Pleasure, Money, Newsletters & Emotions

Dear Darling,

I really, really believe in making the things you wish existed. Just think of all the times you thought to yourself, “man, I wish they made a dick-shaped rocket ship that could take me to outer space.” Bezos thought that to himself and, rich peanut trollop that he is, decided to make it happen.

But you don’t need to have BEZOS BILLIONS to make the things you want. Most of us honestly just want enough money to buy a quality pair of undies, a decent health insurance plan, and splurge on the expensive credenza from CB2. But we are also still very much under the impression that the way we get those things is by trading our time for money. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that—I do it when I edit manuscripts & content—it’s also an extremely limited view of our options. Today, value isn’t created by manpower, it’s created by brainpower. And you make money based on how well you execute on your own ideas.

This is, I suppose, the part that is easy to stumble on, however: do I have any ideas? And how do I know if they’re any good? To which I must confess the horrid, horrid truth: you cannot predict success, only allow for it. You gotta open the door. You can’t be successful in anything if it only lives in your mind. You HAVE to make it live in order to experiment in real time and play with it and shape it and mould it, like a piece of clay, gauging what’s working, and what’s not, so you can refine your idea and make it better. Only then, after you’ve exposed it to the elements, can it be proved a good idea or a bad one—or simply an idea that still needs shaping. Unfortunately this requires that you put your ego on a giant fucking llama and then slap it on the ass and let it ride off into the sunset without you. This has nothing to do with you. You will not be embarrassed, should it not be absofuckingloutely perfect, because there is nothing to be embarrassed about. In fact, it is the greatest human act, the act of creating, and the act itself is full of merit, independent of the actual outcome. You need to do this thing, this thing you have been thinking about, not because it will make you rich in money, but because it will make you rich in mind. The money is always a byproduct of the mind—and if you’re clogging it up with a job that makes you miserable, it stands to reason that, no matter how much you earn, the money could never be “good.”

This is why I believe that we are obligated to make the things we wish existed, because it’s how we express ourselves, our desires, our creativity, our art, and our mind, best. And this is what I have endeavored to do with the creation of Meat & Hair. (I’m sure you’ve seen me talking all about it on the internet, but in case you missed it, it’s my brand-new creative writing newsletter that helps writers, storytellers, marketers and content creators write more creatively in just 1 minute a day.)

Meat & Hair is a collection of the world’s most irreverent, fun-to-read writing, hand-curated by me, sent out every morning to subscribers for free. And that’s because one day, I was sitting there wishing that THIS EXISTED. I love when I stumble upon a book, a passage, a piece of copy, or even just a tweet that’s just so brilliantly written, so delightful to read, that I have to save it. It inspires me as a writer, and always reminds me to keep levity at the forefront of everything I do. Without levity, life is a tireless chore.

And so this was my mission: what if? What if I took responsibility for this thing I wanted to exist in the world? What if I gathered up my personal agency, and put myself in charge? What if I simply gave myself the job?

If you’re familiar with my writing, you know this is at the crux of everything I am. For me, it’s not about manifestation: it’s about dedication. It’s about creating something you are proud to say is yours. And, when you do it right, it’s about creating something that can also support you financially, as well, because that is how the modern economy works: it rewards those who are brave enough to contribute.

So let’s start by talking about the money. Money is important. Money is why most people don’t start things, but rely on someone else to hire them for a generic role, instead. Most people assume that it takes years to gain any traction—and how are you going to get paid for sharing creative writing excerpts on the internet?!

I realize, now, this is the work: bringing these modern business models into the light, if you will (god I hate myself for saying “the light”), because this fundamental lack of knowledge is keeping us small and limited. So here is how Meat & Hair is designed to work, as a business.

There are four parts:

1. Free content
2. Paid content
3. Paid products
4. Paid services

The first component drives the other three. This is how any modern business works: it is propelled by free content. You see content everywhere: Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, articles, blogs, free PDFs, downloadable samples, and, as always, emails & newsletters of all kinds. This is how businesses are found in a modern economy, and not just found, but loved. That’s the difference between paid ads and organic content: sure, a paid ad will get you found, but it’s purely transactional. Whereas organic content is made to feel like a gift. It doesn’t matter what kind of free content you’re creating, always make it feel like a gift. That’s what we all feel loyal to and want to support: the kinds of businesses that aren’t just taking from us, but are giving to us in equal, if not more generous, ways.

That’s where I started with Meat & Hair. The daily newsletter is meant to be this wonderful, 1-minute daily experience of fun & awe. It’s meant to be something that’s enjoyed; cherished; waited for; looked forward to.

It is a lot of work to make, but when you do the thing you wish existed, YOU always look forward to it, too. It’s a pure pleasure to make, not a drag. I’m having so much fun every day, I can’t even tell you: my new job that I’ve given myself involves reading! And curating! And specifically looking for brilliant writing! What a great job to have. So I would encourage you, if content creation feels heavy for you, is it the content you don’t like, or the work itself? I pose this question often to clients and students, because I know—I know—that so many are unhappy in their businesses because they don’t actually like the work they are doing, but felt like it was “the logical choice,” or a “profitable choice.” Please, if anything else, do not do things that make you miserable every day. That’s more of an emergency than most things I can think of.

So! The newsletter is designed to support our customers in a way that just selling them something once cannot. It’s meant to feel fulfilling and rich and satisfying, and it’s meant to inspire loyalty and love and excitement, too. And when you do this with genuine sincerity & interest in creating something beautiful in service to your customers, your sales will take care of themselves.

When I was producing Meat & Hair, I actually went and researched newspapers, believe it or not, because I wanted to know how the ones that did it well had successfully transitioned from print subscriptions to digital subscriptions, and what were all the things they had learned. Because newspapers rely on their subscribers, right? So surely they knew something about what subscribers liked, and did not like. And you know what they found? Three things:

1. Emails need to be digestible enough that a reader can read it through to the end and feel the emotional and mental satisfaction of having “checked something off of their list.” And if you think about it, that’s true—think of the subscriptions you have, and how weirdly satisfying it feels when you open one, read it to the end, and then delete or archive. Purely psychological! And so, so right. On the flip side, if you send a daily email with content like this, that’s lengthy and a bit more cumbersome to digest every single morning, readers will feel bad about themselves when they don’t finish it. Or don’t get to it. Or have to come back to it later. And so what’s created is this negative association: your email = feeling bad. Not because the email is bad, but because the person feels like a failure trying to make enough time for it. Isn’t that fascinating? It reminded me of what my editor at Penguin told me once: chapters should be short enough so that readers feel a “win” every time they finish one.
   
2. In order to form the habit of opening your emails—which one, presumably, would like their readers to form—you can’t send less than 3X per week. I know, don’t shoot the messenger! But 3X per week was the data that newspapers found. 3X per week to form a solid, steady connection & affinity in the mind of readers.
   
3. And finally, the best time to send? 7am. Which conflicts with some of the ever-present advice to send on Tuesdays at 10am, haha, but personally I have always enjoyed getting Seth Godin’s emails every single morning at 6am, because yes, it feels like a morning habit, and I like it that way.

So! That is how I made the decisions to send Meat & Hair daily, M-F, and send at 7am, and make it this fun, digestible newsletter that could easily be skimmed and FINISHED. No long book excerpts, no long-winded stuff from me. Just something light & spritzy & fun & meaningful. And so far, people seem to be loving it! The newsletter itself is only 3 days old, but so far, there are literally 0 unsubscribes. I feel really proud of that! It means that, not only is the content worth it, but the right people are attracted to it, so the messaging is on point.

Now, that’s the free component. But how does Meat & Hair actually make money?

Well, let’s take a look at the free component itself. Notice anything about it? Notice that it’s pretty damn specific? It’s a newsletter exclusively about creative writing. Not marketing. Not even content writing. Creative writing. Which means what?

Well, what it means is that every single person who opts-in for something about creative writing…is interested in creative writing. Which might seem obvious to you, but actually it has much farther reaching benefits than what meets the eye! Because that means that I can accurately guess what every reader needs and wants, and it all has to do with being a better writer. Which means I am able to create hyper targeted offers that will convert 1,000,000 times better than if I set up a general marketing blog, and then tried to sell a creative writing class. Does that make sense?

Positioning Meat & Hair as a creative writing newsletter is a strategic business decision just as much as it is a “I love this topic!” decision. It’s sort of like if you love bass fishing: anyone who signs up to your newsletter on tips for better bass fishing are pretty damn likely to be interested in bass fishing. This is a pretty important component even though a lot of people ignore it because they’d rather try to catch a lot of fish—no pun intended there—but in the end, they end up getting tons of subscribers who aren’t a good fit. And that’s not a smart business decision for anyone.

Now, here’s what’s neat about Meat & Hair: there’s a premium subscription upgrade if you’d like to also get my creative writing how-to column every Saturday. And I pitch the upgrade right on the thank you page after you’ve opted in (go opt in now to see it), with a 15-minute countdown timer, and the opportunity to take 30% off if you want to commit now. This is so hella important, because it’s important to draw attention to the actions you hope a reader will take, and incentivize them to do so, within a given time limit. I’ll talk more about deadlines as we go, but for now just keep that nugget in the back of your head.

However, all that said, offering this was still a risky move, because typically you want to offer something that scratches a new itch—not the same one a reader has just opted into. And technically since the free newsletter is positioned as helping you write more creatively in 1 minute a day, I knew this was a risk. But, here’s why it works: because of the way I positioned it.

I wrote: “For new subscribers who are serious about being the best writer in any room.“

So this appeals to our need to want the best of anything, not second-rate. It also makes a direct statement about a person’s identity: do you want to be the best writer in the room, or a mediocre one? As such, I’m able to get their attention to then open up a conversation about why I believe that the premium upgrade is worth it, and so, so ultra helpful, on top of what they’re already getting for free. And? It’s converting well. In just a couple of weeks we’ve done $50,000 in sales on a low-price point product. This isn’t some expensive, $2,000 class. We’re talking $60 - $80, depending on which options you take. If you go to the checkout page, you’ll see that there’s an order bump there where you can add-on a meaty, hairy publishing guide for an extra $25. (In future editions, I’ll talk more about these and conversion rates and all of that fun stuff!)

The takeaway here is that you should love your product so much, you’d be happy to advertise it right there on the thank-you page—and do so with gusto, and enthusiasm, and be able to make a good-faith argument of “here’s why I think you’ll love this!” And you absolutely should put an offer on your thank-you page. It’s when people are most excited to find you! The key to this is lining it up with your main opt-in offer, so there’s cohesion, and making it useful as hell.

In addition, there’s also a Pro subscription that’s exclusively for creative writers who want to start earning a full-time income with their writing. This is something I pre-sold as a secret upgrade, but do not have publicly available right now. There’s a strategy behind that, however, and the first reason is because only a small subsection of readers are actually freelancers. I know this because I ask on the opt-in form:

So far, the breakdown is as follows:

• I write for paying clients - 16%
• I write for my business - 38%
• I write for work - 8%
• I write stories & essays - 11%
• I want to write more creatively in general - 27%

Which means, of course, that only 16% of readers, so far, are actually freelance writers. So the Pro option, at this point, wouldn’t make sense to advertise broadly. Therefore, I will only be advertising it privately to anyone who’s in that particular sub-segment. One of the goals of everything you do should always be to make your customers feel SEEN. And one way to do this is to make sure you’re segmenting your offers so they can feel like you’ve taken the time and thought to actually send them messages that are appropriate and useful.

The second reason why I’m keeping Pro private for now, however, has to do with a sales strategy I’ll be employing, which I’ll be telling you about in editions to come. (And I can’t wait to share results with you, too! I LOVE building businesses and getting to find that perfect sweet spot of work you love and work people love.)

Aside from the Pro subscription, we’ll also be introducing products and services, which I’ll also be telling you about as we roll them out. However, as you can see, the key to ALL of this…is great, wonderful, awesome free content.

So back to that for a second: in addition to the newsletter, we’ve also got several social media accounts. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. At this stage, I’m running it all. I’m creating all of the free content, every single word you see in the newsletter, every single IG or tweet—all of it. This is important to me for a lot of reasons, but because you really need to have your finger on the pulse of what you’re actually doing, and get that real-time feedback as you go. One of the nice things about Meat & Hair is that it’s less a personal brand than The Middle Finger Project, which means that it has more potential to grow beyond me in ways that TMF never could. If I wanted to hire writers to help me source submissions; to organize the newsletter; to keep on top of social, I could. I can. And that’s a good thing, because nobody can do it all themselves forever. (I do have help with email, but I’ve also been in the inbox, too.)

However, I want to tell you that social media is one of the things that I had a real mental block around for the longest time—which is weird, since I grew up on it, and really used to love, love, love, love it. I was the queen of it, at one point! It’s how I got started. But I had found, over the years, that as more channels came out, and more expectations were placed, and more conversations were started, it began to feel incredibly draining to me. At one phase in my life, it felt like having thousands of people tugging on the bottom of my shirt. It started to be something I dreaded, not because of the people, but because of the emotional weight that comes with being on for people: the expectation that you must always present, and be responsive, and be held captive, in a way, to a world of strangers all vying for your attention. (Which produces guilt, too, because, um…that’s the point of business: getting people’s attention! And also, what a privilege and honor!) Regardless, it became incredibly difficult for me to process. And so I started shying away from social media more and more, because with every post it felt like I was readying myself for battle; preparing to give forth a massive amount of emotional energy that, frankly, some days I did not have.

I realized, years later, that a lot of this has to do with the fact that I am a LARGE, GIGANTIC, SERIOUS-STYLE empath. I’m wildly empathetic, really do feel other people’s emotions, and easily absorb others’ distress. As much as you’ll never hear me using the word “intuitive” in real life, I’m REAL intuitive. This has helped me in countless ways when it comes to building a career as a writer: I know what you’re feeling because I feel it, too, when you talk about it. However, it also has this dark underbelly of becoming easily overwhelmed. Like, paralyzed with overwhelm. Like, analyzing every word out of every comment and deciding that, because someone wrote it this way, they must secretly be upset—which is totally not even empathy, but just straight up fucking OCD, hahahahaha.

ANYWAY, social media became hard for me with The Middle Finger Project because I have such a role as mentor, and many people are making very big life decisions based on the themes I write about. So when I set out to do Meat & Hair, I wanted this to feel completely different: to feel, once again, light & spritzy & fun! Because I knew it was the only way I would be able to do social media: if it was something that did not feel draining, but exciting.

For that reason, I had to ask myself, many times: what should this look like? What shouldn’t it look like? And ultimately I decided on a style that would be fun, just like the newsletter, but not require ME to be the constant source of the entertainment. (That’s a nice thing about sharing others’ writing.) I did not want to be the product of Meat & Hair, like I am with The Middle Finger Project. While being your own personal brand has SO MANY AWESOME ADVANTAGES, it also has the disadvantage of making you the thing that people are buying. And honestly? Being that for hundreds of thousands of people over the course of 12 years is one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever done. Even though it’s just ME, there is still something to be said about having to be “on” every moment of your life. Because that is what you’re sharing online: yourself.

So far, however, I’m experiencing an all-new level of lightness with Meat & Hair, and I can’t wait to check social media every day. This feels good. This feels right. It’s a brand that can stand on its own two feet, allowing me to support it, but not be it.

That said, there’s another place I stumbled hard with Meat & Hair, but I think I should save that for next week, as to not completely overwhelm YOU with this missive. I think it’s worth a conversation of its own, in its own right, and it relates to perfectionism and how to pull the trigger even when everything is NOT perfect. I know you can relate. We can all relate. But, just like Simone Biles, the more success you have, the more pressure you feel. So as you experience more success, you’ve got this catch-22 where you can’t just execute as quickly as you once used to, because now you’ve got more people watching. And that pressure can be downright crippling. I AM SUCH A PERFECTIONIST IT ISN’T FUNNY. Not because I care about perfect, but because of the curse of knowledge: once you know how something should be, even the smallest of details cannot be ignored. And god is that a pain in the ass.

What I have learned, however, is that simple is beautiful. Ease is beautiful. Keep it simple and keep it easy, and you will succeed far more than if you overcomplicate it in an effort to be larger than life and "impressive."

This secret column is a great example of that. I made myself put this out without a fancy landing page and website, because I wanted to write to you, I wanted to write about this, I wanted to share and serve and use the launch of Meat & Hair as the perfect teachable opportunity. And guess what? Here we are! Yay! Sometimes, forcing yourself to just put it out and see what happens is the best gift you can give yourself. Once you do that, the pressure’s off: now it’s just your job to make it better than it was before.

I can’t wait to do that here.

I’ll be emailing every Friday afternoon. It’ll be our little clubhouse; our little space. And I will share as much as I can about what it’s like doing business behind the scenes, and the best advice I can give you from the things I am learning myself.

I hope this was some useful perspective for you. I hope this helps you see all-new possibility. And I can’t to write to you again next week.

Will be keeping notes on Meat & Hair launch and will update you as we go!

Have a great weekend—here’s to DIYing your dream job. 💪

XO,
Ash