Letter from Hector - Issue #18
Hector
Hi all,
I’ve moved our weekly email to Revue. Twitter’s purchase of the platform a couple of weeks ago makes me think it’s going to be huge. Ben Thompson’s excellent analysis tells us why. I thought I’d jump on the band-wagon.
Also, EmailOctopus (a silly name) is plagued with deliverability issues.
Sunday’s come around fast: especially this one. I usually write and publish an essay every week, as you know. I love the deadline. The intent is to force posting something. And ‘something’ always turns into a long-form-ish article into a bit of the world I’ve been mulling.
But, this week, I haven’t got an essay ‘publish ready’, and I’m at a loss for what to say. I’m frustrated. Should I have just hit send? The truth is that longer pieces of content are best when nurtured and not spat out when the clock strikes.
For the last month, I’ve written a daily newsletter to our customers titled Care Innovation. In the gap between essays, I thought I’d tell you what was good and bad about producing such a heap of content.
The daily note we launched on February 1st is about care tech innovation and policy that affects the care market. Early every morning, I pull up Google News and search for varieties of the phrase care-tech.
Discovery number one: there’s a lot of rubbish out there on the net. Discovery number two: it takes a fair amount of searching snare something both relevant and shareable. Once found, I package the news up and stick my ‘take’ on to it. The take could be a comment about how care tech startups aren’t being innovative enough (I don’t think they/we are) or how procurement can be morbidly slow.
The process takes a bit of time—up to 45 minutes on some days. But, this month’s work has been worth it. Nothing forces a sound assessment of the market we work in than being forced to write about it every morning and then publish.
It’s been good to capture the pulse of the industry. The articles browsed (and the emails sent) feed conversations we have throughout the week with industry stakeholders. It’s an idea-loop that generates more insights.
So, yes, it’s been worth the time—but we won’t continue. At the start of the month, I said it would be for only the month, and then we’ll reevaluate the email’s cadence. In the last few days, it began to feel like a drag. It felt like it was interrupting my morning flow (a good time for deep work and exercise), and because of the length of each, it’s hard to unpack a story entirely. I want to explore the nuance behind why procurement is slow, not just state that it is.
In short, it’s been helpful to do, but moving forward, we’ll be writing more thought out articles on a less regular basis. The long stuff is more fun, anyway.
Have a great week. Subscribe to Care Innovation if you fancy it. No spam!
Hector
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