Natalie Merchant - Kind and Generous (1998)
Writing this newsletter has involved several reboots. Some of my readers remember the fits and starts. Others joined in reading later and wondered how I manage to crank out a new post each week.
Substack has been great so far. In fact, this week represents month five (5!) on Substack1 after over a year on Revue before recent Twitter drama.2
The attention economy is real. Another email in the inbox might be clogging arterial flow of your precious time to be enlightened.
If time is money then money is time. So, I try to bring education, utility, a sprinkle of humor, and much humility to this newsletter.
Speaking of which… there’s nothing more humbling than an unsubscribe.
Still, each subscribe is an endorphin hit and likely dopamine release. As such, I appreciate every reader, every click, every share, and the time investments made to read my rambles.
Much has been written elsewhere about network effects on Substack. For me, the vanity stats are much smaller but align to a familiar set of statistics for the graph when things went “up” with a new subscriber addition.
60% of my new subscribers came from Substack platform features 🤯
20% of my new subscribers were existing Substack accounts
20% of my new scribers are brand new accounts on Substack
And as Michael Scott once said that Wayne Gretzky once said that Leonardo Da Vinci once famously said…
“A newsletter is never finished, only abandoned"
- Leonardo da Vinci
- - Wayne Gretzky
- - - Michael Scott
Thank you readers 🙏 for all the feedback and support to get this far. I’ll keep going as long as there are folks reading and topics that I can take a look at each week.
Now I’d like to send along a thank you to the newsletters that inspire me. Your influence and impact on my own newsletter is appreciated more than you know.
I am an enterprise technology investor and executive with an appreciation for companies building disruptive middleware, platforms, and infrastructure. I am also a private pilot, instrument-rated, ASEL.
Finally, as I asked in my Substack Chat… What will be my next newsletter topic?
Until then… Place your bets!
As a reminder, I work at Taos, an IBM Company. If you’d like to learn more about Taos and how we help companies make the most of cloud by embracing cybersecurity and compliance, check out this video:
I am linking to my disclosure.
So long and thanks for all the fish
As I was saying…