🔶 #28: "Start with service: A practical reset for media impact"

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

Today, I want to bring you behind the scenes with me, after I spent quite some time last week reflecting on the evolution of this little space we share every week.

(If you're not into this type of 'how the sausage is made' content, no problem. Just scroll down – seven juicy links are waiting for you.)

Lately I've been feeling a little uneasy because I worried that the newsletter's growth had stalled a little.

New signups started being less frequent:

The open rates are still hovering around a solid 60%, but more often just below 60% than just above as it used to be:

And I've not been able to find a second sponsor after the amazing first experience with House of Kaizen.

The stalling was also an internal feeling: my passion for writing this newsletter is as strong as it was on day one, but the pile of ideas I want to test, and additional products I want to offer, kept growing – and with it the frustration of not finding enough time for any of them.

So I blocked an entire day on my calendar to analyse the situation and set a plan for the coming months:

Luckily, I didn't have to do it all by myself. The week before, Matt Cronin of House of Kaizen helped me apply their framework to my own business, to ensure that the needs of my audience (that's you 👋) and the value my product creates for them are aligned.

We reviewed every stage of the subscriber journey, to understand where there were opportunities for improvement (TL;DR: everywhere).

This was incredibly useful, but I also felt quite overwhelmed: here I was staring at a long list of even more opportunities to improve my newsletter, but where to start? I already didn't have enough time before.

Here's where the rules of good storytelling would expect me to say something along the lines of "...and that's when the light bulb went off". But it never works that way – at least not for me.

Rather than a light that suddenly turned on, I had to sit with the overwhelm and discomfort for a while before an important realisation slowly started to emerge: I was worrying about the wrong things, chasing a definition of success that someone else defined for me and that I didn't really believe in.

Take the first and the third signals of alleged stagnation that I shared up top: