I’m a slow reader. Since Christmas I’ve been adding a bunch of business and creativity books to my bookshelf. A bid to get reading more — any — physical books. Some of these books are punchy, which really suits my reading style.
Unsure if it’s weird or not, I often read in the bath. Whilst reading “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon I sucked up tips quicker than my plug hole sucked up the water. Accompanying these quick fire wins with a tweet from Harry Roberts from CSS fame about his newsletter, I thought, “man, it’d be nice to have one of these quick wins to start my week”. Soon realising that I could help myself and do just that with my MailChimp account. I could email myself, and others, every Monday with a creative kick.
I’ve done newsletters in the past, with one going out monthly for 12 months once. Once my content started to feel forced though I got sick of it and lost interest. How could I do this weekly creative kick then if monthly didn’t work out for me? By making it smaller. Real small. It’s a Monday after all. As a reader of Monday morning emails I need quick wins. It then works both ways . I can write a years worth of small newsletters in a weekend, and consume them over a few sips of my coffee every Monday.
With the idea and focus set, I wanted to make something. I got out the bath and started the stopwatch on my phone to see how quickly I could make something. Let’s be clear though: I’m not riding my startup chariot of fire out of my bathroom into the international market. It’s a landing page that signs you up to a mailing list. There’s people out there making apps and god knows what in small time frames, but I am what I am. I think it’ll be good.
Naming
As the stopwatch started my first task was to find a name. It took me about 20 minutes to figure one out. I used a domain registry search and a social media name checker to see what was free. I wanted to give a strong nod to it being small. Tiny, Spark, Little, Ounce, Snippet, all ran through my mind (or through thesaurus.com) as well as Creativity. Most of these combinations were gone in one way or another. I wanted to try and get something that was available on a .com, Twitter and Instagram. Harry crept into my mind again as I was meeting him the next day. He likes cocktails. You add a dash or a shot of things to cocktails right? I went with Dash of Creativity, and it was free where I wanted. Little did I know that my social media name checker had lied to me. It took me past the character limit for Twitter which is 15 without telling me. @dashofcreativity is 16 characters. Drat. @_ofcreativity it is then, and I made the “logo” a dash. I already bought the .com and that was £12 or something—there was no going back.
Building
Next up was making the website. I know how to make those, people have paid me money to do that for a few years now. I sorted out a little static site and fired in a MailChimp form which linked to a new List on my account. I’ll refine it over time if things work out, I just wanted to get it setup and out there to start testing the water.
Stop
That was that. I tweeted then hit stop on the stopwatch. At 23:23 the timer read 1 hour, 35 minutes and 48 seconds. That’s the time it took me to figure out a name, register the domain and social accounts and make a static signup page linking to a MailChimp account.
I opened a fresh Evernote called “Dash of Creativity Content” ready to be filled with juice. I set a start date of Monday 13th February 2017 for the newsletter so people knew what to expect, and to give me a date to work towards.
I still need to fill up that Evernote and make the template inside MailChimp for the newsletter. I have ideas for both. I have a week. You have a week to signup.