The Making Of: Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Introduction and Background my first internship at Google was a very lucky meeting with someone on a plane I didn't have any experience in Tech didn't have the kind of CV that young people who apply at Google normally have didn't go to an ivy league university didn't speak English because I was born in France we spent the entire flight trying to communicate with a lot of drawings on a napkin I told him I was looking for an internship and through that I got an interview at Google when did you decide it was time to leave left Google to build my own startup my startup fa life can take you in different places sometimes not exactly what you expected your newsletter very close to 100,000 subscribers is that correct at first Nest laab started as just the newsletter was there a sense of Freedom if I don't try to be the startup founder that has raised x million don't try to be the VP of product at Google who has a team of 50 people what is it that I'm really curious about that I would love to keep on exploring that would make me happy to wake up in the morning even if nobody's watching I get to make a living doing the thing I love the most which is writing speaking of writing I want to get into the mechanics of your newsletter how can you write a Weekly Newsletter that is so in-depth and so well researched every week that must take hours you must be so exhausted on top of everything else you're doing and my answer every time is let's go back to Anor as a teenager young andur if you told her that this would be her life as an adult I think she would have been a lot more excited about adulthood than she was at the time into into the world of anore Welcome to the making of Anor Lou so I think we should start here let's go back to Anor as a teenager I want to know what she was like and when you look back can you see any indicators that you'd be doing what you're doing now when you start to connect the dots back to who you were as an adolescent I was a bit of a nerd I loved reading I loved writing I yeah I was a bit of a bookworm I used to spend a lot of time in my bedroom just reading novels to the point where my parents were sometimes forcing me to go outside and do things in the outside world so I think there were some seeds in there from my childhood as to what I wanted to do in the future I really dreamed of becoming a writer but I thought I would write novels with dragons and the kind of like fantasy stuff I had no idea I would be writing research and non-fiction so life can take you in different places sometimes not exactly what you expected um another thing that I really liked doing as a kid was coding building websites I got my first Early Interests and Community Building computer or we got our first computer because it was at the time where if you remember in the you know early 2000s you had one computer per house and uh we were timed by our parents where it was like you have 30 minutes and you can do whatever you want but then you have to you know give it to your brother and your sister because they want to play with it too so I used to spend spend a lot of time online building online communities I was managing one of the biggest forums for online writers when I was 15 or 16 um yeah we had like 20,000 members something like this it was for Young Writers you were an OG Community manager yes I didn't really think about it like this at the time I was just hanging out online with other people who liked writing and we would post our writing and everybody would share feedback we would have little online competitions it was a lot of fun but that's also definitely something that has been a seed for what I'm doing today I'm obviously using Circle nowadays that didn't exist at the time it was a good oldfashioned phpbb forum hand coded Internships at Google and Decision to Leave where I was so obsessed with making it pretty I would change the theme every two weeks which probably was very confusing for the community but yeah those would be the main things writing and building online communities that I already really like doing as a kid wow it's so cool to hear your story and then what you're doing now like there's a lot of parallels there um so I want to kind of jump a couple years past your adolescence into you had two back-to-back summer internships at Google uh whenever you were in college which then led to a full-time job where you worked there for three years I want to know how that first internship came to be what got you into into Tech and into that first internship I think spending a lot of time online like I did at the time you would just naturally become interested in Tech I was fascinated with how it all worked what was happening under the hood how all of those pixels came together and created those magical experiences that I loved so much so many of my other online friends loved so I really so I always had that Fascination but my first internship at Google was actually a very lucky um I'm losing my words literally haven't talked to anyone in two days sorry so you're the first person I know that feeling when you work remote you don't see anybody for a couple days it's real so it's okay that's what Ed is for those internships at Google they were the fruit of a lucky meeting with someone on a plane I didn't speak English when I was younger because I was born in France and my mom thought it was very important for me to learn English so she sent me to San Francisco for the summer to live with one of her best friends who had just moved there and on the plane there I was sitting next to a person who was working in Tech and we spent the entire flight trying to communicate together with a lot of drawings on a napkin trying to just talk about our lives what we liked without using any English because obviously I didn't have any and I stayed in touch with this person for years who became my mentor and to help me even choose what to study in University to help me navigate what I wanted to do in life and when I was 20 something um I told him I was looking for an internship and he introduced me to a lot of different people he had been working with over the years and through that I got an interview at Google and that's how I got my first job really it was a very intense process I had I think eight interviews it was it was hard to get in but I generally think that I wouldn't have gotten in at all if I didn't have that introduction in the first place so it really helped me get a foot in the door I think that is such a unique wholesome story of a chance encounter turning into something so meaningful and kind of life-changing for you in a lot of ways I think a lot of times we can be presented with those opportunities what about you in that moment decided to lean in to that interaction with that person on the plane you know you could have had your head buried in a dragon Fairy book you know as one does what what like kind of urged you to have that interaction with them I think this comes from my mom my mom is Algerian my dad is French and my mom grew up in a very poor family she really is the definition of a self-made woman and she always told me growing up that I should always ask for what I want and people can say no if they want to but I should always make the most of these connections for her as well all of her success she can probably Trace back to having met someone who gave her a chance at some point people who s past the fact that she didn't have an education people who so past the fact that she didn't have any relevant work experience but who trusted that she would learn on the job and that's how she built her career and I think that's what helped me ask this person can you maybe help me find an internship even though I didn't have any experience in Tech at that point I Transition to Starting Own Ventures definitely didn't have the kind of CV that young people who apply at Google normally have I didn't go to an IV league university none of that but I did what my mom would have always told me to do which is just ask and you'll see what happens wow so when did you decide that you wanted to go and and actually stay at Google fulltime so I'm sure there was a process you went back for the second year for the internship for the summer and then you ended up taking the full-time role what went into your decision to join Google full-time I really couldn't imagine any other option that would be that much fun at the time it was about 10 to 12 years ago and I know Google has changed a lot it's become a much much bigger company now but at the time it still had when I joined a little bit of that startup Spirit to it I was still fascinated with how as I say pixels come to life what happens under the hood and it was really considered the mecca of tech like everything important when it came to Tech happened there at the time so it felt like this incredible opportunity for me to learn for me to become more acquainted with how Tech works and another thing that was great at Google at the time was that once you got in they really trusted that you could really achieve anything that you said you wanted to try so there were lots of opportunities to try new projects to work on things that you'd never tried before you could you know travel and work with International Teams I felt like being in my early 20s this would be the best kind of school in terms of learning how to manage projects how to think about product development all of these kind of things in a way that maybe a different kind of company outside of tech wouldn't have provided in the same way I always think that there are moments in our career and I don't think all jobs are like this but I tend to sometimes think that some jobs can actually be like an MBA is that how you felt similar to your time at Google yeah I never really put it in those words exactly but that's what it was it was accelerated learning with a community of peers that I could learn from as well so very similar to an MBA yes yeah when did you decide it was time to leave when that magic I just described started to fade so after a while I felt like I understood how it worked not Tech in general but how the company worked I had a very clear idea of what it took to be successful I knew that if I worked on specific projects or if I collaborated with certain teams I could very quickly Advance my career I had a very clear framework for what success looked like and if I had stayed I could have kept on progressing like this in a very linear way but I felt like I was too young to have this path already ridden in front of me with a step by recipe to follow I felt like there was more to the world more to work more I had to explore I wanted to keep on going out of my comfort zone and I felt like at this stage in my career Google could not provide this anymore so I decided to leave did that lead you to finding this push towards starting something on your own because I know that I know we're going to get to Nest lab I promise uh we can't not talk about it but there were a couple other businesses that you started that didn't gain traction how did you process the experience of starting a new Venture and it not working out that's the interesting thing is that when I left Google to build my own startups I thought I had left the linear path to go and start an adventure of my own but I realized pretty quickly that I was just on another ladder they were still very clear codes as to what makes a startup successful um I spend a lot of time reading everything that was on the Y combinator website how to find a co-founder how to raise money how to design the pitch deck how to build an MVP and all of these kinds of recipes really that had been honed over the years by previous startup Founders and obviously there is no guarantee for Success when you build a startup my startup failed so I'm a prime example of this but I think the numbers are something around like 98% of startups fell so it doesn't mean there's a guarantee for success but I still felt internally like I was following an externally designed road map as to what success looked like I got my first feature in Wired Magazine and I was really happy about this because that was one of the Milestones being in wired or Tech crunch I met with investors I had my first pitch competitions and I loved it but I also realized that for a while that it was not so different from what I was doing at Google and the mode of working that I had it was just riskier and more fast-paced but it a lot of of the codes were were quite similar so when that startup failed instead of deciding to do another one I gave myself time to just explore what it is I'm curious about even if I remove from the equation any external definitions of success if I don't try to be the startup founder that has raised X Millions if I don't try to be the VP of product at Google who has a The Importance of Freedom and Self-Reflection team of 50 people under them if I remove all of those external definitions what is it that I'm really curious about that I would love to keep on exploring that would make me happy to wake up in the morning even if nobody's watching and in my case it was understanding how the brain works I had always been curious about why we think the way we think or feel the way we feel and so instead of starting another startup I went back to University I love that because there's an aspect of these natural pauses in life where it kind of sounds like you went through this reentering of who am I what is it that I want what labels or external like structures don't work for me anymore and you kind of connected with this idea of there's more for me to learn I want to go explore something that I don't know was there a sense of Freedom there that you were intrinsically looking for that Tech and the startup world didn't give you yes absolutely uh not starting a second startup was actually the scarier decision of the two because one of them again had a pretty clear path laid out in front of me again not guaranteeing success but at least I knew what I was supposed to do whereas with the other one I had Absol Ely no idea and that felt like absolute freedom which is a bit scarier but also felt a lot more exciting at the time so there was definitely this sense that I wanted to keep on exploring and the sense of I was seeking a sense of Unknowing I wanted to be in a state where I didn't know what would come next there's something really humbling about that isn't there it's like that fear but that you bump into humility how do you feel like that shifted your relationship with your ego I oh that's a TR question I think I've already up I think I didn't necess really have a very big ego in the first place but everything I was doing to try and build self-confidence was based on the perception of others I've always been a bit of a people pleaser and in my work I was always trying to do the thing that would maybe get me the most positive feedback from other people I wanted to be perceived as smart as helpful as someone that is contributing in a really big way to the team and once I left that path and I started focusing on what I was most curious about there was this kind of like new playground that opened in front of me where all of a sudden I had to build my self-confidence based on my self-perception and I couldn't rely anymore on the accolades of others on that positive feedback loop that I was always chasing I had to have that deep inner sense of self like satisfaction intellectual curiosity that is driven by something that you want to explore yourself versus something that will bring about Authority a sense of external expertise and the admiration of others so I don't think it made my ego necessarily smaller or bigger but the quality of it has definitely changed in the process how do you think that then changes how you view success and failure because so much of success and failure especially in the entrepreneurial Creator startup space is dictated on an external measurement system whereas and I love this discussion I love that you're sharing this because that inner knowing that inner self-confidence you know what is a success to you might be different for someone else and it becomes more personal your successes and failures so how does how does that maybe shift the way that you view failure and success now because it's so based on your own I guess inner framework of confidence that's the great thing about this sense of Unknowing that I have developed now and being comfortable with not having visibility of where I'm going is that when you're not on that kind of linear path anymore there's no end goal either and it's only when you have an end goal that you can fail because you're not reaching your destination I currently don't have a destination so I can't really fail the only thing I'm doing is experimenting trying new things and in a similar way that a scientist who's conducting experiments would not see unexpected results and then feel like oh shameful I'm so bad this is terrible I fell they would just look at the data and say oh that's interesting I did not expect this how can I use that data to better understand what's happening and to incorporate that new knowledge into the next version of my experiment this is how I'm living my life and approaching my work now where everything is in experiment and every single bit of data I'm collecting is part of a new cycle of experimentation so I can't really fail I'm just learning and growing even that is for what I'm hearing is it's rooted in Freedom like the freedom to test things the freedom to experiment and not feel like you have to have this set path or this set instructions even and I and I want to dig into this later but I'm even curious like now the entrepreneurial world has a formula you know you grow the audience you grow the newsletter you grow a community like you know you have you you launch a course there's like these very set kind of expectations or Pathways to success how have you combed that like tendency because as as the Creator economy continues to grow there are these like kind of set Pathways that have been proven similar maybe to your experience with the startup world there's this there's this set of of steps that you take how have you bumped into that or revolted against that um as you've experienced that with Nest Labs it's especially hard for online creators I think to resist this temptation because as it says in the word online Creator we're all online so there's this giant leaderboard of people posting about their learnings sure but also their success and when everybody's so transparent with their success it can be very easy to want to just copy paste what they're doing in the hope of having the same level of success the thing is that it actually can work sometimes you can actually apply what someone did and it will also work for your business so I don't really think that's the issue here the problem is more about is it working for you at a more personal level so I know for example that a lot of my friends who are online creators are seeing a lot of success with YouTube because of that I've actually fallen into the Trap of thinking I actually need to do YouTube as well I need to do that and I've tried several times and the reason why it wasn't working was not necess because of the numbers because I actually grew at at the beginning my YouTube channel fairly quickly but it was so much mental effort for me it was really taking an emotional toll because I actually am not particularly comfortable recording myself on camera so every time I knew that today was the day I was supposed to film my YouTube video that was the one thing that was occupying my entire mind all of my thoughts dreading the moment I would have to sit down in front of the camera and film myself and then I would cringe when I would see the final video but still post it because you got to do YouTube so that's one example where it took me a little while to see that and to notice that it's not because it's working for some of my friends that I have to do it because if it's making me miserable there's no point doing this and really going back to Freedom which you've mentioned a few times what's the point of being an online Creator if then you're creating those artificial constraints on yourself where you have so little Freedom that you may as be you may as well be employed and work for someone else so it's very very hard and I definitely still struggle with it to this day where I'm seeing others people's success and I want to just do the exact same thing they're doing and it takes me a little while sometimes to consider whether this is the right thing for me or not yeah so I I would really commend for anyone in the same situation to just make sure to have a little bit of space for self-reflection and ask yourself those questions is this going to make me successful yes or no but also at what cost and is that a cost that I'm willing to pay and ideally you want to be in a situation where you're very happy to pay that cost and almost doesn't feel like paying a cost for it an opposite example is my newsletter I get a lot of questions sometimes from people saying how can you write a weekly news letter that is so in-depth and so well researched every week that must take hours you must be so exhausted on top of everything else you're doing and my answer every time is it's not taking any energy from me it's giving me energy I'm looking forward to sitting in front of my computer every week and open the Google Doc and write my newsletter and I think those are the kind of projects and those are the kind of Pathways to success that we need to be looking for as an online Creator yeah they're indicators of where we are gathering energy and I love the piece too of pausing for self-reflection back to this this thread I'm I'm hearing from our conversation of Freedom something that I really admire about you and I actually heard you talk Creating a Learning Community for Growth and Mental Health about this in an interview with Barrett Brooks on his podcast good work so when you founded Nest labs in 2019 which is a learning community for people who want to achieve more without sacrificing their mental health you mentioned that you wanted to launch a community that allowed you to have a playground where you didn't have to be the expert you got to learn alongside you know your community I want to I want to pause here and go deeper into that intentional decision because I think that there can be pressure to be the expert to teach to have the Frameworks and to almost feel a little bit separate from your community because you're helping them move forward or achieve a result whereas you are in your community and a part of the learning environment with them so what went into that intentional decision when you started Nest Labs at first neslab started as just the newsletter and I used it as a way for me to consolidate everything I was learning in University about neuroscience and try to turn this into practical advice that Creating a Community Rooted in Connection and Learning people could apply in their daily lives it was a very selfish decision to be honest because I just wanted to learn better and I felt like writing about what I was studying was a great way to do that and then in March 2020 we all know what happened it was the beginning of the pandemic and I had a lot of people reply to the newsletter and say that they were feeling lonely disconnected a little bit depressed and anxious and that they were really missing having conversations with colleagues so that's why I created The Nest laabs community at this point I did not create it because I felt like I had something to teach to others I created it because I wanted to have a space where everybody could come and connect together so the the very even like first days of the nest laabs Community were really rooted in facilitating connection between members rather than me broadcasting my knowledge to the community and it just progressed very organically from this where because of the kind of people who read my newsletter who tend to be fairly High agency curious kind and generous people a lot of people started offering teaching what they were learning to other members of the community so most of the programming we have in the community nowadays is hosted by members of the community for other members of the communities is really peer learning and I really love that because sometimes I can pop into a session and just listen in as well and take notes and learn from those members who know about things that I don't know about so it wasn't necessarily something that I planned but it felt like the most natural decision and again it was a little bit selfish because I gained a lot also from being part of a community where everybody's teaching something to each other and I can be one of the students as well I want to break this next question into two parts and it kind of goes to what you mentioned on the meaning of it and how organic that has been for you I want to break it into meaning and metrics so how has Nest Labs fulfilled a part of your dream or maybe even a part of your purpose how has it changed your life um and then how has Nest Labs Finding Meaning and Financial Independence through Nest Labs impacted your life financially and was that the goal or has that been almost a byproduct in terms of meaning it would be really hard to convey has how Nest lives has completely completely changed my life I get to make a living from doing the thing I love the most which is writing which is so fortunate and lucky and I know very rare this is one of those passions that people have where it's actually really hard to make money from it the other thing that connects the meaning and the money is that I have actually decoupled the writing from the money in the sense that because Nest laabs is a subscription it's just recuring Revenue I don't have any pressure to write viral pieces or to try to appeal to a new audience the only contract I have with my audience is to keep on delivering interesting content every week because of that that gives me enormous freedom to explore the topics that I care about that is also very rare because a lot of people who make a living with online writing there is a direct connection between the money they're making and the actual content that they're writing with a lot of pressure to write the kind of content that will drive a lot of clicks which means also advertising and that's the revenue model of most media companies online so that's connecting the meaning and the money the way I'm making money is allowing me to find more meaning in the way I'm creating content and in terms of the metrics I'm completely financially independent now I don't have to worry about money I'm really in a situation when again they're so deeply interconnected it's really hard to separate them but the fact that I don't have to worry about the financial aspect of things and I can just get up in the morning and ask myself what is it I want to research today what is it I want to write about what do I want to share with my community this is such again a lucky place to be in and going back to Young and lore if you told her that this would be her life as an adult I think she would have been a lot more excited about adulthood than she was at the time I think that's really beautiful because you have worked so hard I know you mentioned luck luck and hard work and so much intentionality went into the structure of the business and also something I want to call out here is how you've taken care of yourself and honored yourself through the way that you've built your business and I I I feel this sense of like calm and peace from you and I'm curious how did you get to a place where you decided and maybe this was maybe this was subconscious for you but you decided that you were going to build something that you would continually take care of yourself through versus I'm going to Sprint and I'm going to hustle and then I'm going to like maybe burn out or I want to quit it seems like you have found a way to manage running the business and taking care of yourself really well has that always been the case have there been moments where you've had to shift things so that you could take care of yourself in order to you know be the the businesswoman that you are [Music] okay sorry oh that's definitely not always been the case I the the very beginning of the nest laabs Community was very intense because as I mentioned it was during the pandemic so everybody literally everybody was online and the community we had at the time was very Balancing Community Management and Self-Care welcoming very tight people would spend entire days hanging out on Nest Labs we had maybe three to four Zoom events every day where people would share things that they were learning they were also just online circles where people could talk about the challenges that they were going through I cried several times during some of these and I was not the only one so we were really deeply connected to each other and spending a lot of time together during the lockdowns and after life started going back to normal I tried to maintain the same level of Engagement in the community because that's all I had known and that was the definition of success I had for nest Labs that was obviously in hindsight not sustainable at all especially now that I had a social life again and I had other projects and I was not glued to my computer from morning to evening but it took me a little while to realize this and I burned out in the process trying to maintain that same level of Engagement um and nowadays I have found a balance again I've hired someone to help me as a community manager which I didn't have at the time so I stopped trying to do everything myself I've also become a lot more comfortable telling community members that I'm not going to show up at every single event I will join the ones that seem interesting to me and I will maybe pop in and like maybe leave before the end sometimes if I have something else that I need to do but it's a lot less self-or usive these days where I'm really participating in the community a lot more like a fellow member than a community leader and I'm relying a lot more on my community manager to take care of the day-to-day and make sure everybody has an amazing experience without necessarily having the need for direct contact for me or me having to solve daily problems so it's been really amazing and it's really made me fall back in love with the community now that we have it's I'm talking it sounds like I'm talking about a lover but like we have a healthier we have a healthier relationship you have boundaries now I have boundaries yes well that it is you know when you started you don't always know what you're building sometimes until you've built it and you don't know the constraints it it might take on your time on your mental health and two you started a mental health focused community and then it was impacting your mental health and so you had to make you know almost model what it looked like to set those boundaries to your community which is really beautiful you also recently posted on um Twitter x what are we calling recently um about about this you actually wrote a very transparent story of when you launched Nest labs and when you needed to take a step back and people stepping in and you wanted to reenter and focus on writing and then you would gotten you announced that you were going to write a book and you got some really negative feedback about that can you talk to me about how you approach those comments as a scientist and as a you know natural experiment you do you take that as feedback do you take that as data what do you do with that and how do you think Handling Negative Feedback with Grace and Action your framework for categorizing that kind of feedback could help creators not internalize it yeah yeah this was really hard when I got that comment from someone who emailed me and saying like uh remind me to not buy your book how are you going to write a book when you already don't have time to manage the community you're going to have even less time I'm very disappointed I'm leaving I'm deleting my account and it was hard because at first I almost never received that kind of comments I I'm very fortunate again to have an amazing community and everybody's so kind that I would normally not receive that comment at least delivered in this way and that brings me to how to deal with these kind of comments I think it's very important to separate the content from the way it's delivered the content and the delivery and in this case even though that's not how I reacted at first I was really heartbroken when I read it but once I've managed to kind of reenter myself and reread it from a place of having a a little bit more distance with it I realized that there were two parts here the delivery was very hurtful uh telling someone you're disappointed in them uh being a little bit snarky and they they were just the way it was phrased I don't know if the person had realized that but it was phrased in a way that it was designed to hurt really and it worked but once you remove that layer the delivery the content itself did have some valid points yes I was very busy yes I was already struggling with managing the community at that time that was that period of time I described before where I I was trying to do everything myself and I was quite burned out uh because of that and yes writing a book would add an additional constraint and would require more time which I have very little I had very little off already so in a way this comment was a bit of a blessing and disguise because that was the trigger for me to finally hire a community manager to come and help me and to set those boundar that we've discussed because I felt like I did not want to be in a position again to receive that kind of comment and I also did not want to be in a position again to receive that kind of comment and feel like huh this is a good point there actually they're making a good point so I wanted to address that part so that's what I would say to anyone who's in the similar situation where they're running a community and they get that kind of negative feedback separate the delivery from the content if once you remove the delivery there's nothing left then you can ignore it safely it's really just a troll trying to hurt you and there's nothing to do with it but if you ignore the rudess or the hurtfulness of it and there's still something interesting in there take action on this use it it's still a piece of data it's still useful it was delivered in a way that maybe was not the best way but it's still feedback and feedback is so precious that you do need to take action on it that's incredibly helpful and actionable I think that we can at times take any sort of negative feedback and like categorize it as not applicable we're like oh that hurt I didn't like how that felt I didn't like the tone and so therefore I'm throwing all of it out and I think that just go goes to your integrity to be able to separate the delivery from the content and say what about this does resonate what about this do I need to take action on and I'm so glad that you have gotten to a place where you're focused on writing you're focused on being a member of your community and speaking of writing I want to get into the mechanics of your newsletter because you are I don't know if you are at but very close to 100,000 subscribers is that correct yeah over a 100,000 congratulations that's that's huge especially as a writer right like not just as a business owner but the fact that someone wants to open your email every week and read it is is just so exciting and like there's magic in that so I want to talk about how aside from consistently writing every week can you break down what problem you felt like when you started the newsletter what problem do you feel like that solved for you you and how did that grow like what specific tactics did you use to grow the newsletter so first in terms of problem that I was trying to solve as I said the origin of the newsletter was really just me trying to have a playground an outlet where I could think out loud and learn better but I very quickly realized that a lot of the topics I cared about were topics that a lot of other people cared Growing a Newsletter through Consistency and Value about as well so I tried after the first few editions where it was really just me following my curiosity and I now try to think about it as a almost like a V diagram where I try to find the intersection between my curiosity and what my readers may also be curious about this is The Sweet Spot really if I can be excited about the content about researching it and writing about it and if I feel like it may be interesting to my audience as well usually this is going to be an indic that at least some people are going to enjoy reading it the consistency though is still very important because even after all of these years I still don't have a perfect recipe to know what is going to work there are additions that I ped so many hours into it I spent so much time so much energy I sent it out and it was crickets and then there are others where I was in a rush I was about to board my flight I was in front of the gate I finished writing it super quickly I hit send and then when I lend my inbox is full of emails people saying that oh that really resonated with me you describe the problem I've been thinking about for such a long time I didn't know there was a word for it so the consistency is really important because you don't know exactly what's going to resonate or not you you need to keep on showing up every week and in terms of growing the newsletter it has changed a little bit at the beginning it was mostly social media and ly Twitter SLX where I would post every single Edition there and people could click on it read it and then subscribe to the newsletter itself to receive the following editions I was also very active in quite a few telegram groups and slack groups and in these I was contributing a lot so it was completely okay for me to share my newsletters here as well because I was posting a lot outside of that so I wasn't just spamming random groups with the link because of that people people supported me also a weird thing I did at the very beginning was launch the newsletter on product hunt which actually brought me like 2,000 subscribers in one day which was great when the newsletter was still tiny and I really packaged it as if it was a product I created a landing page I had screenshots inside of a mobile phone I had all of the benefits it really looked like an actual startup landing page and I launched that that on product hunt nobody said you couldn't so I did it and it worked really well and same because I was so active in all of those different communities a lot of people there supported the launch and so it was one of the top products of the day that day so that was at the beginning a lot of manual sharing across channels where I was already active nowadays because I have quite a few other projects I'm writing a book I'm doing my PhD I don't have as much time to share the news letter as I used to so I usually write it and just send it and that's it and most of the traffic comes from two channels the first one is SEO because I've written hundreds of Articles at this point and again those are topics a lot of people are curious about so they look it up and Nest laabs will come up in some of the top results I very often get people messaging me and say wow this is crazy I've been researching different things and Nest laabs keeps on being top results how do you do this and the answer is that I don't do any crazy SEO optimization but I have a body of content now that is related in terms of ideas and that I Interlink deeply together so you can click on words and it brings you to different articles and I think Google really likes that so I'm I constantly show up on the first pages and the second Channel right now is Word of Mouth a lot of people just read it share it with other people and it's been it's been growing like this a lot too do you share so a common tactic for newsletter growth is also freebies do you ask them to subscribe and then give them something or is it mostly focused on like as you mentioned SEO and when they land on your website they're getting so much value that they join the newsletter I think I still have one form that has a freebie at the bottom of my homepage on nesla but it's not bringing that many subscribers and I'm not a massive fan of this technique because I have found in my case at least that the quality of the subscribers is not as good when you do this people will enter their email address download the freebie and then they're not necessarily going to open any of the subsequent newsletters so I'm actually going to launch a different type of freebie that will be an online email course over seven days because I feel like this is a better way to deliver value in a way that's aligned with the format of the newsletter versus enter your email address get a PDF and then probably unsubscribe which some people do but others they don't unsubscribe but they just don't open the other emails that's a really great point and I love that hot take by the way it's like that transactional tendency versus in a free email course you're building a relationship over time they're getting to know you getting to know your writing getting value over a period of time and then they're almost like this is such a marketing term but they're indoctrinated into into the world of anore and they're more likely to engage and build a relationship with you when there's more touch points up front versus like the PDF and then unsubscribe that's such a good point is there anyone there's a lot of ways to structure a newsletter is there anyone or a source that you've used as inspiration or have you truly just curated your approach over time for the newsletter itself it's been created over time the format has changed maybe a dozen times uh over the course of the past years it started with a series of links to articles I had written over the course of the past uh few days because I used to which is crazy to me now but I used to write five articles every week at the beginning wow um I only write one article every week now so now the entire article is in the body of the email which people told me they like a lot more because they can read it even if they're on offline versus having click on something else um interesting and so even the design has changed a lot I keep on playing with it and tweaking it a little bit like when I was a kid and I kept on changing the design of my online Forum I just love doing this for the online course though I took inspiration from James clear I saw that he did something like that for around habits he has this online course which is I think 7 days or something like this and that's his lead magnet on his website and I looked at that and I felt like well if James Clear is doing that this is probably the right thing to do he he does seem like the The Godfather of the internet right now thank you for letting us kind of peel back the layers into the new newsletter because I think that it's always interesting what works for one person or what you find resonating um is a different strategy for someone else and I always like to hear the nuances of like what works for you and why it works um and I know that can help someone else so I could talk to you forever we haven't even gotten to dig into your psychology brain which I am obsessed with looking at your CV you make me want to go back to college I feel like I want to go get degrees and and learn things so thank you for that energy that you put out into the world that um asks people or invites people to be curious and so I want to end our conversation on this so curiosity is a huge part of being human and especially for creators the more Curious we are about something we want to solve it for someone we want to investigate it and we want to we want to use what we've learned to help or support other people how do you think that creators can use curiosity to not only just understand themselves better but also understand the the people that The Power of Curiosity for Creators they want to help better I think it's important I think for online creators and for everyone in general it's useful to think about curiosity in two ways at two levels you have internal curiosity and external curiosity and both are extremely helpful there's the internal curiosity of understanding yourself better making space to reflect on what works and what doesn't work for you and again not necessarily just at the level of success that you normally have when you think about your business but also thinking about how it feels to get to that success if it feels miserable then maybe it's not worth keeping on going in that direction so really making space for self care osity where you're reflecting on how everything is going at the moment and how it feels it can be spontaneous or it can be something that you even schedule during your week some people do a weekly review some people do morning Pages some people do different types of journaling if you're not the kind of person who likes writing you can even have a weekly accountability coffee chat with another online Creator where literally the only prompt is how are you feeling this week and that's it and some weeks you'll be like yeah great everything's good and other weeks you'll say I'm feeling completely lost or I'm a bit burned out but really keeping a finger on the pulse of how things are going for you and how it feels that's the inner curiosity part and then the external curiosity is being curious about other people about the world about how things are going how things are changing everything all of that is going to have an impact on the direction in which you want to take your business your work your life your relationships so again making space for this and that can be space for Learning and studying the market just observing what other creators are doing as I was saying earlier you should really not copy paste what other people are doing but if you see something that works as in the case for me with this course that James CL is doing I'm absolutely going to do the same thing because I think it's going to work for me you can use that you can use that inspiration to keep on experimenting with your own business being curious about other people whether they're part of your community or whether they are only other online creators on a similar Journey asking them questions about same what works for them what doesn't work for them and taking those lessons and incorporating them in the way you make decisions and just having this General curiosity about the world as well just noticing Trends what is changing what are things that are likely to impact your business a big one very obviously at the moment is AI being a little bit curious about AI at the moment I think is a good thing it's something that every online Creator should make space for so those would be the two ones internal and external curiosity and curiosity can be something that can be just triggered by something that you that is outside of your control but ideally you want to make space for it you want to make space for that Curiosity and a bit of a more systematic manner I'm inspired I I love the breakdown between the internal curiosity in the external curiosity it gives us language to kind of categorize in our brain that inner reflection things we're trying to understand and unearth about ourselves and things that we're trying to understand and and get clarity on or investigate externally I I want to have you back on and just have a whole conversation about curiosity and learning and unlearning um but I am so thankful for the time that we've had together can you share where people can connect with you learn more about nest labs and I know that you have a book coming out as well so any information that you can share with us on that uh we would love to hear so you can follow my work and receive my Weekly Newsletter by going at nestabs docomo letter and just enter your email there and you'll hear from me every Thursday as for the book I'm still writing it it will be available for pre-order later this year and available for purchase at the beginning of next year but I'm very excited to share more in my newsletter soon ah well I am subscribed I can't wait to get more information on the book um and Laura thank you so much for your contributions to the world and for letting us learn more about your story today do yourself a favor go learn go be curious with the Ann laur's newsletter and with that thank you so much thank you hey there it's your host Alexis Ty Miller if you've made it this far in the show I have a special surprise for you we've interviewed a real person from anor's Community Lucas is here to share the impact that Anor and Nest Labs has had on his life it's one thing to hear from the Creator it's another to hear from someone whose life has been changed from their creation hi Lucas Rosen stck I'm so excited to have you a part of today's episode about Ann lore tell me when did you first discover her and her work so um I was on Twitter and it must have been like late 2019 and um I was using Twitter mostly to uh network with other people in Tech and get some tech insights but I was also interested in topics around productivity um let's say and um yeah I came across and Law's tweets and I found it really interesting and then I also subscribe to her newsletter and then um bit later when it was also the start of the co pandemic Member spotlight and there was less to do outside um that's also when neslab started and I learned about it from the newsletter and Twitter and I said okay this is this is a really good opportunity to find out um if an online community like this is something that that could be good or could be helpful and yeah this was the first also like paid membership community that I joined and yeah that's basically how I get started amazing she has a really impressive body of work you know between her blog and her newsletter and now Nest Labs what specifically about let's say Nest lab in particular what specific value um or need did it fill in your life at that time um I think at that point I was like just really interested in um learning stuff and um connecting with people maybe a bit outside the kind of like Niche that I was in before mostly people are also software developers and I felt nestabs had this like really interesting um group of people that andlaw gathered um which had different backgrounds but some overlapping interests and um yeah I've I um really enjoyed that about the community what have you learned about yourself through being part of Nest labs and reading um a lot of her work H that's that's a really good question and um I think um I'm not sure so sure if I learned a lot about myself but I think that I really um learned um that um I enjoy this kind of um Community this kind of exchange um of peers um with um with like-minded interest but also a bit diverse and yeah I think I think I really only then back then I started getting into into this kind of like broader online communities so this was a gateway to other communities for you then yeah that that was the interesting thing because um there's a lot of um like adjacent communities um so there's another Community called inter intellect um the founder of inter intellect is also friend of nlaws and um there's like a broader like scene on Twitter and I think there was also um a lot of like this personal knowledgement space uh which I was never like too deep into but I I always found it like very curious and I think there were all like these different but adjacent communities but really nestabs for me was like the Gateway into this uh into this this whole world of online communities yeah I kind of opened up a door for you yeah that's a good way to put it have there been any transformations in your career or in your life because of being a part of the community as well as just reading her work connecting with other people like in you know not necessarily in real life but as in real life as you can be online so I would I would say there are um quite a few people that I met in um Nest laabs that I also met offline later and um well this this was always like a really great experience to meet meet people first online then offline um and there's also some people I started working working with them at least there there's one guy that I'm currently working with who I met in nlbs first and I went um um I went on a trip to um to India last year and then I also met some people or especially one person that I met through Nest laabs um there and so yeah it this this whole like uh what we call the URL to I pipeline that make meeting people online but then connecting offline and that that has been quite quite a big part of my life in the in the past years that's amazing um what specific memories were able to make with them after meeting them in real life um that's that's a good question I I can't really pinpoint any any very specific thing it's just just this this um this whole thing of having like really great con conversations with with people yeah being able to go deeper being able to um have introspective curiosity and that's a big thing with with Nest Labs being able able to ask questions and be be curious and and be willing to uh not know not know the answer and you know as a professional in a career as an adult um it can sometimes feel like we always have to have the answer and I love that with Nest Labs she's really bringing together people who are okay with not knowing okay with Discovery okay with curiosity yeah yeah and I would I would add one thing because um yeah it's all about like being curious discovering new things but at the same time I think it's also about um like everybody is already an expert at something and also everybody has something to teach and everybody has something to give to the community and what I feel also about andlaw specifically is that even though she's like the the one like leading the community I think she plays a heavy emphasis that she's not like some leader or Guru who knows everything and and we are there to listen to her but it's really like an exchange of peers and and she's also one of those those peers and she also wants to learn from the community um and I have I I always have the feeling that she that she really appreciates the the input that she gets from from the people reading her newsletter being on the forums and everything yeah I get that sense too she she wants the dialogue the back and forth um and she thrives off of that if you could say one thing to Ann more what would it be one thing that I would would tell her um I would say keep keep up the good work I think you're on a um I think what you're doing really has value for um for the people in your community so please keep on doing that but also be mindful about it and don't don't try and do too much and burnout every Creator advice right I love that well thank you so much Lucas this has been wonderful um it's really Co your story and um yeah I agree I want Andor to keep creating so that we can keep being a part of her community