Lesson for you, really lesson for me:
Last week I was digging through my emails, and I found this:
“Oh, btw. If you use AI at all…and want to do a guest post on Write With AI, let me know. Love to promote you.”
That message came from Justin Zack, who I mentioned a few emails ago. Justin is the Head of Partnerships at a paid newsletter called Write With AI, which has 54k subscribers.
Except, Justin wrote me that back in August. I had completely missed it then.
I wrote Justin to see if he’s still interested. He said, yes.
I asked what kinds of posts had done well previously on Write With AI. He gave me an example by Matt Giaro, which is the top-performing post for Write With AI, on how to write a weekly newsletter with AI.
“Mhm,” I said. Just like I thought. I had a problem.
Because I use AI for research… for filling in things I don’t know or can’t think of… as a replacement for Google and YouTube and Reddit combined.
But I don’t use AI to write. Not my own stuff anyhow. I have a policy that I won’t use AI for anything that’s published under my name.
In part, that’s because I think there’s value in making a big deal of actually being real, live, more or less human being on the Internet.
In part, it’s because AI never actually writes like me, and I’m pedantic about what I put out.
So I told Justin, “Yeah let me go away and think a bit, and see if come up with a topic that could work.” Frankly, I was not optimistic.
And then, independent of all this, I wrote an email for this newsletter (by hand, by myself, without AI) about how I had used AI to create a little tech tool — the in-email streak tracker for my Daily Email Habit service.
Justin, who reads these emails, replied to that email and said, “btw, ‘how I created a daily email counter with AI (with promo for deh)’ is what we should do…. just a thought.”
It was one of those forehead-slapping moments. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
So that’s what we ended up doing.
I’ve written up the post about how I got ChatGPT to be my little code monkey. I’m finishing up that post today. I’ll get it over to Justin, and I guess he will publish it at some point on Write With AI when they get a spot in their busy editorial calendar.
But the lesson I promised you, which is really a lesson for me, because it’s a mistake I keep making:
There’s an epidemic of thinking too big and too broad. I know I’ve definitely been infected by this contagion.
Over time I’ve managed to develop an immunity to it when it comes to writing daily emails. But I still get sick with this disease when it comes to writing in other formats… or when it comes to creating offers, or making new products.
So the lesson I would like to suggest to you, in the hope I myself will remember it, is to make smaller, more specific promises.
Don’t teach people how to walk, run, and jump.
Just teach them how to tie their shoes.
And if you additionally restrict your teaching to just a course on how to tie asymmetrical, decorative laces on $400 fashion sneakers, odds are good you will not only have an easy time selling to that dedicated market, but you’ll be able to charge a premium.
All right, time to tie this shoe up:
My Daily Email Habit service does just one tiny thing. Each day, it helps you get started writing an email to your list, with the ultimate goal of making it easier to stick with the valuable habit of daily emailing.
Here’s a tiny case study I got about Daily Email Habit, from Roald Larsen, who used to be a high-powered consultnant and now runs an online brand called Solopreneur MBA:
“Today I wasn’t really feeling it. But the prompt helped to make it smaller. Easier. More manageable to write and send to the list. Nice.”
But I’m not inviting you to sign up for Daily Email Habit, which costs money. Instead, I’m inviting you to sign up to my daily email newsletter, which I write based on the prompts inside Daily Email Habit, and which is free, at least for the moment. To try it out, click here and fill out the form that appears.