Gamification, Gumroad stats, and the future of this Newsletter
Hiya friends!
In this week's newsletter, I'm sharing with you some cool stuff I watched from one of my favorite creators: Ali Abdaal.
I'm constantly thinking about going heavier on my newsletter and blog and setting my Twitter on the back burner - and the reasons keep piling up.
Finally, I'm sharing with you some correlations between my Gumroad sales and tweet performance.
Enjoy!
Gamification, Gumroad stats, and the future of this Newsletter
Gamification
So back to Ali Abdaal - Whenever I watch this guy, no matter how tired I am, I suddenly feel this rush of energy, and I’m ready to work some more.
Some of my friends complain about him talking too fast, but that might be the thing that adds so much dynamic to his episodes and motivates you to do more!
Have you ever thought about gamifying your life? No, not the metaverse thing.
If you’re interested in making things fun for you, watch this video! He talks about the book called Actionable Gamification and the Octalysis Framework.
The book is written for game designers, but you can reverse engineer the Octalysis Framework and apply it to boring stuff you have to do!
What I’m doing with this is, however, something different.
I often find myself in a situation when I have too much stuff going on. Fortunately, I have the energy to do all these things, but...
... as stupid as it sounds, I’m not always sure which things I’m doing because they’re fun and which tasks I only want to finish for the sake of finishing them.
I’m trying to use the Octalysis Framework to understand that the thing I’m pursuing is because of a higher purpose (one of the essential elements of the framework), or I’m just doing it because, well, I want to complete it and feel the dopamine when I cross that task out.
The future of this newsletter
Another great video that was just recently published by him is about Newsletters.
As most of my readers know, I'm mostly active on Twitter.
If you're on Twitter, you probably also know that the tweets you make, and the content you post, are boosting first and foremost: twitter.com.
That's fine in the beginning when you don’t have many followers and nobody knows what’s your offer.
However, as you grow your following, you slowly realize you’re stuck in this game: to get more followers you must play by the rules of the algorithm. Otherwise, you get punished.
One of the most tempting things for me in focusing more on my newsletter is the freedom to write about whatever I want - just as I'm doing it right now.
People who’re interested in my ideas will always have them in their inboxes. Those who aren’t - can always unsubscribe. (but please don’t, seriously 😄)
Most importantly, you don't have to please the algo. *cough* HTML is a programming language. *cough*
As Ali also points out, newsletters are more private but still public a thing.
You permit me to send you something to your inbox, and you can reply to it, and have a conversation with me!
And this is how friendships are born. 😊
Numbers don't lie but they also don't matter
I just recently made one of my best-performing Tweets of all time:
This tweet received over 3000 likes, 910 retweets, and 68 comments.
These are crazy numbers for me, but there’s a catch.
The numbers truly don’t matter.
This tweet:
received much fewer likes & retweets but it resulted in 5 guide sales over the next 5 days:
Chasing numbers on social media is one thing and seeking results is another.
I talked to people with massive followings on Twitter, and they also confirmed: a smaller, more engaged community is much more powerful than a following that's only big in numbers.
What I’m reading right now?
https://book.productionreadygraphql.com/
I started on a new project last week. After spending the last couple of years working almost exclusively with GraphQL, I completely forgot what drawbacks REST brings.
If you want to read my opinion on GraphQL vs. REST, check out:
GraphQL vs REST — akoskm.com Learning curve, tooling, and development in GraphQL vs REST
What are your thoughts on Ali’s content? Do you like it? Does it energize you the same way?
Do you have a newsletter? Please share it with me!
Are you using GraphQL for any of your projects?
See you in the next one 👋