My Road to 50,000 subscribers
My fingers hurt
As a tech CFO, pricing is one of the most difficult undertakings I’ve personally wrestled with.
The journey to price optimization is complex, but you don't have to navigate it alone.
BlueRocket's pricing experts have all operated companies before. And they’ve used that hands-on experience to help companies like Salesforce, Gitlab, Brex, Zendesk, and Google optimize their pricing.
Readers of this newsletter get a pricing conversation with BlueRocket’s CEO Jason Kap.
After 1,343 days writing...Mostly Metrics just surpassed 50,000 subscribers.
I accidently filtered all my posts in reverse order, and discovered I’ve been at it for nearly 3.5 years.
It’s funny - no one read what I wrote for almost 2 full years.
In fact, it took me 500 days to get my first 1,000 view post.
I’m now at 50,000 subscribers, and have written nearly the equivalent of the entire Harry Potter series in the process (“CJ Rowling”).
My unfiltered thoughts:
Consistency is the 8th wonder of the world.
You can “growth hack” your way to “subscribers”, but you can’t feign authenticity or experience when you’re “earning” a loyal “audience”.
If you try to talk about stuff you don’t know, or haven’t experienced, you’ll get exposed like a paper Mache suite in the rain.
If you don’t actually love the process, the grind, you’ll give up.
Don’t copy other people’s stuff.
You have to pick topics in an inherently selfish manner, and then write about them in an incredibly generous manner.
Oh, and did I mention showing up, over and over again?
See you tomorrow for day 1,344.
PS - while the Marathon Continues, some cool stuff that’s happened in the last ~3 years, all a direct result of writing online.
I became a CFO
National CFO Signing Day On day 1 of turning on paid, someone accidently charged $202,000 to their credit card and I had to figure out how to refund them without losing like $10K in processing fees
I did a podcast with the legend who inspired me to start writing publicly about business in the first place - Tomasz Tonguz (Spotify | Apple | Youtube)
I got to hang with
IRL, exactly 49,100 subscribers after he gave me sage advice that helped me find my audience market fitI made a pilgrimage to newsletter Mecca - Substack HQ
I recorded three podcasts from the floor of the NYSE
I had my mug in Time Square (clearly a face for radio)
Editor Walter ate 50 ice creams (1 for each 1,000 subs)
Thanks again for all the love. It allows me to do what I’m passionate about. If you have a colleague who would benefit, please share and tell them how early to the game you were, lol.
Run the Numbers
I spoke with Greg Henry, CFO of publicly traded Couchbase. We covered:
The transition from subscription to usage based pricing
How analyst call backs work after an earnings call
Why they use non standard fiscal years
What working at GE taught him about culture
And why Couchbase guides to ARR
You won’t want to miss this one, as Greg’s one of the best in the game.
What I’ve Been Reading
Friday Forward is a weekly newsletter for nearly 200,000 people across 150 countries who are passionate about leadership and self-improvement. Friday Forward delivers a short inspirational or thought-provoking story to your inbox every Friday.
The topics vary, but they’re organized around universal themes: leadership, self-improvement, pushing your limits, building better personal and professional relationships, and reaching your full potential.
Congrats! Great reflections, photos, and charts. Cheers to your next 50K.
Loved the post and a "positive grind" theme with a fair amount of gratitude and highlighting what I'm seeing most 20K+ sub authors say:
1. Consistency
2. Authentically speaking to your audience on content you're most passionate about.
3. The numbers to back it up.
(The narrative highlighted metric line graph is a great anchor)