Direction of Future

Day 25 of #30DaysOfStartingUp

In Day 06’s letter Updates & Learnings From the First Week, I shared this newsletter’s first-week stats and compared the stats with my past passion projects that went viral:

My most popular passion project had 30,000 site visitors on the launch day. In comparison, my newsletter had 54 visitors on the launch day. I was not dreaded seeing that, but instead, I said: “Most of my passion projects reach their peak on launch day. The startup is a long game. We never want the peak to come.”

This is the updated graph after five weeks; the launch day surge is below the everyday average now:

I originally started the newsletter for my 30 Days of Starting Up challenge; next week will be the final week of the challenge. However, this is not the end but just the beginning! I plan to keep the newsletter going as long as I run my startup, changing it to weekly after next week. 

With the change to weekly, I am revamping the structure of the newsletter. The current daily newsletter is free-form, in which I covered a wide range of topics each day. I am curious to hear what you liked to read and what didn’t spike your interest? I categorize them into three main themes and list the articles of each theme:

1. Startup thoughts, why and how I started, what I learned:

   • Day 01: I Bought a Year of Time for $200,000

   • Day 04: Thoughts on Running a Startup vs. Passion Project

   • Day 06: Updates & Learnings From the First Week

   • Day 09: Sell Fast, Sell Often: How Selling Can Help You Sell

   • Day 10: Made Money While I Slept

   • Day 11: Learn by Practice: 3 Lessons from ProductHunt Launch

   • Day 12: Fighting Unproductiveness

   • Day 15: Lessons Learned on How to Run a Newsletter

   • Day 20: The Ups and Downs of Building in Public

   • Day 21: Bursting the Launch Day Bubble

   • Day 22: Three and a Half Tips Before You Quit

2. Process demonstration, what I am building, and how I build it:

   • Day 03: Brand Personality Workshop

   • Day 05: Develop an Idea Into a Product in One Day*

   • Day 07: The Rule of 99% Effort

   • Day 08: Design to Please

   • Day 13: A Day in the Life of a Growth Hacker

   • Day 17: Entrepreneur’s Last-mile Problem

   • Day 19: Typeface Finder App Demo

   • Day 23: Rebuild Google Fonts Website in 30mins

   • Day 24: Coding Fonts Playground

3. Product domain (branding or tech) knowledge sharing:

   • Day 02: Quality Triangle of Startup Branding

   • Day 14: An Unorthodox Way to Choose Tech Stack

   • Day 16: Choose Typefaces Based on Brand Personalities

   • Day 18: Never Too Small to Exist

You can take a quick glance of all past issues here. I would love to know what you think of the past issues. You can reply with just a number 1, 2, or 3 to suggest that is your favorite theme. If you can spare more details, that would be lovely too! Any insights on what you want to read in the weekly newsletter would be helpful!