The future of Dozen Worthy Reads

A look back at the last 3 years, lessons learnt, and how I plan to improve this newsletter

Hi All,

First off, for those of you that don’t know me (or even if you do know me!) thank you for spending your valuable time reading Dozen Worthy Reads. We live in a wondrous time with more people realizing that they’d rather follow their passion (thus the term passion economy) rather than just “have a job” and while my intent with Dozen Worthy Reads wasn’t (and never will be) to make money it definitely was to ‘homestead’. But while homesteading my intent was also to help people read interesting content.

With that context I’d like to back up a little. In order to go forward we must look back — purely to learn. As all my Berkeley-Haas friends know “Students Always” is one of our defining principles but I digress …

The way Dozen Worthy Reads started was me posting interesting things on LinkedIn and a few friends commented asking me to send the readings out via email and so I did until the 4th edition when I switched to Linkedin for the 5th edition and LinkedIn plus Mailchimp for the 6th edition onward. Read the 5th edition and while you’ll laugh I have come a long way :)

Edition 6 (Mailchimp)

In fact, if you read the intro above, for the past 154 editions nothing has changed. The mission - and my promise to you all - is to deliver great to read content and that will not change!

Learnings

Over the past 3 years I have tweaked the feedback as more of you joined — perhaps each with a different intent but I also realize that I as the “product” grew I lost sight of the audience to a certain extent. My learnings thus far:

• Focus : The intent of Dozen Worthy Reads was/is to give you, the reader, interesting and evergreen content with context. What I missed really was that lots of people want to understand current context. I mean who would really care to learn about influencer marketing 10 years later if it died?

• Providing tech “now” coverage : evergreen content is a bit at odds with covering extremely interesting technology topics. I mean its not math where the principles don’t change right? (or accounting, ugh)

• Enhancing the content and figuring out the “what behind the why” and distilling this information takes a lot of effort — something I am guilty of not doing well in the recent past (and I know it even if you don’t)

  As a product person one of my favorite quotes is:

  “You can’t be everything to everybody else you’ll end up being nothing to anybody”.

With that in mind I write this email (or post) to let you know what to expect going forward:

• In order to ensure the highest quality of content, I’ll publish twice (or thrice) a month one will be a standard Dozen Worthy Reads (similar to the link) every 2nd Wednesday.

• The standard Dozen Worthy Reads will have deeper insight and more well formed thoughts about the articles in question.

• The other one (or two) posts will be long/short form articles on an interesting topic such as Should Apple get into search or Why are there so many dating apps

• The focus for both types of newsletters will be purely on technology, technology strategy, product, and consumer product.

• I’ll still continue to post interesting reads I see to twitter where I have just started (gosh, what a loser!)

What does this mean for you?

This tiny one person part-time show has grown. My mission — provide busy readers with the best technology reads and insights — however has slightly derailed. As a reader if you prefer the current format, I am happy to continue and if I don’t hear a lot of comments opposing this change i’ll switch fully to the new format with Edition 155 (October 14th).

I’d love for you to stay subscribed but feel free to unsubscribe. As part of this exercise I’ll automatically remove folks that haven’t opened an email in at least the last 45 days — my sole intent being to respect your inbox. I expect to rebrand in future and maybe even split this news letter into 2 parts (the 12 reads, and my own original articles) so if you don’t like my (shitty?) writing you can easily opt-out.

Of course all this is subject to your feedback, thoughts, questions, comments or anything else you’d like to share. You can reply to this email or click the comment button below.

Thank you once again for reading, sharing, and for your feedback. More than everything else thank you for trusting me with your time. I truly appreciate it.