Morning Walk #53
Reflections on one year of running Morning Walk and what this newsletter will be about
Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. I’m a product person and an entrepreneur. I’ve been working in 🏙 govtech for eight years and currently work at a UK-based 🏦 fintech startup Silverbird while building a new company in 👩🏼⚕️ healthtech on the side.
Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, digital healthcare, working on startups, productivity, some nerdy stuff and an occasional share of reflections on the Ukraine war and how it feels being Russian at this moment in history.
This issue was sent out to 233 subscriber (+3 from the previous week). Last week’s issue received 343 views.
🧘🏻♂️ Reflections on one year of running Morning Walk and what this newsletter will be about
A year has passed since I sent out Morning Walk #1. That was a bit of a crazy idea. I wasn’t sure for long I could last or how I would be able to build any subscriber base. I tried to keep my expectations low and just enjoy the process. I told myself that I’d be happy if, in a year, I will have 100 subscribers. Now I have 233. It’s still pretty low, but a good start. And I can’t thank you guys enough for staying with me.
Some data
Subscribers base has been growing on average at 35% month-over-month.
You could notice one big spike of new subscribers between issue #40 and #41 in July. The source of that spike was me posting a link to Lenny’s private Slack channel on product management. I wrote a piece about using an iPad as a product manager, and it paid off.
Number of views has been growing slowly at a similar pace, again with one unusual spike in issue #26 when I wrote about us turning a healthtech startup into a community effort.
How it changed my life
I can’t say there were any dramatic changes in my life because of this newsletter. I haven’t made any viral postings; I haven’t met anyone new thanks to this newsletter, no have I found any business opportunities because of it.
But there we many smaller changes that you could notice only on the distance by committing to something for the long term.
My Saturdays now often are structured around finishing this week’s issue.
When I started, I wanted to stick to the same weekly publishing time and settled on Sunday at 8 am Moscow time (GMT+3). I decided to prepare the issue beforehand, and it will be automatically sent out at this time. I have to sacrifice some sleep or family time on Saturdays now. My wife is used to me saying on Saturday, “I need a few hours to finish the newsletter,” although it felt weird saying that at the very beginning.
I’ve gotten much better at writing
I’m still far from being satisfied with the quality of this newsletter, and I have a long way to learn and practice. But the process of writing has become much easier for me. A year ago, I could spend hours trying to squeeze a couple of paragraphs, and my brain was fried. I could physically sense how difficult it is to sit down, focus and just write. Thanks to this newsletter, I managed to pump my writing muscle.
I have new topics for discussion with friends
Quite a few of my friends are reading this newsletter, and some of my writing has become a great conversation starter when we meet. While friends I haven’t seen long ago started messaging me commenting on the last issue of Morning Walk. It’s been amazing.
But the single most important lesson I learned so far is different.
Staying true to yourself is challenging
When I started this newsletter, I deliberately decided not to stick to a single topic. I could have created a newsletter solely about healthtech, iPad productivity, product management, or tech startups. But wanted to be able to cover all.
Yes, on one hand, it is a bit unfair to my readers. I know some of you subscribed because of my iPad piece. Some of you read my musings on healthcare and decided to stick around. I gave this a lot of thought, thinking I should focus on one theme so all of you would know if this would be helpful to you or not.
But on the other hand, I wanted to stay true to myself. And I wanted to be able to share with the world all of my interests and experiences. As a founder building startup on the side, a product manager in fintech, a Russian escaping Putin’s regime, an iPad nerd, a productivity nerd, or simply a human.
After publishing my most viewed issue I mentioned at the beginning, my first instinct was to keep building on that success. People love this! I should do more of this. Let’s write another nerdy piece on the iPad. But it wasn’t me. iPad is only a tiny fraction of my life and my thoughts. If I wanted to talk about iPad productivity, I would have started a dedicated blog, not a personal newsletter.
The same was with not-so-popular topics. Whenever I had to interrupt regular broadcasting to share news about Russia and war, I immediately detected a bigger-than-usual drop in subscribers. And my first instinct was to never write about this again. But I can’t, and I don’t want to. It is a part of me. A part I still want to share.
In his personal newsletter, Justin Mares recently shared this read on the perils of audience capture that hits right on the bulls-eye for me.
Basically, the more one builds an audience online, the greater the temptation to become the persona the audience best responds to. Though it can certainly grow an audience, it can also lead to a strange dynamic where a content creator is beholden to a character they’ve created. Definitely a thoughtful read, and made me extremely happy that I’m only doing this newsletter on the side for funsies.
I’m grateful to my readers, but I’ll keep this newsletter as broad as possible, so please keep this in mind 🙏
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Me writing Morning Walk throughout past year in different settings
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻
This post is public so feel free to share it and don’t be shy to comment!
Hi Stepa, hope you are doing OK in your current situation. Oddly enough I've also been thinking a lot about which topics to write, etc and even asked my readers the same question via a poll. Responses varied but there was a significant number of people who said to keep writing about what I felt most passionate about and I expect that's true for many writers.
I've also read that essay about the dangers of audience building and becoming trapped by an online persona and it's a fair warning. I wonder if that's what has happened to some of the more grotesque (not physically) public figures we read about: they may have been decent at one point but they are now typecast as monsters and have grown into those roles.
Keep up the good work.