571 The Email Every Accounting Firm Should Write

Today, my friends, a very special guest, Jonathan Stark, if you know who that is, you're excited. If you don't, let me get you excited. Jonathan, his background was as a software developer and he, someone similar to me, went from like working with software agencies and running his own own agency to then putting out more thought leadership around, like, how do I just run a more efficient business model that doesn't suck me into the trap of like just trading my time for money? Until one day I dropped out of my desk. That was too much. I went too far there. First got introduced to Jonathan with a book that he wrote about value pricing. Ten years ago, that was the first time any aspect of the value pricing.

Conversation became accessible to me.

But why I specifically wanted to bring him on the show today is to talk with him about how this guy writes an email to his audience every.

Single day and has been doing so for years. And it's like the biggest thing that.

He swears by to build a relationship with the people you already work with and find more people just like him who will then want to come and work with you. I think it's fascinating for most accountants where we haven't even created an email list before and we don't even know what we have to say. This becomes kind of a forcing function to get to more like crystallized ways of thinking and talking about what we do. And Jonathan is like the ultimate person.

To hear this from.

Let me know what you think of this one. So without further ado, let's hop into this conversation with Jonathan Stark.

Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

For folks who haven't met you or.

Seen you in the wild before, what's the 62nd Jonathan Stark intro?

I am a former software developer who's now on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. Is that too short?

You got 54 seconds to go.

All right, so 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years ago this summer I wrote a book called Hourly Billing is Nuts, which was based on my experience switching my software consultancy from the hourly model that I had experienced at a firm. And then I quit and I figured, like, how am I going to do this without what am I going to do instead of billing hourly? And so that was probably a 10 year journey. And then I wrote a book about it. And then I've been talking about that ever since.

I remember reading. So I read your book. I was still running an accounting firm and it was maybe the most palatable version of that conversation I'd come across yet. Because it can be in the abstract. The first time you hear it, you hear it when all you've ever known is the traditional hourly approach. Right. You're like this. I don't. It feels. It's so alien that you're like, ah, this person, they're either lying or they just. They're not living in the same world that I am.

Right, Right. Yeah. That's actually a good way to summarize the response you typically get.

So I would argue these days you are spreading the good word to much more than software folks and, like, you're in my feed constantly. But I can tell you, like, something that you've talked about that's fascinating to me, that, I think is an interesting angle into this conversation for accountants, is.

You send people an email every single day. Every.

You still do this. Every bloody day, your email list gets an email from you, right?

Yep. I'm up to 3,445 in a row.

Good gravy. Okay. That's a lot. I. For a while, I ran this podcast daily, and it was weekdays, and people were like, this is too much. You need to chill out. But we. I think our longest ever streak was like 200 and some episodes. We didn't get to thousands. That's nuts. Let's just start with why. Why? Why are you doing this?

The email list, specifically why.

Yeah, why is it worthwhile for you to do that?

It's funny, I. When I first started it, it was. I launched. I had a sort of sporadic, maybe some weeks I'd send it, maybe some weeks I wouldn't send it kind of email list that was kind of like a flea market. It was just whatever I was interested in that week. If I felt like writing it, I would write it. And every single time, it was torture. I didn't know what to write about. It's like, I haven't sent an email in a while. I don't have any ideas. If I really try and grind it out and white knuckle it. It was just like a battle with writer's block. And then I wasn't happy with the output. It was just. It was like, terrible. And then when the. So I had. But I had a small mailing list, maybe there's a couple hundred people on it.

And how did these very first people find you?

I honestly don't remember because we're talking about. Those people were probably from 2010, and they were probably, you know, ish, you know, so probably like five years. My mailing list was basically dead. It was nothing. It was Essentially like a defunct blog that I sent out over email.

Okay.

And I had written a book, you know, in the tech space. I had a really popular book that came out in 2010 called Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And it was pretty big hit for a book like that.

Sounds like a real page turner.

Oh, yeah, man. But it was. It was, like, translated into seven languages. It was. It was a big deal at the time. My timing was just lucky. I just. I just happened to be the first person to write about it. It turned into a very big thing for lots of people. Anyway, they're probably from that. So they were. I was. I was pretty active on Twitter at the time. I was probably. I was blogging about mo technical mobile topics. So I had a lot of software developers, web developers in particular, those following me. So those would be the people who are on the list probably. But I was talking about tech stuff, you know, like the user agent string on mobile, the mobile browser, and Windows Phone 7. You know, stuff like that. And in 2016, I think it was July 2016, I published hourly Bailing is Nuts. Because I had been a lot of people from just my. My network, my connections, my colleagues, all the software people. Whenever we started talking about business or they'd complain about some issue that I knew stemmed from hourly billing, I'd get into the whole meta conversation around how they ran their business, and I ran my business extremely differently from all them. So they were very interested because nobody really likes billing by the hour. They kind of hate it. And. Or at least tracking their time. I mean, know, I think most people don't like it. And. Yeah, so then I would just. I was writing. I started writing more and more around business topics instead of technical topics. So that turned into the book in. In July 2016, and for the launch of the book, I had a friend named Philip Morgan, who was a daily emailer at the time. And I was also on Seth Godin's daily mailing list. And I really liked it. I liked the. Receiving these sort of little thoughtful tidbits every day from other people I subscribed to. And Philip was like, just go daily for a while when you launch the book. Try and sell more copies or whatever, get the word out. And. And he's like, and I think you're gonna find that. You keep doing it, you're gonna like it. And my experience was exactly that. Like, you know, I had all the fears, like, everyone's gonna unsubscribe. Nobody wants that many emails. Everybody's inbox is too full already. I feel, I'll feel like I'm spamming them all those things. And they didn't sign up for daily, they signed up for weekly. And so how can I just switch over all that stuff? He's like, just start doing it. If they unsubscribe, they unsubscribe. And what I found was not that many people unsubscribed. And I kept them really short. And by that time, I did know what I was talking about pretty well. So I had 10 years of experience of applying value based pricing and productized services and positioning my business and all these things. And I was doing really well. So I'm like, well, this stuff can work. Maybe not for everyone, but it can work. And but what I found when I was writing about it, I had a much harder time explaining it to someone than doing it for myself. So I, I'd say like, hey, here's how I did this thing. And then I get all these replies like, I tried that. It didn't work for these reasons. And I'd say, okay, that's. Those are valid reasons. I could see why that wouldn't work, you know, like, whatever, you know, they're in a different space or something. And so I would ask them questions. So I ended up answering like millions of, not literally millions, but probably literally thousands of questions, which I loved. And it made me better at communicating the ideas. And so I just felt myself getting better and better and better at communicating these ideas in a way that produced outcomes for people. And I just, I got hooked on it. I found it was much easier than weekly. I never have writer's block ever. I've got an idea file, like 1500 ideas in it, and that's after writing every day for 10 years. They just spawn new ideas.

Were an accountant to begin doing this, sending an email every day, would that be the place to start? Is the questions you're getting from your clients.

That is a great place to start. So starting is very exploratory for most people. I teach a course on this, and a lot of people, they sense that they need to have better positioning before they start doing this. And so they, they put it off because they don't know who they're really writing to, or they're afraid it's not gonna air quotes, it's not gonna work to make them money or something there. So they want it to pay, pay off results more quickly. They feel like they're not ready to start because they're still too general. And I understand that it does make sense. But I think the reality is, at least the people I've interviewed about this is that the process of writing every day helps you figure out what you're, who you really want to serve, where your real expertise is, the gaps in your knowledge, or at least your ability to articulate that knowledge. So I just say start writing. Like if you, if you, it's, it's really hard. I. Here's what, I'll just say it, it's probably going to take you 18 months before you start to really feel like authority inbound, authority around. Like you're the go to person for your expertise and people are referring you and people are, they're, they're nicknaming you as something like I turned into the ditching hourly guy. And you know, it's going to be a while. But in the thing that is shocking to everyone and the thing that keeps people at it is that you're crystallizing your thinking in that first phase. Like you're actually becoming good enough to be a thought leader. You're probably not good enough to be a thought leader now because you can't. Even if you're really good at what you do, you probably can't articulate it in a way that produces meaningful results for anybody reading. So it takes a minute. It's an investment. It's a gardening kind of thing. Like, you're not getting tomatoes after day two. You know, it's going to take a little while. You do a little bit of work every day. I mean, I spend maybe five or ten minutes on it every day. It's not a big deal. And after a while, you know, after six months, you start to see the tomatoes coming out. And after a while you get so many tomatoes, you're giving them away to your neighbors because they're just popping out everywhere. So, you know, if someone listening, if they feel like they'd like to get better customers, if they feel like they would like to get paid better, you know, have a higher profits, work with a very specific kind of client that they really like working with. And not so many of the people show up on the 14th with a shoebox full of receipts and, and they would like to get better. And basically helping people at scale for free, then, you know, it's probably for you. It's. If I would delete my website before I stopped doing my mailing list is by far the most important thing for my business that I do.

Most accounting firms don't have a mailing list. And even when you say a mailing list they may not know what that is. Of all the things someone could do from going out and posting on social media and upgrading their website and all that stuff. Like, why does the mailing list kind of the foundation of all of that?

I mean, you know, you post on social media, I post on social media and I've seen over, you know, LinkedIn, for example. I feel like in the past year, the visibility of any particular post on LinkedIn has gone way, way down. 20, 24, I had a post that have over a million views and I'm lucky if I get 10,000 now. That's like an amazing one now. So I don't know what's going on over there, but I don't really care. It's like I'm just gonna write my. To my email list. And the thing about the email list is that your inbox, I guess, is. I guess this is a setting now. And it's not always true, but typically it's not a algorithmically driven feed. Like, just think of that word feed. Yeah, I'm going to feed this to you and you're going to consume it. It's like, it's so gross. But anyway, with the email. One of the really cool things about email is that it's not, you know, it's, it's not. What do you call, it's not curated to make you angry. It's like it's. It just comes in in the order that they come in. And you can read it or not read it, but you see that this person is showing up for you. So, like, you get an email from me every day. You see, there I am. I'm here to give you a tip or to help you, I call it, you know, taking your vitamin J. And you can take it or not take it, but you still see that I'm showing up there. It's much more likely that people on my mailing list are going to see my face in their inbox every day, then catch one of my posts on LinkedIn. It's just, I just no faith that anyone's going to. It's just shouting into the void pretty much. And I've had viral posts that do basically nothing for my business. So it's like, what's the point? I mean, I'm still posting stuff there, automated stuff there, you know, like greatest hits and, and posts from the past and all my comics and stuff, you know, because I want someone, if they search for me, I want them to find something, but I just, it just produces no positive effects that I can detect. And anyway, so here's. There's a couple of other cool things about email though too. One is it's portable, so if you wanted to change providers, you could just export all the email lists and import them to some new provider. Ari said it's not algorithmically driven, which I think is really important. I've already said that even if they don't read them, they're going to see you in their inbox. And then the other thing that's wild is that it's broadcast by default, outgoing, and then it's private, one on one incoming. So I can send an email to 10,000 people and they know that by replying to me I'm the only one that's going to see it. So it's broadcast out one to one in. And what happens there is that since it's not a comment on LinkedIn, there's no performative AI BS. It's always like a genuine question. And since they know it's private by default, they will share stuff with me that they would never share on social media, like their annual income or how they're doing their business is doing terrible. And can you help me with this? So you get into these really great conversations when it's. When it's an email list that's.

I had never thought of email as sort of the last bastion of the feed you actually had control over, which ironically enough, like Gmail's trying to kill that too now. Right. And like AI inboxes and you'll never actually read the message. I love that though, for accountants that are like thinking about building a quote unquote email list for the first time. Something you said earlier, like, I feel like you're into like folks who haven't done this. You're into the vanity of like, oh, building an email list. And that sounds interesting and having more people on it over time. But I would argue what you explained is actually the more powerful outcome. That is the process of writing consistently, like crystallizes the ideas that you have. And that is arguably the more powerful asset is you actually develop a language to be able to speak very clearly about what you do and answer these questions at a much better quality.

Yeah. So let me tell you a quick story. I think it was 2004, ish, maybe 5. Sam's Publishing reached out to me to ask me if I'd write a book for them. And I said, I'm not really an expert. And they said, well, you know, we found these couple of blog posts from you on your, you know, terrible blog that no one read. But we came across this thing that no one else is talking about and we want, we've been looking for someone to write this book and we wanted you to do it. I said, okay, I'm not really an expert, but I'll write it anyway. So I wrote it and what I found was writing the book is what makes you the expert. You know, you don't start off as the expert, even if you're really good at it. You, by the time you're done writing a book about a subject, even if it's only 120 pages, you have had to look up and research and double check and test so many things that you kind of took for granted or didn't really matter. But now that it's going to be printed on dead trees, you're like, you do not want an error in there. Or at least I didn't. So the research that you do to write a good book turns you into like a worldwide expert on that thing. So it's the same, but you need a lot of permission. And it takes 18 months before the thing is edited and printed in people's hands. And you know, not everybody's getting invited to write a book. So doing it in so to so it's. This is sort of like encouragement to someone to start if they don't feel like they're an expert at anything, you're probably not. But if you've been getting paid by happy clients for a long time, you're good at something. So start writing about the things that excite you or you're passionate about or you want to become a better expert at and put yourself on the hook to do the research and you know, and come up with the content and really crystallize your thinking. You'll be exploring this big problem space and you'll probably find areas that, where there's either a particular problem or a particular kind of person or some combination of the two, like a client. And you're like, that is really fascinating to me, this one particular area. And you just go really deep on that. And before you know it, you're like the one and only expert on that thing.

So this last fall we did a tour of 13 cities, hosted workshops for over a thousand accounting firms. And a bumped into a lady at.

One of these events and she said.

This week I have four new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, Cloud Accountant Staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode sponsor. She just said Cloud Accountant Staffing. Four people starting at the same. Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud accountant staffing makes it possible. Back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks. Try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other cloud accountant staffing. They're going to help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around, what about security? What about it? What about do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already pre vetted. And even from that portal you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks they've sourced, they've done like some personality assessments for them and you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal.

Super cool.

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I, I'm a big believer in just reps yielding results like people I, I point to. You know, I think YouTube is probably what people bring out most that, you know, you're such a natural on video and all this. And it's like, man, we've just, we just done more videos than anybody else. And even around thought leadership, I'm like, I've probably written more about more words about accounting firm thought leadership than anybody else over the last three or four years. And where I'm at today, like, it really is a product of that. And that's what excites me about a commitment to more writing. Like, if an email list is what gets you there, awesome. But arguably the biggest asset is you on the other side of having done that. For folks that are thinking about this for the first time, I mean, that's just an unbelievably overwhelming thing. The notion of like writing every single day when you don't normally write. What's the practical advice for how to, how to save your ideas? And are you actually doing it every day or are you batching? Like, what would you tell somebody just starting?

Yeah, so I will answer that. And I know the answers are pretty strong because I've interviewed like 10 or 15 people who do daily emails and I have a sort of limited run podcast that I just published once a long time ago called Doing Daily. I asked people. I asked people the questions you just asked me. So. So I'm about to give you my answers. Okay, but if you go to DoingDaily Transistor FM, there's I think maybe 15 people have interviewed. And what's wild is I think every single person had a different process, that they came up with the actual process, but every single person also found the crystallizing your thinking experience and that it got easier than it was if they did weekly or monthly before that. So, so they, everybody found that it became easier and everybody had a different process. So there's no one right way to do it. But I do know from teaching this to many people that there are a lot of blockers up front, like what should my designing the template for what it should look like and I'll run out of content and I don't want to be, you know, make this big promise like I'm going to do this and then fail after three weeks or whatever. So the first step that seems to work for a lot of people is to just write down, take 15 minutes and see how many titles you can come up with. Or like subject lines basically. Like how many title, like what areas that do you think would be interesting? An article that you could write or a question that you recently got from a client or some new tax regulation that you've been studying, like something you been working on or researching and just see how many you can write down off the top of your head. And if you're good at what you do and you've been doing it for a while, I can't think of a time when someone couldn't come up with 30 ideas in 15 minutes. Like, and even if it's 10 ideas, but, or if it takes you a half an hour to come up with 30 ideas, but if you come up with 30 ideas, there's your first month of emails. Basically you just have to write them now. So moving on to the next thing though, the most people, when they sit down to write an email, if they have any experience with doing this on a weekly or monthly basis in the past, they're going to write way too much. So, so keep the ideas for the each email is you're making your list atomic, by which I mean there should be one and only one takeaway or action item or, you know, thing to think about from this email. Not three, not two.

One.

What is the moral of the story? What is the single point? And if you're only going to write 100 or 200 words to make this one single point, you can't describe everything about this giant topic. You just focus in on one thing like the emotions of leaving your, your filing your tax to the last minute or something. And it's like, okay, here are the emotions of it. Here's what I want you to take away. Dear reader, at the end of this tomorrow, you can talk about the next thing that crops up. And the day after that you can talk about the next thing that crops up. So it's a switch from writing these kind of like articles. If you've ever written like a 1500 word article for like a trade publication or something like that, it's like you're writing sections. It's like you're publishing in a serial format, you know, like TV show episodes, telling you that you didn't, didn't tell you the whole Game of Thrones story in one episode just tell you a little bit. Little bit, Little bit, little bit. And what's cool is if you send, if you leave, you can't put everything in, which means you have to leave something out, which creates a thing known by writers that's called an open loop. And open loops keep. It's like a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger is an open loop. It's one kind of open loop. So if you don't if you can't put everything into each email, which you can't, then it creates open loops and then you get replies because people are like, well what about this thing? It's not that easy. You forget this thing. And it's like, stay tuned, I'm going to write about that tomorrow. Or could you tell me more about, more about that and then I'll write tomorrow's email about that subject. And pretty quickly, once you have like three or four hundred subscribers, you get enough questions, the whole thing just snowballs and you can just answer questions for like, you know, years.

I think people probably quickly jump to like, I could build a drip sequence and like this, it could look like I'm doing this every day but. But I could just bank them all and take the year off, right?

I had the same thought, which is like, like I felt like people who are joining my list in year two, they missed all of the emails from year one. Like those were useful emails that that.

Person, you wrote them, they should see him, Jonathan, right?

This is all solid gold nuggets I'm leaving on the ground for them. Like how could they dare miss them? But I found that. And so in my mind I was like, well, the big question is when someone joins, should they get today's email or the very first email you wrote? It's a fair question. And I wanted to do the they should get every single email I ever wrote. So they kind of start way back at the beginning and they move along. But what I found was I didn't like the way that felt because on today, 10,000 people would be getting maybe 7, 800 different emails from like a whole bunch of different emails. For me, some 3, 4, 5, 10 years old are getting received by this audience all at the same time. And I found that this doesn't make sense. But the email list feels like a community to me even though the members can't talk to each other. So when, when they're getting these random old emails, they feel like an outsider or something to me. And like I don't even remember writing this email. It was from 10 years ago, literally. And there's something immediate and live about the daily email that then a conversation can start even though it's through me. Like I'll get 10 or 15 replies to an email with follow up questions or people sharing their story. And then for the next week I can be like, oh, you know, this person wrote in and had this to add, which I think is a great point. And another person wrote in and asked a follow up question. A bunch of people asked the same question. So that's what today's email is about. And it feels more like. It feels more alive to me.

Yeah, y' all right? Same wave.

Yeah, exactly. We're in the same place. And I didn't used to have this, but my old emails were. Weren't published on my website. Now they are. So in theory, someone could go back and read them and sometimes I refer back to them for whatever reason or link people to them or people you know will find them in a Google search or something like that. So that's how I kind of split the differences. I started publishing them on my website if somebody wanted to read the old ones. And hardly anyone does. I mean, it's way more about getting the email in your inbox and being. And feeling like you're all in the same ride.

So accountants that like weighed into writing a newsletter letter, a common trap is they're going to write this weekly or this, this monthly newsletter that's like a roundup of tax updates. Very technical things that they think are important or interesting to them.

Yeah.

How much of this is writing what I want to say and what I think is interesting versus what the recipient needs to hear?

I think you should write whatever you feel like writing and not worry about getting benefits from it immediately, because you're not going to get benefits from it immediately. And if you write something really technical and you start off like that, then you're probably going to get questions about it which can then turn into emails that are directed that are. That are meant to serve a specific person or group of people who ask the same question. So I think starting off with technical can get you into the place where you're actually helping people instead of just nerding out about tax law. If you just nerd out about tax law, you're going to get other tax law nerds on your list. Yeah, maybe you, maybe you want that. But ultimately, I think one of the things that I teach in email 365 is like in the opt in page where someone would sign up for your mailing list. I'm like, who is this for? These are the two questions you have to answer right away. Not right away, but two questions you eventually want to be able to answer very clearly. Who is it for? And what is your promise to them? So if it is for tax professionals, and the promise is that you know, in less time than it takes you to drink your coffee, you'll be right up to date with some tax law area of tax law. I Don't know. With me, it would have been like, you know, the latest and greatest in JavaScript frameworks or mobile JavaScript frameworks or something like that. But you're just, I mean, if you want an audience of nerds like you, then, then you, then that will work. If you want an audience of like, amazingly valuable potential clients, then you want to serve them. And that almost with your, with what you're writing, that almost always means picking a particular kind of person to write to. So, like you and I talking, if we went out for drinks or something, neither one of us is going to get speaker's block. We're not going to not know what to say next. But writer's block happens all the time. And the reason why is because you don't know who you're talking to. And I found this out big time. I've written a bunch of software books and the one that I get the most compliments about was one that I wrote specifically for my sister. It was like, I'm writing the book and at any point when I was like, should I get more technical here? Should I get less technical here? And I was like, what would Tari think if I wrote this? Like, what questions would she have? And so I wrote, you know, like Yale educated, smart person, but not technical, not software person. So I was like going to write it for that reader and people really responded to it. So if. And I never got writer's block like in previous books where I'd spiral out, do I have to teach people how to like double click a mouse? Like, what can I assume they know when you're writing this book because you don't have them sitting there to ask. So with same with your email, if you know who you're writing to, you've got sort of like an ideal customer profile in your mind or an avatar of your ideal reader. Ideally, you can think of an actual person, you know, who's your ideal buyer. Maybe it's a client that you have worked with for a long time and imagine that that person is sitting across from you as you're writing your email and you're going to get more people like that because they're the same kind of, they're in the same kind of place. And you're going to be answering questions for them and they're going to be like, oh my God, I feel every time I read one of these I feel like smarter or inspired or whatever. And pretty soon your positioning is going to coalesce around that thing and, you know, eventually you're going to be known for the go to person for this specific thing and they're not even going to be considering anyone, anyone else. Which is where, you know, pricing leverage comes from, which is another huge topic that I talk about.

Yeah, I imagine a blocker here is probably. Well, I'm serving a very general client base. So in order for this to be useful, useful like is there even a version of this that is useful? If I'm serving a very generalized group of folks, does that undermine the value of what you're writing or is there an element of discovery there too where writing helps to sort of flesh that out?

I mean, it depends. That's a great question. It's a classic question. It depends on what kind of business you're trying to build. If you're creating a accounting empire and you're going to hire a bunch of mini me's and pay them as little as possible and, and mark up their hours and build, you know, that's a way to, that's a way to get rich and ride off into the sunset on a big pile of money. But if you have more of a service posture and you really want to help a particular kind of person, then focus on them in your email list and the heart is going to come through, the care is going to come through. It is a service business like an accountant is a service provider, professional services provider. So if you have this posture of service and there's this particular group that you really want to serve, well, then help them for free at scale on your mailing list. And I mean that's what I would recommend the whole thing. I, I don't want to go into a whole can of worms. Open a whole can of worms about specializing. I think if you want to stay small but make either work less and make more or, or work more and make way more. Probably everyone listening works too much as it is. So if you want to, if you want to work less, spend more time with your kids and family and so forth. But you don't want to take a giant pay cut and you don't want to work 80 hours in tax season. Automation is one thing you can do, but another thing you could do is be able to raise your prices, have a particular kind of client who is falling all over themselves to pay you that money and is very happy to do so. So you can work less and make the same or more and then spend more time with your family. I don't think a soloist or a small firm can do that and also stay general in the clients that they work with. I think you have to pick a segment of the market that you're especially good at serving, whether it's because you have empathy for them or they're in your sweet spot for some other reason and come up with products and services for them that are just wildly valuable and then scale up in that way instead of just hiring more and more and more hands.

Yeah, that's the dream.

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Last sort of question on this. You started email at a time when I would say email was maybe a more obvious choice than it feels like for many people now as, as social media platforms have grown and there's a lot of pressure to like, well, if I'm going to post this thing in one place, I've already done the work. I may as well post it in the 12 other places that it could go. Do you feel any pressure to do that of like, well, if I'm going to write this, I may as well blast it out of every channel possible. Or are you just fine pushing that out only on email?

You can push it out only on email, but then you do have the problem of like, well, how does anybody hear about this? So you can do things like word of mouth things and tell two friends and have webinars and other things that you send out to the list and bring your friends and that kind of thing. And I do that and it, it it's like a thing to do. It's not like you're not gonna have a huge spike of signups, but it works. You could buy ads and send people to your mailing list with ads. And if you're advertising, you know, for free, like they can just go join your mailing list for free and they're gonna get this, you know, this ebook or this thing when they first join. And it's gonna be valuable if, if you're like this, you're gonna benefit from this other thing and it's totally free. So advertising be another way. But you're like, yeah, couldn't I just blast this out to TikTok and LinkedIn and Instagram and blah, blah, blah, whatever Clubhouse or whatever the next one is. And the answer is yes, you can fairly easily set up or have someone set up automation that will blast it out to all those platforms. Does that do anything? Not in my experience. It doesn't do anything because each of the platforms has its own vibes and culture and norms. And if you don't abide by those vibes, then it just feels out of place. Yeah, you know, it's like, it's like you speak in the wrong language almost. Yeah. I found in 2024, I took LinkedIn really seriously. I was like, okay, this, I'm going to do it seriously because I hate social media, haven't been on it for years. I said, I'm going to take LinkedIn seriously because I had a lot of students that were on LinkedIn and I wanted to find out if there was, if I could figure out on their behalf how to actually work this machine. And you know, I think we said before the show I had a post that over a million views in 2024, and it did very, I mean, maybe I got 20 subscribers to my mailing list from a million people that saw the post. Not a great conversion rate. So, and, and a year later, a year and a half later, it's like they're just always messing with the algorithm. So stuff that worked back then doesn't feel like it works anymore. I just want to chase that thing. So I think the, the best example. But I also want people who Google me or search me up on LinkedIn. I want them to find something. So if they're looking for me there. So I, I, I haven't done it yet because I've been busy with this new community thing I'm doing. But when I get around to it, maybe next month I'm going to again copy Seth Godin what he does he just posts his daily email verbatim on LinkedIn and at the bottom it says, this is a repost of my daily mailing list. You know, for the latest version, you can go to my blog at Seth's blog, all spelled out so it's not a link. And it's like, okay, you can see he's not there. He's not engaging with anyone. But if you want, you know, if you were using LinkedIn like an RSS reader or something, and you just want to read your Seth over there, you can. But eventually the, the people who want more are going to go to his blog and then they're going to sign up and then it's going to be in your inbox and then they're going to. I don't even know if he even sells anything anymore. His next book, let's say. So yeah, so you do need a way to, you need a way for people who aren't on your mailing list to find out about you. I, I Honestly, I think YouTube has the best recommendation engine right now. So posting some of these on YouTube would be cool. I feel like that's a pretty, that's almost a. Maybe for a certain person that's an even bigger ask than writing daily is like going on YouTube and having your face on camera and worrying about your background and all the lighting and all that other stuff. But so, yeah, people have to find out about it somehow. Word of mouth is solid. You know, if you write amazing stuff, people are going to share it with their friends and yeah, so you can, you can pump it out to the other platforms. I don't, it's free. Basically. You just have a automation that does it, so you might as well. But I don't think you're going to see much. I don't think most people will see much benefit from it.

Yeah, and like the point of showing up on social media, like usually the goal is how do I get these people off platform? Like, I'm here, I'm here for discovery, for the sole purpose of getting them on my email list where I have more control and can consistently get them things. But no, that is, that is the struggle. And like podcasting is a whole other beast. Or it's like there really isn't such thing as algorithmic podcast discovery. But yeah, email at the end of the day is, it is the holy grail. Jonathan, I appreciate you doing this. So, Jonathan, you've got your book. Hourly billing is nuts, right? I think that's how I first discovered you ever so long ago. We'll share that below. Your community is called Ditcherville.

That's right.

And you do you run like a.

There'S like a cohort email365 sort of thing you run in there from time to time?

Yes, I have a five day podcast challenge, a five day email challenge. I have a course about how to write proposals. Probably doesn't apply to your people. There's some workshops in there, video courses inside of the community that people can go through. They're Most like assist 10 day systems challenge to increase your productivity, things like that.

So are there many accounting folks in there?

Some, you know, it's, it's about half software people and then the other half is a mix of lawyers, mechanical engineers, accountants, architects. I think I have a couple bookkeepers. So anybody who traditionally bills by the hour is potentially going to end up in there.

Okay. And then to get a taste of writing an email every single day, perhaps the best way would just be to get on your list and get an email from Jonathan every day or some.

Anybody who emails daily so, so you can experience what it feels like when that person shows up in your inbox and, and gives you a little gift. It's like a little present for free. So you could try Seth Godin, you could try me. Jarlene Carter, who I know is in your universe, she has a daily list. Erica Goody. I don't know if she's doing daily still, but she has a really good email list. So there, you know, there's plenty of them out there.

Cool. Well, this is your chance, so we will link yours down in the show notes. And Jonathan, thanks so much for doing this.

Anytime. Always a pleasure.