End of year 2024

This will be our last newsletter of 2024 as we enter the holiday season, shopping for last-minute gifts and getting ready to indulge in cookies. We want to thank each of you for your support: for reading and encouraging us.
Wishing you a cozy and relaxing time with family and friends!

Lookback:

We launched our newsletter on March 27th and have released a fresh post every 2 weeks since then. We're now 23 articles in—a number we weren't sure we'd hit back in January/February when we started this project.

Our wins:

1. Content Quality: We're proud of the quality of information we've shared. Everything stems from personal experiences or conversations with vetted colleagues and partners.
   Our most read article was “Finding Focus and Efficiency with Weekly Recaps” , while “Fall Learning List: Soft Skills for Product Managers” and “When English is Not Your Native Language” generated the highest engagement.

2. Consistency: We posted consistently, though it wasn't always easy. Life and work sometimes overwhelmed us, but we managed by supporting each other, taking turns writing articles, and stepping in when needed.

3. Friendship: Starting a work project with a friend requires high trust. We were both initially worried about potential disagreements, but we've struck an excellent balance of accountability, openness, and honesty.

Our learnings:

1. We haven’t been able to grow our subscribers as much as we expected.
   We are currently at 218 (thank YOU, seriously), falling short of our 1k year-end goal.

2. Generated AI images quickly lost their magic.
   Limited tool flexibility and creative constraints made the process frustrating without improving article quality, leading us to experiment with personal photos and memes instead.

Look ahead:

1. We want to grow our audience.
   As mentioned above we didn’t hit our subscriber goal. Frankly, we also haven’t really made an intentional effort. We want to dive deeper into SEO best practices, into specifics of Substack and into unapologetic self-promotion.
   Self-promotion is something both of us struggled a lot - we are just simply not one of “those” LinkedIn influencers. We are very self-conscious and do care what our colleagues think of us. We want to try to be a little bit bolder with self-promotion next year as long as we both don’t cringe reading each other’s LinkedIn posts.

2. We want to experiment with different content types.
   Newsletter world turns into podcasting which then turns into video podcasting. How lucky one of us works for a company that supports video podcasting ;) We don’t yet have a plan, but experimenting with new formats sparks our interest.

3. We want to experiment with our publishing schedule.
   Is Wednesday morning really a good time to hit your inboxes? Are we posting too often? Too rare? We want to find a sweet spot.

4. Better graphics.
   Seriously, no more AI generated images. We will try to find the format that feels authentically and esthetically ours.

   We are excited and hope to meet you in your inboxes in January 2025!