Hi Team,
இரவு வணக்கம் (iravu vaNakkam), Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from New York City!
A Thing 😄
As promised, I wrote a blog post on How to Migrate from Ghost to Substack (Pt 1).
I migrated this newsletter from Ghost to Substack for 2 reasons
Better email deliverability
Network effects to grow the community
I have now done it 2x - once for myself and once for my sister.
By documenting exactly how with copy-pasteable examples, this experience can help all humans with access to the internet.
Let me know if you decide to follow along and if you run into any funny gotchas :)
A Tweet 🐦
I used to hate following up.
But then I realized that people don’t respond because they forgot, not because they hate you.
One thing I still struggle with is the wording of a follow up.
While the story here is how Nathan Barry secured an exit for his early employees at ConvertKit, I want to bring your attention to Dharmesh Shah’s wording.
The shape of his offer:
I’ve done research on a problem you have.
“If you’re interested, I offer you {{Insert Offer Here}}
Haven’t done this before, so it might be a terrible idea.
But, wanted to float this out there, because life is short”
It validates the counter-party’s potential fear about engaging. It softens the offer with the humble admission that this is the 1st attempt. It shows vulnerability with another admission of a potential mistake.
It reminds the counter-party that risks are worth taking.
It’s easy to dismiss this email as a VC reaching out to a CEO. But, even in engineering, we routinely have to pitch ideas to sibling teams and upper management. And even beyond engineering, think about cold emails to people on the internet that you admire!
The more outlandish your offer is, the easier it is to interpret a non-response as a “No”.
So often we over index on the technical parts of engaging with other humans. But in reality, without addressing their emotions - we miss the forest for the trees.
I’ll keep this handy as a reference for the next time I’m following up - and you should too!
A Thought 💭
You have to teach people how to treat you.
I once had a job where I had many feature requests for a platform team. One of these features was to add authn/z to the platform. These features wouldn’t benefit just our team, but improve operations and security for all application devs.
The platform team told me this was impossible to deliver in less than a year.
Instead of matching their energy, I kept on giving.
I architected 3 entire options [A, B, C] to solve authn/z for their platform. I enumerated the pros and cons of each. It was obvious which was the best technical solution.
And they still selected the shittiest option, option C, with 1 pro and 8 cons.
I had spent 3 weeks coming up with these options. I lost sleep knowing that if we’d go with Option C, we didn’t actually solve the problem. I only kept option C to placate their emotions.
We still struggle with the technical debt and security flaws that came with that choice.
If I were in the same situation again, I’d escalate this as high as the CTO before letting the platform team choose option C.
Let them (platform team) defend their poor technical decision to management instead of us (application devs) having to live with it.
Nobody is worth compromising your well-being in exchange for their presence. Now, when I notice someone is a taker, I adapt to matching their energy. If you’re open to wasting my time, I am open to wasting yours too.
It cuts both ways.
I'd love to hear any feelings you felt while reading this and until next time - be easy.
Love,
Janahan
P.S. Your hair looks great today :)
So much good stuff in this edition, I just went through your ghost to substack guide and all I can say is I wish I had that when I moved over. Will be referencing it and linking to it for other people for a long time, thanks for writing it up! Also, I absolutely loved the tweet story and the thought this week is very deep.
Thanks for the blueprint Janahan! I think I am ready to move, sensei 🙏🏼🙏🏼