to learn. And I think this is a mistake a lot of people are making and that prevents them from getting started is that they feel like they need to be the experts before they start writing their newsletter, when in reality, you can use your newsletter as a way to learn, as a way to explore. And the, the kind of like, change in mindset that you want to have here is that instead of saying, hey, here is something I know everything about. Just read this, listen and learn from me. You can say, hey, here's something I just discovered that I thought was interesting, and I thought you might find it interesting too. Here's my take. What do you think? And in that way, you really create a dialogue and a connection also with your readers, where it's not just broadcasting whatever you think you know, but also inviting conversation.
- [06:11]
Co-Host
I think that's great because I often think, like, when you listen to people who are, you know, thought leaders in the space, it's almost like they're on stage, they're telling you something that you should know or that you should do. And it's less of a conversation, more of like a speech or like a directive from them, whereas the way you've approached it, it's more like you're sitting down in the crowd and you're talking with people and having more of the conversation where it's more back and forth, it invites replies and communication and dialogue. So I really love that.
- [06:39]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun and I've been learning a lot. And I think, you know, just also explicitly in the newsletter encouraging people to reply and say, by away, if you think this is wrong or if you have something to add, let me know. And I've had times where I wrote something and someone replied and said, actually there's been new research that came out that debunked that very thing you wrote an entire newsletter about. And. And you know, once you're past the little. It's a bit uncomfortable when you're like, I just send that thing to my entire list. Once you make it a habit to just almost be grateful for this feedback that you get. And then you can. That's the great thing about a newsletter too, is that you can in the next newsletter, say, by the way, thank you so much. This person who reads the newsletter shared this paper. I was not aware of this. Research didn't come up when I was reading the literature here. Now we know. And you can move past the embarrassment and make it a learning experience.
- [07:39]
Host
And through those a hundred articles in 100 days, I'm sure you were able to get that quick feedback loop like you're talking about. You're not waiting a week to write again to someone else. You're just like continuously sending a new article. And I guess that is a good question. Were you sending those articles daily at that point, or were you just writing five a week and then sending them once at the end of the week?
- [07:58]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, I was doing the letter. I was not. I. I didn't want to spam people. And. And generally, part of why the experiment worked for me was that I said, I'm going to write an article every day, but I didn't commit to a specific length or a level of quality. I just said, there needs to be an article that I write every day. Some articles are very, very short, just a few hundred words. Others are these deeply researched research essays where I fell into a rabbit hole. And it really helped for me to just have this confidence that every Thursday I could send a newsletter. It had five links to the five articles I wrote that week. And some of them, I think, were not that great, but there was always one of them that I felt like was really good. And so it was more like, here's what I wrote this week and here are some options. It's a bit like a menu. And. And I would highlight normally in the introduction of the newsletter, which one I was actually really proud of, and just say, hey, that's the rabbit hole. I was the most excited about this week. And so if you don't have a lot of time, that's the article I recommend reading. But I also explored those other ideas, even though I didn't have much time to go that deeply into them. Here are the links. You can read whatever feels interesting to you.
- [09:15]
Co-Host
That's really cool.
- [09:15]
Host
That's awesome. Um, and so at the End of this challenge. I looked back and you had 6,000 email subscribers in a hundred days, which is pretty crazy. I think you had a few hundred of, like, personal friends and that kind of thing before that. But overall, that's a really good number. Um, 250,000 page views to your website, which is kind of insane, actually. Obviously, you had a hundred articles written and you hit the front page of hacker news, like, four times with one leading to around 30,000 page views, which had to feel pretty crazy at the time.
- [09:48]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, it's so interesting for hearing you reading back those numbers to me now, because I don't pay attention to these things anymore, which is amazing. And I don't think it's because they don't matter. Right. It's just because I'm very fortunate that I got to a stage where my newsletter is big enough that I'm seeing a lot of the benefits of having this newsletter without having to really worry about where it gets featured or if you ask me how many page views I get right now, I just know how many subscribers I have. And beyond that, I have no idea what my numbers are at the moment. And I feel like it's amazing. It's almost like this escape velocity where at some point you don't have to be so much in the weeds anymore. So there's a bit of nostalgia listening to you telling me these numbers that I don't look at anymore.
- [10:36]
Host
It's funny, I don't. I don't look at them as much anymore either. Like, I know my subscriber count, like you said, but the page views I looked at the end of the year, and I was pretty surprised by it. So that's pretty funny to hear that. I think that's. Once you hit a certain point, like you said, like, you just kind of pay attention to other things and focus more on quality and output instead of the actual looking back numbers, if you will.
- [10:57]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Exactly.
- [10:58]
Host
So I found. I went back again into one of your Indie Hackers posts, and you had shared a link of where the traffic had come from on your Google Analytics, which I didn't find at the time when I wrote the Deep Dive, but I found it last night. And it's funny because when I did initially write the post, I thought that most of it was coming from, like, Google and that kind of thing, but from that link that you shared, over half was coming from social media. So I kind of want to, like, transition into talking about how you built in public while you were writing these hundred articles and got. You just built a really raving fan base and community on Twitter mostly. And so I just kind of want to talk through about that. Like, what is your philosophy around building in public or building with the garage door open, as you once said?
- [11:43]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, I would start sharing about my articles a lot earlier in the process than most other newsletter creators would at the time, where I would sometimes just share a couple of ideas and say, hey, I'm curious about these things. What do you think? And just by seeing the level of engagement on a tweet, I could already kind of gauge whether people might be interested. And that would not necessarily be the only data point I would use to decide whether I would write about something. Sometimes if I was personally super curious about something and nobody else cared, that's also a data point. And my own curiosity is very important. But if I was hesitating in between a couple of topics, just quick tweet could be very helpful in that sense. And then I would very often also share screenshots of drafts and so just the introduction, the outline, some ideas, and just say, I'm working on this. And again, what was great is that I could again see if people were excited. But at this stage, I had written enough that usually because it's Twitter and because we're a bunch of nerds, a lot of people would jump in and say, I love that you're writing about this. Are you aware of this book? Are you aware of this research paper? And do you know about this? Have you considered this question? Very often they would highlight blind spots or angles that are questions that I hadn't considered at all in that initial version that I wrote, and I would incorporate that in the next iteration. So not only that's what I love so much about it is that it was both kind of a marketing tool in the sense that it started raising around awareness around the upcoming edition of the newsletter even before I had started writing anything. But also it made the newsletter better. It made the content better because it was like an R D public lab that anyone could join and contribute to and share content that I could add to the article.
- [13:36]
Co-Host
Do you think there's any cons to building in public?
- [13:38]
Ann Laura Lecompf
The only one I agree with, there are so many that I've heard that I really don't agree with. People are going to steal your ideas and those kind of things. I don't agree with this. There are so many different ideas and except if you're working on something like a patented and even that like the person who's going to see it in your tweet, is not going to be the person copies it. So I don't agree with this. The one thing I agree with is that it is more work. It is actually more work, and people who say otherwise haven't really done it. If you do actually want to learn and share and build in public and be transparent at every step of the way, it is work in addition to the actual work of doing the thing. So all of those posts, for example, that you're referring to, where I went in my Google Analytics and I took the screenshots and I wrote these posts and I shared with others what I was learning as I was learning it. That was additional work on top of writing the newsletter. The fact that I would stop in the middle of writing an outline and take a screenshot, put it on Twitter and wait until people would reply and then read those additional research papers that were shared with me, that was more work also. So I think this is very important to acknowledge. And I know I have noticed even in myself that in times of my life where things got busy for other reasons, I tended to start closing the door a little bit more. Not because I wanted to be less transparent and what I was learning. And not that I didn't want to engage with people at these different stages, but I just didn't have the time and the mental space to do that extra work of learning in public.
- [15:13]
Co-Host
Yeah, I'm really glad you hit on that. You know, the idea, somebody stealing your idea and talking about the work as well. So I just. Two things I want to just comment on. I think I've heard people say, I've not come up with this, but I. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything, more or less. Ideas are obviously not worthless. But the point is everybody has ideas all the time, but if you don't execute on them and act on them, then then it's really meaningless. So I like that that you've called that out because that is a kind of a counter to somebody saying you shouldn't build in public because someone will steal your ideas. Yes, it's possible, but chances are you're going to be the. The one to who's passionate about it, who's sharing it, who's actually going to execute on it. And the other point is, I feel like the. How you said, you know, it could be more work. Would you consider that maybe you'd have to do that work at one point or another, meaning you shared it up front. It's more work to, you know, share in public, but then by doing so, you were quickly shown, say, oh, there's more resources on this topic, or there's other research here that maybe you're wrong about or that you'd have to maybe change your hypothesis or something along those lines. Whereas if you hadn't done that and just built kind of with the garage door closed, later on, you would have published what you thought was this great piece of work, but somebody would have then read it and be like, actually, there's more research on this in here. So I kind of feel like you're almost getting ahead of. Ahead of the curve there. You're doing the work basically now as opposed to having to do it later.
- [16:37]
Ann Laura Lecompf
That's interesting. Well, first, you don't have to do anything. There are so many ways to approach this. And it might actually be the case that you're okay sharing a first version in your newsletter and waiting for people to say, hey, this is wrong, and then you correct it in the next one. I think that could be a valid approach if that's intentional and that's how you decide to do it. I think also there's the risk of the planning fallacy where you add a bunch of steps in between the idea and actually hitting publish and you feel like, no, first I have to ask a question on Twitter and see if people are interested, and then I'll do the screenshot of the outline and when they share this, and then you end up having a bunch of drafts where you never finish writing them and you never actually publish them. And I have a few friends, for example, on YouTube who publish one video every like six or seven months. And those videos are amazing. But you kind of want to question, like, are you really learning as fast as you could, but. And I'm not saying you need to publish every week either, right. But there might be a middle ground. I think really the key word here is being intentional and not necessarily copy pasting what another person is doing. And why not? I mean, obviously I wrote this book called Tiny Experiments, so I. I'm a bit. I'm not necessarily objective here. I do believe this is a really good approach to just experiment with a way of doing things with your newsletter. And that might be the very open, public way of doing things, but also equally try the one where it's semi public, where maybe you just share in a WhatsApp group with fellow creators and you don't have to put it on Twitter and maybe there's another version of this and see what works for you.
- [18:18]
Host
I guess this is a great place to transition into. I saw in one of your articles written A long time ago, I think, called the science of brainstorming. You kind of had this spicy take about quantity versus quality. And you were talking about how quantity. There's actually some scientific backing to quantity being kind of important instead of just focusing on the quality of something. Do you want to talk to that a little bit or.
- [18:44]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah. They did that study that actually has become since then quite famous, where I think it was an art teacher that divided his class into two groups and asked them to. I think it was a pottery class. Don't quote me on this. I haven't read the paper in a long time, but I think it was a pottery class. And he divided them into groups and he said, you have this allotted amount of time and you need to create the, artistically speaking, the most beautiful vase or whatever, sculpture, whatever it was. And in one of the group, their strategy was to try to really, like, think together, approach it strategically, ask themselves what makes for a beautiful piece of art, and then they were like, ta da, here's the thing. And the other group, they had the more quantitative approach to it, where they just said, let's make a bunch of these little widgets, these little pieces of art, and then we'll select the one we feel like is the best, and that's what we're going to plant. And they ended up being more successful and more creative in the way they approached it. The output was actually better than what the, the first group did, where they tried to be. To really optimize for quality and to be very strategic. And there is really something, as you know, it's a. It's a metaphor, obviously, but I think it's a really good metaphor. When we think of creativity as a muscle and it does atrophy and, and you need to use it. You need to use it. You need to apply your creativity. And it's only when you do that, when you have lots of repetitions, that you also start developing your own taste, where you start noticing what works, what doesn't, and where you start becoming better and better at finding that. You know, that Venn diagram, that intersection in between what you enjoy creating and what your audience enjoys consuming. You can only do that through repetition.
- [20:37]
Host
Yeah, I think, I think there's something to be said about this. In terms of escape velocity, like you were talking about before, you start with this like high repetition thing in the beginning, and then you, you're building that muscle, and over time you can kind of pull back a little bit because you've learned some, but still continue to put out quite a Bit of content, just not at the daily pace necessarily, but you've learned over those hundred days or whatever. The challenge ends up being that like, what your audience likes, what you enjoy writing, what you enjoy reading about and learning about. So I think there is something to be said about in terms of like going harder in the beginning and then kind of pulling back a little bit once you find that perfect mode and or channel of writing. So it's interesting.
- [21:19]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah. And I would add to this that I think it can also be helpful once you find yourself in this nice comfortable routine from time to time, to reinject a little bit of experimentation and so to say, okay, I've been doing this thing in this way for a long time. It's kind of working. But what could I experiment with? Unfortunately, we very often wait until things stop working to start experimenting again. And I'm seeing that a lot with online creators at the moment with obviously a lot of websites, including mine, relied on SEO pretty heavily for traffic. And now a lot of search engines, including Google, are summarizing a lot of these articles. People are not clicking anymore. They don't come, they don't visit your website, they don't subscribe to your newsletter. Just harder to grow your audience. Right. That's just one of the examples. But a lot is changing at the moment in terms of technology, in terms of audience building. And I see a lot of people and that was my instinctive reaction too. So it's not that I'm better or anything like that. It's like we start panicking. Things are changing. I'm not ready. The system that I had that was so well oiled and worked perfectly is not working anymore. What do I do? Right. And this is why I feel like it's helpful. It's a little bit like always having something that is simmering in case of, on the, on the pot simmering, in case you have a random visitor that comes to your home and is hungry, you know, making sure you have something to serve them. Always having a couple of experiments running, even when things are going well, just so if things change all of a sudden you have those different things that you can try and that you've started already?
- [22:56]
Co-Host
Yeah, I love that metaphor. That's, that's a great metaphor. So in terms of like experiments that you've done, are there any that you go back to time and time again in terms of like, this is my favorite way to experiment or favorite experiments to, to do? Like let's take the newsletter since we're, we're talking about to People. People listening or operating newsletters and stuff like that. Any that come to mind?
- [23:17]
Ann Laura Lecompf
No, there's actually been one that I did last year where I switched to sending it every two weeks instead of every week for a few months, which I was very scared to do. But I was completing my PhD at the time and it just had become a lot during this few months. And so I decided to do that. It was completely fine. It was fine. Nothing bad happened. The newsletter kept on growing exactly at the same pace. I think very few people actually noticed. I had a few people who emailed and said, hey, where's this week's edition? But very few. When you look at the number of subscribers I have and my open rates, the fact that so few people noticed that I didn't send a newsletter, which really shows, right, that I, I think my newsletter is this very important thing, but it's really not. It's just a part of their week and when they get it, they read it and happy to learn something new, but if it doesn't come, they're very busy with other things and they're not going to run around screaming, where is the newsletter? I didn't get my, my newsletter, so it was fine. That was one experiment. Then I went back to. To weekly. But in general, and I think that's also what' to keep in mind when it comes to experimentation in your creative work is that it's also completely okay to intentionally say, for now I'm going to stick to what works and I'm going to experiment in other areas. And I know that personally, the past year has been quite intense in terms of work. So I have also intentionally decided to not experiment too much with what was working with the newsletter, the website and the community. And I've been experimenting more with stuff around my health. So trying to go to bed at the same time, trying meditation, trying to take more walks outside, and those kind of things, which may seem like they're not related to your creativity, but they're very much related to your creativity. And so I'm sticking to this regular schedule with the newsletter, but I'm experimenting a lot in terms of taking care of my mental health.
- [25:19]
Host
It's all about different seasons, right? Like you think, we always think, oh, just publish every week, publish every, publish something great every week. You have to stay consistent. You have to do this. And I think there is something about that. But there's also something to be said about giving yourself some space to be able to almost miss the work again, right? So, like, after you do it for A long time. There's something to be said about taking a little bit of a. Maybe not a quality break, but maybe republishing something that did well in the past that, you know, is valuable and giving yourself that. That mental space. I think there's something to be said about that 100%.
- [25:53]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah.
- [25:54]
Host
You're talking a lot about tiny experiments. And I did not get a chance to read the book ahead of time, sadly. But I'm excited to read it. Can you give us a little bit of a taste of what that means in terms of maybe a content creator or something like that?
- [26:07]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah. The way I describe how to design a tiny experiment in the book is simply to choose an action and a duration for you to perform that action. So an experiment is really saying. And that's the difference with a habit, a habit you say, I'm going to do this thing for the rest of my life. Whereas with an experiment, you say, I'm going to do this thing for this specific period of time, and I'm going to withhold judgment until I'm done collecting that data. And when I'm done collecting that data, I will make a decision as to whether I want to keep going or I want to tweak it or I want to completely stop that thing. And so for. In the context of a newsletter, for example, you could say, for the next month, I'm going to go for a longer essay that I put directly in the newsletter instead of the links that I normally send out. Right. Or if my newsletter is usually an essay, maybe I will switch to links for four weeks and just see what happens with my audience. Right. I saw Paul Millard, for example. He did an experiment when he was on pattern leave and he just said, for. I can't remember the number of editions, but he didn't write his own newsletter. He just asked friends to write it for him. And that was the newsletter. And so that was an experiment that he run, which. So there's a scale, Right. In terms of the different things that you can do, you could. Some people, they're scared that if they have sponsors in their newsletter, people are not going to like it. Instead of saying, now I have sponsors, you can say, this is an experiment. For the next six weeks, we're going to have six different sponsors and we're going to see how that goes. Right. So that's what a tiny experiment is, is saying, I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to do it for this specific duration. And just like a scientist that doesn't Start analyzing the data as they're collecting it. You wait until the end, and at the end, you decide whether that worked or not.
- [27:57]
Co-Host
I love that. I think that's really smart. It's. I'm. You've already sold me on the book just by that description of it. And it made me think you've got atomic habits and tiny experiments kind of on these two different ends of the spectrum. For, like you said, you start a habit to improve your life for the rest of your life. But I. To me, that's very overwhelming. I'm like, I want. If I want to make a change, I want to see how it actually impacts my life or my newsletter instead of, like, committing to that change, you know, for now in perpetuity. So I really like that.
- [28:28]
Ann Laura Lecompf
I love that you're mentioning yes, and I love that you're mentioning habits, because habits can be good or it can be bad. But the problem is that when it comes to good habits, we just assume that something that is good for other people is going to be good for us. Right. And I see that a lot. I'm going to just keep, like, you know, just focusing on newsletters, for example. You're going to see that someone is. Is running their newsletter in a specific way, and you're just going to say, that's what I'm going to do. Now this becomes my new habit. I'm going to take this habit and make it mine. What I recommend doing is having an experiment and running that before you turn it into a habit. And an experiment can become a habit, so you can actually use both. But before you commit to it, try it and see if that thing that worked for another person also works for you.
- [29:15]
Co-Host
Yeah, I could see that being very useful.
- [29:18]
Host
I really like that. I did actually read a part of the book because you have a free chapter up on your site, and I think this relates, and it stuck out to me, and I can't stop thinking about it. So I want to just read a quick excerpt, if you don't mind. So you said linear goals breed competition and isolation. When everyone around us is climbing the same ladder, scrambling over one another, become competitive for all the wrong reasons. Even when we think of goals as our own individual ladder, we look at others on theirs and race toward the top. And so you're just kind of like, pulling out this thing, like you think this is your race, but you're looking at everybody else on the same path and kind of doing the same things, even though it feels like your race. I. I just. I love this. So I don't know if you want to expand on that at all, but I did want to call that out because it was just so insightful.
- [30:02]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yes. That's the problem with linear goals. When you have this very clear vision, this clear plan, and this outcome that you're trying to get to is that we're all doing that in parallel. As if you can picture a bunch of parallel ladders that we're all climbing at the same time. And we keep looking left and right and asking ourselves, am I going fast enough? Am I doing this right? And you know, oh, this person is. Is more successful than I am. And. Or you might have FOMO and all of those different feelings. Right. And the reason why is because we're pursuing very similar versions of those goals, and so we're all climbing in the same direction. Social media also doesn't help at all with this, where there's this leaderboard where we can actually see where everybody is on which rung of their. Of their ladder and where we are, and we can compare ourselves to each other and compare our success to each other. Whereas when you have less of a linear approach and more of an experimental approach, you're just going through cycles of experimentation. This is your own cycle of experimentation, you say, that's my hypothesis. This is the thing I want to explore. I'm going to run this experiment, I'm going to collect my own data, and based on that data I collected, I'm going to make decisions about where I want to go next. But because of that, my series of cycles of experimentation are going to look nothing like yours. There's really no way I can compare my success to yours because we're in our own little sandboxes trying different things. Right. Instead of trying to climb a ladder. And. And there's also a less binary definition of success because you're not trying to get to a specific number of subscribers. You're not trying to get to a specific definition of success that everybody has. You're just trying to learn more about yourself, about your work, about the world. And you're trying to just iterate your way to something that feels good. And so that's your own definition of success.
- [32:00]
Co-Host
I think that's really important to call out because in the newsletter world, we see these vanity metrics like subscriber count, and we've referenced, you know, you've got, I think, 100,000 plus subscribers on your newsletter, which is. Which is admirable. But you and I may not have the same goals, so is kind of a. It shouldn't be something that I'm necessarily looking to when I'm, you know, wanting to grow my newsletter. Because our goals might be different. The way we monetize might be different. Our audiences might be totally different. So I really like that you've. You've called that out. I want to ask you actually, a little bit about growing your newsletter. And you. You've said how you've been very busy in the past year with writing the book, and I believe you just finished your PhD. Like, you've. You've completed that?
- [32:42]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yes.
- [32:43]
Co-Host
Yes. Congratulations.
- [32:44]
Host
Huge.
- [32:45]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Thank you.
- [32:47]
Co-Host
So grown, grown, a community, a newsletter, PhD, and. And now about to be a. An author, A published author. So congratulations on all that. So I kind of. I feel like the question is, like, at least the question I have in my mind is, how do you do all of this? So I know some of this now you've got the luxury of having this huge backlog of content that you can pull from for your newsletter. But how did you manage, let's go back maybe four or five years. How did you manage publishing, writing, and your community all at the same time? What did a typical day look like? Were you doing it all alone or did you have help?
- [33:25]
Ann Laura Lecompf
At the beginning, it was just me. And it actually wasn't too hard because at the very beginning, I was just writing the newsletter and I was consulting and freelancing and building a bunch of little side projects and learning how to code. So and I was really just optimizing for exploration. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I was. I was doing all of these things in a way that felt actually very free and didn't feel like I had too much work. It started becoming a bit more complicated to manage when I started the PhD. Like, that's when it's. That's when I realized, oh, doing this PhD while also writing about things that are actually different from what I study and my academic research also is going to be a bit of a challenge. And that's when I hired. I hired people to help me. And so now I have three people working with me that manage different parts of the business, and they're absolutely amazing. I could not do what I'm doing right now without them. I have one person who manages all of the partnerships and sponsorships for the newsletter. So anytime someone is interested in sponsoring the nestlabs newsletter, I don't even. I just trust this person to manage it. And they know exactly the kind of sponsors are okay, and the ones that are not. So they're managing all of this. And then I have someone who manages our community and our social media for the Nest Labs account who's also amazing. She schedules all of the events, she answers questions, she creates conversations. And I only show up in the community once a month, office hours, virtual meetup type of thing where we just have a conversation together with whoever in the community wants to show up. But it's very little work for me. And because of that, I still have a lot of joy and just showing up once a month and having those conversations. And then I have an executive assistant that's helping with the mess that my inbox is because I use the same email address to send a newsletter that I use for everything else. And I still haven't fixed that. So I have 100,000 people who have my email address.
- [35:32]
Co-Host
Wow, that's a busy inbox.
- [35:35]
Host
I feel that pain. It's a great thing in the beginning because people can easily reply and find you, but over time it's like, wow, this is because people just like subscribe me to a newsletter that I never signed up for and I'm like, that's not really great. Thank you, but no thank you. That's so fascinating. So are those three people all full time?
- [35:59]
Ann Laura Lecompf
No, only one of them is full time and the other ones are part time.
- [36:02]
Host
I guess now after, you know, you've built your newsletter to a hundred thousand plus subscribers, which is crazy. Congrats. Are you like, how did you go from that 50k to 100k? I'm sure that's a loaded question, but is there any, like, any strategies that stood out or is it just you hit that escape velocity and you've been doing this for long enough that people are sharing the newsletter.
- [36:24]
Ann Laura Lecompf
I think it's a lot of that. A lot of people are just sharing it. There's word of mouth. I also am at a stage now where in which the PhD studies helped a lot, where I do have. Have developed certain knowledge around certain topics. And so I do get invited also to podcast conversations like the ones we're having right now, and, and also to speak at events. And those are always amazing opportunities to connect with a new audience that might not have heard about me. So I would say, actually. So, yeah. So to answer your question in a more useful way, I would say that in the past few years, connecting with other creators has probably been my biggest source of growth and collaborating together sometimes. That's the thing though, is that we never called them cross promotions, because I never really did cross promotions, but by just by virtue of becoming friends with fellow creators and they might be working on the project. I'm super happy to put it in my newsletter. They will then put something. You know, when my book comes out, I have quite a few friends who offered, I didn't even ask and who said, tell me. When the book comes out, I will put it in my newsletter. I will post about it on Twitter, on our Instagram. And it's just because we've been supporting each other over the years. And so that would mean that would be. If I had to give. And I'm not. I don't really like giving advice about these things because it's just so different and there's so many different ways of going about it. But if I was to give a piece of advice, here is, if possible, to reach out to other creators who are at a similar stage in your journey and just connect and maybe have a call together and share what you learned and, yeah, make friends, whatever comes out of it. At least you'll have new friends, which I think is a good thing.
- [38:09]
Co-Host
I think.
- [38:10]
Host
Yes. I think I, I think I harp on this every single week in my newsletter. Like, I'll go through all the, the things people are doing. I'm like, but don't forget to build relationships, because it's the most important thing. So I 100% agree with you on this one. And I think it's, it's awesome that you called that out. Um, it's. It's so important and it's so overlooked because it's not like the shiny thing of, like, how to grow your newsletter, but it is the one that's going to be the most sustainable over time. I think that's the keyword.
- [38:36]
Co-Host
Yeah. Sustainable, right?
- [38:39]
Host
Definitely.
- [38:39]
Co-Host
And I say that because social media is a great way to grow a newsletter as well. But the sustainability of showing up day in, day out, over and over and over, whether it's posting, engaging or commenting, can be very taxing after a while. And that's where people often get burnt out. Chanel, you got burnt out last year, right? By posting on social all the time when you first started. So I like the relationship aspect of this. So I'm really glad and Lord that you brought this up because I think that's really important and it, it almost is something that is hard to burn out from. Like when you're meeting people, you're getting excited by these conversations you're having. You're not necessarily doing with an ulterior motive of, hey, maybe they'll support me later. It's just. No, we're just gonna chat and see where the road takes us. So I think that's a really sustainable way to do these, these types of. Not even growth strategies, but just like growing of your community and network, for lack of a better term. But I don't mean that in the, this lazy networking way. No.
- [39:32]
Ann Laura Lecompf
And, and thanks for using the, the word sustainable. And also, yeah, really point out, I generally have never really connected with someone in the hope that at some point they will put something in their newsletter that would be such a long game that I, I'm just, I feel tired just thinking about it. Right. And so I think really when you connect with people, the only thing you should be thinking about is would I, if we were to find ourselves in the same city at some point, would I be excited to grab a coffee with them and just catch up? And I think that's a good heuristic. If that's the case, then reach out, have that conversation, make a new friend, and then see what happens. You know, I have people who have helped me with things with the book launch that I actually connected with for the first time maybe six or seven years ago in a completely different capacity where there was no way for me to predict actually something really cool could come out of it six or seven years later. But the reason I connected with them in the first place was just because I thought they were interesting regardless of what they were working on at the time. So I think that's the mindset you want to have when you approach people. Just would I want to be friends with them? And if that's all that comes out of that, if I have a new interesting friend, would I be happy with just that? And if that's the case, go and make the ask, send the dm, make the connection and yeah, make that new friend.
- [40:49]
Host
You never know when the serendipity is going to happen. Could be years and years, decades later. Even so it's just a great, I don't know, building relationships is just like the best thing. I think you can take it throughout your life. Even if tomorrow you were to stop the newsletter and do something completely different, I think it would still be valuable for you. So definitely interesting to see. Okay, so I guess we're coming up here towards the end. I kind of want to ask you these days, like, are you, are you using any, like just digging into your tech stack, if you will, in lack of a better terms. But are you using like a notion? Are you still using roam research like you used to? Like, how do you keep track of all your Ideas and content and that kind of thing.
- [41:35]
Ann Laura Lecompf
I'm still using Roaming. I hope it never goes away because I have so much stuff in there. So I'm still using Roam. I know my team are using Notion. Literally everybody on my team is using Notion except for me, which is really funny. So they send me dashboards, they send me links, things to review and I reply in an email like a grandma and I say, yeah, I like that on row number three. I think I would do it differently. And it's really funny because I, I, I write a lot about pkm and I actually love Notion as a team and a product, but I think it's just because I'm an ex Googler and all of my habits are so deeply ingrained around the Google Suite and Google Sheets, Google Docs and all of that that I never really made the switch to Notion because I think I'm a power user of these tools and I can do most things that Notion can do I can actually do with the Google Suite, so, so that's probably why I never switched. So we use Notion at Nest Labs. I'm the only one who doesn't.
- [42:42]
Co-Host
You show your Google Docs in the Notion pages?
- [42:45]
Ann Laura Lecompf
I do, I do that. I just send them the Google Doc and they, they have a lot of freedom in the way they manage their work and I don't really care what stack they use, so, so yeah, I'll just share the information in a format that makes sense for me and then they, they just run with it and do whatever they want to do with it.
- [43:02]
Host
And your newsletter is. Are you on kit? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's what I thought. Very cool. Any other interesting tools you found recently that you're like really excited about?
- [43:12]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Well, I mean, you're probably going to have every single person on your podcast mentioning this, but yes, absolutely. I am using Cloud, I am using Chat GPT, everybody else is. And yeah, no, and they're very super helpful. They're just saving me a lot of time and processes, brainstorming different approaches for projects. Absolutely love them. I don't think I'll say anything new about them in the next few minutes that we have, but yeah, I've been using Canva to design a lot of the visuals and actually they have a really good generative visual AI in canva that I've been using for the designs for the newsletter also, so that's kind of cool. And so if you don't get the result you want from ChatGPT, go and try Canva for this. Their AI is actually quite nice and I think that's it. I'm pretty actually pretty old school with my stack. I like when things work and I like being able to focus and explore without having to worry about zapier integrations.
- [44:12]
Co-Host
Yeah, fair.
- [44:14]
Host
Oh yes. I just cringed when you said that word.
- [44:18]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Having.
- [44:18]
Host
I got an email this morning that one of mine broke. So yes, I feel the pain.
- [44:23]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Yeah, I know.
- [44:26]
Host
Awesome. Well, this was so much fun. And Laura, thank you for coming on the podcast, everybody who's listening, make sure you go check out the Tiny Experiments book. It is out now and you can go order it wherever you order your books from. So thanks again for coming on the show. This was really, really great. Appreciate you.
- [44:43]
Ann Laura Lecompf
Thanks so much for having.