Why I am excited about newsletters
Pro tip: if you have a company that makes 39 BILLION dollars a year profit, don’t waste money on a functional customer service department. Customers are only giving you their life stories and if they lose those, they can just make more! Save your money for a ranch in Hawaii, where you can have cows and feed them macadamia nuts and give them beer.
How many times has your Facebook been hacked? How helpful was the Facebook service department? I once used Instagram as a way of recording and sharing a friend’s historic first public concert. Big mistake. The next day my account was closed. No reason given. The video was/is gone as are the photos I had posted there.
The AI and algorithms of Facebook/Instagram are wasting more and more of my time. Twitter:no.
So, keeping things positive, I am now commed to running newsletters. Starting out slow, my first is called LynnV8, a collaboration with the mastermind behind Picaisso. Cars are our theme, specifically using Lynn’s AI skills to create 3D models of historic, classic and imaginary cars. More information of all kinds will be provided. This newsletter will be subscription only.
Subscription! You mean I have to pay? In the case of LynnV8, yes.
Here’s why: great newsletters require time. Some newsletters are free and they hopefully have the good fortune to have reliable sponsors or an active tip jar.
But, the key to success is for people to know that the newsletter provides value- and they open it! This is a slight exaggeration, but I would rather have 50 paid subscribers who open their email newsletter every time, than 500 subscribers, only about 10% who open.
Lynn and I hope to provide enough value to car fans that the subscription is worthwhile.
If LynnV8 is well received and we bring in enough money so that we can move to Hawaii, we would not do that, but we would be able to start other newsletters that could be free. And we could actually pay writes whose work we really really like!
Kueh is the name of another newsletter being planned. The other is called Maith and is meant to demystify new technologies like Augmented Reality and onchain services.
Of course, these newsletters are not meant to compete with Facebook or Instagram. What they will do is provide trustworthy, interesting and fun information. If subscribers interact and contribute, another dimension will be added. But for now it is one day at a time and we are still at the bottom of the learning curve. Zoom! Zoom!
PS I am using the beehiiv newsletter platform. When I asked beehiiv about a technical issue, they referred me to Tinker Solutions. Both companies have provided me with outstanding service: promptly and patiently explaining the answers to all of my newb questions. They have a ton of online resources, but of course I had to find a topic that has not yet been covered. I am sure they will maintain this level of quality even if they reach the point where they can feed their cows macadamia nuts.
PSS Even though I do pioneering work in GeoPose AR/ the real metaverse, Meta has yet to impress me enough to call it anything but Facebook.
