Hello, dearest accomplices. It has been a minute. But not too long. I was in a geodesic dome in Arizona and that is a tale for another day.
I will now re-begin this call to attention by addressing your burning questions about the accompanying image.
Left side page, a printout of my Substack mailing list growth since May. Right side page, an artist’s rendering of future growth, after the Dream of Virality (maybe I made that word up) should come to pass. Full disclosure, I was the artist who rendered this future growth and even as I was drawing I had concerns about scale. In the background, a fantastic table by Brady Lenzen, but that is not currently as relevant as the more abstract currency of drawn lines and their relationship to People Like You.
I have been attending learning sessions hosted by Substack called Grow, that are about making this image achievable for real, i.e. as a reflection of organic growth rather than as a reflection of putting a piece of paper near real growth and drawing a viral dream with a nice pen, the one I use to write in my no-longer-blank book every morning. That particular writing process is not unlike this process: find an anchor, say a thing. The blank book anchors are things like Wow This Is Good Coffee or I Could Have Slept More/Less or Today I Need To Make Two School Snacks and One School Lunch, while the Thank You Campaign Weekly anchors are things like I attended a presentation by someone at Substack Grow who actually made a lot of sense to me.
Ali Abouelatta writes something called First 1000, documenting the process by which Entrepreneurs of Interest connected with their first 1000 customers, which is cute and quaint because now they are all “bajillion customer” kind of institutions. Imagine when they were just selling lemon ices out of the trunk of a Honda Civic! Inspiring! Et cetera. Ali is adopting his own growth models, though, to the the thing he is writing about growth models, which pleases me in Russian Doll fashion. Also, now “Doll” autocorrects “DLO” thanks to the global pandemic you may have heard about. Though I suppose a Russian Distance Learning Option is kind of appropriate, too, if you are into, like, connecting the dots.
Perhaps inspired by the research he’s done connecting zero to a thousand to a bajillion, Ali had a series of recommendations on growing one’s audience, which is important for people like me who don’t really do anything. (Kidding! Kinda!) Some of those strategies were kind of the tried-and-true (post about it on tikstabook, tell your friends, tell people on the street), but some were what he described more as stunts. And so I thought I would, in a continuation of the Russian Distance Learning Option, launch a stunt inspired by his stunt inspired by, maybe, all those other stunts: I will send him this very post, which he might share with his bajillion people, (the stunt on one level,) which contains yet another stunt, which is the firesale on all the music that I have released myself, which has recently been acquired by One More Revolution Records, which is also me and is therefore yet another stunt. And then what would happen if there were ONE THOUSAND customers, somehow, as a result? Then Ali could write a post about One More Revolution Records/Andrea Mazzariello’s first 1000 customers, as a kind of human interest story about Unsuccessful Companies? I cannot bear the thought of such entwining, almost unbearably pleasurable.
And now. All of the music!
Visit One More Revolution Records! (<= click. Please.)
Here is a discount code (first1000) for Half Off(!) all the things.
Have a listen, have a buy, pass it on to literally anyone. And maybe next time I will tell you about the geodesic dome and the human interest story and the riches.
Good day, fine ones. Yours in Suspicion About All This,
A