139: Paid Newsletter Secrets and Organizing Knowledge with David Elikwu

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People do love the work and they do find it valuable. Then even if they are maybe not reading it right now or they're getting inundated, they can come back to it. And people frequently do. Imagine being a doctor and you're prescribing someone a course of medicine. You wouldn't say, oh man, you're not taking this thing. So I'm just going to stop giving it to you. You know that. Okay? Whenever you are ready to start taking your medicine again, I'm just going to send it to you so that it's there when you're ready. And I know it's going to be good for you. And you know it too, whenever you're ready to do it. But human nature is that people don't always take their medicine. People rarely finish the full course of any prescription, but you give them the full course anyway.

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Hello hello free Timers. I am so thrilled to be here today with David. David Elicu is a writer, speaker and startup operator with a background spanning technology, corporate law and marketing. I had the pleasure of being on his podcast the Knowledge thanks to a mutual introduction from our friend Bob Gower, who knows that we both geek out about no shit. And we had so much fun. We were just jamming, talking before we hit record, talking afterward. I'm so impressed by everything David's doing and building. He also founded Democratic Republic, which is a social impact brand supporting global artisanship through African coffee and biodynamic wine. He hosts the Knowledge podcast, as I mentioned, where he interviews the best and the brightest in business, entrepreneurship and beyond. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me Jenny. It's fantastic to be here.

I had so much Fun going down the rabbit hole of your work. The tables got turned because you did all this research on what I was up to. And one thing that I wanted to start by asking you about is your newsletter process, but more so your newsletter strategy. So I landed on this page somewhere that talked about what readers can expect. There's a Blue Pill. That's your free newsletter. You say fortnightly on a Tuesday, which is very fancy. A weekly shot of knowledge, condensed focus, and roughly the length of a good cup of coffee. Love that. Or the Red Pill, which is ten pounds a month. And that's your paid newsletter almost every Monday. My favorite part about the Red Pill column was that you say, help me feed my dog and I'll keep you on the cutting edge. So I'm wondering. I've always been hesitant to even explore a paid newsletter because I feel like all of a sudden it just constricts how many people are reading it. And it's enough work to keep up with a free one, let alone trying to keep growing a paid subscription. So I would love to just hear about your strategy and how's it working out so far?

Sure, more than happy to. Okay. Before I get started on that, I would add that there's actually a third one, which is the Revelations newsletter. And the only reason I'll mention that is because I will explain how I managed to deleverage the hard work that comes with creating newsletters. And so part of it is my inability to pick only one thing. I wanted my newsletter writing to be more sustainable when I started it. I'd already written it for about two years, I think, at this point, before I split them. And I loved the art of writing. But one thing that I think comes up a lot for creators and certain entrepreneurs that do creative work is the point at which your passion starts to feel like work. And I think that's part of why I wanted to use the payment aspect to be able to deleverage my passion from the work. And so that was part of why I split it into two. And I have one that's free, and then I have one that's paid. And the paid one is less frequent, but it allows me to stay true to myself and my interests. And whenever I write it, it's because there's an idea that's burning in my heart and I really want to get it out. And it's not because it's Tuesday and I have to send something.

Do you sometimes worry then, when you have that really juicy piece that you write for the paid newsletter do you feel sad that all those other subscribers on your free part of the list are not going to see it? Because that's sometimes how I would feel.

Yeah, I've definitely felt that way. So you're not alone there. One thing I would say is that, to be honest, there's definitely times where I've just sent it anyway, something that is really, really good, I've just sent it to everyone. And part of the reason for that is because it reminds people that it exists. Because there's 2000 and something people getting the free one and a lot less getting the paid one. But if you're just used to getting something every week, it's good to get a reminder of, oh, wow, this was so good. And I wonder if I pay, there'll be more of this good stuff on the other side. So when I've written something that I know is one of the best things I'll ever written, if I do know that in advance, then I will try and share it with everyone, just as a teaser to get people back into the main one.

And then I bet you sometimes, if not publishing in full, where you cut it off at just the juicy hook, where it's like, ah, dang it, oh, I gotta pay for this thing. What's the difference between the Blue Pill or the one you describe as Blue Pill, your main newsletter, and then you mentioned this third one called Revelations, that you call your curated newsletter every Thursday? Personal updates and some of the best nuggets you stumble upon. What's the purpose of splitting the free part into two, the Tuesday and the Thursday?

I think the Blue Pill is actually the new one, the stuff that's in the Revelation 1. So originally when I started the newsletter, so prior to splitting them up like this, I used to write one long newsletter and the main part was the essay or the original thoughts. And then I'd also have book recommendations. I'd have a short personal update from me at the top with something that's new. I might share some links. So the point was I was doing everything in this one big newsletter. And so what I decided to do is just strip all of those other aspects out because I didn't want to stop sharing recommendations of great things that I've come across and things that I'm doing and having that personal aspect. So I just stripped all of that out into a separate newsletter. And because I've done that, I've been able to reformat it in a way that makes it super easy to produce. Because one thing that happened quite regularly is that I'd be about to send out a newsletter and I've done all the work on the main part, and then there's still this other aspect that I have to do that then feels like work and then I lose motivation and then I end up not publishing that week. Or something comes up like that.

I know exactly what you mean. I actually have the opposite issue, which is that I curate so much stuff and I keep it in this notion collection bucket. So when it comes time for the newsletter, I have all these great curation links that I want to share. But writing the intro is like, oh.

What did you say?

This week?

Yeah, that's exactly the thing. That's how mine works now. So now I'm just repurposing all of this stuff that I already keep, the book recommendations. I read loads of books every year and my wish list is always growing. So now that it's in this discrete format where this newsletter is just that kind of stuff, it makes it so much easier to. Oh, I just scoop up some stuff either from my wish list or books I've recently read and then I grab a bunch of stuff from my. I just have a. My links, like one huge database in notion with all of the links that I've saved. I just throw three of the recent things in there. And then one secret that I will tell you that I don't think many people actually know.

We love a good secret here.

Yeah. So the blue pill is actually just stuff that I've already written in the red pill. The words aren't the same, the ideas are the same. And the reason I did that is because, as I mentioned, I'd already been writing it for two years. This newsletter and all of that stuff goes into people's inboxes and it disappears forever. So everyone else has no idea that it actually exists. And so what I did is, you know, I felt like I've had two years of learning, two years of writing experience, two years of knowledge that I've added to myself. If I was to go back and write all of these other ones again, I'd write them completely differently. I'd write them better. So what I've been doing is I just go back and I break them up into digestible chunks and I just rewrite them. And so it means that I've got a lot of content and I don't have to worry about the content for the blue pill stuff because it's ideas that I have already partially digested and I'm just rewriting. Like, how would I approach this now? Two years later. So because I'm doing that every week or every fortnight, there's always stuff to write about and all I have to focus on is writing new stuff and pursuing new ideas in the main newsletter.

I love that. It's like polishing stones, going back through your own archive, taking juicy nuggets and just polishing them and updating them. That's such a good idea.

Yeah, exactly. And then I guess the free time aspects that I think you can bake into that, that I have in a way as well. I've actually done it with both of my newsletters. I don't know how much you want me to rabbit on about this.

Oh, I love a good rabbit hole. Yeah. Okay, go for it.

Okay, so two of them are fully or partly automated. The blooper one is now just a sequence so that anytime you join that newsletter, you're going to get all of the emails. And so that is automated, so whenever you start, you get all the emails. But what I love about that and why I intentionally, is because even when those emails exist, I still go back to the beginning and I continually update them. So, in fact, if you were to subscribe today, the version of the emails that you get should be better than someone that signed up five or six months ago, and you're getting a better version of those same ideas. And then with the revelations one, I do a half version of that, where actually the top half of that newsletter, where I have a personal introduction and here are the things I've done most recently is new, I do that every week. But the bottom half, which just has links and stuff to things that I've come across or books that I'd recommend, that part is stock, so that part is a sequence. And so again, it just means less work for me. Each week I just focus on, here are the latest things, here are the new things, here are my current thoughts, and that's it.

To clarify technically how that works, you're using ConvertKit, right, for your software?

Yes. Yeah.

So how is it that you can customize the top half but automate the second half if it's in the same newsletter?

So this is one of my secrets. ConvertKit has a feature called Snippets, and I think something similar might exist in some other email platforms, but I actually have nested snippets, and it's probably harder to describe this over audio, but essentially I have a snippet that will preload something else. And so all I have to do is I put the snippet in all of the emails, and then I change to something else every week. So every week I change what that snippet is going to call upon. And so everyone is getting a different email, but all the emails contain the snippet. And so as long as I change the snippet every week, the top half of everyone's emails is different every week, but the bottom half is the same.

That is so interesting. I'm trying to picture it. And are the snippets, is that where you're saving links? That's your curated piece.

So the curated piece is at the bottom. Just because if it's something I recommend, I'm always going to recommend it. The only part that changes are the updates from me. So if I'm saying, you know, here's what I'm up to this week, here's how I'm feeling, here's what I'm doing. And then in that section, I also will share new posts from me. So if I've done a Red pill newsletter that week, I'll share that. If I've done a podcast like my podcast with you, then I share that. So the things that need to be timely, I can make sure they're always timely. And the things that can be evergreen, I make sure always evergreen.

I see. And the evergreen pieces are saved as.

Snippets the other way around.

Oh, okay. Because I don't use ConvertKit.

No, no, no. So it's a sequence that is evergreen. And then in order to create the timely section, I use a snippet and then I change the snippet every week. So that part is different every week.

I see.

So if you subscribed this week and someone else subscribed last week, the first half of your email this week will be the same as theirs. Because I send that every week. So that's like in the spirit of a real newsletter, I am sending that to you every week. But the bottom half, which just has some of my recommendations, just to reduce the workload, that is a sequence. So you will get something different from what someone else got last week.

That is so fascinating. I love hearing about this. After I spoke with Alan Dibb, I set up as well a mega autoresponder series because let's say the Friday Time well Spent newsletter. Every time I send a time bound one, I evergreen it as a verb. So I take out anything time bound or specific or that would not be relevant in a month or a year from now and then I program it into the welcome series. In doing that, anybody new who joins has 150 days of content and I have my space 10 days apart. I'm wondering if you do less, but what do you do when you create a sequence for a list? What do you do for the people who were already on it? Because that's always what I want to know. Like, yes, anyone new is good to go and kind of always will be. But what about the thousand people that joined before you shifted to this strategy?

The thing I can think of might be that you start I'm not sure if in other remote platforms you can do this, but you definitely can. In ConvertKit, I would start with the email that you want to send out now and send it out and then after it goes out to everyone that's on the list, then you reorder it so that it's no longer first, if that makes sense. So that the people that are already on your list have already received it and then they can just fall in line with whatever everyone else is getting. And the way that that works in the Blue Pill newsletter that I send, for example, is that I know the bulk of the people in my newsletter that got it when I first started it are at a certain point in the sequence, and everyone else is somewhere behind that because they subscribed afterwards. So I can just intentionally curate what is going to go out to the bulk of people because they started it first each week or each fortnight. And then I know that by the time everyone else gets it, it's going to be a few weeks from now.

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I also noticed in the subject line of your different missives, sometimes there's a green dot, a green circle which is using the green emoji, so it really does jump out in the inbox. Sometimes there's a blue circle and sometimes there is Not a circle at all. What's your logic behind that?

Yes. So that is just to earmark the difference between the blue pill one has the blue dot and the revelations one has the green dot and then the red pill ones don't have anything at all.

Well, I'm not yet signed up for red pill. Do you put a red dot when it's the red pill, or am I possibly getting red pills even though I'm not paying for them?

No, actually I'm just trying to think. I think I might put a red dot. The difference is, and this is another secret, or not so much of a secret, but I don't actually send the red pill ones from ConvertKit. I send them from Ghost. And so, yeah, so it's a separate email platform, but I consolidate all of the emails.

I'm glad you brought up Ghost, because I wanted to ask you, I know you're someone who researches your tech very closely. How did you decide on Ghost vs something like substack vs creating your own subscription through Stripe or PayPal? Which always kind of boggles my mind why people give a cut to these services at all. And I know you probably have a good reason. So share with us how you landed on Ghost as your tool of choice for this, for the paid piece.

I used to be on Substack and that's where I actually started. And so I used Substack for about two years and I just knew that I wanted to go paid, but I also wanted to be able to own the platform myself and have essentially my own website and my own place where all these things live and start building SEO and start doing all of that. So all of this was part of one big effort to move into personal ownership. Part of the reason I chose Ghost was because they have a good system for being able to manage subscribers, unsubscribers, et cetera, and also that it connects to the cms. So I can have a blog that is part of the newsletter and part of everything else and that blog is the website that people can visit and that people can come to. One thing I am considering or have already considered moving to, and the only reason I haven't is just because I paid for a year of Ghost is a service called Midnight, which is essentially just Ghost, but it is partially self hosted and you can completely self host Ghost and you can do it through, I think it's called DigitalOcean and you just pay like $5 a month. So there's a version of this that you could do that is super cheap and super Personal, I am not yet willing to go all the way to that side, but there's a halfway house, which is called Midnight, and I think their service is about $15 a month versus the full ghost, which is about $30 a month. Well, actually, I think maybe there's a cheaper plan, but depending on the number of subscribers you have, you have to pay increasingly larger amounts. So I think that will be the next piece for me is detangling. Okay. I still want to have this website, and I still want to have the content management system, but I don't want to have to pay just for the growth.

My friend Dori sent me an article about Substack. Getting mad at all these people leaving, like building their platform and then. Yeah, exactly. Getting annoyed to give 10% or more and then piecing out.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a great place to start and it's a great place to grow. I think what's so good about Substack is they just make the writing easy and almost effortless. I know they've added a lot more to it, a lot more complications, a lot more personalization, but at least when it started, it was essentially just a blank slate. And it was a good way to get started writing with zero friction. But I think as you grow and as your audience grows, if you want more control over who gets what, if you want to be able to have a much more robust business behind the scenes, then eventually you probably have to grow out of Substack. And I think that's what a lot of the larger Substack operators are finding, particularly the ones that are paying. I think once you go past a certain number of paid subscribers, it makes very little financial sense based on the way it's currently set up.

I was a huge Substack skeptic for a while, and then just recently I had a slight change of heart. Not that I'm moving over there or anything, where I downloaded the Substack app and all of a sudden all these newsletters I subscribed to were coming in in the app. I had a nice feed in the. Like we used to have in the good old days of blogging with RSS feeds, and you have a nice newsletter inbox. It was such a good UI and user experience to aggregate all these newsletters because email just gets so chaotic. And then I know that they're doing this private podcast feed as well, which I think is very interesting. I use a private podcast feed within the BFF community for bonus content for them, and I delivered the free time audiobook to anyone who pre ordered via private feed. Have you thought about as well creating a private feed for your podcast? Are you pretty happy having that just be fully open?

I think it's something I'd consider. I've considered it in the past and it's more so just a question of the workload and the return on time invested. And so I think that's my main forcing function right now. Like if I was able to maybe delegate a bit more or improve my systems to the extent that I had extra time to be able to do it, then sure, because I'd love to do more content, audio and visual in general. And I know that, for example, I've thought of doing more with my podcast, like even just doing audio versions of some of the newsletters I send or other things like that that people have asked for, or sharing things from my course or sharing other bits of information. And the reason I haven't right now is just because my podcast is mostly in the interview format and I don't always want to throw additional stuff into that feed. And so I think that will probably be the pivot point, to use your word. But either I'll get to a point where I get comfortable with, okay, the feed is mostly interviews and there'll be a mix of me sharing stuff directly as well, or. Or that will become a separate private feed and that will be maybe part of the paid offering.

Yeah, it's interesting how Sam Harris does it where a good number of his interviews are just cut off at 45 minutes. And then if you want the 90 minute, the full deal that's in the private feed versus creating an entirely separate bonus episode, which is what I do.

Yeah, that's a really good point as well, actually. Do you subscribe to that?

You know, this is my secret and sorry, Sam Harris. I'm normally so above board with this stuff. Many years ago, my brother shared with me the private feed. So I get that. I can't believe I'm saying this right now because I'm uber vigilant about never doing pirated anything. Like, my husband thought I was absolutely ridiculous when he first met me that I refused. I'm like, we support authors in this family, we support artists, we buy the books. We don't do any of that. But the one exception is I have Sam Harris's private feed and I'm not technically a member of. I'm sorry, Sam. See, now I'm going to have to fix this.

We can try it. You can give it to me instead.

Yeah.

So funny. I want to ask you more about your systems and even automation of how you organize your content, or at least the content that becomes the newsletters. But first, let's talk about the numbers a little bit. You don't have to be specific unless you want to in terms of the number of paid subscribers or the revenue that you're getting. Do you get discouraged? Do you feel happy with the numbers? And you're very encouraged and you're like, this is totally worth it. I'm so glad I have a paid version or like I fall into sometimes in various parts of my business over the years where you go, I thought this would be a good idea, but it's so hard to grow the paid subscriber base. I'm not meeting my revenue goals to make it worth having an entirely separate newsletter platform, et cetera. I don't want to put words into your mouth, but those are kind of like two things that I think are very common for people to feel where are you at with it? And how do you gauge success or not and whether you want to continue with the private feed or not.

If you don't mind, I might jump into a third tangent which is 100% related, but it's not directly answering your question. But I might come back to the question afterwards just because there's another aspect of this has been front of mind which relates to the payment cost and I've just been thinking about it even this past week. Do you mind?

I never mind a good tangent. Please, please, whatever comes to mind.

It's pretty much right in the same vein. So maybe slightly to answer your question, I do think it has been difficult growing the paid aspect and I think usually the people that I see doing this really well are people that have already built a really, really substantial following and they have tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers on their free so that by the time they switch on their paid usually you can prob something like a 5% conversion or something, but then that becomes a meaningful number. So I've been doing this for this is the third year, I think, or just over two years. And in the first year obviously started from zero, it got to 500 subscribers, then the next year 1000 subscribers. This year we passed 2000 subscribers. Very small in the grand scheme of email things, but at least I can see that we've pretty much doubled every year that I have been writing it and on the website part, which is why I invested in Ghost that gets thousands, thousands of views every month. So from an SEO perspective, people are coming and reading the stuff and we're converting some of those into subscribers as we grow. One thing that I've been thinking about, which maybe answers part of your question, is I'm really interested in this idea that it seems like people have been paying more for the things I've charged the most for and paying less for the things I charge the least for. And I need to do some more investigation into what the correct answer is or what that means for me and my business. But I have found it incredibly interesting. How so? When I first started the paid, it was only £5amonth instead of 10. And I had hardly anyone pick up as soon as I doubled it. Almost the same day I had additional subscribers. And I find that really interesting. And I didn't even tell people. I didn't even say, oh, I'm going to raise it. I just raised it. I spoke to someone and he was like, this is too cheap. And I said, okay, fine, so I'll just double it. And I doubled it and more people paid. And then in addition, I have this course. And the course is multiples of the cost of the newsletter. The newsletter is like £10. The course is like £700 right now, and the cost might go up. And so it's almost two orders of magnitude higher cost. And I have people for that and I fill cohorts for that. And so that is one aspect that I find really interesting, where it seems to be a lot easier to sell people on things that maybe the price is a signal of the value. And so when people have that higher perceived value, particularly when you are less well known, I feel as though if you were better known in advance, then you'd have maybe less trouble. You don't need to do any convincing. Whatever price you set, if Seth Godin releases a new thing, whatever prices he sets, it's Seth Godin, of course I'm gonna subscribe to this thing, and so it doesn't matter. But when you're less known, I think you rely maybe more on other signals. So one could be direct of the signal of the quality of the public work that you do, which is why I keep the free newsletter. But then the pricing, I think maybe is the alternative signal.

In my conversation with Richie Norton, he said pricing is branding. And it's just so true. And it's just fascinating that the numbers are bearing this out for you because I think so many business owners get hesitant to raise prices. And then what you're saying is it actually increases the perceived value. And then I agree the prices to join my community, my private community, have Grown a lot over time. Partly because I noticed that once people enrolled, they were so committed because the price was just high enough that you really want to show up. It's not the kind of price you can phone it in.

Yeah.

And so it just attracted really committed, engaged, wonderful people.

Yeah, you're really right on that. And I can give you a great example of this. So with the course, when I did the pilot, I think it was around £400. And then also at one point in time I did some discounts. And so there was someone I think on the last cohort that got a discount, maybe when they weren't supposed to. I think I thought I'd switched it off, but somehow the discount code still worked for them. So they got a big discount on what the price should have been and they just didn't even turn up. Because I can see they read all my emails and sometimes they reply. They replied on one of my YouTube videos. They just left a comment. So this is someone. Maybe they didn't want to turn up live and they just wanted to watch the recordings, which is also fine. But I find it interesting that someone that got a discount on the full price of something didn't show up when people that pay almost twice the cost show up every single time.

Yes, I've had that happen too. So I love this tangent. Thank you so much for bringing this up. And I think you're exactly right that as with so many things, especially things like paid subscriptions, it's people who already have an existing platform and base of people who just will buy anything and everything they create. Then when they launch a paid subscription, it's kind of immediately tips over the point where it's worth keeping. Do you feel like you're there yet with yours or are you going to give it a certain amount of time? I'm just wondering the cost benefit analysis of where at some point, if the subscriptions weren't high enough, maybe you wouldn't want to go to the trouble of keeping it. Or do you find that the people who sign up for that are like are they're just so committed and they're so interested in you and your work and that you enjoy connecting with them no matter what the total revenue from that stream is.

What I'm more so thinking is almost the opposite. And maybe that will change and maybe I should rethink. But the way I'm thinking about it is how can I add more value to the existing package? And realistically, kind of what I mentioned, the course costs so much that the newsletter is a drop in the ocean. And so I can just start attaching the newsletter. And I have, I just add it as a bonus to all sorts of things. And I just say, hey, if you buy this, you get three months of the newsletter. Because if you're paying, let's say, £100 for this and the newsletter is £30 for three months, then that's a nice bonus for you. And if you decide to renew once you realise how great it is, that's fantastic for everyone. And the same with the course, I think I give people six months of that. That's £60 of value. And usually people stay on it. And so I'm trying to find other ways that I can provide things that are of value. Because the hard thing is with gated or paywalled content, you don't get to see the value. It's almost the same way in Costco they give out all these samples, right? Because everything else is wrapped up. And so if you were just looking at the packaging on all these random things, half of that stuff I'd never buy. But because they give you this little taster and you taste it, you're like, wow, this is fantastic. And so now I'm interested. Now I might consider. And so what I'm trying to do is find ways that I can bundle this thing that's relatively lower cost with other things, essentially as a free add on for a period of time. And then once you've had the sample and you've realized how good it is, then you're much more likely to stay on. And so I'm trying to grow the top of the funnel and then I'm also trying to grow the essentially the free trial range and giving the newsletter as an additional benefit. And then once you get it, then you realize how good it is.

I love that. The Costco sample model of business development. That's a good article. Title.

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Do you ever get self conscious with newsletters in general? I know for me, I've had a newsletter over 10 years, probably 11 or 12 by now, and I know it's the best direct way to reach people. Even a podcast, it's hard to know who's out there. But I also know in my own inbox, I am buried in newsletters. No matter how many of them I love and appreciate, I'm just drowning in newsletters. So do you ever get self conscious that you're creating all this work and that people's attention span is just lessening or their inbox is more and more crowded?

Maybe not so much specifically on that. And this could be a point of bias, because I really respect and love a bunch of writers and I subscribe to their stuff just like you. And very frequently I have zero time to read their stuff. And in fact, some of my email haranguing has worked against me because I use Superhuman and I put all of my newsletters into like one bucket. You could do this with Gmail. You have a rule, and it's set up so that all these kind of newsletters go into this bucket. And what it should be is that then when I have time, I can go through and read almost like a feed, a digest of all these different newsletters. And I'm having less and less time to do that. But I haven't unsubscribed, and I still know and love those writers. And when I do go back and I go through it, then I find the stuff and it's useful. So I think that is one aspect that I keep in mind, is that if people do love the work and they do find it valuable, then even if they are maybe not reading it right now or they're getting inundated, they can come back to it. And people frequently do. And the second thing that I have also noticed very much following on from that is also that the times that I've stopped, and this was more so towards the beginning of this journey when I was just starting the newsletter, and it's hard to find the motivation and it's hard to get into the swing of producing regular content, is that anytime I stopped, people would email me. And even when I don't stop, people email me and people will share things from their life. Wow, this was so helpful. I have this relationship with my dad. I was going through this. All of this stuff was going on in my life, and this was super useful. This was great with my business. And so I think because I do occasionally get that feedback, I know that for the people that it does resonate with, it is super resonant for them and it is useful. And so it's good for them to have in their inbox. And so it's almost like, you know, maybe this sounds pompous of me, but imagine being a doctor and you're prescribing someone a course of medicine. You wouldn't say, oh, man, you're not taking this thing, so I'm just going to stop giving it to you. You know that. Okay. Whenever you are ready to start taking your medicine again, I'm just going to send it to you so that it's there when you're ready. And I know it's going to be good for you, and you know it too, whenever you're ready to do it. But human nature is that people don't always take their medicine. People rarely finish the full course of any prescription, but you give them the full course anyway.

I love that. And that's true. You're searchable. That happens to me a lot where I'm searching for something in my inbox and then a random slew of newsletters come up on that topic and I go, oh, what do these people have to say about that? So you're right. I love that. Last question. Before I give you the famous final question of this interview, can you take us behind the scenes of how you organize all your snippets and what I call collection buckets? I know you use Notion, but is it one mega database? Do you have a different database where you keep story snippets? Just share with us something interesting, crosses the transom, crosses your awareness, and you know, you want to save it into one of your newsletter buckets. What does it look like on the back end?

I actually have two databases. One is the direct answer to your questions, or I actually just have one bucket that everything goes in. And I try to optimize for searching over sorting. And you can only do that if the tool that you're using is good at searching. Thankfully, Notion is great at searching. As a contrast, Evernote is probably better for sourcing. So if you're on Evernote, you probably want to have all these complex folders and all of this stuff. On Notion. I do none of that. What I do have, I do have some tags that I could add which are topical. But really I just make sure that when I'm saving something using the Notion web Clipper, I just pack the title full of keywords so that whatever I'm searching for when I need to find this thing I'm going to be able to find it and it helps tremendously. So if I want to write something about stress, I just do command K, because Notion has that shortcut now. And I can just search and find everything that I've ever looked at about stress. And I think the paradigm that I have in mind is, is I forget the guy's name, but it was a writer and he talks about having an anti library. And that's what I think of mine as, where there's some of these articles, maybe I've read them in full and very often I haven't. Usually I'll take a glance, enough of a glance to know that this is something good, and then I just save it. And so then when I'm doing research, instead of starting by searching Google, I start by searching my anti library, my library of things I haven't yet read, because usually I'll have the answers there because I spend so much time gathering stuff from across the the Internet. And then the other database that I mentioned I have is for writing. So the first one is more resources and it's more for searching and finding stuff. And the other one is more for notes. And so there I will contain notes from, for example, podcasts that I listen to, YouTube videos that I watch, but then also my original notes and everything that might become a newsletter one day. And there's a few things I do with that so that I do lean more heavily on tags. But I think probably one of the best systems that I use with that is something I call the Velocity of Knowledge. And that's the framework that I use to think about it, where I have a velocity score of 1, 3, and 5 for every original thing that I keep in my notes. It's just a notebook, digital notebook. And what it means is that A1 is something that could just be an idea, it might just be a title, it might just be one sentence, it's something that I know I could explore. And then a three is something that maybe I have a few sentences or I have one paragraph and then a five is I probably have a few paragraphs, or at least I have a structure of what this essay could be or what this newsletter could be. And so what it means is that I don't feel the pressure of having to progress things from beginning to end all the time. As long as I can progress it to a 1, a 3, or a 5, there's no twos or fours. So it forces me to commit to reaching whatever that next level is. And so whenever I do have the time to write. I can just go straight to the fives and see. Okay, I already have some paragraphs. I already have the structure. Let me take this all the way up. Or I can start with a three and say, okay, I've got a few sentences. Let me flesh this out some more. So it allows me to keep things in status and I don't have to worry about progressing everything to the end. I have a bunch of different ideas that are at these different levels, and I can always jump right in and pick up the ideas that fit how much energy I have right now to take this through to completion.

I love this. Thank you for sharing. I feel like we got all your good secrets today. I love this velocity score of 1 through 5 and especially the name of it, because it's so true. Once you get from a three or to a five, you have so much more velocity with that idea. It's ready to go. It's easily copy pasteable, whereas A1 is going to need a little more energy and effort. That's so cool.

Yes, exactly.

All right, final question. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

So there's a great quote that I came across recently, and it is a slight misquote of an original quote, but I love the misquote better. And the quote is, you are born a thousand men and die only one. And what that speaks to is the infinite possibilities of life and that you start with all the possibilities of the things that you can do, but by the end, you only have the path that you've already taken. And I think this wraps up in a lot of what we discussed about, which is, you know, do you take the path of multiple newsletters? Do you do the paid newsletter? Do you do this? Do you do that? But I think the key of that quote is, is that you should kill the other things on purpose so that you don't kill them by accident. And I think you should be intentional about curating the possibilities that you leave open so that you don't kill them by inaction and lack of planning, fear, any of those other things. Because very often you might be filled with fear, you might be filled with trepidation, hesitation, and you miss out on some of those other opportunities to take different paths. Whereas if you can intentionally decide which path you want to keep open, then you can ensure that those are always relevant and open to you.

So good. Yeah, in writing, in publishing, they call it kill your darlings, which I think is kind of an aggressive term. Yeah, but you have to be willing to cut stuff that you really like for the sake of a book and publishers are hardcore on the word count. I did my last book free time independently so I I slap on the wrist. I made it like a hundred pages too long because I did not kill enough darlings. And then the anti library. I just meant to tell you earlier it was Nassim Taleb who talks about the anti library and I do the same thing in notion. I have an almost anti library of articles that I save knowing I want to read them and then save them for later. But I really appreciate that reminder to be intentional. And there's another quote I always say John Maxwell, you have to say no to the good so you can say yes to the best.

Yes. I love that.

Well, so many great secrets. So many permission slips today. David. This has been so fun. Where do you want to send people if they want to learn more and keep in touch and subscribe to get red pilled?

Yes. So the easiest place is the landing page which is newsletter thenledge IO and you can find me on all socials. Eloku awesome.

Thank you so much David and big thanks for listening everybody.

Thanks so much for having me.

If you've listened this far you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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