✊ Educating myself, shipping product and the anxiety of recurring costs

Hey there 👋

First off, sorry I didn't send the email last week.

I was looking to switch platforms, and Revue made it hard to export the subscribers list. Once I got the list, they made it hard to automatically add new subscribers to the new platform (beehiiv)

Took me a couple of days to sort things out. 

But then the deadline for my writing course started to loom large, so I spent most of my time there.

I did release the course last night, now waiting for responses from the students🤞

I am biased but I think it's top notch 🙈

• 7 hours of video

• 166 slides

• 104 page e-book

• Detailed walkthroughs and lessons on every type of writing we have to do in 2022.

• Including blog posts, newsletters, Twitter threads, landing pages, you name it!

• Breakdowns of Copywriting and Storytelling principles and how we can apply them.

• Practical techniques to find your unique writing voice.

• How to build a regular writing habit.

• And how to never suffer from writer's block ever again.

• 29 Exercises for students to put all the theory into practice.

• Lifetime Community Access to get feedback and support.

As 1 of the students said, it surprised them how packed the course is.😅

My wife also helped me make a swanky cover for the course:

Looks neat, doesn't it?

(She wants 20% commission on every sale now 😅)

Shipping Product and Self Education

I feel a sense of emptiness now since shipping the product.

It had consumed me for the last 6 weeks. It's all I could think about during this period. And now that I'm done I'm not sure how to proceed.

I'm taking a little breather before jumping into building my next product. 

Want to spend this time educating myself. Few ways I'm doing that:

• Joined Daniel Vassallo's Small bets community, and it feels like a university I always wished for.

• Finishing off Josh Spector's 2nd Skill session, it's about content curation. The first one helped me write my most successful blog post ever. I hope the 2nd one allows me to improve my curation game.

• Want to learn Google Ads, will try out the free stuff on YouTube, if it doesn't work then will buy a paid course. Let's see.

I'm also going to build more systems and processes around all the work I do.

Right now all of it feels like I make a long To-Do list every week and just focus on 1 item after another.

I need more processes.

Recurring Costs

As I think of building processes, I realize that I will have to pay for software.

I realized I end up benefiting the most from the products I pay for, be it knowledge products or software products.

So free stuff isn't going to be as effective for me.

Software products I already pay for:

• Zlappo for Tweet scheduling

• Jasper for AI copywriting

• Llama Life for daily productivity

• Ghost for my newsletter Listen Up IH. (It reached $13 MRR today 😅)

• Plausible for analytics.

• Carrd for Landing Pages

I love these products, gain a lot from them, but the costs do add up.

Products I am looking to spend money on:

• Course hosting + Email marketing platform (Podia most probably)

• Blogging platform (Confused between Feather.is and Superblog.ai, both built by Indie Hacker friends)

• Website builder (To start working on the job board I've been meaning to start)

I don't want to spend too much money on tools. But I know that they also give me the best chance of generating predictable revenue.

Let's see, will take things 1 at a time. 

Moving on...

My best Tweets

Controversial opinions always get interesting conversations going. I will write an essay about these predictions soon:

Some incredible product pitches here:

I'm particularly proud of this thread:

Extremely humbled that my writing course crossed $500 in sales:

Doing research for a post I'm writing: "First100 users playbook".

Some great answers here:

Recommended Reading

Elon Actually Bought Twitter:

Jon Yongfook's reflection on reaching $36K MRR:

This is what happens when freelancers take on too much work:

Bottomline

That's it for this week.  See you next week 👋

Important note:

I’m trying out a new format for this newsletter. Going deeper into the ups and downs of my journey.

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It would mean a lot to me🙏

Cheers,

Ayush