I started a newsletter to share what I was learning. This was after I’d finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow and Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan. These books contained such powerful mental models that I wanted to make a curriculum out of it in the form of a newsletter. But I wasn’t sure that’s all I wanted to do so it was a mixed bag of the stuff I was reading and lessons from these books.
This is how a typical newsletter looked like. Lots of inspiration (re: copied) from the CB Insights newsletter (killer product).
You can find the archive here: Rahul’s Newsletter
I could only write 12 newsletters before I stopped this.
Some observations from this failure (?):
- This project took off well – as you can see from the open rates and click rates but soon I got bored because I felt I wasn’t adding value to my readers.
- Not everyone had signed up for a crash course in psychology and it seemed like I should’ve communicated my intentions better right at the start. Actually, even I wasn’t clear on how this newsletter would shape up. Lesson learnt – be focused.
Nonetheless this was an interesting experiment – I had to write an original piece each week, find relevant content for the newsletter and make a story out of it.
I might do something like this again in the future although with better planning.
rahulramchandani.com 