How We Became the Top 5% of All Newsletters as a Decentralized Team
During the Christmas break, I discovered that we were in the top 5% of all newsletters, possibly even 1%.
During the Christmas break, I discovered our newsletter, The Automated, was in the top 5% of all newsletters, possibly even 1%. Why? Because we had published more than 21 posts. Far more.
We wrote over 47K words, served over 131 daily posts, which is essentially half of the 2023 working year, and served almost 1 million impressions in the process!
Not only that — we scaled to OVER 18k subscribers from 0!
How did we get there, starting from 0 subscribers? There have been a few important factors and focuses throughout.
Micro-interact constantly
We have a decentralized team operating between Asia, Africa, and the UK, so we operate on Whatsapp and conduct small conversations constantly. I find it necessary to keep the flow of conversations flowing so that we have multiple micro-interactions everyday. In my experience with small team leadership, these micro-interactions is what makes a team trust each other, like an intricate spider web connecting us all.
Always come up with new ideas
This is one of my primary responsibilities as part of the team. I think of myself as the creative guy or the “Chief Breaker of Things”, and my job is to find ways to stretch or break the existing mould.
For example, I had alerted the team of possibly ghost-writing a newsletter for a Pullitzer prize winning journalist friend of mine. Even though we haven’t executed this plan, I want to keep that flow of good and fresh ideas going so that there’s always something new that we can converse around.
Have a weekly 1 hour call
What we then do is have a weekly call where we check status in and discuss what happened in the business in the week. We prioritize this as a face to face call, since this is the only time we can have a F2F call during the week.
Face to face allows us to deliberate ideas and have open-ended questions. We can discuss strategy and the nuances of our operations at length and without judgement.
Accept that there will be some things not communicated
As a decentralized team, I have to accept that some things will not be communicated, not out of neglect, but out of convenience or things moving too fast on the ground.
As someone that likes to overcommunicate, this can be frustrating as I don’t have the constant flow of information that I’m accustomed to. But I have learned not to fault the person, but the situation.
Have an operational board member attend
We’re fortunate to have my friend and advisor Mark Lunt, a seasoned business operator, to sit into the meetings and provide some structure and order.
This is akin to a board meeting, and though we don’t have them quarterly and instead weekly, I find this helps us orient ourselves to execute quickly. If we need to break out and do a separate call to discuss operational items, we do so, without Mark.
Focus on the process first
My partner Daniel focuses the team and making sure that the process is finely tuned and operating smoothly, outputting a high quality article each and everyday. This takes discipline and focus, and that is his core strength.
When the process is smooth, the output will take care of itself. So on our weekly calls, we do spend a lot of time trying not to perfect the process, but to get the process better everyday.
Focus on momentum
As a team, we need to focus on growth and momentum. This can come in the form of subscriber growth, click through rate, or open rate. In can be other things as well.
But the most important thing is to make sure that there is momentum to something. Without momentum, an idea loses energy and dies. For an idea to become a company, there needs to be plenty of energy to get it over the hump until it becomes a sustainable company.
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