2 years ago, I stumbled upon Paul Graham’s website and absolutely fell in love with how he was sharing his ideas in such a simple yet effective format. In particular, his essay on How to Fund a Startup? was one of the main motivators for me starting my own software development agency, Bloorsoft.
Since then, I’ve been attempting to document my thoughts more and share ideas that I find interesting. To be frank, I was hesitant to be active on social channels and post my writings. Questions like “why would anyone care?” and “who am I to give people advice?” kept circling in my head until I had a very important realization:
None of it really matters! I want to talk about my journey as is and share my learnings. Maybe it'll help others on the same path to avoid my mistakes and fast track their growth.You might have noticed that I’ve been more active on LinkedIn! This is definitely a result of the above. However, this post is not about LI, I wanted to talk about my new blog and newsletter so let’s get into it!
Why do I need a blog/newsletter?
Personally, I believe there are three main reasons: sharing knowledge for the sake of improving the world (already talked about), building a community of likeminded individuals, and of course, financial gains.
We are in the age of information & social media and yet, the rate of loneliness has continued to sky rocket. Although our new social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are often blamed for this problem, they are also amazing tools for finding others with similar interests and passions! We have the option to authentically share who we are and find people who can make us feel less lonely.
In addition to having a platform for distributing your thoughts and ideas, a blog or newsletter can actually improve your business! Many people choose one or the other when they first start out, but having both can be extremely beneficial.
They serve different purposes. You can use a blog to attract new customers and show them that you are an expert in your field. A newsletter, on the other hand, helps to nurture your relationships with customers and keep them coming back.
Once you have a sizeable audience, you can funnel them into other platforms and potentially convert them into paying customers. Plus, your blog or newsletter itself can become a source of income! Checkout this post on how Morning Brew, a business focused newsletter made out of a dorm room, was sold for $75 million!
Sure… How can I make a blog?
I used astro.build! Special thanks to chrismwilliamson for his amazing template. If you are familiar with programming, I definitely recommend Astro for creating your blog. I also hosted mine on Netlify and connected it to my personal domain, parsatajik.com, in less than 5 minutes!
I don’t recommend coding your blog from scratch particularly if you’re not proficient in SEO. The Astro theme that I mentioned above was specifically developed with an auto sitemap generator, RSS feeds, embedded meta information, and all the goodies that you would need to improve your rankings on Google.
If you’d rather go no with no-code options, platforms like Webflow, Framer, or Wix are also amazing. Search for a template (look at this masterpiece designed using Webflow), and start customizing it & adding your posts to the CMS.
How about the newsletter?
I looked at a variety of options before selecting my preferred platform. The following were my top two choices:
I ended up going with Beehiiv since I was really impressed with their reader referral program and potentially better pricing model.
The process for creating a newsletter on Beehiiv is fairly simple. Go to beehiiv.com, create an account and follow their instructions to setup your digest. I recommend adding an automation where your subscribes get a thank you message upon signing up. This video was very helpful:
Concluding Thoughts
I hope that you enjoyed reading this post. The reason why I created this blog and my newsletter was to share my journey of building 12 products in the next 12 months. I really hope that I can inspire you to create more and give your ideas a chance.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or need help with anything!
Godspeed,
Parsa