Learn from what others do, not what they say

There's a lot of hustle in the indie world, trends and growth charts come and go.

A great way to learn about how businesses are run is to sign up to their email list. It can be pretty insightful to see what emails actually go out and how they are promoting their products.

For example, often we’ll see events being promoted right up until the day before they are happening. When I see that, I interpret it as: they haven’t sold out, or they don’t have as many attendees as they would like. If they were sold, and if it was easy to sell, one single email would have been enough.

I use to sign up email lists so I could keep them in a folder and look at them every so often to look for patterns.

What I took away from this is:

• there are ebs and flows in business, emails are often sparse or they come in all at once

• when value is being sent out, it’s usually followed by sales pitches

• often the lifespan of these businesses can be short, or sporadic

• most are not consistent

• and oh my, the long sales pages and drip campaigns (I don’t care if they work, urgh, no thx)

• burnout, failure or closure often happens (and that’s when the emails stop)

We can also learn from others activities, such as blog posts, content produced, social following, etc. Emails are my fave tho.

Observing and listening from what people actually do is enlightening. You can build a picture of their journey in real time and over a specific duration. It’s also interesting to align it with what people say or teach later. I personally also use it as a way to ask myself if that is the kind of work I would enjoy doing.

There are many ways to learn about businesses and people seem to rely on building in public or courses. It’s not that those are specifically bad, it’s more that the picture is rarely complete and often over glorified.

The grass is always greener, right?