If you start...don't stop

(Annual) Lessons from the blog

We offered no annual recap at the end of ‘23 rather asked whether you were optimistic about the future. This January, we offer no predictions for the year ahead only a lesson learned from last year: once you start, don’t stop (because it will take you a while to regain ground).

A year ago we did some roundup learnings from a few months of publishing Tikto Tidbits. We now have another year’s worth of data and accompanying intel. First up, an analysis on whether people actually read what we’re writing (open rate) and how many of those people there are (subs).

Subs (right) and Open Rate (left), emoji for effect

One of the reasons why we continue writing - beyond liking the process and nurturing our network - is that people seem to enjoy reading Tidbits. There is minimal reader churn and our average open rate through 2023 was 45.9%.

That number comprises a big hiccup however. Between posts 25 and 26 there was a 3-4 month gap while we did some consultancy work for Mercuri helping them get their new fund off to a great start. We came back in October with a bang - announcing our investment in Furthr.Earth - but we’d clearly lost share of mind and the following 3 posts languished at an open rate of 35%. We eventually got back in the groove helped in this regard by a good bit of FT coverage late last year.

Of course it could be that posts 27, 28, 29 were rubbish topics and/or writing compared with everything else that we publish though the coincidence following our quarter-long interlude seems too great. 28 - Why Humanise the Machines - was one our our personal favourites, but what do we know?

We know that: if you start a writing habit you need to keep it up…or be prepared to do some hard yards to get your audience’s attention back.

Quality analysis: open rate and open rate moving average

Our lifetime average open rate is now 41.1%. We’re pretty happy about that. Especially as we’re aware that we can sometime lack repetition with our subject matter. Our love for the writing takes us in tangential directions - from deal announcements to AI Doomerism, PE deal structuring to the state of venture capital - which may blight ‘focus’ though this is merely a reflection of what has been top of mind for the last couple of weeks. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to affect people opening what we send them. While our inboxes struggle with their daily bombardment and subsequent indigestion: thank you for reading and for those who have provided feedback.

The lesson that we’d like to draw out of this runs alongside the often quoted the medium is the message. Between posts 14 and 15 we changed platform from erstwhile-Twitter’s erstwhile-blogging platform to Substack. Open rates were transformed.

Lesson 2: Choose your platform carefully, and you should probably choose Substack.

There are so many other stats to look into, and here’s a selection of other things that we looked at:

• There’s an increasingly strong negative correlation (-0.23) between post length and open rate. That’s not what you’d expect to see. That said we try (usually succeed) to keep things to a ~700 word length (3-5 minute read time) so outliers are now describing a lot of this + the three posts in early Q4 with lower open-rates were also some of the shorter ones.
• We’ve kept to a rough cadence of writing every two or three weeks per year, barring our 3-4 month hiatus, there’s no change there.
• We previously thought that having post titles as questions had a positive effect on open-rates. That hasn’t clearly played out. Perhaps it’s a little thirsty.
• Curiously, the to-date best performing post is last year’s Shoulder Season and Blog Performance with a 54% open-rate. Perhaps we were growth marketers in another life.
• In terms of subject performance there’s no clear winner between Announcements, Advice, Market Analysis, etc. Each category has performed well to underwhelming. So we’ll keep up the variety.

Our goal for 2024 is to expand our readership. We’ve not really focused on this but we feel as though it’s time to get our numbers up. If you know someone who might enjoy this post, or any from the back catalogue, please do forward this on. Likewise if you have any thoughts to share on how to improve Tidbits, we’d love to hear them.

Tikto

At Tikto, we purchase stakes in EBITDA profitable businesses or tech businesses with challenged business models and follow that up with incremental growth capital. We bring our network of experienced operators to help execute a business plan for the next phase of our portfolio companies’ growth.

Get in touch: [email protected]