WTF happened in the last two weeks...
...and what god can I sacrifice a goat to make amends?
Hi friends,
This is going to be a “tea heavy” post, but a lot of you asked about what happened with Flodesk, my growth team, and…well…the last two weeks have been a lot, and I think I’ve finally turned a corner, but it might be instructive, so I’m just going to go through it. If you get something out of this, I recommend these posts for even more.
Growth team
The first part of this story is in this post. I signed a three-month contract with my growth team on February 14th after talking to them the previous week. I believe in both planned and unplanned serendipity and within short order I saw this company pushed by several people I trust, so I thought I would give them a shot.
This is dangerous thinking, because businesses often do a big push at once, which makes seeing them everywhere seem more fortitous than it actually is in reality.
This year has been my year of embracing my inner Desert and focusing on all things ads and optimizations. It was a big ask, with a minimum of $22,500 on the line, but I did it. My problem with ads has always been that I will cut them off too soon, and this meant I would have no choice but to give focused attention to ads for at least three months.
It took me about a week to know that it was a bad fit, and I probably should have talked to them about it then, but I believe that once you hire somebody, you should let them do their job and trust in their process. It works great when it works. When it doesn’t…woof.
I should mention here that this team did nothing wrong. I checked all their work and I wouldn’t have made any other choices, except to stop running ads sooner. It’s just that they were a bad fit for me. It didn’t take me long to realize that my processes were not built to scale in the way they expected, so I spent a lot of time trying to build processes while the train was barreling down the track.
There are people who can take you from 0-1, and others who can take you from 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000, and beyond. I needed somebody who could help me get from 0-1 consistently, instead of the inconsistent mess that I had going, and these were not the right people for that. I do make money, but it is not predictable enough to scale with ads right now.
I should have probably tried to get out of the contract sooner, but I wanted to trust the process, and frankly, for one brief, beautiful moment we did have it working. For a 10 day period, we were at breakeven or better on ads before everything fell apart again. It’s the first time in my life it happened, so I know it can happen again.
So, on May 7th, I fired the team. It was clear this was a bad fit, and I have no ill will toward them, but I sure do wish we could have ended sooner or figured it out quicker. I did end up with a pretty slamming offer at the end of it, and I had direction. I know exactly what must happen if I want to grow at the kind of scale where they could help me.
On the day that I fired them, this is how my experiment was going…not great.
If you are a paid member, you can read all the raw reports from my growth team right here.
Flodesk
Earlier this month, one of the members of our Action Fantasy Book Club told us that they had a problem with the last list we sent them. If you don’t know about our book club, we work with an elite group of authors every year to grow our audiences together by offering one free book to members every month. Joining the book club as a reader is free and at the end of every month we share the list with all the authors.
While I was concerned at this issue the author presented, it wasn’t until May 11th that I got this email from Flodesk.
When I asked for more information about what happened, I was given this email.
I was really confused since these are my lifetime statistics with Flodesk.
Even when you look at my last emails, there is nothing out of the ordinary here. They are all within bounds.
Since the only growth metric I use right now for my fiction is the Action Fantasy Book Club, and the April people would have just matriculated through my initial email sequence, I determined it had to be part of the same problem our author mentioned.
I ran the whole list through Zerobounce, and honestly that’s not too bad.
It is considerably worse that a healthy list though. I ended up running my whole list through Zerobounce, and here are those stats.
The thing is, though, that the Action Fantasy Book Club list was much smaller than my main list, and if I sent emails all together, then the bigger list should have masked any issues with the smaller list.
Back to Flodesk. I’ve been with them for years and years. I don’t have access to the accounts where my original list came from to verify everyone again. So, they were asking me to delete 71,000 out of 75,000 from my list. I told them at such and they didn’t care.
They were treating me like I was a new customer, not somebody who had spent years on the platform. They didn’t ask me to just delete a few lists, which I would have done anyway. They were asking me to delete almost everyone.
It’s important to note also that Flodesk doesn’t integrate hardly anywhere. They just opened their API a few months ago. Before then you either had to use their forms or upload.
So, literally every opt in was imported from Bookfunnel or another service for years. I do have the receipts for many of them, but not all of them.
We are in Tuesday now, and I have a Kickstarter ending Thursday, so I had to make some moves.
The bad news in this, or additional bad news, is that we’ve had to stop the book club. If we can’t guarantee people’s accounts won’t get shut down, I can’t ask people to keep promoting a book club. So, we’re closing it down this month.
The Stopgap
I did have a plan for having my Flodesk account canceled, believe it or not. I had been working heavily with Convertkit earlier in the year when I was going hard on Sparkloop, and had started using them again when I fired by growth team. I actually started using them again once I knew for sure that I was firing them since they have a 14 day lag before emails are officially validated.
So, I had already sort of planned to move my Flodesk account to Convertkit, but I wasn’t ready to do it now. Additionally, Convertkit wasn’t ready when I actually moved my list over to them, and suspended my account, forcing me to jump through hoops most of the day on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I had a Kickstarter ending, so I decided to implement my stopgap measure…the Wannabe Press Substack.
I had thought about doing a fiction Substack, but it felt like too much. It still feels like too much, but I absolutely had to set something up to get an email out on Thursday for this book launch. So, I uploaded my whole list to Substack, and by the end of the day on Wednesday, I had everything approved and uploaded.
I don’t plan to do much on this for the decided future, but I was able to send out one email to my list for the end of the campaign.
Thanks to a brilliant post by
, I already knew how to get my Substack emails into Flodesk through Zapier, so I just fixed all my Zaps to work with Convertkit instead, and added ones for Wannabe Press emails to get into Convertkit, too.Beehiiv
The last remnant of my growth team was my Beehiiv account. I originally asked them to use Convertkit, but they were more comfortable with Beehiiv, which ended up being fine because it allowed me to see how they grew my account from the beginning.
There ended up being 10,650 emails in Beehiiv by the time we ended our relationship, and I decided to use it to test out something I had been thinking about for a while. Namely, doing a daily email fueled by ads.
You might bristle at ad supported newsletters, but I’ll bet you read at least a couple. I know I read Morning Brew, Stacked Marketer, 1440, The Skimm, and more every morning, and my idea was to do something like that, but more like my weekly digest.
These weekly digests are getting out of control. There are now 6 sections, each with between 5 to 30 links in each of them. As the single most popular thing about my publication, I thought maybe I could find a way to carry it forward into its own thing.
I even have a brand I built for it called Authoreque, which is basically like my weekly digest flavor + Morning Brew delivered every morning in quick bites.
The nice thing about Beehiiv is they have an ad network and a couple people reached out to run ads for them. This seemed like the perfect time to do a test of which style of daily would be better.
Here’s one style, which would feature summaries of the articles, bonus bits, and 1-2 ads every time. This is almost exactly what the dailies I read above do for their format.
I tested this against this type, which is simpler, but would require me (or somebody) to write a new bit every day.
The metrics were very close.
The earnings were less close.
Finish things by finishing things:
Why create a signature series:
Julia Roberts taught me how to shamelessly self promote & more:
This isn’t really fair b/c I had already run the Premium Ghostwriting Academy before the final screenshot and I think it’s are aligned than the Gamma one, but it is data.
Based on reaction, I’m more inclined to do the first one, but I do like the simplicity of the second one. I definitely appreciated this test, but I’m not sure it helped me choose.
I also did make some money on Boosts, while I was working with my growth team.
The problem being that most of the newsletters were AI or crypto, and I don’t work in either of those spaces. If I did this would have been way easier.
Convertkit
The biggest thing I love about Convertkit is that it integrates natively everywhere in a way neither Beehiiv or Flodesk do. For years I was using Mailchimp as an intermediary between Flodesk and Bookfunnel, for example, and now I have a native integration. I don’t love that Convertkit is 10x more expensive than Flodesk, but their customer service was much better.
I was able to talk to a real person within minutes of my account being suspended, and they were very, very nice about the whole thing. They had me sorted the next morning, so that on Thursday I could spend all day fiddling with Convertkit.
Interestingly, Convertkit just started a newsletter plan that lets you grow for free up to 10,000 subscribers. It’s not as robust as their normal plan, but it’s very interesting.
Since I already had moved over a bunch of automations from Flodesk to Convertkit, a lot of my time was spent formatting each one correctly, and getting all the tags triggering correctly.
I love writing automations in Convertkit. It’s truly a joy for me instead of the terrible experience it is on every other platform.
Let’s talk about getting my emails to transfer. As of Thursday morning, I kept emails in three places besides Convertkit: Substack, Flodesk, and Beehiiv.
I wanted to start fresh with Convertkit, and not carry over any dead weight, so I decided to only bring over people who opened an email in the past 30 days. That’s a really harsh statistic to follow, but since I already had my full lists on Substack, I didn’t think it was that harsh in the end.
I decided to also keep anyone who had ever downloaded a book from me, backed a Kickstarter, or did basically anything to show that at any point they were interested in my work beyond the bare minimum.
By the end of the day, when I finished uploading everything, deleting people who unsubscribed from my different lists, etc, there were 43,000 emails in my Convertkit account.
To give you some more context, I ended up with 22,000 active people in my Wannabe Press Substack, but that list had 75,000 people on it, with 50,000+ having unsubscribed or bounced. Of those, I brought over a little over 13,000 people who I consider “active” into Convertkit.
Similarly, while I have 33,000 people on my Substack as of this writing, I only brought 24,000 of them to Convertkit.
One other weird thing about Flodesk is that once somebody bounced even once, they kicked them off my list forever, with no hope for redemption. So, there were quite a few bounced emails that I decided to bring from over the years to see if they were still active or dead.
In all, my Convertkit now represents 15+ years of my career all in one place, instead of across the whole internet. I feel a whole lot of ways about it.
The lesson here
I think the lesson here is that if you’re nimble and agile, these things can’t keep you down for long. I always assume a platform is about to collapse and have an exit plan.
It’s also a testament to owning your data. Because I had access to my emails, I could migrate them to another platform (two actually!) without it destroying my business. The Kickstarter launch ended up being my most successful standalone book launch ever, and I was only able to inform people about it because I could access that data when my account got suspended.
Always, always, always have your data backed up in more than one place. I had my emails backed up on Substack, Beehiiv, and was working on Convertkit. I also have Dropbox, OneDrive, Apple, and Google backups of my work, plus an external harddrive and Backblaze. Yes, this costs me money, but it allows me to move very quickly.
This isn’t the first time something like this happened to me, and it could have destroyed my whole life. Instead, within 48 hours I’m completely up and running again like nothing happened.
What’s the plan now?
Honestly, I’m not quite sure. I was hoping to have all this sorted before Convertkit’s Craft + Commerce conference I’ll be attending in June, and I think I’ve gotten everything settled down without even sacrificing a goat or anything, but I’m considering a significant change to the format, wherein I still have The Author Stack, but there are far fewer articles posted, and mainly we test out the daily for a few months.
Honestly, I spend so much time on Substack for it to account for only $14k of my revenue every year. I have been trying everything for over a year and even dropping over $30k on ads isn’t getting the revenue up to where it needs to be sustainable.
I am in a unique position because I have a lot of other products that people can buy from me outside of Substack, but I haven’t seen book sales drastically increase either, or courses, or conference attendance.
So, something has to change if I’m going to keep spending so much time doing it. My thought right now is that I will write an article every week, and then maybe we will have a guest post, too. Plus, we have the podcast. Then, most of my content will be delivered through the daily emails.
I feel like that’s what you all would prefer anyway. Instead of overwhelming you with content, each day will be just a little morsel of goodness that you can skim in 3-5 minutes, instead of delivering you 100-200 links at once.
What do you think?
Ever had a complete nightmare of a month like this?
Do you have any other strategies to get through them besides just being prepared?
Are you going through it now?
Let us know in the comments.
If you saw value here, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member to help foster more of this type of thing. As a member, you’ll get access to over 725 exclusive posts, including books, courses, lessons, lectures, fiction books, and more, or you can give us a one-time tip to show your support.
Where to go next:
Ooof. 🫣. Also you are brilliant! ⭐️
*Pops off to download and save all the emails 😆 *
I just actively working on becoming more active on a couple of social media platforms, one of the being Substack and got my first subscriber today. Hopefully, I won't have the issues you encountered.