Ending An Experiment And Starting A New One

Closing my TypeShare and doubling down on Substack, especially Notes.

You would not be reading this newsletter if I didn’t first try my hands at short 200-350 word essays at this place called TypeShare.

One last look before I shut it all down

I did try writing daily for 30 days in Substack in early 2021, and immediately stopped writing afterwards.

I made a fresh attempt to get my writing muscles going, this time at TypeShare, between June and October 2022.

Scoping down to write 200-300 word essays in TypeShare, plus joining like-minded people at Newsletter Launchpad, made this transition a lot more successful.

The TypeShare experiment has served its purpose — namely to jolt me into writing more regularly. I’m shutting my account and migrating my two most popular TypeShare essays here.

5 Tier Problem Hierarchy

This one was and still is my most popular tweet at over 100 likes and 40 bookmarks.

Course Correcting >> Move Fast With 70% Information

This one on Course Correcting, was cited by some people who follow me. Everything else other than these two essays in my TypeShare account was pure chaff.

Aside 

I received some interesting feedback from Sean (better known as skmurphy on Twitter) after he read my Course Correcting post. 

I'm meeting him coming early Monday morning SGT 7am to talk more over zoom.

Hope to share what we discussed in future newsletter issues or essays.

Substack Notes

Speaking of experiments, I recently tried my hands at Substack Notes. And from this graph, can you tell when I exactly tried it? You have one guess 😉

There’s an issue with Substack Notes where you cannot follow a person without also subscribing to their newsletter. I expect some of these new subscribers to be surprised by this mechanism.

If that’s you, and I’m grateful you gave this a shot, feel free to unsubscribe. I prefer a smaller group of rabid readers over a larger group of lukewarm casual readers.

Cross Pollinate between Notes and Essays

One interesting feature from Notes is you can highlight specific lines in a newsletter or essay and restack them like quote tweets.

The synergy is two-way. You can also cite Notes right inside the essay. The same note above looks like this:

Cross Pollinate between Comments and Notes

You can also restack (boy, the verb does sound clumsy) comments. Here’s the before.

Here’s the after.

I am leaning more into Substack and the Notes feature and see where this takes me.

Limited: Tag Person only Works on Web

Apparently, you can use @ to tag someone but only on the web version.

Unsolved: How to Restack Quote in Essay as Reply to a different Note?

I posted this as a question in Notes. Complete with a gif to demonstrate.

Prediction: Comments to be Merged under Notes

I’m going to start a Note going forward for every published essay and post it in the comments so that people will comment in the notes instead.

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I have written several short essays here in Substack. Not all are sent out as email newsletters like this one because I don’t want to mail your inbox every time I have an idea.

Not all are equally well-formed or good. Some take more time to probe and sculpt. Having said that, I intend to send out a newsletter edition on the first and third Saturday of every month.

With that, I see you on the 6th of May.

As always, I wish you and your family good health and fortune.