Welcome to Experiment #1!

Advice I give to every client:

Build an email list, and communicate regularly with the people on that list. I believe it’s so important that I include email marketing software for free with our website hosting to make it as easy as possible. And yet…

Live footage of the cyclone press newsletter:

Clearly I’m not modeling this well.

When I thought about why I only average 2 newsletters per year, I realized it was because I wasn’t actually excited about any of the things I was supposed to say.

“Did you know we build email marketing into your website?”

“We’re a KC Chamber Superstar!”

Great. Fine. Who cares?

It wasn’t about finding the time. It was about finding the purpose.

Sometimes, when you procrastinate on something important, it’s not because you’re too busy, or it’s too big… it’s because you’re working on the wrong thing.

There was a disconnect between what I thought I should be doing, and what I knew I should be doing.

Website Support

I thought I should be informing people of the services we offer, because historically I haven’t done a good job of that. And yes, we will absolutely build an amazing website and host and maintain it and help you with your ideas and I’m proud of what we do and it’s great.

Founder Support

But I know I should be sharing my personal perspective on what it even means to run a business. Why it’s bigger, and harder, and more fulfilling, and completely insane and there are people and tools and concepts and books that can help you better navigate this crazy journey.

I do what I do because I love supporting entrepreneurs. It’s not even about websites. It’s about helping people build the life they want to live, on their own terms.

If I were to follow the traditional marketing advice to niche down, define your target market and determine your content pillars… then everything I write should be about website design, website development, website hosting, website support, with the appropriate keywords and headings and meta descriptions to beg the almighty Google bots to please send me a trickle of traffic that goes somewhere other than Forbes.

Writing a blog post called “5 Most Common Website Mistakes.” Sharing it in a newsletter with a link to the privacy policy software we offer.

Blah.

I want to write about how you have to define success for yourself and your business, and that it can (and should) look different from everyone else.

I want to write about how no amount of business coaching on how to structure your pricing packages will get you past a self-inflicted fear that your work is not valuable.

I want to write at the intersection of the hard and messy work of being a founder, and the hard and messy work of being a human being.

I am interested in peeling back the layers, one at a time, because if a single epiphany can help you pause and make a better choice, I have written something that’s worth something.

This kind of writing didn’t fit under the cyclonepress.com website agency newsletter, and it didn’t fit under the smschumacher.com art + essay newsletter. So I started a new one. And guess what? I’m EXCITED about it, because this is what I know I should be doing.

I have two goals for Experimental Pixels:

1. Accountability

If I announce to everyone on this list that I will send you something every other week, that means I have to actually send you something every other week. I’m constantly saving small observations and epiphanies, and a bi-weekly schedule with force me to (consistently) clarify my thoughts in a shorter format.

2. Learning How to Model Something Different

I am not a business, I am a human being. I contain multitudes, and likely you do as well. So I’m not going to contort myself to fit into a box. This newsletter is a space for me to share founder thoughts, that one book passage that wedged in my brain, an observation while painting, updates on my kid’s first business that I totally did not secretly encourage and mastermind… who knows. This genuinely is an experiment, and what I learn from it can be directly applied to my clients as they navigate their own projects.

I refuse to be categorized, in hopes that it gives you the freedom to do the same. I’ll talk more about what I mean by that in the next experiment.

What project do you keep stalling on? Why?

Just for a moment, stop rushing around, sit with this question, and be willing to hear the answer. “I’ve been too busy” might be the surface-level reason for why you haven’t done The Thing – but maybe there’s something deeper.

If sitting and meditating isn’t your jam, I highly recommend the Morning Pages technique by Julia Cameron. Just start writing (by hand) your stream of consciousness, no expectations, on 3 letter size sheets of paper. There’s always something about hitting that 3rd page. See if it works for you.

Side note: if you landed here from my regular art + essay update, it’s because I forgot to tweak the settings. This is my new project, Experimental Pixels newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. If you like this kind of thing, make sure to do that, because these lists will be segmented differently now that I’ve caught the error. Thanks!