Day 83: Marketing, Money, and Morality (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, a friend introduced me a friend of hers who runs a popular newsletter about productivity, and we got a chance to video chat today. (This is one of those cases where I’m going to err on the side of being cautious and keep the other party anonymous because I’m not sure how much they’d be comfortable with me sharing.)

One of the topics we discussed was around specialized tools that help people spend their time well. I talked about Hide Feed and Intention and how I loved building these tools and making them excellent, but hadn’t cracked the nut of distribution and marketing. They shared how they had built some specialized tools themselves and wanted to share more with their audience.

It sounded to both of us like the perfect opportunity for a 🎉 *~partnership~* 🎉.

Since we’re both new to this, we decided to have me brainstorm potential partnerships models after the call and share it with them.

In today’s post, I’m going to consider the different approaches we could take. (Side note: This is one of my favorite parts about committing to doing everything in the open — in situations like this, I think it’s common to fall into the trap of thinking in zero-sum ways and try to create some kind of information asymmetry to optimize for one’s personal gain, but I’d much prefer to live my life in co-op mode where everyone can win together.)

Let’s start with our goals.

• Goal 1: Provide awesome benefits for their subscriber base

  • Their newsletter has a free tier and a paid tier, and they’d like to provide extra value for their paid members

• Goal 2: Have people discover my products, pay for them, and help me make a living building things I love

  • Since Intention is not yet fully ready for prime time, I’m going to narrow my goal in this situation to Hide Feed

There are a ton of potential ways to brainstorm — I’m going to start with the extremes and work my way in.

A. All their subscribers get Hide Feed Pro for free forever

This model is optimized for providing awesome benefits for their newsletter subscribers. While it might seem like this wouldn’t contribute to getting paid users for Hide Feed, that’s not necessarily true. It’s possible that these users could share Hide Feed with their friends and thus drive more discovery and conversions as a second-order effect. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful that Hide Feed is viral enough for this to actually happen at a meaningful level.

B. All their subscribers are simply introduced to Hide Feed (no special deal)

This model is optimized for having people discover Hide Feed and potentially convert into paying users. For what it’s worth, I think this is also valuable to the newsletter subscribers because they’re learning about a tool that they might find quite useful. But there’s definitely more we could do to make the newsletter subscribers feel special and super glad to be a paid member of the newsletter.

So we’ve covered the ends of the spectrum. I’m not sure if I’m tired or what, but writing everything above took forever, and I’m finding it quite difficult to think through these cases. Also, I was hoping to be able to use whatever I come up with here and apply it to any sort of partnership that I make in the future, but I’m realizing that this scenario is a bit special because (1) my partner is focused on providing value to their paid members (rather than getting a commission, which is more common) and (2) my partner has both free members and paid members, not just one audience.

Maybe it’d help to consider this from a general case, establish some principles, and then narrow it down rather than starting from specifics. Let’s say someone with distribution (e.g. a popular blog, newsletter, YouTube channel) wants to partner up with me to share Hide Feed with their audience. Some people will happily do this for free if they love the tool or we’re friends, but it’s fairly common nowadays for people to receive a commission for every sale made through their audience (aka affiliate marketing). Affiliate marketing is a topic that I’d like to write about in more depth at some point because I have quite conflicting feelings about the commercialization of personal expression and its impact on the integrity of creators, BUT that’s for another time.

Actually, should it be for another time? Oh man, this is stepping into some philosophical territory and I’m really going off the rails here. There’s something really unfortunate about advertising and affiliate marketing where everything has been commercialized, and it’s difficult to tell whether someone is saying something because they truly believe it or because they have a financially incentive to do so. I think it’s hard for even the person themself to know. This is why I greatly respect creators like Ben Thompson and Sam Harris who go through great lengths in order to truly remain independent by sourcing their income from their fans directly, not advertising. Go read Ben Thompson’s ethics statement — the level of care he puts into his integrity is almost unheard of nowadays.

This is why I avoided doing any affiliate marketing or taking sponsors when I was making videos on Facebook back in 2017. I wanted my self-expression to be pure and to establish a connection with my audience where they could trust that I was saying things because I believed them, not because I’d make money.

But then again, I share referral links with friends for different services all the time. Isn’t that a form of affiliate marketing in a way? I share a service and get rewarded for having someone sign up?

Oh boy, what a pickle I’ve gotten myself into. These are the areas that I have the hardest time thinking through because I feel like a crazy person for caring about these things when almost no one else seems to. Back in my video-making days, I had people tell me that they wouldn’t mind if I put ads in my videos or had sponsors because they’d be happy to support me that way. I didn’t understand how they didn’t care about their attention being captured for commercial purposes or how I’d then have a financial incentive to use their attention for my personal profit — was I crazy or was society?

These were concerns that I had as a content creator / someone with an audience, but now I’m on the other side of the table, where I have a product that I’d like more people to find out about. Does that change anything? If someone is okay mixing financial interests with the audience that they’ve built, should I refrain from partnering with them simply because I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that myself as a creator?

To answer yes feels like I’m being paternalistic. Sure, I may have had the goal to represent myself authentically which entailed not bringing money into the mix, but not everyone has that goal or sees it that way. Or maybe I’m just thinking that because I want to be able to set up these partnerships and try to have more people discover my products because my marketing is nonexistent. It’s hard to tell at this point.

I want to be thoughtful about the decisions I make because that’s the main reason why I embarked on this whole indie maker journey — I want to be able to live my life and do things in ways that are in line with my values and the things that I care about.

At this point, I’m not thinking clearly, so I’m going to let this simmer in my subconscious and revisit it tomorrow. THIS IS HARD