ChatGPT for Email coming Thursday for $500
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emails in your inbox into your very own newsletters + sales emails
(without stealing from anyone).
This week I was a guest on SparkLoop’s Send & Grow podcast—a show I listen to every single week. Dylan and I talked about…
email marketing vs newsletters—what’s the difference?
my extremely unconventional approach to getting booked on podcasts
consistency secrets from 7 years of emailing every single week
why I’m no longer a believer in lead magnets
Listen to the full episode on the Send & Grow Podcast —>
Only got a sec? Click for a 1-minute sound bite
New format, you like? (Please vote at the bottom of this email)
Just Because Tim Ferriss Did It, Doesn’t Mean It Will Work For You
Growth marketing is a total boy’s club.
But I want to grow, too. Not, like, “GAMESTOP TO THE MOON!,” just a regular amount, and in a new direction.
I’ve been learning from a new bubble of people in the newsletter space, reading enough emails to fill a volume of J.R.R. Tolkien, and turning to advice from people I’ve historically not paid much attention to:
Men in the growth marketing space who are mostly white, in their 30s and either childless or do not participate in child-rearing.
(These men make notoriously bad boyfriends but that is another story. I love a bad boy so maybe we’ll come back to that.)
At some point I decided I didn’t want advice from those guys. This decision came on the heels of reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, a book that still haunts me.*
Reading this book is like watching a car crash: utterly gruesome.
It tells the story of a CEO trying to save his company, Loudcloud, in the wake of the dot com bubble bursting. The guy lives under his desk for two years, going through rounds of layoffs, an epic product failure, pivoting to a different product, and navigating a series of calamities that set my nervous system on edge. It is allegedly about resilience and perseverance.
Early on he mentions he has two little kids…
…and then they are never mentioned again.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those kids as I read. I wanted to shake Ben and tell him, “Your boys are growing up and you’re missing it. You only get a little time where they want to snuggle you and kiss you and lay on top of the book you’re reading to get your attention. In a few years you’ll just be some guy who drives them places and turns their dirty socks back the right way before washing them.”
But that was my problem, not Ben’s.
I don’t even know if Ben Horowitz has boys.
At the time I was giving so much of myself to my business and worried constantly that I wouldn’t remember my kids growing up, a fear that turned out to be absolutely warranted. There is a two-year gap in my memory that starts the year my youngest son was born.
Like Ben (we can assume), I missed a lot.
So I stopped reading books written by young bucks with seemingly limitless time and power, “a small loan from their parents” and full-time domestic support.
I turned to other voices, books like Disability Visibility by Alice Wong and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.
Those were books I could relate to.
Those books taught me about resilience and perseverance in ways that were relevant to me as a divorced mother of two, a business owner with hobbies, a queer woman, and a person who mows their own lawn, cleans their own house and shovels their own driveway.
I think it’s important to know who you’re learning from, how those people really spend their time, what their priorities are outside of business (if any), and what their lives look like.
A lot of business strategies work but they’re all consuming and not available to people who, say, have a full-time job. A subscriber recently told me that as a neurodivergent person, my advice about systematizing and organizing was not relevant to her.
That’s fair.
Who you learn from matters.
So…I’m wondering.
What do you want to know about me and my work?
What do you wonder about my life and my priorities as you read these emails? Maybe you don’t sit around thinking about me all day the way I wish you did (ha!) but if you do…
Hit “reply” and let’s have an unofficial AMA.
~ T-Boss
*In case you were wondering, yes, it is the same Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm reportedly worth $6B.
Gold From Around The Web
15 Lessons From 30+ Years in Newsletters—an excerpt from CJ Chilvers book, Principles For Newsletters, the best $5 I’ve spent all year.
Lu Castello can’t verified on LinkedIn without using their dead name—see what it’s like to get verified on LinkedIn as a trans person
A clip from my chat with Natalia Sanyal about using sneaky tricks in emails (spoiler: we disagreed)
