🎯 Taking a Break (The Importance of Focus)
The Sunday Night Review #169
Hey everyone,
This week it’s the Monday Night Review. It’s a bank holiday here in the UK so I decided to postpone writing this email until today.
It’s been a busy past week for me. On Monday last week I launched an online course through my other weekly newsletter (for YouTubers) and I wanted to share some learnings from it.
I decided to start that weekly newsletter back in October because I wanted to write about what I was doing at work and help more YouTubers. Since then I’ve written 29 issues, which have been well received.
But I wanted to do something deeper, and one problem area for a lot of YouTubers is thumbnails (the little pictures that you click on to watch a video). To a normal person, it sounds like the most niche thing ever, but to YouTubers they can be really hard to get right. So I decided to see if people would be interested in a course about thumbnails. I tested the demand by allowing people to pre-order it for $99.
I’ve never done this before so it was a bit scary. But I knew that it was a two way door and if not enough people were interested, I could just refund them and keep going as I was.
But 31 people have pre-ordered it so far 🤯
It feels pretty mental, especially considering they haven’t received anything for it yet! I’m now feeling quite guilty for having $3,069 sitting in my Lemon Squeezy payment dashboard, but it’s great data that people are willing to invest in it (and it’s going to force me to get a move on to release it!).
Initially, when I saw the money coming in I didn’t quite know how to feel. Because of my job I regularly see payment dashboards with numbers a lot bigger than that. It almost sucked the fun out of it. But then I remembered that 2 years ago my mind would have been blown if I knew I was doing this now, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with how incredible it is that 31 people have put their faith in me. I want to make it as good as possible for them.
It does feel like nice validation because I stopped doing YouTube consulting for a bit to try to create something more scalable. For 7-8 months I was hustling away on my side projects but had minimal income from them. Now I can progress with more confidence that I’m doing the right thing. And the nice thing is that with more effort there’s the potential for more people reached and more value creation.
The long term goal is to write and create more, but I try to optimise for learning too. And building, marketing and selling an online course is something I’ve never done before for myself, so it feels fun to explore.
It may be a complete flop, and maybe everyone will want their money back, but given I’ve been in the online business game for a few years now I’m confident I can figure it out. I’m trying to embrace an experimental mindset and not get stressed out by the whole thing, because all of this is supposed to be fun.
But in order to make this course good, I need to focus on it. And with all the chaos of summer (and having a job) I can only afford to have one side thing, so I’m pausing both newsletters temporarily. I know that writing them each week as well will be too much. It’s genuinely hard to do because I’ve written this one every single week for 3.5 years and I love documenting my life and my learnings with you, but I don’t want this course (and people’s money) hanging over me for months.
I’m extremely grateful for all the lovely replies that come through each week, and I hope you all have a blessed time until I re-enter your inbox with some stories and learnings to share.
As ever, have an epic week!
Tintin :)
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