Hey Reader,
๐จ nerd alert: I think I've reached a new level of nerdy rabbit holes - as of writing I'm 2 hours into a 4 hour podcast about how the electric grid was built.
What's shocking is I think is it's such a cool blend of history, science, and how business decisions shaped something we take for granted literally every second of every day.
Did you know Thomas Edison waged a PR war against AC current calling it a killer? (AC won and now powers every household in America)
The Messy Middle
What if we just told people what we were thinking?
Sometimes the simple things are the hardest to get right. We've been talking about the idea of growing The Breakroom all the time...
"The bigger it gets the better it gets," "#BiggerThanUs," and "we want to work with 180 creative service providers this year" are all things we've said either in person or on socials in just the past week.
And for months one of the most common questions we've talked about on coffee chats & Breakroom onboarding calls is "what happens when it grows?"
Having a membership with 21 people means:
- You can know everyone by name
- Even if everyone shows up for a call, everyone will get a chance to speak
- The online portal has 1-2 "go-to" experts for things rather than 50 people that do the same thing
And growing means we'd lose that.
But does it have to?
This is a problem that Jo & I have talked about literally every single week since we launched The Breakroom last October.
But we never (publicly) told anyone.
So we had a plan, but people only saw a glaring problem.
This week we virtually attended RellaCon where Rella announced some pretty sweet stuff. But I got most excited about their public road map - then immediately realized we should be sharing our road map.
Taking the ideas we've been sharing with people 1:1 for months, we built a simple road map.
Based on how many members we have, we're thinking about "unlocking" (read building) new features designed to keep the culture that makes us special as we scale (yes I 'borrowed' the idea from Kickstarter where they have "unlocks" based on number of backers of an idea):
Over the next few weeks we're going to work on making this more public, turning one of The Breakroom's biggest weaknesses in terms of growth (losing the "smallness"/"intimacy") into one of the biggest strengths (unlocking amazing new features).
What could you tell your customers/audience that you've been accidentally gate keeping?
This Week's Needle Mover
Idea 23: DM the Payment Link: Drop the payment portal links directly into a DM/text message to make paying instantly accessible right from their phone.
After a few days (or months ๐คทโโ๏ธ) of DM'ng and sending VMs with your dream client, they finally say those sweet sweet words "I'm in".
How often does this lead to a message in a different platform (email), on a different day (tomorrow), and probably a different device (computer) just to get them booked?
Make it as easy as possible for people to pay their deposit/booking fee - drop the link directly in the same conversation for them to have no excuse not to do it right away same platform, same day, & same device.
Whether you use Honeybook, Dubsado or another CRM they all give you shareable links to project contracts & invoices. Or you could even have one landing page where everyone pays the booking fee & signs a standard contract, then you follow up with the full project invoice right after.
Yea, sure, it may be more steps for you. And your automations aren't designed to send DMs... but if that's what gets someone booked for a 4 figure offer... it's probably worth your time.
Ps we go way deeper on this topic in our Podcast episode with Kendraโ
This Week on the Podcast
Collabs are one of the easiest ways to grow an audience. But what does a collab or cross promotion for an email list even look like?
This week on the pod we interviewed Chenell Basilio a Newsletter Growth Strategist about her 30 Days of Growth series. Last year she did it for the first time and had 3,714 people sign up, 1,757 of which were new to her email list.
As of Today we're on day 10 of the second round with 30 new creators growth strategies that she's breaking down. Our interview was fun learning about how she built a series, why she's doing it again, and what you can apply from what she's learned.
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โListen on Apple Podcasts / Listen on Spotify / Watch on YouTubeโ
Overheard in The Breakroom
As a growing community, I love that we're in the room with experts that take direct interest in what we're building for The Breakroom.
As our "in-house" Notion expert, Kat sent multiple voice memos and even a Loom video walking through how our new shared Book/Podcast/Newsletter database could be improved as I'm building it out.
Resource of the Week
We're (obviously) big community nerds, so when Sam put on her podcast a breakdown of what she learned from an in person Invite-Only Mastermind (apple podcast link) of course we wanted to know...
Jo's biggest takeaway - Sam got clarity on her stance on AI, while she's not a fan of using it for creative things, she sees how it could be really useful for productivity things.
See you next week!
Lyndon
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