Julian Shapiro: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, my experience, you definitely hit the nail in my head with the handbooks you put out. It's an interesting middle ground between a newsletter and a book. It's cool to just have a digital way of doing that, of just kind of consolidating a bunch of ideas and going really in depth, but not having to write a book. Well, speaking of the contract there. You have a very large newsletter that goes very in depth. That arguably is a more valuable asset than my handbooks for someone building an audience, because the newsletter has this built-in form of retention recurrence, where they get pinged in their inbox when you have new content, and then it becomes a referable thing and people refer each other and then they sign up for the newsletter. I do love the emphasis on longform via newsletter, but the reason I do it on the web is, and we'll talk about the trade-offs in a second, is it's much more digestible and referencable. No one's going to go refer to the epic guide in their email inbox that's very hard to navigate for building muscle or something. One, it's a UX decision. Two, I get the SEO traffic, which you don't. And then three, it's basically a living asset that I can keep updating over time. It's not stuck in someone's inbox and getting printed out. One of the things that might separate me from other writers, at least many other writers online, is I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts and handbooks as I am writing ones. If you come back to anything I've written over the course of a year or year and a half, it'll be updated, because I consider everything I write to be evergreen. I avoid writing things that I feel like are a drop in the pan, just like talking about a trend or something, something very newsy. I avoid that altogether and I'm just interested in writing stuff that'll be relevant for a long time. I didn't know that. That is very cool. I love that you do that. You should make that clear. That's so interesting that this is not stale. Last updated, last week. I don't know if you already do that.…

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