One month ago, I started my personal newsletter. I am blown away by what has happened in those first 30 days:
- I started with only 15 friends, and now there are 125 subscribers. If I imagine all of us in one single room, it would be a pretty packed room. I couldn’t be more excited. Thank you guys!
- John Mihaljevic gave me a shout-out in his Manual of Ideas mailing list, spreading the word to the investing community. Welcome fellow Value Investors! (I was a speaker at this years VALUEx conference, talking about my deep value approach. More about this topic in a separate issue). By the way, John’s book is amazing if you want learn about value investing approaches (I’ve listened to the audio version and loved it)
- My newsletter where I discuss the insights from my meditation app project led to a wonderul blog post
- I reconnected with several friends, with some of whom I haven’t been in touch for years. It has lead to beautiful (and sometimes deep) email conversations, and a number of lunches/dinners I am looking forward to
- One friend reported that my entrepreneurship advice from several years ago has proven valuable and paid off (I helped him sell his company to a larger company. I couldn’t be happier for them, as they are awesome guys!)
- One former employee described how valuable his time at Trigami has been, and how much this time has influenced his life. It showed me that Alain and myself — by pure intuition and dumb luck — probably have done more right than wrong. To this day I am very proud of the team we had and the culture we built together (I am still half-joking that we had the right team, but with the wrong product). Back to the employee: This particular person is now living his dream, cruising around in his motorhome office (how cool is that!) and combining nature with work. More about this story, and about Trigami, in a later issue.
- The newsletter even got attention from journalists
What was the most effective method to gain more subscribers?
- For the first few weeks I only used social media and my blog to promote this newsletter. This led to about 30 subscribers.
- Then I’ve sent an email to about 200 friends and colleagues, and minutes later my inbox looked like this. See? This is the power of email. Immediate response!
