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.
Everyone wants to go as fast as they can go. Everyone wants to find ways to move a little bit faster. Many are willing to cut corners.
But resist the urge to chase shortcuts.
The good stuff takes time: Building relationships, testing new ideas, talking to your audience. There are no shortcuts there — you’re going to have to do the work, and the work doesn’t always happen quickly.
Be patient, and embrace the work. It’s the way forward.
I’ll often talk with newsletter operators who tell me they want to launch another new thing: Another course, another ebook, another product.
But the question I always have to ask is: Have you gotten everything you can out of the stuff that’s already out there?
I’ll see newsletters with great engagement that are missing obvious monetization opportunities, like running ads or affiliate content.
I’ll see operators with a paid membership who aren’t promoting it nearly as much as they could — even though with every new member they get, they’re getting more value out of a thing they’re already working on.
Forget about launching new stuff for a second. Look at what you’re already doing — is there an opportunity there to get more out of the work you’re already doing?
———
That’s a random snippet of emails in my inbox at the moment. (I’m not trying to pick on any of these particular newsletter operators!)
I had a call with a client last week about their newsletter strategy. “I feel like we don’t have a complete picture of what our audience wants,” they told me. “What are we missing?”
I’ll tell you what I told them: Building a strategy is like putting together a 10,000-piece puzzle. Every time you do something — like sending an email, running a survey, or talking to readers — you collect a few more puzzle pieces. But you’ve got to be patient — it takes time to collect enough pieces so you can start to see the full picture.
Your goal is to do something every day that helps you discover a few key pieces of your puzzle.
———
That photo of a puzzle comes via Unsplash and Hans-Peter Gauster.
There’s a great story in the New York Times this week about Michele Lowe, a former advertising executive, who now coaches rabbis on their public speaking skills and helps them improve their sermons.
I’ll quote this section directly:
Some of Ms. Lowe’s clients are confidential, concerned to be seen as needing a crutch. At first, Dara Frimmer, a rabbi at Temple Isaiah on Los Angeles’s Westside, was reluctant to share that she had sought help on a sermon.
“There is a fear that rabbis have to be wholly original and brilliant and poised and always have the right words,” Rabbi Frimmer said. But she came to realize that turning to community in a time of need was a profoundly Jewish ideal. “With great pride I wrote at the bottom: ‘Thank you to Michele Lowe.’”
Everyone needs a little help sometimes — even people like rabbis, who spend their careers speaking publicly. Rabbis lead public services and private services. They stand before their congregations at bar and bat mitzvahs and at weddings. They spend time with their congregants during moments of joy and sorrow.
And yet: They still need help! It takes courage to be willing to ask — and to truly listen to the advice being given.
No one has all the answers. Everyone — even the pros — has questions.
Always be willing to ask.
———
That’s the outside of Sixth & I, a synagogue in Washington, D.C. The photo was taken by Ted Eytan and is used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.
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.
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.
There’s this lie I’ve been telling myself for the past decade: Once I get through this next stretch, things will get easier.
But I know what’s going to happen. After this stretch of work, after this stretch of travel, after this stretch of busyness, things aren’t going to slow down. Things aren’t going to stop.
There’s always going to be more.
Things don’t magically get easier at the end of these stretches. There will be new challenges, new problems.
There’s always more.
But the good news is: Even though it doesn’t get easier, that doesn’t mean it’ll get harder. You’re always learning and figuring out new ways to solve problems. New obstacles appear, but you’re also learning more about how to get past them.
No, it never gets easier. But you’ve gotten through hard things before. You’ll get through these, too.
At age 30, in my annual Things I Believe post, I wrote:
You don’t need to be able to predict the future — but it helps if you can see what’s coming around the corner.
I certainly don’t know what the future holds. But I think I can see certain pieces that will matter in the decade ahead. I think small, curated, in-person events will matter. I think relationships will matter. I think expertise will matter. I think that there will still be a desire to learn new skills — that will matter.
You should do the same. Try to identify what’s coming in the next month or the next year or the next decade, and start to make moves to invest in things that will help you in whatever comes next.
Maybe that means starting to have conversations with others who operate in the space you want to move into.
Maybe that means finding ways to level up your skills in a certain area.
Maybe that means making a little time to work on the ideas you have.
Maybe that means launching something small to start to carve out your niche.
Maybe that means finding partners to work on these ideas.
Whatever’s next is coming. Time to make your investments now.
———
That’s the eye of the famous bull on Wall Street. This post isn’t about that type of investing, but it still seemed like a nice fit for this blog post. The photo was taken by Redd F for Unsplash.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and he told me that something was annoying him. He’d been talking to his parents, who are both retired. He’d asked if they could help him with this big task, but they said they couldn’t — they were too busy.
“I don’t get it,” he told me. “They’re having lunch or dinner out every day, they’re playing pickleball, they have volunteer projects. That’s all stuff they’re choosing to do! But I’ve got work and family stuff. I’m the one who’s really busy!”
They’re not busy, I told him — just occupied. (Too occupied to take on this one task, unfortunately for him.) But it’s easy to confuse “busy” and “occupied.”
And it reminded me of something I used to do — or, if I’m being fully honest, that I occasionally still do — when I want to feel busy. I’d collect a bunch of small tasks and put them on my to-do list. And I’d cross them off. At the end of the day, I’d feel like I’d accomplished something — look at all the tasks I’d completed!
But then I’d look at the bottom of the list, and there would be one big task still on my list. It’d been the one thing I had to accomplish, and I hadn’t even started it. Deep down, I knew that I was only taking on all these other tasks to try to make myself feel better about avoiding the big task.
