The Sample publisher report

Nothing much to report from last week—I spent most of it finishing up a freelancing project and participating in various cultural rituals. I updated the roadmap just now.

I often go back and forth on the question of "should we keep working on The Sample full-time, or should I do more freelancing part-time while we wait for it to grow?" For the sake of not being constantly distracted, I've decided to only consider this question once per month. Full-time is definitely the way to go for now, so we'll wait till the end of January and then see how things are going.

I have decided, however, to spend only three days per week on short-term growth. For me, that's growth in terms of "get more people to submit newsletters and enable paid forwards," while my cofounder continues to be in charge of improving our subscribe-in-1-click conversion rate and getting more subscribers from FB ads. Besides that, I'll use Thu-Sat to work on long-term/speculative projects. For one thing, it's a way to hedge against the possibility of The Sample needing a long time before we can take salaries from it. But honestly, it's also just good for morale. As a programmer I've found it's very difficult for me to spend all my time on marketing without getting depressed.

So on the growth side, I'll be blogging, messing with ads, and cold emailing people. Perhaps I'll experiment with partnerships. With my coding time, I'll be putting more work into Biff, the web framework which I've used to build The Sample. There's a batch of updates I've been wanting to finish for a while. After that, I'd like to make a new reader app of sorts, along the lines of my The messy future of social media post.

I think a reader app (with various novel features; not just a clone of stuff that already exists) would make a good compliment to The Sample. In particular, a reader app would probably be more sticky, and it would give us the opportunity to make improvements anywhere in the discover-read-share workflow, not just in the discover part. I haven't spent any time on it yet because business-wise, I think it's far more important right now to grow The Sample as is. So it's a good fit for my "long-term project" time, plus I really want it for my own personal use. More on that later, perhaps?

Once that's in a state where it's at least covering my own needs, I might experiment with more wacky newsletter growth ideas. Like some kind of directory/system for classified ads and cross-promotion, an area which I still think is in need of much innovation. Again, going back to that post, I think it would be valuable to find ways for independent publishers to help each other grow more, without needing to rely on Twitter et. al.

Jacob