I’m Dan Oshinsky, and I run Inbox Collective, an email consultancy. I'm here to share what I've learned about doing great work and building amazing teams.
Every few years in the email space, someone will put out a big piece of research that says something like this:
“After extensive testing across thousands of newsletters, we’ve discovered that purple call-to-action buttons drive nearly 2.3% more clicks than blue and red buttons, leading to significant improvements in long-term conversion rates.”
And for months after, though most users won’t notice it, suddenly it seems like every ecommerce email has changed their CTA buttons to purple, even in cases where purple isn’t one of the brand’s primary or secondary colors.
I’m worried the same thing may happen after this interview I did with Hanna Raskin, publisher of The Food Section newsletter. As I wrote in the intro to that Q&A:
In May 2022, [Raskin] told readers that she’d randomly remove 15% of her free list, but readers who chose to pay for a subscription would “avoid the axe.” It worked — she saw an immediate bump in subscriptions, and that growth has steadily continued for over a year.
I’m nervous that some newsletter operators will read this and make it the new purple button. They’ll think: The lesson here is that random acts of aggression against my list are a great way to convert readers to a paying subscription!
But the next time you see a story like this, don’t simply copy and paste.
The best teams see stories like this and think: I wonder if we should change the way we present our CTAs? Or: I wonder if we could try alternate marketing messages that would work for our audience?
They look at their data. They talk to their audience. They work on honing their voice.
And then they go out and test different tactics to see if they can create something that resonates with their unique audience.
Don’t just plug purple buttons into your newsletter. Test, don’t copy.
Sometime in 1999, I went to go see a sports documentary, “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” in theaters with my parents. Sandy Koufax is probably the best-known Jewish baseball player of all time, but Hank Greenberg — a member of the baseball Hall of Fame who won two MVPs and hit 331 homers in his career — was one of the first Jewish sports stars.
I remember it was a packed house at the theater. Aside from going to High Holiday services, seeing a documentary about a Jewish baseball player in a theater full of Jews was probably the most Jewish thing I’d done in my life to date.
I was a 12-year-old Jewish kid who loved sports, so even though I didn’t know anything about Greenberg before that night, I loved the documentary. It was insightful and poignant and funny — before that night, I didn’t know a documentary could be funny!
There’s one moment from the film that I still remember well. In 1946, as his baseball career was winding down, Greenberg married Caral Gimbel, whose father ran Gimbels, a department store that, in its day, was a rival to Macy’s.
At that moment, a talking head appeared on screen to discuss their wedding. “For a lot of people,” he said, “marriage was a gamble.” He paused. “But for Hank, it was a Gimble!”
I’ve been to live stand-up shows and seen plenty of funny movies in theaters, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a group of people laugh quite as loud as I heard that theater laugh that night at that joke. It’s a corny line — but for that crowd, it killed.
A few months later, my synagogue announced that they’d be doing a special screening of “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” for all the kids in my Hebrew school class. I remember enjoying the documentary just as much the second time around. I remember getting to the part of the film that discussed Greenberg’s marriage. I remember waiting for the joke about Gimbles, and for the big laugh.
Except the laugh never came.
It was the same joke in the same documentary. But the first time I heard it, it played to a packed theater of Jews, most of whom were huge fans of Greenberg, many whom were old enough to have seen Greenberg play personally, and all of whom, I’d bet, had shopped at Gimbles at least once in their life.
And the second time, I watched with a group of fellow 12- and 13-year-olds, who were born the year Gimbles closed, and who were only there because attendance was mandatory.
It turns out it was only a great joke to the right audience. The content matters, but the audience you’re bringing it to matters more.
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That’s the statue of Greenberg at Detroit’s Comerica Park. Greenberg played 12 seasons for the Detroit Tigers. The photo was taken by Jeff Dunn, and is reused here thanks to a Creative Commons license.
It’s hard to make time for everything you want to do. I know I’ve got a big list of things I’d love to do one day — new projects, new adventures. I don’t have time for it all.
So it always comes back to this big question:
What is it you really want to do?
• Do you want to read more? • Do you want to learn a new skill? • Do you want to run that first 5k or 10k? • Do you want to launch a new project?
You can’t do all of it. You can’t choose everything.
But you can make time for some of the stuff you want to do. Maybe it’s not as much time as you’d like — maybe it’s just 20 minutes a day. Maybe it’s an hour or two a week.
Three weeks ago, you showed up in the world. But your mom and I weren’t sure if we’d ever get the chance to hold you.
It’s a long story, but I’ll start here: A few years ago, your mom and I decided we wanted to have a baby. (You!) So many of our friends decided they wanted to have a baby, too, and 10 or 12 months later, a beautiful baby arrived. We assumed that we’d be like them: We wanted a baby, so we’d have one — probably right away.
But we had no idea how hard having a baby would be.
We had one miscarriage, and then a second. We tracked everything we could possibly track. We had our blood tested (totally normal), peed on sticks (ew), and were forced to ejaculate into cups (double ew). We had so much sex that, by the end of certain weeks, your mom and I had to give each other pep talks before trying again.
We had doctors tell us that nothing was wrong with us — we were just unlucky! Take these giant pills that smell like fish food four times a day, every day, for the next month, then try again! Everything’s fine!
Everything was not fine.
We were told that nothing was wrong with us, but when the outcome you want never happens, it’s tough not to feel like something might be wrong — and it might be you.
We started to have serious conversations: Why did we want to be parents? What would we be willing to do to become parents?
We told ourselves that if we couldn’t have you, it would be OK. The life your mom and I had, before you? It was enough.
But we still wanted you in our lives.
So we talked about our options. Sex wasn’t working, and IUI (as your mother called it: The Turkey Baster method) didn’t either. So then we came to IVF: In vitro fertilization.
We have relatives and friends who conceived via IVF. It’s not cheap, and it’s not easy. We were lucky — beyond lucky — to have the money and time to try.
Deciding to do IVF meant all sorts of changes in our lives.
IVF meant intense monitoring of your mom’s lab values and ovaries.
IVF meant that I had to learn how to give your mom shots, and not always at home. I gave her shots in hotels, in restaurant bathrooms, and once in a public hallway outside the Eataly at the World Trade Center. (The person who walked by mid-shot simply ignored us — maybe the greatest act of kindness we’ve ever been given.)
IVF meant getting middle-of-the-day voicemails about the quality of my sperm and your mom’s eggs, and it becoming as normal as checking the weather forecast.
IVF meant that friends were sometimes too scared to tell us that they were pregnant, even though we were truly, always happy for them.
IVF meant lots of conversations with other moms and dads who’d gone through IVF. Your mom had it so much harder than me, but there were still questions I had to ask that they don’t teach in Sex Ed. How do you, exactly, masturbate into a tiny cup? Sitting? Standing? What should you watch when producing your half of a child by yourself? Let’s say you’re in the doctor’s office, and the TV seems to be stuck on English-subtitled Chinese stepmom porn. Do you call the nurse for help? The front desk? Just click buttons until you figure out how to change it? (Son, I’m proud to tell you: I clicked, and I figured it out.)
IVF meant waiting — lots and lots of waiting.
IVF meant taking home what will forever be our first photo of you: A collection of tiny cells under a microscope.
IVF meant walking back and forth, sometimes a few times a week, to that doctor’s office on Madison Avenue, sitting in the waiting room with dozens of other men and women who wanted to be parents as badly as we did.
IVF meant walking out of that same doctor’s office one day, having just gotten wonderful news about you, and pretending like we hadn’t, because we knew so many people in the waiting room weren’t getting the news they wanted that day.
IVF meant holding our breath at every appointment, every week, for months, even long after the doctors told us that you were doing great and that things would be OK.
IVF meant discovering that so many other people were going through infertility too, or had gone through IVF. It meant sharing stories — some funny, some angry, some sad — to help others understand that they weren’t alone in their infertility journey.
IVF meant big changes: Turning my office into your nursery. Learning how to install a car seat. Figuring out parental leave and childcare.
IVF meant that one day, in early July, we had the incredible joy to finally watch you come into this world.
And yes, we know that someday, you’re going to ask us where babies will come from. Your friends might ask their parents the same question, and they’ll probably start by saying, “Well, when two parents love each other…”
But not your mom and I. When you ask, we’ll tell you the truth: Babies come from a special doctor’s office on Madison Avenue, across from a Balenciaga.
You, Ben, like everything at Balenciaga, weren’t cheap! But you are perfect.
We’re so grateful — to the doctors and nurses and techs who made you possible. To the friends and family who supported us along the way. And most of all, Ben, to you, for making us parents.
We love you.
-Dad and Mom
The very talented Abbie Sophia took that photo of the three of us.
I found a notebook full of notes from my earliest BuzzFeed days — I started writing these notes back in 2012. On one page, I outlined a few rules for success for BuzzFeed’s newsletter strategy:
• Be kind, show love, give lots • Personality resonates. • When they let you into their inboxes, they’re making you their friend. They want to listen. • Make sure we give them great stuff • Make a connection • Shareability + personality + timeliness + reliability
And those rules still apply to newsletters today.
So there are two possible explanations for this:
1) I was some sort of email genius who accurately predicted the future of the space. (Very unlikely.)
2) The rules haven’t changed much for building great products over the past decade. (Ding ding ding!)
The latter holds true for any product I’ve worked on over the past two decades. The technology changes, the terminology changes — but the basic rules for creating great stuff remain the same.
And I don’t know what the future holds, but I’d bet that in a decade, if I look back on this list, these rules still won’t have changed.
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That’s the photo from one of my old BuzzFeed notebooks. I found it while cleaning out my apartment earlier this year.
This year, I started writing a quarterly review of my business.
Every quarter, I take 20-30 minutes to go into a Google Doc and jot down a few thoughts on the quarter’s work. What worked well? What am I excited about? What needs work? What’s on the horizon? I write it all down.
The more of these I write, the more I can track my progress over time. I’ve got my spreadsheets to show me the hard numbers — but the quarterly review is a way for me to track how I’m feeling about the business.
It doesn’t take much time, but as I progress, I’ll be able to better understand the trajectory of Inbox Collective — what I did and why I did it. It’s another tool to help me hold myself accountable and to build a better business.
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The data is great, but it helps to be able to track the bigger story alongside it. To that point: At top is a photo of a chart, taken by Isaac Smith for Unsplash.
Earlier today, I typed this very website into my browser — https://danoshinsky.com — and nothing came up.
There was an error message on screen. So I typed in a different URL, and then a third. Those pages loaded correctly — it was just my website that wasn’t loading.
A decade ago, this would’ve been a crisis for me. I would’ve spiraled, and started frantically Googling stuff to figure out a fix. It would’ve ruined my afternoon.
But I’ve seen a few things at this point. I’ve had website errors; I’ve dealt with a few tech situations. I’m no IT person, but I can handle a few small things.
So I went through the options, and within about two minutes, had figured out the issue. I hopped on the phone with my hosting service, and three minutes later, my website was up and running again.
It’s nice to know that I can handle certain small issues like this. But it’s also a nice reminder: The older we get, and the more stuff we run into, the easier it is to handle problems like this.
The first time you run into something, it’s a crisis. But the third time you’ve dealt with it? The fifth? The tenth?
It’s not a crisis — it’s an issue. It’s something small you can handle.
You’ll learn how to handle it, and the next time, it won’t seem quite so bad.
Sometimes, change happens slowly. You start to feel the changes coming, but they’re not coming all that quickly. You can see the transition period happening. You can prepare for the change.
And sometimes, it just happens.
You’re looking around and notice that everything’s suddenly changed. No warning, no advance notice — it’s all different.
But no matter what changes, or how fast it changes, remember: Things will always change.
I was reading this interview that Judd Apatow did with Mel Brooks for The Atlantic. If you know me, or if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, you know I love Mel. (I have written fondly about him many, manytimes.) The man’s lived an amazing life, so I always make time for a Mel interview or talk show appearance.
This latest interview closed with a fantastic back-and-forth between Mel and Judd:
Apatow: Your body of work is so enormous. How do you look at it now?
Brooks: I don’t look back at it. I simply don’t. I just know that we did a lot of good things.
Apatow: Well, there’s a quote from you where you said, “We should enjoy life; we should not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.”
Brooks: Yeah.
Apatow: Has that always been your philosophy?
Brooks: No, I just made that up at the moment.
The closing punchline aside, it’s that line — “we should not future ourselves so much” — that stuck with me. I know I’m guilty of getting ahead of myself and worrying about what might happen in a year or two or five. But I don’t know what will happen in the future, and neither do you.
Stay in the moment. Enjoy the moment.
Now yourself a little more.
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That’s a photo of Mel with his wife, Anne Bancroft, at the 1997 Emmys. It was taken by Alan Light, and reused here thanks to a Creative Commons license.
