Six months in: On losing your way and reconnecting to your motivation

I've been writing a newsletter for six months.

It brings me great joy every week, but the other day I confessed something to my readers: lately, I've been feeling a little uneasy because I worried that the newsletter's growth had stalled.

New signups started being less frequent:

The open rates took a little dip (while still hovering around a solid 60%):

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: the pile of ideas I wanted to test, and additional products I wanted 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 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:

Why was I worrying about securing another sponsor? When I started to write this newsletter, I had no plan or ambition to monetise it in the first year. But I found one sponsor, felt good because I was making some money out of this (I mean, who wouldn't), and so I started chasing more sponsorships when I wasn't actually ready to do that in a systematic way.

And you know what happens when you chase sponsorships? You convince yourself that you need more subscribers as soon as possible because you feel like you need a big reach to justify sponsors' investments.

But they might need that reach, not me.

I was following a growth playbook that works for many others but doesn't speak to my values and my vision.

I aim to be useful to my readers, and that's true whether five people are reading or five thousands; whether I'm making any money off this work or not.

Long-term that's not sustainable, but my plan was clear: I'm writing this newsletter as an experiment in 2025. No revenue ambitions, no chasing 'growth' for the sake of it. At the end of the year I'll take stock and see where we go from there.

I just sort of forgot all of that, distracted by the early success.

Let me be clear: I do want more subscribers because I do want more people to find hope and inspiration in the people-centric vision for journalism that we're building together.

And, let's be honest, seeing the number of subscribers grow just feels good and there's nothing wrong about it. As long as you don't let it distract you from what truly matters.

As Matt told me at the end of our chat (I'm paraphrasing): "You're living on your own skin the tension that media organisations face when it comes to prioritising between chasing revenue or focusing on creating value for their audience and trusting that revenue will come as a result of the value you provide."

That does sound familiar indeed...

Have you faced or are you facing similar challenges in growing your newsletter, podcast, or another product? I'd love to exchange notes. Connect on LinkedIn.