139: Paid Newsletter Secrets and Organizing Knowledge with David Elikwu

Oct 25, 2022

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“Build an email list,” is business advice equivalent to “Make sure you breathe.” We all know it’s a best practice to communicate consistently with our communities, but coming up with something interesting on a regular basis is easier said than done! As is building out a paid newsletter subscription in parallel to the baseline missives.

Thank goodness for our guest today, David Elikwu (also a fellow Notion nerd), who is taking us behind the scenes of his business to share how he organizes information and builds automation into his newsletter sequences, and the strategy and software behind his paid subscription.

More About David: David Elikwu is a writer, speaker, and startup operator with a background spanning technology, corporate law, and marketing. He is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping curious people think deeper and work smarter. David also founded Democratic Republic, a social impact brand supporting global artisanship through African coffee and biodynamic wine. He hosts The Knowledge with David Elikwu podcast, where he is joined by the best and brightest minds in business, entrepreneurship, and beyond.

🌟Key Takeaways:

Price affects perceived value: Sometimes, people are willing to pay more for higher-priced products, so don’t assume that lower prices lead to more subscribers!
Try the Costco Sample Strategy for business development: With gated content, people don’t always get to see the value of the offer—look for ways to bundle relatively lower-cost programs as a sample (with an expiration date) with higher-priced programs.
Assign a Velocity Score of 1 through 5, where 1 is something that could just be an idea, 3 is something that you have a few sentences on, and 5 is a few paragraphs and/or structure ready to move into a finished state. This will allow you to jump right into creating content with whatever time and creative energy you have available.

📝Permission: “You are born a thousand men and die only one.” In other words: shut down projects on purpose, so you don’t kill them by accident. Be intentional about curating the possibilities you leave open for yourself.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Create a collection bucket for saving snippets that you want to add to a future newsletter. See Jenny’s Loom on Notion for CRM & Idea Collection »

📘Books Mentioned: Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business, Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

🔗Resources Mentioned:

David on the web, LinkedIn, Twitter: @Delikwu, Democratic Republic
Podcast: The Knowledge with David Elikwu
David’s Notion Life Wheel Template and Career Overdrive course
Tools: ConvertKit, Ghost, Substack, Midnight, Digital Ocean, Sam Harris’ subscription-based podcast

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

💻 Access Free Time episode transcripts on Podscribe »

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