August 26, 2019

Success story from Chris Ferdinandi

Sent by Jonathan Stark on August 26th, 2019

List member and private coaching alum Chris Ferdinandi had this story in my coaching Slack when a new student asked how Chris keeps up with his daily Vanilla JS email list (shared with permission, sales numbers redacted):

I had been writing a weekly newsletter for a year that was stuck at 30 subscribers. Jonathan and Philip Morgan both challenged me to try daily writing. I decided that if I could come up with 30 ideas in 10 minutes, I’d try it for a month and could always switch back if it failed. I set a timer, wrote down 25 ideas, and decided that was good enough to start. Magic happened! I expected a wave of unsubscribes. Instead, my subscribers more than doubled to 70 that month. After a year, I had almost 1,000. Three years later, I’m at 6,700. The growth for both my list AND my sales has been significant. My stretch goal used to be $X per month in sales. That then became my ideal target after I started hitting it regularly. The last three months I’ve done $4X in sales, and the summer is usually slow for me.

It’s true. When you write every day in public, magic happens. I’ve seen it happen over and over.

But first, it helps to know what you want to the be “go-to” person for and - perhaps more importantly - who would care enough about it to read your messages every day.

Any ideas?

Yours,

—J