What I learned this year (part 1?)

Welcome to your 1,000th wrapped & reflection piece of content this week 🤣

This year, we launched & experimented with a bunch of new stuff. As a reflective exercise, I wanted to break down what I learned from 2 of the biggest ones.

#1 I decided to be a long-form guy

At the end of January, I decided that I was going to start writing a weekly email based on two things I was seeing:

• If I looked at myself as a consumer - scrolling on social media quickly became mindnumbing and I felt worse, but reading long-form emails was where I went to learn and I felt better when I was done. I wanted to show up in a place where people went to learn, not Doomscroll.

• Even though social media started as a place to see content from your friends, family & who you chose to follow, social media has (kinda) become a “slot machine” - each piece of content is pulling the metaphorical gambling lever hoping that your content would perform and be seen by your ideal clients. Basically no ownership of the audience.

My first long-form email went out on February 1st to 236 people on our email list through Flodesk, here’s the quick breakdown from Flodesk for Jo & I’s emails from January to June:

• Avg Open rate: 58.26%

• Avg Click Through Rate (CTR): 2.66%

• Total Sends: 39

In June we switched to BeeHiiv to for sending our emails, from then until now these are our stats:

• Avg Open rate: 62.5%

• Avg CTR: 3.9%

• Total Sends: 38

• Subs as of today: 279

What I learned:

• The metrics don’t tell it all - I’ve struggled with keeping an (almost) weekly email schedule at times because more often than not I get no replies. It feels like no one cares 😭. Social media has trained us to care about immediate validation. But at least once a month I’ll have a conversation with someone and in passing they’ll say “I love reading your emails each week”

• Reps matter - when I started writing my emails, I frequently quoted the 100 posts rule (to paraphrase MrBeast, the first 100 things you upload don’t matter; they’re where you learn the art and your voice. If you stick with it the 100th will be good). Turns out that with one email per week, that’s 2 years! But with the 37 emails I sent this year, I can feel like I’m finding a little more of my voice each send. And that’s what I’m choosing to focus on rather than “making it big” right now.

• Writing makes me smarter - with the rise of AI I’ve had a few people ask me if I use chatGPT to help write my emails. By active choice, I don’t. My personal goal is to be “the go-to biz coach,” which means I need to have clarity on my own thoughts. Putting ‘pen to paper’ each week has forced me to refine more than one idea that I’ve ended up quoting in future conversations.

• The right tools matter - switching to BeeHiiv improved our Opens and CTR and added tools for us to grow and monetize. For us, this aligns with our goal of growing as thought leaders.

Now that we’re consistently putting decent numbers on the board, I want to start leveraging some of those monetization tools Beehiiv offers (when they align with our brand). Starting with our first ad ever 👇 (🤫we get paid $1.75 per person that clicks on it, we’d appreciate your support)

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#2 Capturing Luxury - the scalable high-ticket group program

If you’ve followed us for very long, you’ve probably seen us talk about passive income. Early on this year, we were fairly sure we wanted to move away from being ‘just’ branding photographers (this also applied to our revenue streams).

We’re constantly talking about new ideas/offers/launches around here, so we started on a journey to launch a group coaching program for branding photographers on how to become high-end branding photographers. At the time this was perfect because:

• This was the model that we’d seen a lot of people do - launch a repeatable cohort-based program, record most of it to limit repeat effort each round, launch over and over

• We wanted to be educators & coaches, but our audience was photo-related - this was the middle of the Venn diagram, so on paper it was logical

The Stats:

• Price point: $997

• Round 1: 2 attendees

• Round 2: canceled - Jo burnt out right as the launch started

• Round 3: canceled - we didn’t sell any

What I learned:

• Copying doesn’t always fit you - just because it had worked well for other people, doesn’t mean we were ready to make the tradeoffs that other people did to make a successful group program (eg: one-dimensional social feeds, repetitive content, grueling posting schedules)

• We created it for us, not our customers - when we put together our group program, we put the best of us and what we wanted into it (it was really good) but that doesn’t necessarily mean we met a need that a lot of people knew they had. With enough education, we could have cultivated the “need” but…

• It was a “good enough” not a passion - there are lots of ways to make money, but running your own business is one of the most stressful/uncertain.. we settled for something that neither of us was jumping out of bed in the morning to do, we both were “okay” with it.. turns out it’s difficult to sell something you’re not excited about

• Swim with the current, not against it - looking back, around the time we launched Capturing Luxury, a lot of the people we looked up to who had successful group programs were also struggling to sell spots in their programs… major trends (in our corner of the internet) are fairly easy to see now that in general group programs, & masterclasses are losing interest while personalized 1:1 offers & in-person events are growing in popularity.

• Maybe launch ‘just’ one thing at a time - round one of Capturing Luxury coincided with onboarding both our new marketing agency’s clients… meaning more stable income, but possibly too much new all at once (we also wound down the agency as well)

While we don’t offer Capturing Luxury anymore, it did set us up for where we are now:

• The lessons were the basis of Your Big Shift & the presentation we gave at the She’s Going Somewhere retreat in August.

• We’ve fully leaned into personalize 1:1 offers because that was the feedback we received from people during the launching of Capturing Luxury

• By leaning into being photo educators we got great opportunities like being ambassadors for Imagen.ai & speaking at Reset Conference next year (use code “BRADFIELD100” at checkout for a $100 discount)

Should I do part two of this? I’m thinking part two could be:

• We launched & shuttered an agency for the second time

• We killed all our Nov & Dec launches because of Coaching (and burnout)

Hit reply if you want me to write that email next week

Lyndon

Ps we’re in prepping for 2025 season - have you considered a biz coach to help you achieve your goals? (or even figuring out what your goals are…) We’re offering the first coaching call for free so that you can ‘test drive’ coaching with us before making any commitment. Hit reply, lets chat about your big plan for next year!