
Life Lessons After 10 Years of BetterExplained.com - jrheard
https://betterexplained.com/articles/life-lessons-10-years/
======
WA
Wow, that was a great post. I can share quite similar numbers: I run my
business for 10 years now. It makes about 12,000€ per month. It grew 24% last
year. Most traffic comes through evergreen content. I wrote about a hundred
articles with 220,000 words in total. I answered more than ten thousand
support emails over the years and generally try to be helpful. I didn't do
social media.

I want to add two things:

1\. I change articles when I don't like them anymore. I treat articles like
shopping windows. Nothing for eternity. I experiment.

2\. I don't get the newsletter advice. Seriously. Whenever I read something
like this, it's always: _Start a mailing list for the simple reason to be able
to contact people._ I get the idea, but I don't understand the details. This
advice never talks about two quite important things:

a) What should you write in your newsletter, if your articles are evergreen
and mostly to attract new readers? They're not made for existing customers –
at least not in my case.

b) Email lists grow stale. People might read your newsletter for months and
after a year or so, they'll forget about it or delete every email. That 50,000
subscriber email list grown over 8 years? Probably way less worth than many
people think, because relevant are only the last 7,000 or so. Better than
nothing, I guess.

Obviously, I don't have a newsletter, although I have people's email
addresses, because people need to have an account to use my software. But I
actually never contact them.

~~~
kalid
Thanks, glad you liked it! We have about the same wordcount after 10 years :).
Far fewer support emails on my end, maybe about 4-5k comment replies.

Agree on updating articles over time. Text is infinitely tweakable and there's
so many ways to improve it over time (often in response to comments I'll
reword things, create/update diagrams, fix typos, etc. -- if there's an issue
with a YouTube video, there's not much you can do.)

I wasn't sure about email either, but Patrick's post demanding I do something
convinced me:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-
email/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/)

(He actually sent an email saying that was the most important thing to do,
yelling it, and said 1% of people would actually follow it. I decided to start
it just not to fall into the trap.)

Here's what I've found personally:

1) It has a better chance of being seen than other social channels. I don't
want to be buried under political news and entertainment on Facebook, twitter,
etc. Also, many older folks aren't as familiar with tech, but check their
email.

2) It's a self-selected group. Here's a set of people who _want_ to hear from
me, which means I can be myself a bit more when writing a newsletter update. I
imagine I'm writing to some friends who want to know what's going on. I used
my email list to get 50 paid beta customers for my Calculus class, which was
itself delivered by email in its first iteration.

3) Marketing is way better. I sold more books by announcing it to my 20k email
list (at the time) vs. getting on Reddit and HN homepages, with ~1M pageviews.

4) Engagement is higher. Many people reply to the email and we have a quick
(or long) conversation, but they don't want to leave a public blog comment.
Also, it helps keep in touch with a larger set of people.

5) For numbers, I have about 38k people, 35% open rate, maybe 5-10% click rate
depending on the content. If your audience isn't engaged you should
prune/remove people who haven't opened it in a while. But, for an engaged
audience, you can get thousands of people to take a look at something.

6) Help people get started. I have a short auto-sequence that goes out with 3
lessons (I'd like to make more). Getting a gentle nudge every week with some
new content helps people (vs. having to remember each week to find some
articles to read).

When people think of "newsletter" they think of spammy groupon emails designed
to sell sell sell. I aim for simple, plain-looking updates (not technically
plaintext, sometimes I have images), with a casual vibe. "Hey, have something
new you might like. Enjoy."

7) On what I write: announcements of new articles, new product launches,
requests for beta customers. I probably email 1-2 times per month on average.

8) Lastly, it's fun for me. I don't like the FB/twitter environment that much
-- it feels too much like a stage -- with email, I feel like I'm chatting with
friends around a table.

~~~
WA
Thanks for your detailed response. I think 8) is good advice for me. I think
of newsletters as this serious thing. Every email should deliver value. Maybe
I need to rethink this, make it more fun for myself and don't try to think too
much about it. 6+7) seems a good approach for this.

------
politician
"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now."

~~~
kalid
(Kalid from BetterExplained here, thanks for posting this!)

The impact of evergreen content was my biggest eye-opener. The more time, the
better, but don't beat yourself up about "lost time". Just start today. Before
we know it, 2, 5, 10 years will have passed.

This worked for blog posts, starting an email newsletter, selling books on
Amazon, making YouTube videos (for standard math concepts), design
improvements to the site, etc. You plant the seed once and it bears fruit for
years.

~~~
politician
I thought that this quote captured an incredible kindness to yourself (your
"younger you"). Thanks for writing it down.

~~~
kalid
Really glad it resonated. It's hard to overstate gentleness with yourself, I
remember the instant last year when I forgave myself for mistakes / regrets
that had long bothered me. I was walking outside at night, and literally felt
an evaporation from the back of my head. Tension I didn't know I had just
disappeared.

Hope it helps someone do the same.

------
s_m_t
Pretty much everything I know I've learned from the internet or from books I
found on the internet... but for some reason I had not found your site until
just now from this post! It looks really nice so I'm going to start reading
it.

Actually, now that I think about it, I probably have come across your site
before but I think I may have exited out after a quick glance at the front
page. Maybe I'm crazy but when I first look at your site it seems like I have
to sign up for some sort of service to access the content. I hate signing up
for services, free or otherwise. The first thing I see is

'Math without endless memorization.

Instead of memorizing procedures, learn why equations work. This site helps
you overcome mental roadblocks and truly grasp new concepts.'

and then a box right below it asking me to give you my email. If I press
pagedown I get to a section titled 'blog posts' (in my mind not the actual
content I would be looking for) and then at the very top of the page I see the
horizontal navigation bar, but none of the titles really read 'click here to
learn cool stuff for free'. By this point I've probably left your website.
Something to think about, definitely going to start reading your site and I
really respect what you do.

~~~
kalid
Thanks for the detailed and honest feedback!

The newsletter is fully optional, basically to get alerted to new articles &
other site news. The homepage should be fully scrollable with a big list of
articles, you can also check out:

[https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet/](https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet/)

for a visual guide. That said, I'll definitely think about rewording things,
and I've long wanted to make a "Getting started" section for students,
teachers, parents, etc. Really appreciate the feedback!

------
handsomechad
Just commenting to say I love your site. Used it a lot growing up / in
college. Extremely lucid explanations

~~~
kalid
I love hearing that, thank you. I started the site to help other frustrated
students -- I clearly remember cramming in a small dorm room and not having
things click. Happy it helped.

------
charlieflowers
Hello, Kalid. At the "critic" from the HN post, just wanted to say hi and that
I am as big a fan as ever. It was interesting to me to read our discussion
again.

~~~
kalid
Hi Charlie! Great to see you, and thanks for the support over the years :).

That discussion was an eye opener for me (in a good way), it showed me of how
easily things get muddled in online discussions as context goes missing. It
always reminds me to really see what the other person is thinking.

------
thefalcon
I appreciate the effort and intention behind trying to avoid becoming an eHow
or HowStuffWorks.

~~~
kalid
Thanks. I was really disappointed to see what happened to HowStuffWorks. I
loved reading it in high school, and it likely planted the idea in my head
that a single person could start a learning site.

On paper it reached "success" (sold for millions, is now a Top 500 site) but
unfortunately it's far away from its original mission.

There's been countless studies about happiness and income, but I realize once
my reasonable needs are met, my life satisfaction comes from things that can't
be bought (getting in the zone, helping people, feeding my curiosity).

------
mamurphy
Good post. I run a small blog and your retrospective gave me some good
insights on how to approach things moving forward. The idea of evergreen
content and your monetization breakdown were nice to see.

------
wodenokoto
I love betterexplained and I almost religiously check if it has an article on
any topic I'm reading up on.

At least the free content can't stand alone, but it makes khan academy or
coursera videos much easier to follow if I've read an article on
Betterexplained before hand, and I think that has tremendous value.

Does anybody have experience with any of the courses? Are they worth it?

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chris_wot
I think I might have been the Chris who was on his feels good list. I said it
then, and I'll say it again - the guy is incredible!

------
mhartl
Thanks for the great post, Kalid! Both useful and inspiring.

~~~
kalid
Thanks Michael! railstutorial.org has long been an inspiration for me, showing
what an educational site could become.

------
RichardHeart
I love the evergreen content advice!

