Milk Road's Conversational Success

A story about how Shaan trained writers at Milk Road newsletter by having them record voice memos instead of writing drafts.

"We went from 0 subscribers and never having written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars in 1 year. The key was training other people to write it instead of me, because I didn't want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5am to a couple hundred thousand people.

One of the hacks to training people was - I felt like they were writing with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly they were writing about stuff that's kind of boring. I told them 'I feel like you would never just tell me about this if I was your friend.'

So what I had them do - forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically 'Oh did you hear what happened today? This guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.'

As soon as they started doing that I was like 'Yep, that sounds perfect - just write that down.' It was such a good filter. If you can't even talk about it, you're not ready to write it yet. You have to first be able to explain it in plain language."