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.
There are a lot of great places to watch the New York City Marathon, but for my money, nothing beats the corner of 59th and 1st.
Runners are coming off the quiet of the bridge and on to 1st Avenue, where crowds gather four or five deep to cheer family, friends, and total strangers on.
It’s also mile 16 of the race. Runners still have 10 miles to go.
And every year, I go to that corner and watch thousands of runners hit mile 16, with so many more miles to go — and they keep going.
And every year I think: It’s amazing what truly determined humans can do.
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I took that photo at 59th and 1st today during the 52nd running of the Marathon.
Couldn’t I sell courses? Couldn’t I write a book? Couldn’t I give more talks? Couldn’t I charge more for each speaking engagement?
And then I have to take a few steps back to acknowledge what I’ve actually done.
I’ve built an audience, I’ve built a business. I’ve created, from nothing, the best paying and most flexible job I’ve ever had. I’ll take more time off this year than I’ve taken since college. I’m in a position where I get to pick and choose what projects I take on and who I work with.
I’m proud of the success I’ve had. Success should be enough — do I need to be excessively successful? Do I really need to do more?
I know the answer to those questions, but it’s hard to quiet the voice that wants to do more. I have to remind myself: I don’t need to do everything. This is more than enough.
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That’s from a talk I gave in Denver in September. It went well — but yes, I still do wonder if I could’ve done better for those who attended.
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.
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That photo of a puzzle comes via Unsplash and Hans-Peter Gauster.
I had a moment last night with my newsletter. I wasn’t sure what to do about the intro section — I knew there should be an intro, but I wasn’t sure what I should say. And I felt stupid for not knowing: People pay me every week to help them figure out stuff like this! Why couldn’t I figure it out on my own?
And then I thought about a conversation I’d had with a client earlier in the week. They were feeling a little down, so I gave them a pep talk. It seemed to help.
And I thought: Could that be the intro?
So I wrote it up last night, but didn’t schedule the email. I wanted to read it again this morning.
This morning, it still made sense. It gave the newsletter something it didn’t have before — a bit of life, a bit of personality. It made it sound more like me.
I think I figured this one piece of the puzzle out today. And I know there’s a lot more to figure out.
But just figuring that one thing out made me feel a little lighter — the weight of this one task, however small, has been lifted.
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.
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.
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.
