Hi selected friend,
You are one of a handful people that I’d love to share some thoughts about Naive Weekly with. Feel free to archive the email straight away. Should you read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, no matter how brutal they are.
From early December to late July I wrote 33 issues of Naive Weekly. Then the madness of Techfestival became overwhelming and ever since I’ve kept silent.
Now I’m thinking of relaunching the newsletter, but before doing that I need to figure out why…
Why wasting time writing a weekly newsletter
Taking a break helped me clarify what good came out of spending 3-4hrs/weekly on writing a newsletter. My initial motivation was simply to start reading regularly again. A conservative estimate is that I’ve read more than 1000 articles since December. In those terms the newsletter was successful.
Would anyone ask me about why it is good curating a weekly newsletter, my learnings from the past +100 hours of curation:
It pushed me to keep on reading
It helped me structure thinking through writing
It gave me permission to reach +400 inboxes weekly (including inboxes of good friends)
It forced me to consciously improve my news sources
Why not wasting time writing a newsletter
At the same time I’ve also been thinking about what I did not get out of writing the newsletter. And the answer is strikingly simple:
No visible compound interest
I could have complained about that I was spending more time reading articles rather than books, but to be honest the main criticism I have of the newsletter is the lack of compound interest. Especially considering the time investment of 3-4 hours per week.
Is not too surprising.
Back in December when I decided to launch the newsletter I was in-between everything. Physically I was in Budapest, Copenhagen and Berlin. Mentally I was thinking about Techfestival, Third Wave List, Human/Curated, an ICO, co-living and a handful of projects connected to co-matter.
Being in-between made it hard to re-invest interest into one coherent journey, because such a coherent journey did not exist.
Naive Weekly v3
Let me be clear. I enjoyed writing the newsletter and I want to relaunch it! However, before I start writing to the entire email list again, I want to figure out how the f*** to create compound interest.
For this, I ask for your inputs! My own thinking has reached this point:
tl;dr co-matter
My main story is co-matter. If people should remember just one thing it should be that I’m doing co-matter. The more eager people can start to figure out what co-matter is. That we connect, educate and (soon) invest community leaders around the globe.
If I can get this far, I’ve come a long way. But how do I get there?
Right now I’m more questions than answers. I’m considering:
Should I modify the curation? (e.g. include more on community)
Should co-matter be clearly represented in the newsletter? If yes, how?
How should I describe what the newsletter is about so it is accurate yet interesting? (It was “Stories on Technology, Inequality and Social Norms”)
Is Naive Weekly at all a good name or should I call it something else?
Should I change something in the formats I use?
Deadline: I want to send the next real newsletter next week (working title: Now Nostalgia). So I should start to find some answers.
Oh, and I might try using Substack as a new home for the newsletter. It’d allow subscribers to become paid subscribers in the future. But it is also just a fresh alternative to the usual email clients.
<3
Kristoffer