Why I Write | Customers, Etc.

Valuing real connection, even if I struggle at optimizing for reach.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing this right. By “this” I mean this (mostly) weekly newsletter that ends up in the inboxes of people I’ve worked with and have met on the internet. Occasionally people find Customers, Etc. via the Substack network, but mostly it’s the people who subscribe or who click through a post I make on LinkedIn or in the various Slack communities I’m a part of.

I can get discouraged when I post something I wrote to LinkedIn and it gets hardly any traction. Sometimes the posts I worked on the hardest seem to have little to no activity. The most recent post I shared on LinkedIn had 2 comments (1 of them was mine), 3 likes, 1 repost, and 465 impressions. The one where I wrote about my retreat got nearly 6,000 impressions.

Why does one generate more impressions and not the other? How much should I care?

Photo by me

Why I started

Customers, Etc. began on April 20, 2020 with a post on Focus. It’s the only post without a hero image and I didn’t explain why I was writing. I just started.

A month later, I wrote a post called Changes, where I shared how my job situation had changed at FullStory in the midst of the pandemic, but again I neglected to share why I started this newsletter.

I’ve written about writing on numerous occasions—it’s one of my favorite topics—but I don’t think I’ve ever circled back to talk about where this newsletter really came from and why I continue to write. Let’s cover that in this post.

In February of 2020, I had started a brand new role at FullStory as leader of a new practice called “Customer Experience Management”. I wrote about it at the time on my blog, before this newsletter existed:

As of Monday, I’m stepping away from managing support to lead a new “Customer Experience Management” practice, which will be accountable for customer experience across the entire customer journey. I’ll be writing more about what this practice is and why it was necessary in a future post, but I can rest assured that the theme of solving hard problems and helping people continues.

Because CX Management was a brand new function that lived under the broader CX organization and alongside well-established practices like customer support, customer success, sales, engineering, etc., I wanted to go on a listening tour, talking to various leaders within FullStory and outlining a strategy for how we would move forward with CX management.

Each week, I would set up several hour-long interviews with a handful of senior leaders, with everyone from the CEO to key individual contributors. At the end of the week, I would send an email to everyone I had met with thus far, sharing highlights of my conversations, making connections to previous themes, and updating people on the progress of defining what CX management was going to actually be.

I loved sending out those weekly updates. It was a great forcing function to help me think strategically and practically about what I was focused on, and communication forced clarity to the various stakeholders who would be interacting with the CX management program at FullStory.

When the CX Management practice was eliminated during the beginning of the pandemic—which I wrote about in Changes—that meant the research I had been doing and the weekly emails would stop.

It’s always hard to lose your job, but I also experienced a sense of loss when it came to no longer having a weekly email to send out. That email had become a platform where I would explore ideas, connect disparate themes, and showcase the hidden systems that underly our daily work and how those systems affect the customer.

As I wound down the CX management program, I sent one last weekly email, this time to the entire company. I shared how the CX management program would be “on hold” and invited everyone to subscribe to a new weekly newsletter I would be publishing outside of my work at FullStory.

That’s how this Customers, Etc. newsletter got started.

Perhaps I should pivot

This newsletter started on a platform called Revue¹. I picked Revue because I liked a feature they had where readers could “heart” posts directly from within their email inbox. I thought this would be a helpful way to measure engagement. I wasn’t writing to maximize shares. I was trying to write thoughtful pieces that resonated with readers and inspired people to think in new ways. Maybe getting a little “heart” next to a post would help me know my writing was effective.

The problem was that people rarely ever used that feature. Most posts had zero hearts. Every now and then my dad would heart a post and I would get an email notification in my inbox (thanks Dad!). Even after I switched to Substack, I noticed the same thing. I’d write these long, thoughtful posts that got virtually no engagement directly on the posts themselves.

Posting to LinkedIn would always generate more activity, though it’s never been a steady firehose of comments and reactions.

Sometimes I wonder if I should try to be more of a LinkedIn influencer. I’ll create LinkedIn posts where every sentence is its own paragraph, the hero image will always be a picture of me, and I’m always asking people to “comment for further reach”. Hot takes will abound. There will be many impressions and people I don’t know will “follow” me.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Photo by me.

I don’t know. I’m not going to say I’ll never lean into effective marketing tactics, but for now, that’s not why I’m writing.

Real connections

When I started my MBA program at Georgia Tech, I continued posting to the newsletter. Being in class provided an endless source of inspiration. The posts would be scheduled to go out on Thursday mornings and I would usually share to LinkedIn by the afternoon.

Something that surprised me was when I would show up to class on Friday evenings, it was common for several of my classmates to tell me they had read my post that week. Not only had they read it but they could point to specific things that had resonated with them. Had they liked the post on Substack or commented on LinkedIn? No, but they had engaged with the writing in a meaningful way, which was always my goal.

One of the reasons I love having an email newsletter is that replies come right to my inbox. Because it’s email and not a social media platform, it’s personal, so the messages are often personal. Old friends and colleagues will share something that resonated in my writing, and then they’ll offer up details about how it applies to them or what they’ve been up to. Often they’ll ask what I’ve been up to as well. The connections are always real and meaningful.

When I catch up with work friends over coffee, it’s not uncommon for them to say something along the lines of, “that piece you wrote about [XYZ] really resonated and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.” This always surprises me and delights me. Many times I may have forgotten—at least in the moment—that I had written something about [XYZ]². I’m really grateful my writing can be meaningful to people, even long after it’s exited my short term memory.

Why I continue to write

I still enjoy the process of delivering this newsletter. It’s not always easy and I don’t always meet my self-imposed deadline of scheduling posts to be delivered on Thursdays at 7 AM ET (like today), but I like the frequent practice of tying themes together and presenting ways of understanding that may be new and refreshing to people in their work.

And most importantly, I like the serendipitous exchanges I get to have with people who read my newsletter. I may not be optimizing my reach, but I’m creating real connections with people. That’s what matters most.

1. Revue was eventually acquired by Twitter and then was shut down in the months after Elon Musk acquired the platform. I had switched to Substack earlier after Revue had a bug that caused edits I had written to fail to save, resulting in me sending out a heavily unedited draft version of a post. (This would have been called a break in the loyalty loop).

2. Another take on this idea of forgetting topics and revisiting them is that it often happens to me! I’ll read a post I wrote several years ago, thinking before I start reading that I’m deeply familiar with the topic (I mean, why wouldn’t I be? I was the one who wrote it!). But then as I dive in, I realize there’s a lot more depth and nuance than I had remembered. “Past me” was more intimately familiar with the topic than “present me”. That’s also a good reason to write about things while they’re fresh and in the moment. “Future you” will think they remember things better than they do.