“Find your purpose” and other learnings from the EJCP at CUNY

Don’t be shy and adjust your value proposition.

After 100 days as a participant in the fourth cohort of the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creator Program (EJCP), I want to go back in time, stop, breathe, and look at the path I have traveled to this point.

I applied to the EJCP with my Sala de herramientas newsletter, a weekly digest for people who work in front of a screen. It is an initiative that has been in existence for more than two years, but in the last three months it has undergone significant changes in terms of the value proposition, the purpose, and the people I aiming to reach.

The EJCP was a conducive environment to evaluate what I am doing and learn how to improve it. Being in a group with amazing journalists from 15 different countries, with particular problems and concerns, was like being in front of a mirror that makes you feel less alone.

A brief explanation of what I’m doing

I started Sala de herramientas in March of 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time I decided to help other teachers who were struggling with adapting to online teaching. I made this horrible video on how to use Loom to record your screen and share it with other people. I uploaded it to YouTube and in a few weeks it had thousands of views.

That was my Minimum Viable Product. I didn’t put much thought into it. I just did it and released it into the world. And it turned out fine.

This momentum gave me ideas to continue doing other things and “package” a weekly product. Since I was coming across digital tools and resources every day, I decided to gather some stuff and start sending them out through a weekly newsletter.

I have been sending the newsletter for more than 100 weeks and I have managed to cultivate a special relationship with the people who receive it.

The three things that impacted me the most during the EJCP

1. Review and adjust your value proposition

When I started I wanted to share resources for journalists and professors like me. Later I realized that people working remotely and freelancers also found value in the newsletter. It was during the EJCP that I could crystallize a more clear definition of my readers: “people working in front of a screen.” To achieve this, the sessions with Ariel Zirulnick and the use of the Membership Puzzle Program guides were essential.

Learning: Adjusting the value proposition was key to focus my work, think about my ideal readers, and understand what problems or tasks I can solve for these people.

2. Think about humans, not eyeballs

Many in the newsletter world brag about their open rates. My numbers are not bad, but I prefer to translate percentages into real people. Every week between 1,000 and 1,200 flesh and blood human beings open my newsletter. And about 200 to 300 click on the resources I share. I want to get to know these people better, find out why they subscribed, what motivates them every day and how I can help them through the newsletter.

It was Tanmoy Goswami, a participant from a previous EJCP cohort and author of Sanity, who visited us and said that he always writes back to those who respond to his newsletter. That, I think, is the spirit that moves you away from an obsession with metrics to a more human and meaningful relationship. Great piece of advice.

Learning: Just as it is important to think about the next hundred or thousand subscribers, never forget the ones you already have.

3. Find your purpose

During the EJCP I had a couple of meetings with my mentor, Christian Fahrenbach, one of the founders of the German initiative Krautreporter, and author of their daily newsletter “Morgenpost.”

The first time we talked, Christian asked me to learn more about the golden circle of Simon Sinek. That concept kept me thinking for much of the 100 days of the EJCP: Why do I do what I do? This is how I described my purposes in the final pitch of the program:

Learning: Scrutinize your motivations and discover if your passion is a point of connection with other people who fall in love with why you do it.

Looking into the future

Thanks to the EJCP program I have learned to look with perspective, following the roadmap that we began to trace at the beginning of the 100 days.

That means my concept of “future” is no longer what happens next week. I have to project my goals for the next three months, six months, even for the next year. Based on that, these are the big questions I have for the future:

• Can I get at least 2% of the people that open the newsletter to become paying members by the end of 2023?
• Should the newsletter remain as a side project or aspire to something bigger?
• How much time should I spend on opportunities outside of the newsletter, like consulting and workshops?

These are questions that have to do with monetization, growth, scalability, and lateral opportunities. In the next 100 days I hope to reevaluate and see what answers emerge.

If you are interested in what I do and you want to learn Spanish from Chile, the most tangled and confusing country in Latin America, subscribe to Sala de herramientas.

It’s free and we’ll have a good time.