One year of writing every week

🥳 The pnote newsletter is now 1 year old! Time for lessons learned

A year ago I started writing a weekly newsletter. 52 weeks later, it’s still going!

The path to the first 100 subscribers in January 2024

Here’s what I learned so far.

🎯 Get to the point

Whatever you want to say, say it right away. No one wants to read meandering posts that struggle to get to the point.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to write tight, elegant prose that does just that. Maybe some people can do it naturally, but I can’t. The solution is to write a bad rambling draft first (that I can do), and edit it later with fresh eyes. When editing, move the key idea to the front and remove the fluff.

💫 Pick a theme, but don’t sweat it

The common wisdom in the newsletter sphere is that you need to pick your niche (along the lines of This is a newsletter for ABC who want to XYZ) and stick to it strictly. I rejected this formula early on, because I write for fun, not as a side-hustle.

Instead, I chose a pretty broad formula: I write about whatever I’ve been learning or experimenting with in the given week. In practice, a lot of this is either about Deep Learning or about my coding side-projects.

This approach gives me space to go on segways and makes writing more fun. But here’s the happy twist: this relaxed approach seems to result in better posts as well. In fact, the three posts with the most Substack engagement so far covered a variety of topics:

• Simple lasts longer , about the use of Web Storage API to store state in the Invader map

• Be more lucky , about the science and psychology of luck

• Read fewer books, feel better about it , about well, reading fewer books and feeling better about it 💫

I guess my audience has diverse interests :).

💪 Practice helps

The hardest thing about a weekly newsletter is that you need to have an edition out every week. I publish on Sundays and at the beginning I had my share of tense Saturdays stuck in anxious writer’s block.

This gets better with practice. After 52 editions I’m a bit better at getting started and getting to a first draft. It feels good to have one by Wednesday evening – this way I have a few more days to edit with fresh eyes.

How it started: with a post about how Steinbeck believed that in writing habit is more important than talent

I guess Steinbeck was right: In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

🫶 All feedback is welcome

Writing on the Internet often feels like writing into the void. Every time someone reacts to my posts, in person or online, it gives me a little boost and I’m grateful for it.

This experience has been very instructive for me as a consumer of content: it made me write more thank you notes and warm comments for others.

In other news

• 🔎 University of Chicago researchers show LLM-based financial analysis potentially beating human performance. The Hacker News comments are interesting: That ann benchmark is nowhere near state of the art. People didn't stop working on this in 1989. They realised they can make lots of money doing it and do it privately.

• 💡 Ben Evans on LLM model ranges: half-a-dozen players now offering a range of models with different price performance/speed trade-offs - generally, there is the frontier model (best results), and then a large and more efficient production model, something smaller and cheaper/faster, and then whatever they can squeeze onto mobile. They all have a benchmark showing they’re in the lead, but there are no moats.

• 💫 It’s Vivatech 2024 in Paris! The annual technology conference is back, this time with Elon Musk on a video call (last year he came over in person). In the exhibition space, lot’s of AI and LLMs, but I was most impressed with a stair-climbing wheelchair. (France is a country with mixed record on making its often centuries-old buildings accessible.)

Postcard from Belgium

Last weekend was the third and, sadly, the last French long weekend in May. I went on a bike trip around Belgium, knows as “the flat country”. Some of the hills we needed to climb were decidedly unflat :).

Keep climbing,
– Przemek