In the third episode I interviewed Corey Quinn the better dressed of only 2 cloud economists in the world. In addition to helping companies get control of their Amazon Web Services (AWS) bill he helps everyone else get on top of the torrent of information coming out of AWS every week through his newsletter Last week in AWS.
Corey was “drinking from the firehose” anyways trying to figure out what news from AWS had economic impact clients of his consultancy, the Duckbill Group. Curating that information with a healthy dose of sarcasm proved a winning formula, leading to consistent audience growth of around 100 a week since he started publishing.
Over the course of our conversation we covered:
- how putting your personality into your newsletter makes it more interesting for readers and more sustainable for you (and may also make it harder to take time off)
- starting a newsletter as a way of drawing attention to something else
- growing that newsletter into a standalone business
- the launch process that Corey used, and the fail metrics he was prepared to pack it in if he didn’t reach
- ways to build sponsorship into your audiences expectations (even if you don’t have sponsors)
- the most bespoke, complicated curation and generation workflow you could imageine
- an extremely generous offer from Corey to anyone considering starting a newsletter of their own
If you aren’t already, please consider subscribing to both this podcast and my newsletter. I also have the twitter, and would love to talk to you about this episode there.
