The Early Days
When I first launched my email newsletter in September 2023, I had a lot of ideas about how to give back to the QA community.
Here are the ones I wrote about in my very first email:
Building a full-fledged QA learning community
Helping people get their first QA job
Giving talks
Making courses
Collaborating with indie devs to get real-world QA experience
But I didn't want to do any of these things in a boring way.
I'd been following people on Twitter for a while in the "solopreneur" space thanks to stumbling upon a Dan Koe video in early 2023.
These are the people who teach and talk about online business skills:
Copywriting
Email marketing
Sales funnels
Digital products
Stuff like that. I was already subscribed to a few email lists and took note of how they wrote emails.
They were always so captivating, and I actually wanted to read them.
Most of these email lists sent daily emails, not weekly.
I always had something to read with my morning coffee.
Unlike most of the tech newsletters I see that just aggregate a bunch of "useful resources" once a week.
Impersonal, boring, and I forget about them until they pop in my inbox the following week.
I didn't want mine to be like that.
I wanted to share stories from my life and the lessons I learned along the way.
I wanted to inspire people and teach them skills to help them succeed as a QA professional.
I wanted the reader to feel like they knew me. Like the email was from me, not some automated news aggregator machine.
So I started my first email list and told my audience to sign up.
For the first email I wrote, all I did was set up a free account on ConvertKit (soon to be called Kit) and send a new "broadcast".
Only 1 person signed up (it was me).
My "Solopreneur" Experiment
While I was motivated to give back to the QA community, I also wanted to build a business.
I thought about how cool it'd be to be able to help QA folks as an online educator.
But to do that, I'd need to find 2 things:
A product or service QA folks would be willing to pay for
A way to market and sell the product or service
Email is the best vehicle for selling products and services.
There is a lot of theory to back this up, but 90% of my sales came from people buying something through a link in one of my emails.
Nobody ever bought something through a social media post or a link in my bio.
Food for thought if you don't have an email list.
For the 1st month, I only saw 1 other person sign up, one of my friends on Twitter.
I eventually got better at marketing the list and writing QA content, so around January 2024, my list shot up to 30 people.
Then I started launching some mini-courses and study guides as lead magnets, and my list eventually grew to over 100 people.
At some point, I realized most of my readers wanted job-hunting advice, so I pivoted the newsletter to be exclusively focused on job hunting in the QA space.
Then I realized most of my audience was on LinkedIn, not Twitter, so I wrote more content on LinkedIn.
Narrowing the focus and target audience led to more subscribers.
I was at around 150 subscribers now.
Then one day a QA friend shared my newsletter with their LinkedIn audience, and that 1 post she made put me over 250 subscribers.
But subscribers don't mean anything to a business.
Just because you have a lot of readers, doesn't mean you have a lot of sales.
Your emails and posts may be entertaining or even informative, but your products and services are how you deliver the biggest impact to your community.
Attention is finite.
Transformations require people to focus for long periods of time and apply what they learn from you.
It's easy to read an email and say, "Oh cool, I'll definitely try that out."
But then you never do anything with it.
There's no accountability. Nothing at stake. There's no pressure for you to do anything.
The High-Ticket Experiment
Freebies like emails and content have their place, though.
They build trust and keep people engaged with you.
I've given away some free resources, but I've also made over $250 selling my knowledge.
What I've seen is when people pay for my knowledge, they tend to take more action on it than people who don't.
(There are always exceptions)
I wanted to see just how big of an impact I could make.
In late June 2024, I paid a business coach for 1 month to see if he could help me launch my first high-ticket paid coaching program.
The offer?
Work 1:1 with me for 90 days to turn you into an extremely employable candidate (and ideally, land a job).
They could leave whenever they wanted if they stopped feeling like it was a good fit, and I would stop charging them, no questions asked.
I'll spare you the nitty gritty details of how July went.
Long story short, I didn't land any clients.
But I learned a lot about the market I was trying to target (QA job hunters):
Job hunters want a job guarantee
Job hunters cannot usually afford high-ticket programs
Job hunters who pay high-ticket expect technical skills training
In other words, job hunters are not a good market for 1:1 coaching unless you have the evidence to back up your ability to land people jobs.
And even if you do have those case studies, the expectations of you are very high if you do land clients.
Retiring the email list
I sent this on August 7, 2024.
I was going in a different direction, mostly because of what I learned from the high-ticket offer experiment.
My conclusion?
My authority is weak.
Sure, I get a lot of attention, but I don't have enough evidence for people to trust me to deliver outcomes for them:
Testimonials that prove I have driven outcomes for people
Projects that show off my technical skills
In my eyes, authority is everything.
I've never told people to do something that I haven't done, but I don't execute on my own advice better than everyone else.
And I need to be the best if I want people to expect the best.
Or I can't complain when people don't value what I'm offering.
The new direction
Portfolio. Projects. Courses.
I launched a portfolio site on August 2nd. Wrote about why you should too.
I'm building projects to show that I know what I'm talking about.
I'll build the best QA Automation course on the market.
And then...I don't know. I'll see how that goes. I've wanted to make a course for a long time, but have held back.
It seemed like a lot of work to make a course that teaches technical skills.
But I want to leave a legacy for the QA community that can actually help someone get a job when I'm not around.
It's not that emails are useless. I've gotten so many compliments from readers and it makes me kind of sad that I'm taking something away from them.
But I'm hoping to give something even more valuable back to them.
There's a chance I will return to sending emails after this "next chapter" of mine is finished (i.e., when I'm ready to launch the course).
But for now, I'm putting it to rest.
If I have knowledge to share, I'll write a blog post instead.
But I won't be writing blog posts on a cadence. If I do something worth sharing, I'll write about it.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a QA job, I challenge you to join me.
In a tough job market, authority is everything.
Continue finding creative ways to build your authority in public.
Maybe it's helping out a QA community like STU or MoT.
Maybe it's building a project with a group of friends and posting about it.
I think some people forget I'm just a QA guy who decided one day to start posting content and helping random people on the internet.
I don't even have 5 years of QA experience yet.
I'm not some Senior-Ultra-Mega-Staff-Principal Engineer. Anyone can do what I'm doing if they care enough to learn about the world of content creation.
So many won't, though. And it's a shame, because there's a lot of people who would love to see you out there sharing your gifts.
What about you? Where's your newsletter?