I don’t know about you and your sphere of influence, but in mine, I’m talking with a lot of folks who are feeling near or at the end of their rope. They are tapped out. And to be honest, so are Ryan and I.
What a dog shit year 2023 has been and we still have roughly ten weeks to go! There have been promising signs of some form of normalcy on the horizon, but each week seems to grab a hold and pull us back. Wars, layoffs, shootings, strikes, inditements, The Social Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, wildfires, floods, more layoffs—ugh—where or when will it end? Wait, did I just see a locust on my window?
Last week Ryan and I received yet another data point that indicates folks are zapped.
Months ago we purchased the October 10th sponsorship slot for the wonderful newsletter, Dense Discovery. We have worked toward publicly launching our first public cohort with that issue. It was exciting as neither of us had ever placed an advertisement for a new service before. We never discussed or set a target for click-throughs, visits, or sign-ups as we did this out of pure curiosity. We believed that we would get some kind of response even if it was no response at all. Better to have some data than none.
So our ad went out to tens of thousands of people, hundreds of people came to our landing page, and nobody signed up—Zilch. Good to know!
The problem with this data point is that we don’t know why. Maybe our landing page sucked. Maybe people are burned out. Maybe our earlier indications that a lot of people were interested in this content were false. Or maybe it’s all of these things or none of them. Who knows?
What I know for certain is that Ryan and I are not only trying to jump-start Jump Ship, but we, like many of you, are also engaged in other work to bring in revenue. For many of us, the year has not been kind to our bottom lines and we’re all in some state of struggle to leave our retirement accounts intact. And let’s not kid ourselves, we’re browsing job listings too. Not because that’s what we want to do, but because it feels like the prudent thing to do.
So, we’re debating if we should push, push, push to get our first public Jump Ship cohort done before the end of the year or hold off until after the new year.
To our supporters and subscribers, we would love to hear your thoughts as many of you have been on this journey with us since earlier this year when we started to test our content. Where are you right now and what would you like to see happen?