My Newsletter Metrics Have Been Torturing Me

One of the hardest things about this newsletter is having patience with the metrics. I’m intentionally doing this without a profit motive. But everything inside me wants to drive growth.

But is driving growth actually the right thing for me?

It’s fun to set up feedback loops, goals, and targets. It’s also critical to question them.

• That scientist's video with 59M views? It attracted a mass audience, but did it attract HIS ideal audience?

• A self-optimizing ad machine learns from who clicks—but what if the "wrong" people click more?

• Ever notice how the loudest feedback often comes from people who will never buy, or aren’t your ideal customers?

This creates a fascinating conundrum: If you carelessly optimize, you end up drifting from your ideal customer. You end up with vanity metrics instead of valuable customers.

I mean…if you want a high-growth garden, just let it be overrun with weeds. Forget the corn, tomatoes, and squash.

I’ve heard it said once, and it bears repeating: Sometimes the things that appear to perform "the worst" are actually performing better—it's just filtering for quality over quantity.

PS - But I do have specific plans for how I plan to grow my newsletter. More later! :-)