100 Subscribers Quotes

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

First, I subscribe to everything that my Dream 100 are publishing. If they’re on your Dream 100, they probably publish on at least one, if not many, different platforms.

Digital subscriptions are transforming the broader publishing industry in profound ways, and a new breed of reader-supported titles are enjoying newfound popularity. In the technology industry, for example, Jessica Lessin’s sharp, pointed (and subscription-only) The Information now has the second-largest team of tech reporters in Silicon Valley. Ben Thompson has thousands of readers who are happy to pay him $100 a year for his excellent Stratechery newsletter, and Bill Bishop writes an email newsletter about current affairs in China called Sinocism that has more than thirty thousand readers paying $118 a year. Meanwhile, all sorts of splashy, venture-funded, “digitally native” titles like BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Daily Beast, and Vice are struggling to hit their numbers. Any guesses why?

Its February 1, 2018, earnings call was almost exclusively dedicated to highlighting its service revenue, which was $31.15 billion in 2017 and could constitute a Fortune 100 company itself. That revenue is growing at 27 percent a year and represents more than half of Apple’s growth. And while its hardware business is seasonal and subject to wide peaks and troughs, its service business shows consistent, predictable growth quarter over quarter. But guess what? Some people still don’t get it! The Q&A session of that last earnings call was dominated by analyst questions around iPhone supply and demand. It’s enough to make you slam your forehead on your desk.

HDFC Bank was the first of the private lenders to go public— even before it completed a full year. 'It was a mistake,' Deepak told me. The RBI required the new banks to go public within a year but all other lenders went back to the regulator and got extensions. 'We didn't ask for it. We were too naive,' Deepak said. 'Everybody took time as they wanted to get a premium. We sold at par, ₹10. But I have no regrets.' Deepak pushed for a par issue as the bank had nothing to show. And the disaster of parent HDFC's listing was still haunting him, though that had happened a decade and a half ago. In 1978, India's capital market was in a different shape and mortgage was a new product, not understood by many. HDFC put the photograph of its first borrower on the cover of its balance sheet, a D. B. Remedios from Thane, who took a loan of ₹35,000 to build his house. The public issue of HDFC bombed. In an initial public offering (IPO) of ₹10 crore, the face value of one share was ₹100. ICICI, IFC (Washington) and the Aga Khan Fund took 5% stakes each in the mortgage lender and the balance 85% equity was offered to the public, but there were few takers. The stock quoted at a steep discount on listing. For the bank, Deepak did not want to take any chance. So portions of the issue were reserved for the shareholders and employees of HDFC as well as the bank's employees. HDFC decided to own close to a 26% stake in the bank and NatWest 20%. Satpal was offered about 5% and the public 25%. The size of the public issue was ₹50 crore. 'We didn't know whether it would succeed. Our experience with HDFC had been a disaster,' Deepak said. But Deepak had grossly underestimated investors' appetite for the new bank. The issue, which opened on 14 March 1995, was subscribed a record fifty-five times. The stock was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (now known as BSE Ltd) on 26 May that year at ₹39.95, almost at a 300% premium.

So while climate change threatens our quality of life and the actual lives of millions who live at or below sea level, we’re paying attention to a billionaire launching himself into space. At least he said, “Thanks to all the Amazon Prime subscribers.” If this doesn’t demonstrate our gross idolatry of tech innovators, I don’t know what does.

The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

six reasons why email is the best: My company AppSumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email. This percentage has been consistent for more than ten years. Don’t believe me? I have 120,000 Twitter followers, 750,000 YouTube subscribers, and 150,000 TikTok fans—and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers. Why? Every time I send an email, 40,000 people open it and consume my content. I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them. On the other platforms, anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content, but it’s not consistent or in my control. I know what you’re saying: “C’mon, Noah, email is dead.” Now ask yourself, when was the last time you checked your email? Exactly. Email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people! It’s the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today. Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY! Social media decides who and how many people you’re seen by. One tweak to the algorithm, and you’re toast. Remember the digital publisher LittleThings? Yeah, no one else does, either. They closed after they lost 75 percent of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. CEO Joe Speiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million. You own your email list. Forever. If AppSumo shuts down tomorrow, my insurance policy, my sweet sweet baby, my beloved, my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier. Because it’s mine. It also doesn’t cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list, whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money.

of a 100M ultra broadband subscriber network capable of providing broadcasting and communications convergent service to 10

We have already mentioned that when it comes to YouTube subscribers, having shorter videos is better,

The mass media stereotype of an MPD patient is a woman harboring an internal collection of delightfully different people ranging from wide-eyed little kids to kung fu masters and nuclear physicists. Skeptics tend to focus concretely on the impossibility of there being 10 or 20 or 100 separate people inside that woman's body (e.g., Sarbin, 1995). By and large, this stereotype will not go away. Alter personalities are real. They do exist—not as separate, individuals, but as discrete dissociative states of consciousness. When considered from this perspective, they are not nearly so amazing to behold or so difficult to accept. A fair reading of the MPD literature shows that authorities have long subscribed to this thesis: “Only when taken together can all of the personality states be considered a whole personality” (Coons, 1984, p. 53). Paradoxically, it is the critics who implicitly accept the view that the alter personalities are separate people.

As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.

I am a human being not a human doing. I will not choose to be perpetually productive. I am more productive in the long run, when I balance work with play and relaxation. I will not try to perform at 100% all the time. I subscribe to the normalcy of vacillating along a continuum of efficiency.

After subscribing to my Dream 100’s content, I try to buy some of their products. This allows me to see their funnels and what they’re selling on their backend and get a good idea of what they are doing.

Six Steps to Getting Started Right Now As we saw from the stories in Chapter 1, you don’t need a lot of money or special training to operate a business. You just need a product or service, a group of people who want to buy it, and a way to get paid. We’ll look at each of these things in more detail throughout the book, but you don’t have to wait to get started. Here are the six steps you need to take: 1. Decide on your product or service. 2. Set up a website, even a very basic one (you can get a free one from WordPress.org). 3. Develop an offer (an offer is distinct from a product or service; see Chapter 7 for help). 4. Ensure you have a way to get paid (get a free PayPal account to start). 5. Announce your offer to the world (see Chapter 9 for more on this). 6. Learn from steps 1 through 5, then repeat. Almost all microbusiness building follows this sequence of events. Of course, we’ll be discussing specifics as we go along, but it’s always better to start from where you are than to wait for everything to be perfect. If you have an existing business and are thinking about how to apply the concepts from this book, focus on either getting money in the bank or developing new products or services. These are the most important tasks of your business-not administration, maintenance, or anything else that takes time without creating wealth or value. If you’re not sure what to do, think about any of these ideas: Can you contact your customer list with a special offer or incentive? Can you introduce a new product or service to complement your existing portfolio? If you’re a coach or consultant, can you offer a special deal for clients who prepay? Is there a new way you can attract subscribers, clients, or customers? But one way or another . . . just do something.

Jessica Lessin of The Information says: “I still believe it’s much safer to build a business that doesn’t need any advertising to survive. Doing so forces you to focus 100% on your value to your readers. It’s the only way to make sure that what the news publishers deliver to readers in the future is smarter, more informed and more relevant than in the past.