Sachin Monga: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And Hamish too. Especially on how often I can take a break, he's always given me advice of, "You can take a break more often than you think," because I feel like I can never not do a week. Both those pieces of advice. It took me a while to get over, maybe I could charge for this and then maybe I could take some weeks off. Right, right. I think there's a generalizable piece of advice here that might be my answer to the question of what's a common pitfall, which is people are really worried about how their audience will perceive them and really ultimately their own worth, right? Should I send a newsletter three times a week into people's inbox? Is that too much? Should I ask anyone to pay me ever? Is that crazy? Am I allowed to take a vacation ever given that I've got people paying on an ongoing basis? And is that a bad service to provide if I'm taking a two week summer vacation? I think almost in all of those cases, and then you could imagine five more things like that, readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you, are pretty forgiving and are really there to support you and want you to take that vacation. There's probably more people who would want to pay for you that just don't even know about you that would totally pay if they could. Go back to that spectrum of, am I just trying to write a blog post? Am I trying to start a media empire? It's kind of like many people won't know yet. Just open up optionality for yourself and see what happens. Maybe don't be too worried about what your audience might think. I think that maybe is one difference between Substack than something like Twitter or Instagram or something. Subscribe as an action is pretty heavyweight. It's like a costly signal, right? It's not as easy as just matching the follow button on a bunch of accounts on Twitter or something like that. If someone is subscribed to you, they're granting you write access to their brain is maybe the way I view it in a nerdy sense. What that means is not just like, "I'll let you write your one long form thing once a week," but, "hey, you've got this other person that you think might have something interesting to say? Cool, let me know. I'm here for it." I think writers underestimate that. Maybe three things I'll add to this just for folks that are thinking about, should I try this out? Should I not? One, when I joined Substack, I already felt like it was too late, and this was three years ago. I was like, "Nah, it's too late. Everyone's already got their big newsletters. There's no way I'm going to make any dent." I think people feel that now, and I think it's also not true. I think there's so much opportunity.…

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