If You're Thinking About Launching a LinkedIn Newsletter (Or Doing Anything New), Here Are 7 Things To Consider

This article is part of The Disruption Advisor LinkedIn Newsletter series. Subscribe today and join thousands of leaders who want to become fluent in the language of growth.

Last week, we tried something new. We jumped to a new S Curve of Learning, launching a newsletter here on LinkedIn.

As with any new S Curve, it is an experiment. We are on the launch point. We don't yet know if it will work. We are figuring it out.

That said, what we know from our framework of personal disruption is that there are seven accelerants that can increase the odds that your new learning curve will be a success. We will take each of them in turn, sharing what we've done, and what we've learned thus far.

1.   Take on market risk.

This is the idea of playing where no one else is playing. It’s where we create rather than compete. We have done this well, but we could have done it better. My colleague Scott Osman, CEO of MG100, suggested I start a LinkedIn newsletter in Q3 last year. Like Snapchat, the idea was in my mind, and then it was gone. But in February, another colleague and friend, Bob Glazer, CEO of Acceleration Partners, started talking about how he launched his newsletter and how happy he was that he had. Now I was paying attention. We were going to do this. We launched on March 3. I had thought to launch in mid-February, but I didn't make it a priority with my team. Launching in early March, we took on some market risk, but the field would have been less crowded if we’d taken action earlier. Since we know from disruption theory that the odds of success are six times higher when you take on market risk, walk through the door of market opportunity sooner, not later.

If you decide to launch something new, how can you take on market risk, play where no one else is playing?

2.   Play to your distinctive strengths.

Our team has a strength––we write well. We’ve written three books. But our distinctive strength is that we have a community here on LinkedIn that likes what we write. A few months ago, after interviewing social media expert Claire Diaz-Ortiz on our podcast, she said we should be right here. Because many of you on LinkedIn want to become fluent in the language of growth. You want to disrupt yourself. That’s what playing to your strengths looks like.

What are your distinctive strengths? Are there social media platforms should you be on? And do you communicate best via long-form writing, short posts, video, or images?

3.   Embrace your constraints.

Once we decided to launch this newsletter, our timeframe was short. It’s tough to write a brand new piece of content unless you are a really fast writer. And I am not. So, we dusted off a piece we had written several years ago, and updated it! Which, given the constraint of time, was the right decision. What I learned from your comments is that many of you weren’t yet familiar with this notion of personal disruption. The constraint of time became a tool of creation, pushing us to focus on our foundational ideas.

As you think about starting a new project, what are your constraints? How can you embrace them and turn them into a tool of creation?

4.   Battle your sense of entitlement.

We have a lot of followers here on LinkedIn. It would have been very easy to sit back and expect the editorial team at LinkedIn to invite us to do this newsletter. They didn’t. We had to reach out, to apply. We also needed to ask for help and be willing to learn from others. Like Bob Glazer who dedicated time and energy to walk us through the rules of the road. (You can read his newsletter here). And Dorie Clark, a personal brand guru, who also recently launched a newsletter.

When you want to do something new, do you expect/wait to be asked? Or do you willingly put yourself out there? When people help you, do you give a shout-out?

5.   Step back to grow.

It would be easy to tell ourselves we don't have time to learn how to do something new, to understand the platform, to read the instructions. Trying something new causes discomfort. We might feel anxiety because we don’t know what we are doing, and we’re trying to do it in front of a lot of people. Why bother anyway? We already have a platform. But that’s how people get disrupted. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing. Which given this is the work I do, if I were advising myself, and I am---it’s usually a good idea to disrupt myself before I suggest you do.

Maybe it’s not a newsletter, but when was the last time you experimented with something new like your social media platform? Take the time. Deal with the anxiety. The feelings of perfectionism that come with not knowing. Stay relevant. 

6.   Give failure its due.

There will no doubt be newsletters that people don't like, so there will be learnings there. But the immediate learning is once you’ve decided, act. There’s more on the question of knowing if your failure to act is about fear here. But the little failure, in this case, was not paying attention when the idea first was presented. And the bigger failure being not acting once the decision was made. What we learn from Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich is that to a person, successful people, are decisive.

What is something you’ve decided to do, but haven’t acted on? Learn from our return on failure and if you’ve decided, do it. Now.

7. Be driven by discovery.

We are at the beginning. This is our second newsletter. We have a hypothesis that you want to know about becoming fluent in the language of growth. We are going to provide you with content, and then you will tell us if it’s valuable by how much you share and or comment. Here's what we know to date. As of today, over 9,400 people signed up on LinkedIn after one week. 17,723 people viewed the article and 230 people reshared the newsletter. While a few hundred of you who weren’t yet subscribed to our other newsletter signed up over there. We’ll also track if there is an increase in the number of listens to the podcast. And when we get this feedback from you, we will iterate. Learn, leap and repeat.

If you are thinking about a newsletter, what would you write about?

What metrics would you watch? How would you plan to utilize feedback to continue to discover and learn more?

The launch point of the S Curve can feel uncertain. Things might feel unsure. It might all feel like a grand experiment, but know that if you feel that way, you’re doing it right. Because that's what you do when you are at the launch point of an S Curve. You experiment. You learn. You keep moving up your S Curve of learning

Which of these 7 points will you apply to a new project this week? Leave a comment below and let us know. And if you know someone who is at the launch point of their S curve of learning, would you hit the share button and send this article to that individual so they don’t feel so alone at the launch point?

If you liked this, please subscribe by hitting the button at the top of this article and we’d also invite you to sign up for our newsletter here. Here's a sample.

Finally, if you are at the bottom of your S Curve of Learning on social media, in particular, you might want to pair this article with our interview with Claire Diaz-Ortiz on how to use social media.

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Whitney Johnson is the founder and CEO of WLJ Advisors, a boutique consultancy that helps leaders and the people they work with become fluent in the language of growth. Whitney is one of the leading management thinkers in the world, according to Thinkers50, and the author of the bestselling Build an A Team and critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself, both published by Harvard Business Press. She is a world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an advisor to CEOs. She is a member of the original cohort of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches, and was selected as MG100 / Thinkers50 #1 Coach on Talent. Whitney has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times.