email365 meta post

Since all of my current readers are also Email365 participants, I’m going to break the 4th wall here a bit. Hopefully this will be helpful to any of you also struggling with your content themes.

So the other day, I realized that I don’t want to write about digital health (my current intended industry audience).

I know what I want to write about - leadership vs authority, work incentives, purpose, and behaving like humans in work settings that encourage us to behave like worse humans. But those topics won’t attract my ICP.

I also don’t want to be stuck in digital health. I want to build an audience around the topics I care about, not around an industry.

But I had a great conversation yesterday that flipped a switch in my head (thanks Pranav!).

On the surface, the topics I want to write about don’t align with what my intended audience wants to read about. It feels like I have a wrench and need a hammer. The wrench can kinda hit the nail in, but it’s not the right tool. The topics are not the right content for the audience I’m trying to attract.

So what needs to change?

I didn’t pick the tool metaphor out of a toolbox: I realized that I don’t need to nail anything. I need to affix two boards together.

There are many different ways to do that. If you have a hammer, you need a nail. If you have a wrench, then you need a bolt.

Jonathan Stark’s email newsletter isn’t about independent consultants and expertise businesses. It’s about pricing.

That’s his fixture - nail, bolt, glue, whatever. It connects the things he wants to write about (value pricing) to a valuable audience (people who care about value pricing). He finds his audience because his audience cares about pricing - but that’s not his whole business, is it? It’s part of it - just like leadership and creating good team incentives is part of mine. It attracts his ICP (us). But the important thing is the audience. What does the Email365 course have to do with pricing? Not a lot. Yet it’s part of his business, because his audience can support it.

More importantly, his topic is very niche - his audience isn’t. He found a very specific pain point that lots of people have. If he decided he wanted to expand his business to helping enterprise companies with their pricing models… well it wouldn’t be seamless, but it would be possible.

So I think I’ve been approaching this entirely the wrong way. My network is in digital health, so by default I’m going to mostly reach people in digital health - for now. But I think I can align my writing with a different, broader ICP without impacting my business at all.

Every non-technical digital health startup founder struggles with leadership, especially technical leadership. They often forget that their employees have different incentives and sense of purpose than they do.

But lots of other people struggle with these things too. Right now, the economically valuable, differentiating thing I bring to the table is technical experience in digital health. The realization I’m working through now, though, is that this doesn’t always need to be the case. The individual components of what I do are valuable in and of themselves regardless of the industry.

I can focus them through the digital health lense for now - the realization, though, is that it’s just a lense. I can put new lenses in front of it.

To be really concrete about it: I can talk almost entirely about software dev leadership, for example, and share it under my current positioning in digital health. It’s relevant to lots of people, including but not limited to digital health founders. If I want to change my positioning, my newsletter topic doesn’t have to change and I won’t alienate my current audience.

I still need to hone this idea and refine the actual “fixture,” but I thought it might be helpful for some of you.

My email topics might go kinda wild for the next little while - hopefully you guys still get something out of it.