"Honing In"
Every week features new newsletters from Nathan Graber-Lipperman examining media, business, and pop culture through a Gen Z lens, as well as telling stories from his personal entrepreneurial journey. To read his last newsletter, click here.
Before I get into today’s letter, I just wanted to say several things.
First, if you like what I’m doing with these newsletters, consider sharing it with someone else you think would enjoy it, too! Send them to this landing page, and they’ll be good to go.
Second, if you have any comments or thoughts on the topics and themes presented here, email me a reply. Additionally, if you want to keep the conversation going and engage with our community, consider joining our Discord channel! Some of the things we’re talking about include the question of reform vs. abolition in the Black Lives Matter movement; whether or not Space Force deserves a Season 2; and why grapes are jerky (yes, there’s a "Hot Takes channel). To quote Bryce Phillips, one of our staff writers, when talking about how to frame our Discord: “Come for the pop culture, stay for the intellectual conversation. But make it savvier and sound better lol”
We’re still selling our limited-edition “BLM” Tee in support of Black Lives Matter here!
Third, as part of our initiative to support the Black Lives Matter movement, I am writing a weekly recommendation for a piece of art produced by a black creator. A lot of the things I’ve been drawn to during my lifetime — sneakers, music, sports, and more — have been driven and inspired by black culture; therefore, I think it’s important to acknowledge this on a personal level while also celebrating incredible works and accomplishments with the Unplugg’d community.
On Sunday, I shared my thoughts on the 2016 Oscar-winner Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins. We’re starting a book club of sorts in the Discord channel where we’re consuming and discussing these projects each week, so if this is something you’d want to participate in, follow the link to the Discord above or hit me up at ngl@powderbluemedia.com to figure out how to get involved.
Last, we’re looking for more writers for UNPLUGG’D MAG. We aim to publish two-to-three really good longform, evergreen stories on culture and life every month moving forward. We will also be paying writers for their time and product. To learn more about the types of stories we want to publish and how to get involved, click here.
Alright, onto this week’s letter…except, that’s the thing. By doing things like asking you to share and leaving me a reply, didn’t I kind of already start it?
When we first started our mailing list, it was simply to bump what we were doing with Unplugg’d every week. In the fall, I created a new model: tell a story from my journey; link and comment on what’s going on in the world of media, startups, and pop culture at large; then review something that I’m watching/listening to/reading.
The goal of this was to create a letter that stood out on its own as a piece of unique content that provided value to the reader. You could follow along with me and my company without sacrificing the quality of our longform stories. Plus, it allowed me to be more timely with my commentary; given that most of my stories for the mag take at least 15 hours or so to write (at the bare minimum), the letters allowed me to focus on what’s trending. The longform would still be served as the entrée — timeless, evergreen content — while the letter would simply be an enjoyable appetizer.
At the same time, promising something weekly and delivering it is, well, tricky. Even if those monster newsletters took less time to write than a longform story, many of them still pushed 2,000+ words. When you write as slowly as I do — sometimes, it takes me 30 minutes to craft just one sentence the way I want to — I was still looking at nearly a full day’s worth of staring at the computer screen, typing.
In the fall, I got burnt out and decided to take a break in the winter for personal reasons. In bringing the letter back these last couple months, I’ve been able to sit down and crank out more of them, yet without much of the cadence, rhyme, or reason that I wanted to deliver. Since then, I’ve constantly flip-flopped on the purpose of this thing.
What’s the end goal here?
Is it to scale a following for myself that I can then take wherever I go?
Is it to drive brand awareness for Unplugg’d?
Is it to sell products, acting as the first slice in our funnel?
Is it to keep our subscribers updated on my personal journey, and the growth of my startup?
Is it to provide me a space to write out more timely commentary for fun, and nothing more?
When you’re dealing with this many questions, it doesn’t make much sense to devote as much time as I do to writing without knowing the true purpose behind the action. Yet I’ve found that indecision can often be the greatest enemy of productivity, as writing is a muscle. I compare it to my experience running cross country in high school: when you haven’t done it in a while, it’s extremely painful and difficult. Once you get over that hump, though, you’re in a real rhythm, and you want to do everything you can to keep flexing that muscle, lest you lose your #gains.
(Also, on a side note: if I’ve used this analogy of running with you in the last several months and compared it to something completely unrelated to the act of writing, sorry about that. Spend enough time with me, and you’ll probably realize I peddle the same, like, three metaphors in an effort to sound intelligent.)
These questions were going back-and-forth in my head when I reached out to Mike Raab. Mike is the Director of The Garage SF, Northwestern’s entrepreneurial hub out in the Bay. Along with being an awesome scribe himself, he started a newsletter for The Garage SF and shared some of his insight in building the thing here (if you’re interested at all in starting your own email newsletter — or even just the concept of “passive distribution” — I highly recommend giving his piece a read). I wanted to pick his brain a little bit and ask him about strategies for growing a following and creating something people actually want.
Our thirty-minute conversation broached a lot of different topics in the world of newsletters and online media, but I think the most important thing we talked about was knowing your audience. Once you know your audience, Mike said, you can figure out how to provide value to them.
The Garage’s satellite campus, located in San Francisco.
For his newsletter, his target demographic included Northwestern students and alumni and, more specifically, NU students and alumni tangentially associated with or interested in the startup world. Therefore, since many of these people receive other, more popular business newsletters during weekday mornings, Mike sends his out at 12:30, aiming for busy folks to give it a read during lunch breaks. His content strategy is tailored to this hyper-specific audience, writing about what’s going on in the NU startup community; his growth strategy revolves around signing up alumni he meets with every week and relying on them to share it with their peers.
This all made a lot of sense, but we both agreed that it wasn’t necessarily a repeatable model for me because I didn’t have the same kind of set community that The Garage has. So Mike challenged me: do you have a niche you can hone in on? Or if you opt to write about your journey, how can you ensure it’s something that will interest people other than family and friends?
Right off the bat, if you know me, you know I really struggle with the concept of focusing on one thing. I’m passionate about way too much, including practices (like writing, video, and e-commerce) and buckets of culture (like film, entrepreneurship, and sneakers). I’ve always been wired this way, so the thought of only writing about one topic is a tough pill to swallow.
Yet someone recently sent me an essay from Ben Thompson, the founder of the ever-popular Stratechery. Thompson was ahead of the curve when he started his media and technology newsletter back in 2013 and transitioned it into a subscription model in 2014. When he started productizing his mailing list, he had 1,000 subscribers paying $100 a year — a cool $100k revenue stream — and has only scaled the letter’s reach exponentially since.
There’s a conversation here around the “1,000 true fans” idea, one which we’ll save for another day. More importantly, however, is Thompson’s steadfast belief in what he calls “Never-ending Niches.” The strategist argues that over time, the natural scarcity of content — limited by things such as physical distribution for newspapers and the amount of hours in a day for cable news — was replaced entirely with the boundless landscape known as the Internet.
Therefore, Thompson says, we now live in an “aggregation world” with three clear strategies. The first is to cater all of your content to speed and SEO; that way, you can drive traffic to your content through Google. The second is to place an emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories; that way, you can drive traffic to your content through Facebook (and other social medias).
Given both of these platforms planted their seeds in the 2000s and have grown deep roots since, they practically have a stranglehold on the industry. This sets up a difficult dynamic for new players to break in. Thompson writes:
“Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.
That left a single alternative: going around Google and Facebook and directly to users.”
Enter the third strategy, or the World of Never-Ending Niches.
A graph from Ben Thompson’s “Never-ending Niches.”
When it comes to content, quality — while seemingly subjective — is pretty cut-and-dry. Either something is polished and well-organized (and therefore worth reading), or it isn’t.
But in comes the niche. There are an infinite amount, all laying on an ever-lasting horizontal axis. “Success,” says Thompson, “is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.” For example, if your niche involves writing about cars, your subscribers — who most likely care a lot about cars — are the ones who decide whether or not your content is of a high caliber.
It doesn’t really matter if someone obsessed with, say, bird-watching thinks your newsletter is trash. The audience that you’re delivering value to is the only audience that matters.
There are both positives and negatives to the World of Never-Ending Niches. The positive, in my eyes, is that there’s a proven, scalable model where you can sustain a business in the digital media world without sacrificing quality. The negative is that there’s not a whole lot of flexibility present.
In other words, no matter how good your content may be, it will be difficult to succeed if your content is unfocused. If you’re not playing the game where the major players — Facebook and Google — set the rules, you will simply struggle to build a following.
To come full circle, I have gone back-and-forth on this all in recent weeks. I want to lean into my writing more because I think that out of everything I do, it’s the thing that has always distinguished my brand the most. But therein lies the inherent question, the one that’s stumped me for so long: what is my brand?
The thing that I’ve always relied on — almost as a crutch at times — is my voice. I’d like to believe that it’s what stands out the most in my writing, and people certainly seem to agree with me when they read my work. Yet if Thompson’s theories are to be believed, you can’t bet big on the quality of the writing alone. You need a specific niche.
Therefore, I’ve decided to center The G-L Review around three buckets: media, business, and pop culture. While these topics have always been at the core of what I wrote about, I have been quite sporadic in framing what this letter is about; however, I am explicitly telling you what to expect week in and week out.
In other words, I am defining my niche.
I believe that the value I can provide to you, the reader, is heavy with critical analysis both from my personal, qualitative experiences in entrepreneurship, along with my passion for diving deep into these topics in a quantitative fashion. Plus, even if there are other strong figures writing in similar capacities — Thompson and Scott Galloway come to mind — I’ll be approaching this newsletter with a Gen Z lens.
After all, I grew up with — and on — the greatest disruptor in all of human history: the Internet.
Therefore, here’s the cadence you can expect from me every week:
Tuesday mornings (8:30 am CST): Deep dives + stories such as this one, as well as updates on what we’re doing.
Thursday mornings (8:30 am CST): Shorter bursts of informal commentary on media, business, and pop culture.
Sunday nights (7 pm CST): Reviews of the different content I am consuming.
While selling products and driving impressions are great motivators to create a newsletter, I believe that my goal with The G-L Review is to engage you, the reader, with content that you find both useful and valuable. I want to really build out this community because I think it has so much potential, and I’ve been really excited to see your replies and watch the conversations start to pop up in our Discord channel as people begin to interact with one another.
This means I have two asks for you (which I, coincidentally, also asked at the top):
If there’s a specific theme or topic I touch on that you find either super valuable or wholly uninteresting, I would really enjoy this feedback so I can tailor future letters to fit your preferences more! Feel free to either reply to this letter or hit me up at ngl@powderbluemedia.com with insight.
Share this letter with other people you know have similar interest. If you find yourself engaged with the content, please consider sending it to people you think will dive into it with similar enthusiasm! That’s how these things grow, and I would love to grow it right alongside you.
Along with getting these letters delivered directly to your inbox, you can also read them on the Unplugg’d website and through my Medium account. So feel free to follow along with all three of those mediums to get notified as soon as I release them, as I’m taking a break from social media and will not be posting them there.
Past that, it’s on me to keep up with the expectations I’ve set up for myself. As Mike wrote about, the best way to engage readers is to commit to your cadence, putting your head down and simply grinding. It’s not the easiest thing to stomach; after all, I’ve written more than 200 stories over the last four years, and the creative process can get quite exhausting over such a long period of time.
I am certainly prioritizing this letter and setting out plenty of time so that I can keep on schedule, but at the same time, I will say that my experiences with burnout in the fall taught me that my own health is most important. As I wrote in the beginning, these things certainly take time to write, and while I can’t promise a 100% hit rate, just know that this cadence is a general gauge of when I’m aiming to publish this letter every week.
Nevertheless, with some wind behind my back and the summer ahead, I believe I’m up for the challenge. As anyone in this world knows, it’s about the journey — the hours you spend when no one’s watching — and how you tell the story.
NGL is the creator of Unplugg’d, a lifestyle brand that creates mission-driven products through longform storytelling. To discuss the contents of this letter, consider joining in with the Unplugg’d community through our Discord channel here!