Author: Fabrizio

Timing

FabrizioLeave a comment

It might be that after the hyped launch, the excellent marketing execution, the promise of a new way, the vision of a better future, and much more, Hey.com is just asking too much of its audience.

Because investing time and money in a channel (email) that most people consider as that tiny room in their house nobody ever opens, full of unorganised crap you should have trashed years ago but never did, is a huge ask. We can probably all live with that type of mess in our lives. It is stressful, it is impractical, it is clunky. But we can still go there once or twice a day to see if anything worthy happened (usually not), and then go back to using more modern and comfortable means of communication for the majority of our interactions. Who cares if there are 1,346 unread messages, junk messages, when we will never ever pay any attention to them?

And so, Hey.com might just be misplaced in time, based on the assumption that we actually care while we do not. There is no great product, no flawless on-boarding, no inspiring mission that can revert this.

Unsubscribe

FabrizioLeave a comment

Unsubscribing from your list should be simple: click a link, unsubscribed.

But if you really decide, for reasons that are probably not really good, to make it difficult for subscribers to unsubscribe, do you have a plan to use the additional information you are requesting? Are you going to extract insights from the answers you get? Is there a way for you to turn those into actions that will, for example, decrease the number of unsubscribes over time?

My guess is, the answer is no.

And so, why bother? Why adding additional steps to a simple process? Why leaving a bad taste in your subscribers’ mouth in the very moment they are signalling they are getting tired of you?

Nobody ever loved something more because they found it difficult to leave it.

Hard work

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Hard work, they say, will lead you to success.

But hard work is not working 14 hours a day, weekends included, allowing yourself little sleep, few acquaintances, overworking your team members, writing three paragraphs when one would be enough, replying to all incoming emails within minutes, taking more tasks than you can handle because a promotion is in the air, eating crap because you have no time, a constant status of busyness.

We should stretch the idea of hard work along time and understand that hard work is consistency, determination, showing up with no regard for the reward. Hard work is long term.

Hard work is practice.

Getting past

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Life is not about avoiding problems, for the simple reason that problems, challenges, difficulties are an intrinsic part of life itself.

Life is more about identifying problems and finding the courage to stand right in front of them saying: “I will get past you”. And it is true both for the problems that surround us and for those who are within ourselves.

By the way, the better we are at dealing with the latter, the stronger and more effective we are when we tackle the former.

Easy

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Just because something is easy, it does not mean it should not matter.

Easy has a tendency to go unnoticed, to not be motivating enough, to be left out of curricula, cover letters and history, to be frowned upon, to be looked at with skepticism, to be considered as something anyone can do, to be the last task on the list, to be left behind.

The truth is, regardless of how easy something is, it still needs to get done.

And doing does matter. Always.