Welcome to Below the Fold! The newsletter that lets you peek into TPan's brain 👀 🧠

We're getting into the the holidays, traditionally a slower time of the year when it comes to work (unless you're in retail!).

As such, it's a great time to reflect and I've been doing a ton of that. I've been pondering how to move forward with various efforts from an entrepreneurial and creative POV.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why visualizes this eloquently:

To add a layer on top, I often think about James Clear's framework about decisions:

The Web3 with TPan journey comprises of countless forks in the road and decisions in the road. My guiding principles for my work help at these points:

1. Provide as much value to the space as possible, as small as it might be in the grand scheme of things

2. Prioritize my Premium subscribers (supporters!)

3. Keep my Substack content free for the public

With that, the updates for TPan below aim to reflect the above.

Perks Recap

• I've had video chats (and some IRL ones) with many of you, which have all been great! I want to be more explicit in the time that I provide my premium Subs, and would like to provide complimentary consulting sessions. Whether it's discussing my writing, helping with Growth/Marketing strategy, even topics outside of Web3, I want to help! Give me a holler if interested.

  • I'm intentionally making this perk open-ended for now, and will adjust the parameters as appropriate. For now, let's see how this goes 🙂

What’s going on with TPan

Professional

Continuing to experiment with free vs. premium content

In BTF #10, I shared that I would gate some of my historical Substack content. To be honest, that didn't sit well with me as I have wanted to keep my Substack content free forever (I've publicly stated this too!). I have since reversed that decision, and replaced that 'perk' with something more tangible as shared above. I'd chalk that up as a win for free and prem subs 😉

Substack content cadence

I will be slowing down my publishing cadence in the New Year. Part of me is crying inside typing this because I've been proud to be able to write at such a clip. However, I need to ruthlessly prioritize while making sure I stay sane. I will go from publishing 5x/week to 2-3x/week and the premium newsletter will come out once a month. With the extra time I will:

1. Increase bandwidth for consulting work

2. Repurpose my content into different formats to increase my reach

3. Repurpose my existing content into something more polished and monetizable. I'm thinking of a book or something of the sort. "50 Growth Case Studies in Web3", anyone? Whatever it is, Premium subs will receive this content for free.

Creating a Premium sub chat:

This has been slower progress than I hoped, but the goal remains the same. I want to be more accessible to you all in an exclusive way! Next steps here are hooking up Unlock and Guild, and airdropping tokens to access the chat.

This channel will likely live on Telegram. Open to thoughts and suggestions as well!

Personal

Gifts

I've never been a gift type of person and over the years it feels like I've given A and my family pretty much everything they'd want (short of a car or house, I ain't gifting that 😂).

As I've grown in age, I just want to spend quality time with loved ones. I'm simple like that, life is already complicated as it is. And I'm grateful that those closest to me feel similarly.

What I'm thinking about for my writing

• Saw a great Advent Calendar engagement concept from protocol, will be highlighting it!

• Apple has been getting some heat from the Web3 industry lately, trying to putting their 30% fee on blockchain gas fees. I'm chatting with some other writers in the space tomorrow to create a co-written pieces to educate our respective audiences on how gas works and why this is a poor decision on Apple's part. It'll be a fun exercise to creatively co-write. Looking forward to it!

Chat soon, folks. Grateful for all of you!