in my best year at Uber I made about like 320 or 330 000 in total compensation and when I quit my job I was actually thinking like am I am I crazy because I'm leaving especially in Europe This is a lot of money disabled this will be similar to something you know someone in a similar position would have made like five or six hundred K in
in total in the US but now I am making more in in composition that I made at Uber and the difference is that now my composition while my earnings are keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing so there's no theoretical cap on this of course there is an actual cap there's churn growth is slowing over
time but it's very very strange because I felt that I was in a really privileged position I just honestly making tons of money doing an odd job that I loved and this was at Uber or or as a software engineer and I'm now doing stuff that I love and um in some strange way I guess it even pays better welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and
my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is gergay oros in a sense gergate is the meat of
engineering he's got the top engineering newsletter on sub stack it's growing really fast and like me he does this full time in this episode we talk about the life of newslettering full time like we both do we get into gruye's decision to leave his cushy Tech job at Uber to go into this life full time with the day-to-day
life of a newsletter person is the pros and cons of this life what it takes to be successful and a bunch of advice for how to get started if you're curious about going down this route this is a pretty unique episode and it was really fun to do if you ever thought about writing or going down this kind of
creative route you'll love this episode with that I bring you gergay oros [Music] foreign this episode is brought to you by lemon.io you've achieved product Market fit you're able to activate engage and retain your customers but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to because it's hard to
find great Engineers quickly especially if you're trying to protect your Burden rate meet lemon.io lemon.io will quickly match you with skilled senior developers who are all vetted results oriented and ready to help you grow and all that at competitive rates startups choose 11.io because they offer only hand-picked
developers with three or more years of experience and strong proven portfolios only one percent of Canada to apply get in so you can be sure that they offer you only high quality talent and if something ever goes wrong lemon.io offers you a swift replacement so that you're kind of hiring with a warranty learn more just go to lemon.io Lenny and
find your perfect developer or Tech Team in 48 hours or less you start the process now you can claim a special discount exclusively for Lenny's podcast listeners fifteen percent off your first four weeks of working with your new software developer grow faster with an extra pair of hands visit lemon.io Lenny
this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like netlify contentful and Cameo rely on about to power their experiments wherever you work running experiments is increasingly essential but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a
modern grow team stack this leads to wasted time building internal tools we're trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool when I was at Airbnb one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device by country and by user stage
EPO does all that and more delivering results quickly avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discovered Apple lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead you turn north star metrics like activation retention subscriptions and
payments nfo supports tests on the front end the back end email marketing and even machine learning clients check out EPO at getepo.com get eppo.com and 10x your experiment velocity welcome to the podcast it's awesome great to be here Lenny so I think this is going to be a pretty special and unique podcast your newsletter is the
number one technology newsletter on sub stack called the pragmatic engineer by the way my newsletter is the number one business newsletter and sub stack and so we're connected in this really special weird way and I thought it would be pretty fun to just explore this weird path that we're on doing this newsletter
thing and in that help listeners understand kind of the pros and cons of this life how to go down this route what it takes to be successful all that kind of stuff but before we get into all that I'd love for you to spend maybe a minute just kind of giving us a little overview of your career and kind of how you got
to where you're today doing this newsletter and what you spend your time on now my career started out as what you might consider a pretty typical software engineer career I graduated from a university I did a computer science degree for like a five-year program so the bachelor's and Masters I kind of worked on the side I kind of hacked
around built small websites here and there and do your University I worked at a small web agency and then I kind of worked my way up in the industry so I started off at a consulting company like we were just building for other companies I'm originally from Hungary so Hungary and in Europe I then moved to UK
which was a big step up for me in terms of just you know getting access to to I guess more modern software development I was at a consulting company there as well and I moved up to London which you know like in Europe I kind of feel it's it's like the New York of of Europe or even the Silicon Valley back in the day
back before brexit it was the biggest Tech Hub I worked at a bank well an investment Bank there and then on the side I was always building kind of mobile apps and I got into Skype but like I say Skype but it was Microsoft they just bought Skype at that point and it was a lot more startupy environment a
lot more fast moving I then moved to another startup where I was a founding engineer of a acquisition it's a startup called sky scanner and then I ended up at Uber at Amsterdam where I joined as a senior software engineer and I kind of I became a manager and then the manager of managers and it was just like I feel
like looking back at that part of my career just felt kind of really growing all the time just kind of taking each step one one step at a time which gave me a lot of appreciation for all these levels and then just as I was on this really good kind of career path I was on the path to being a senior engineering manager or who knows one day I might
have had a shot at being either director of engineering as well I decided to leave Uber and uh it we'll talk about a little later in the podcast but I didn't plan like this but I started writing a newsletter right now here I am writing a newsletter where a bunch of people are reading it and it's a really unexpected
turn and a really cool life as well awesome on the newsletter just to give people a little bit of context of how big this has gotten can you share just a couple stats about the growth of the newsletter the size and anything else you want to share there well just today I checked and it's at 189 000 subscribers it's the past
I think the past 90 days has been growing with 80 000 subscribers so it's just it's almost a thousand people per day which was just incredible because I mean these numbers are huge if you're listening you're probably thinking wow and that's how I feel every day as well but I've been writing a Blog for for
many many years and these are numbers I never thought it would be and the growth just seems to be accelerating so there was a Tipping Point in April where the newsletter was growing in the first like about like nine months of the newsletter it got to 50 000 subscribers and in the next five months or six or seven months
it went up by another 100 something thousand subscribers this one was one sub Sac introduced recommendations which has been a massive growth engine and I guess being one of the top obligations that kind of benefited from it but those numbers are are again so this is the paid newsletter as well so there's a
free version of the paid version there's thousands of people paying for the newsletter it's a single digit percentage but it's a very very healthy uh one and again it just beat all my expectation and I guess were similar boats because our our news that are set up yours of mine is somewhat similar we have plenty of differences as well but I
made most of my revenue from subscriptions and I I don't do sponsorships or ads in the newsletter so it's kind of like if people sign up for the free one they get articles every now and then and then for the paid one they get it a lot more and in more depth can you give listeners a sense of just like the order of magnitude income you make
from this versus your cushy Tech job at Uber you don't have to share numbers or anything like that yeah so I mean I'll share a little numbers of of my cushy Tech job at Uber because so you know I was in Europe and the European Tech salaries or Tech I'll say that total composition will be lower than for
example the us but it'll be higher than let's say regions like India or Indonesia you know there's Regional differences and this is true for for big Tech as well Uber was a good example on this but in my best year at Uber I made about like 320 or 330 000 in total compensation this was after Uber went public so it includes the the stock the
the base salary the bonus which was very very good in Europe and when I quit my job I was actually thinking like am I am I crazy because I'm leaving especially in Europe that this means that this is a lot of money to say well this will be similar to something you know someone in a similar position would have made like
five or six hundred K in total in the US so I walked away from that and I was pretty sure that I'll I'll just be anything a lot less and I'll be you know but I'll enjoy what I'm doing or I'll kind of have I'll just give it a go but now I am making more in composition that I made at Uber and the difference is
that now my composition while my earnings are keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing so there's no theoretical cap on this of course there is an actual cap there's churn growth is slowing over time but it's very very strange because I felt that I was in a really privileged position I just Honestly made me tons of money doing a
job that you loved and this was at Uber or or as a software engineer and I'm now doing something I love and um in some strange way I guess it even pays better I mean part of it is this locked part of this is situational I think we're going to talk a bit more about this but this was a very very surprising and very unexpected for me
awesome yeah that's a great segue to the first thing I want to talk about but just to kind of frame what I want to spend our time on today there's kind of these four areas I want to explore when is your decision to leave and start this life of writing which is a very non-traditional life two is the what the
life of a paid newsletter person is like what do you do all day how do you find time to do this how do you produce so much content three what it takes to be successful at this a lot of people I always say it's easy to start a newsletter hard to keep it going and I'm curious what you find is important to be successful and then for how to get
started if you want to start your own newsletter but before I get into that I just wanted to add a thought that I had the way I think about this life in terms of comparing to the old job is one it feels like instead of one boss I have thousands of micro bosses and one of them can fire me and many do every day
but it feels like safer than at a tech job or like one person yeah and then the other piece is yeah assuming keeps growing you're getting a raise almost you know every day every week depending on the growth rate and that's kind of cool so that is really cool so I I had a spreadsheet that I maintained for the first year of the
publication where I listed for every article how much did my annual revenue go up a week later so kind of tracking like what was the impact and the crazy thing was that uh you know when I wrote a really good article that resonated with people you know so sometimes it was an article that I thought was mediocre
people said loved it.hof and it was a really good article that I put tons of work in I saw myself getting a raise and this is just something you just don't get at a big corporate I mean it's by Design and there's a lot of good stuff about it but this like I feel that this this life and I'll we'll touch more on
this but there's a lot of surprising things both good and bad but this is a really good one so you're you know for doing something awesome you can just get give yourself a raise especially because this is just like you mine is also one person business right now yeah okay so you're an Uber you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars
writing code it's pretty sweet Uber's growing you probably got all these rsus that are Gonna Keep accumulating it's pretty pretty good and you decide I'm gonna try to make money on the internet writing which is an obvious way to make a lot of money uh not and so I'm curious what got you to leave that job and explore
writing and get to this writing path the short of it is it was a promise to myself and covet and Uber doing layoffs and the longer version is that when I joined Uber I mean before Uber I was you know now we're talking numbers on on my old job but I was working in London as a principal engineer at Skyscanner
Skyscanner was a unicorn one of the one of the few unicorns in the UK kind of UK headquarter and all that and I was making I think like 90 something thousand pounds in base salary which is like maybe 120 130 or 140 000 depends on how the pound is doing or sometimes you know these is almost just the same but
back then that was a really good kind of and this was most a bit like they were I got some stock as well and I thought I was close to the top of the market in London like I kind of knew people and it seemed this was a really good compensation package and then Uber called me up saying hey do you want to interview I interviewed with them they
gave me an offer and I negotiated and they basically doubled my compensation I I was like oh wow this is like let's just stop so I knew about Silicon Valley compensation but I I assume that I knew if you're not going to get this but Uber was getting close to something closer to that so I told myself like all right so I'm
getting a bunch of like a really good deal on most of it is stock which is which is Uber bus this is in 2016 no one knew if Uber will go public although I kind of suspected because they contacted me to build the payments seemed to socks compliant payment system and you need a sock to apply and payment system if you
want to go IBM so that's funny it reminds me of Airbnb there's all these people trying to figure out when are we gonna go public and then there's like oh there's a team working on sock stuff and sarbanes-oxley oh this is good yeah so so anyway I I said like all right well this is a massive lottery ticket if it
goes in like every year I make two years of salary pretty much like that's how I was kind of thinking but if not again don't forget I'm I'm in Europe where we're kind of used to not seeing any Returns on on stock so European software Engineers will not value stock as much because they just haven't seen success
stories so I told myself if four years later Uber exits and I make a bunch of money I owe it to myself to take a risk because then I'll have like you know four years of save in my bank which you know back then I had like like maybe like six months of savings or something so this was the promise to myself and
then I probably would have forgotten about this but four years later almost on the dot uh cool this starts and it really hit super hard we're laying off people we we have to leave 20 of the engineers I was a I was I was already managing a group about 30 people I had managers under me and 20 of the people or fifty percent had to be let go and
I was thinking to myself like you know what am I doing here like I looked ahead Uber was going to have a really just bad year I'm gonna have to manage morality up up to then I helped put together this team we had a really good Charter and we had to throw that Charter out the window because it made no sense with the
economic reality so I thought back like I told myself if I'll be here I'll take a risk and I'll try to do something else so I was like all right let me pull this trigger and my plan was very simple leave Uber and start a startup a raise Venture Capital because I haven't done that before but it kind of runs into
family my brother's on a second startup he sold his first one to Skyscanner and now he's building this startup called craft docs it's a really slick put document editing system they just raised their series B so he's like you know I kind of through him I know what startup life is and I felt I never did that I
was always with the big companies so my plan was all right leave Uber raise money and do something on platform engineering I saw Uber a classic way that Uber alumni starts businesses is Uber has invested silly amounts of money to build everything custom internally like everything that you can think of our build system I suppose custom or
experimentation system our container you know the the way we kind of automatically said that a lot of the engineers up so a lot of people will not just leave and whatever they saw they just build it for the world to use because no other company really does what Uber does because it makes those sense but a lot of them will pay for
that was a plan but before I I let's do this I wanted to finish a book I've been writing this book for it was coming up to a year called the software engineer's guidebook which is just kind of my advice for people to grow professionally in the field and I figured all right let me leave the company the six months I'll
write the book I'll just use my savings to kind of you know take a break and then I'll race the the venture capital and what happened was I started to write this book but I got sidetracked I started to have fun online like in terms of I was like writing on Twitter on my blog I accidentally published a book
called building mobile apps at scale I just kind of did it for a few months and the weirdest thing was that my plan was that I'm gonna just not make any money and this book building mobile apps at scale another book that I published about tech resumes I just wrote These in a few months they started making money
they made about a hundred thousand dollars in the first year and I was like that's interesting people are buying my books and I self-published it to the drum rolls of places where I get to keep I think like 90 of the revenue but still this was really interesting and I got to the point where like all right like I
should now start a startup like I should do fundraising and do all that and and then I I asked myself why do I really want to do that and the answer was two reasons one is I love working in small teams at Uber I'll be honest I didn't really enjoy being a manager of managers it was felt a bit too abstract I didn't
like the being in the meetings not doing not doing you know like the the work what I really liked is when we had a small team and we had this really big kind of vision and it was like us against the world we were like 10 of us and we were just getting some done we were putting out fires it was so much fun so that was one of the reasons I
wanted to start but I kind of was hoping to recreate this feeling and the other thing honestly was money you know this is in 2021 before the market crashed you know just doing the math like if you're if you found the company you know I'll be a CEO and the founder maybe I'll have a co-founder this becomes a unicorn by
that time we have we will have raised like five rounds funding or six I'll be deluded as hell but I'll still have let's say five percent uh five percent of the bill is still 50 million after you pay taxes still flipped over and I can buy a bunch of stuff that I don't need and I was myself like right and then what and I was like well after I
bought everything that I don't need I probably want to kind of share what I know with people do YouTube videos that are going to write books I was thinking to myself like to hold on like I would go off and do this for like 10 years because that's how much you need to plan to do it I need to stop doing what I'm
doing right now because I I would owe it to my investors and my team to not you know like spend all day on the internet like writing about stuff and then I want to do this again so it's reminded me of the story of the of this fisherman I think there's there's one that goes online that does the same thing of like
you work really hard to do what you're doing right now so I decided like you know what let me just try giving this a go like the story of the fisherman I think I know what you're talking about but the story of the fisherman is is that in Mexico an American businessman sees it fisherman who is just chilling
fishing and he asks them like hey what are you doing like oh all day like well I kind of fish for three hours I hang out with my family I I didn't chill and I sleep in every Saturday and this is like all right here's what you should be doing you should like fish not three hours but you should fish like you know
like five days a week eight hours a day from sell that fish turn over a profit hire more people to do it then start to be behead of all those people then sell your your fishing company and he's like okay so and and then what and then you can actually buy an island and you can just fish for three hours you can sleep
in on Saturdays and sleep on Sundays so I was kind of thinking like look I have savings I don't have like huge but I have it for I can still take a risk so let me take a risk on on writing and I was thinking original of just like spending more time to finish my book but what I didn't like about books even though I was making money is they're
really kind of it's hard to predict how like if you're gonna be making a living or there's some people who actually like this excitement but I didn't like it like I didn't know if today I'm gonna be making like 50 to 50 bucks or 10 bucks or 300 bucks so I was like interesting there's this paid newsletters which I've
been thinking about and you were one of the few people who shared some of your early numbers and I figured this could be interesting because it's recurring revenue and the only reason I was really hesitant to start a paid newsletter I was thinking about doing so for for at least like six to 12 months is I was
worried about writing every single week something really really kind of you know worthwhile reading and it's a lot of work but then I looked back and I saw that I wrote three books well as I told you I wrote two books but there was a third one that I also published in a year and I was like I'm pretty sure I can write so for for two weeks I
collected ideas of what I would write about and I had a super long list so I was like okay ideas also check and then I just screw it I'm gonna take a risk it's a bit of a more professional risk and and maybe a financial one as well I will announce that I'm going to start a paid newsletter every week I'm gonna
write something really in-depth about software engineering it's gonna start next week and I told myself that I'll I told my wife as well that I'll do this for six months and I'll see what happens if there's traction it's great you know I might have found myself a new a new job basically if not I'll just refund
people like everyone who bought an annual subscription I didn't tell this to people obviously but but for six months I'm gonna give it my all you know like it's it's basically like a startup so I told her like and my family that it's gonna be a lot of work I know I might not be around as much and they
supported me and then I took a plunge I took a big breath and started off and that's how it went from leaving Uber to start a venture funded startup to starting to write full time awesome and we're going to talk about what advice you have for folks that are thinking about starting something like this at the end what was the period between
leaving Uber and starting the newsletter it was pretty much a year a little bit less of the Year might have been like like 10 months or so but it was a year from when I decided to leave Uber so Uber did layoffs in April and it was it was really stressful so it was the first time I I I didn't lay anyone up but people on my
team were laid off I wasn't told who's going to be laid up it was just really stressful I mean it's weird in the sense that the people who were let go obviously worse for them but I still felt terrible and I I just didn't feel that good about it I think this was the breaking point like I I just this was
the point where I realized that it's not a family which is weird because it never was but it kind of felt a family-like but it's just a corporate and I'm just a number and you know this could happen to me again so I think I I lost my sense of like the trust in the system that it'll take care of me because I saw some of my
colleagues who are really good professionals I'd argue they were better software engineers and managers than me they got let go because they were in the wrong team so this was April and in July I went to the holiday and like two weeks and I just realized like I I just I need to leave and I should and I really had the urge to do
somewhere where I'm in charge yeah and and if if you're a manager listening to this that you might relate to this if you're an engineer listening to this maybe just you know shut your ears or you'll figure it out eventually but when I was promoted into it's a management and it wasn't promoting into it because
it was a side step but I didn't get the salaries or anything but it you know it still feels like a promotion day only from all the people who are only let people transition who are are considered pretty good I felt this would be a big deal I'm not a manager right what no one told me is yes I was a manager but I was
a middle manager I didn't have too much Authority I didn't even have a budget for my team like you know someone was underpaid and I couldn't do anything except complained for HR for for six months and hope that they do something so it was pretty frustrating because I didn't feel in charge in the sense that
I didn't have decision making process and the reason I wanted to do the startup is I decided like I liked being a manager but I did not like how I was not in charge and I couldn't take like you know corporate for what's telling us to do stuff and then we're telling them no BS we can't like I don't want to do
that with my people so I decided as for next job I could be doing this but instead I'd like to be in charge so I'd like you to be a founder or someone who's high up so that I can actually take full responsibility for the things that I want to do or I don't want to do the short of is I decided to leave in July I I we have longer notice periods
in Europe so I I served a longer notice period and then could have left but it was a year after the decision let's talk about what your life is like these days writing a newsletter full time people might be listening be like man three hundred thousand dollars for writing an email a couple times a week that's
pretty sweet so I want to talk about the good and the bad of this life so maybe to start how many posts are you putting out a week I started the news that are saying I'm gonna post once a week like you'll have one end up post and I started to do that but interesting enough eventually I I upped it to two so
I now promise people two posts a week There's a more in-depth a more Timeless posts about some software engineering topic on choose Tuesdays and there's something that's called the scoop something a bit more timely where I reflect or analyze what's going on on the market interesting stuff I'm hearing and every now and then there's a bonus
post so I'll say two on on average but this the second one came a lot later but initially you know in the first few months I was like all right I have this like one post per week and it needs to be good and it was interesting because you would think writing a postal weakest is not a big deal like it's it's easy
you know like it's it's the as you said let's say you're making 300K just writing one post a week but it actually because it was pretty stressful in the beginning because it turns out to write that post it takes you know at least a few days or sometimes even longer sometimes it takes a week or two for me to research in
terms of talking with people I chose topics that are not covered because why would people pay for something that is out there already or well known then I need to write off I write a first draft I get some feedback from people who I trust often not always but but I often do and then there's an editing phase
where I work with an editor who kind of helps make sure that it's it's just correct and all these things usually just kind of add up even if I only spend a day researching the stuff is like a day researching then I kind of have a draft on Sunday two draft day three I get feedback on day four it's editing it's almost a whole week so I was
working on unparalleled things at the same time I was often like running against the deadline I I was barely finishing it which is not what I was expecting initially so the first few months I feel was a bit more stressed but again I the good thing is actually my calendar so I said like I'm not talking with anyone I'm I'm just doing
this so in that sense it was good but the one thing I realized if you look at any journalists who's doing stuff full time and they're writing like not these click bait articles but actually like in-depth you look at the Washington Post in New York Times search for the name and look at the articles that they write and they're
going to be longer articles they have like one a month like like seriously like you look at the investigative journalist they might even have less because and you know they have a bit of a different level they have to check with legal and all those things but my editor is a journalist so he was actually telling me like oh yeah you
actually leave them back then you actually write a lot of original stuff because a lot of my emails are about like five six thousand words which is considered pretty long yeah when you said that people listening might be like oh any one post a week is easy I think most people are the opposite they're
just like I can't write anything I don't have time for any writing how can you ever write one good thing a week so I think there's both sides to it and it's it's cool that you shared kind of the process do you have like a specific Cadence per post it's like Monday draft Tuesday review Wednesday editor is that hey work I write every post over
multiple weeks most of them some of them I might be able to write faster but what I now have is nowadays I actually write two articles so I have I have the Thursday that is the the scoop which actually is a lot a lot easier for me to write interesting enough and my Cadence is that on Monday I I finish up the the
last of of the posts that goes out on Tuesday it's a small edits but it's already done pretty much so it's just a few small tweaks maybe I have some feedback coming in on Tuesday I published this post and I do some free writing I kind of write about some other ideas that I have that's going to be future posts on Wednesday it's kind of
my free day in between where I it's interesting because what what I feel is what I don't have pressure I tend to not do much stuff which might just my mind saying you just need to chill maybe that's it but one thing I miss from the corporate world and you know if you're listening and you're in a job and you're
thinking oh Gary's job is so amazing one thing that I liked and I really miss about working at Uber is I actually had a schedule this is weird I hated the back then but I was I I needed to do these things and whenever you have a pressure you do it and this works in fun user I put in the second post music I
think to have a bit more pressure because the second part of Wednesday I'm already starting to write my Thursday newsletter on Thursday I write that Thursday newsletter and a Friday I'm now writing the the next newsletter for Tuesday so almost every day except for Wednesday I have a strong pressure to
write which when people ask like okay how do you write so much because I did the maths and I wrote like four or five books worth of content just last year it's because I have these deadlines and as you said like I I also know that thousands of people are paying me you know I have like like they have
expectations of me and so this is how it's done like if you if you want to write a book the easiest way is go to a publisher and sign a contract not because of the money in software engineering you're not going to get much like five thousand dollars or something like that that's what I was offered initially but it's the pressure like you
absolutely should go to a publisher or or you know like have some external someone to hold you accountable and then you'll get it done and I'll I'll let you know another kind of you know secret or not so secret detail in my mind when I started a newsletter a year ago in this Crossroads like I want to write this book which I think will be a great book
the software Engineers guidebook I I feel you know it'll be my kind of you know summary of like my last 10 years of what I have to share as as advice but I was worried that it's just a big project that just gonna take months and I'll lose motivation Midway and I partially I went down the newsletter route because I
liked how every week I would have to write something and I had the sneaky idea of hey what if I wrote this book where I kind of write some posts that will be part of the book and then the book will just kind of come together partially and I've kind of been doing that I haven't been telling people but some of the posts are gonna be not not
exactly but they're the ideas they have this chapter and I have this list like have I written about this topic in the newsletter and I got you know where I got this idea from there's the book The Three Musketeers from Alexander to my course yeah yeah and you know how it was written I don't so he he wrote the book
for magazine he was apparently just low on money and he started to write for this magazine who told them like all right we we need you to write something that our readers will want but we want so that they will buy the the magazine and I think he was getting a cut of some sales or something so he needs to write
in a way that was interesting and then cut it off in a way that people would come back and buy the next one and he wrote a whole book and that book when I read it it was really long I was like hold on if he could do this then this is kind of a good strategy like she was writing it because he just needed the
money like that's all and then he wrote a really good book on on the way so one big learning for me from newsletterism I would I would argue that you can use this not just for newsletter any business that you do you know if you're gonna go out and start a new business you'll probably have some ideas and it's
not just gonna be newsletter it's gonna be a fun bunch of other things if you put in ways that you have to do do certain things no put in constraints for the things that you need to do and then you're gonna do that without that when you're on your own when you're an entrepreneur I was a great like I think I was a really diligent employee like I
I always try to get my work done show up on time I try to meet all expectations but what I notice is when I start to work for myself it just went out the window like for almost 15 years of you know being this like Star employee who really wants to do well I find myself upset at myself for not you know just
kind of wasting my day but I fixed it by if I telling people you're gonna get this every week and now I have to do it I just have no choice this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked or you're
going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance sock 2 is a way to prove your company is taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners especially those with serious security requirements also if you want to sell to the Enterprise proving security is
essential sock 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals or it can put your business on hold if you don't have a sock 2 there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table beginning a sock 2 report can be a huge burden especially for startups it's time consuming tedious and expensive enter Banta over 3 000 fast growing
companies use vanta to automate up to 90 of the work involved with sock 2. Banta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months less than a third of the time that it usually takes for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off vanta just go to vanta.com Lenny that's
v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today I definitely wanted to dig into that a little bit deeper this issue that folks in our line of work run into which is unstructured time and having to create your own structure I have the same exact problem when I started this thing like
and before I even started the newsletter we're like how do I use my time well how do I create some kind of deadline for myself so I'm curious what other tricks you found to help you stay productive and focus because there's Twitter there's Instagram Tick Tock there's all these things that pull my attention and
I've learned a couple things I'll share that have been helpful but I'm curious what have you found to help you focus and get things out the door two posts a week which is a lot of work so a problem that I have and this might be unique to newsletters I'm not sure I use Twitter for a lot of research and unfortunately what that means that
when I start to write something it can really pull my attention because I have Twitter open and I get a message from someone it's a little bit like slack but I'd argue it it can be worse because because also Twitter for me is also something that is very useful in in generating people raising awareness so kind of whenever I
tweet it kind of helps my business so that's a good thing right but it also it justifies for me spending more time on on for example Twitter that I want to so I I find that I come up with a method and it works for like a few months and then I need to change it because I my brain just learns to work around it so
I'll tell you a few things that I did and I'll tell you where I'm at right now but I use for example apps like I use this app sender that I know you're also there uh yeah and I love that app also yeah investor and designer but I love it yeah and I found it helpful the idea of like focused time and it turned on but
it might just be me but but after a while I kind of like get used to these things and I find them not as efficient I I found the pulmonary method for a few months useful when you kind of have the 25 minute intervals and the one thing that has never failed me but I just find it hard to do is I find it hard to start I I have this
this kind of benefit that I have all this time so there's two things that always work one is it's almost time for me to go home and then I'm I'm like super focused so like when I have this external thing and I know that there's no way I can't I need to focus on you know it's basically the deadline so
if you have deadlines that works the other thing is if I start to get ice fund three or four minutes doing something focused and I cannot get the flow of it so trick I sometimes do when I'm just like I just don't feel like doing anything is I set a timer of 20 minutes and then I say all right no distractions I have a script where I
just kill I I use a Max on the whole smile I just kill all LinkedIn Twitter Facebook what whatever size so I I just cannot reach it like like it's just a very simple python that I wrote for myself and then I in the first few minutes I'm kind of grumbling I'm like I wish I could do this I wish I could just look at Twitter to research but about
five minutes in there's a switch and I'm like I'm now actually like heads down and doing it and this has been the thing as consistently worked the interesting thing is that I I feel guilty a lot of times that I'm not working as far as I could and I do wonder if it's guilt or or if it's if it's my mind or body telling me
that it just wants a break or it wants to be something else I still haven't figuring it out but I'm I'm on the way there awesome that's a really cool trick the the host file trick so that's like something that you have to be kind of technical to to do I imagine there's some Chrome extensions that could do
that to some extent for folks but the whole idea there is force your brain not to have any way to look at something that'll be distracting by blocking your computer from even being able to go to the site that's awesome yeah so there is definitely going to be extensions that you can use I mean but if well and you know on this
podcast we'll have a variety of people if you're a software engineer it's pretty simple because even if you're not you can look it up in the whole spot if when you override your host file you can actually block things what you're doing I did this because I wrote a script where I need to run the script and I
need to run to the script again to unblock it and it's kind of cool because I put a ticket for myself so I I usually find that the tools that other people use maybe this is just me or maybe this is software engineers I don't like them because I feel they're either too opinionated or they're not opinionated enough so I don't know if
this is just the fact that I I used to like to build my own tools and my own scripts because I can so I found that my scripts worked the best best for me but as you said there's a bunch of a bunch of really good tools so my advice to people would be you know look up all of these let's try them out you're you'll
you won't know until you try them and again I had stuff that worked really well for a certain amount of time I don't know why I maybe I just get bored easier or something that I just need to to rotate but for example when I went back to Center I have no affiliation by the way so I I'm just tell this but I I
really liked how they keep evolving as well it's a to do like cooler things I have a community element where you're kind of competing with people on uninterpreted time and closing stuff so that to me is a like I I'll do one last thing one last thing I'll Center it again I I have no physician what I really liked about
Center is it allows you to turn on your video camera and I felt really kind of forced to do work because I knew that you know people on the other side of the world might be watching me even if it was not true yeah I love that feature it centered that out by the way if folks want to check it out so to summarize
some of your tips which I love standard deadlines totally work for me too blocking sites so that you can't get distracted by Twitter and Linkedin and Tick Tock and all the things and then yeah I guess that's the three right the three that work best for you yeah and and the simple thing started 20 minute timer and you say for 20 minutes
I need to focus on on this thing on your iPhone or somewhere else it's just 20 minutes but during that time you cannot do anything else and just try it it works for me like like a charm one side once I decided I should do it the school Center does that for you and it has music and all the things yeah so I like
that a lot awesome what do you love most about this life that you lead Now versus what you used to do and then I'm going to ask you the opposite but let's start there I really like that it forces me to have my calendar empty because for so many years my calendar was this giant mess of meetings on top of meetings and
I would barely have any time to actually have focused time now I actually have the opposite I I usually have a lot of focus Simon I had very very few meetings or or things and even now like I kind of get like a little bit like cagey like oh I have this one meeting in in the hallway so I like house it's kind of that manager time to Major
time so that that's the best part and I also like how much in charge I am so initially it kind of freaked me out in the sense that how much creative freedom I have you know I can I can write about whatever I can change the format I can do this I can do that it can be a little bit over overwhelming because I also
kind of know that you know people are going to be reading this and what are they going to think about it but I I do like that it's very entrepreneurial so I get to experiment a lot as well which reminds me a little bit of my old job because Uber we also experimented a lot you obviously more in a corporate setting but that I guess
that's just kind of gotten uh extended so you know these are the two favorite things is the the open calendar or like very few meetings and experimenting trying out stuff and being able to decide what I want to try out plus one on both those I I have a rule of no meetings before 3 pm and it generally Works 99 of the time
and the reason I do that is to your point if there's a meeting at like 11 I just like can't do anything really deep until that point and then afterwards I have to like get back on track and having that deep focus time is so important for this work even though like half the time I'm on Twitter and
distracted as long as I get enough time to focus good things happen okay opposite what are some of the most surprising downsides and kind of sucky parts of this path that you've taken well one is obviously it's lonely so I I do miss I had a really good team at Uber and it wasn't just a team it was the people I liked like you know ever has
different views on a remote work I actually didn't and I didn't enjoyable orgasmic because I just liked hanging out with people I guess I'm not kind of more outgoing type and I I really like you know walking up to the coffee station and having a chat with people or at lunch sitting next to someone and and
talking about it obviously sometimes it's annoying because I wanted to get work done but for the most part I missed it more than I haven't so I miss not having that I kind of conversate for that but worth me to share workspace like a shared office which is a techie workspace so everyone needs to work in Tech so I should get to say hi to people
and and have a little small small talk the structure is weird because I felt really guilty for the first few months because I felt that at Uber I was more productive because I had to be like I I was doing so many things like in a day you know I would I would start my day let's say at nine or at 8 30 and I
finish it up at I don't know like six or five thirty it depends I would probably have on an average day I would have like uh you know like good eight meetings I would like finish like two or three documents I would send over this sent over that like I actually had like looking at my output like you know I now
I write a lot but I wrote a lot I think I wrote almost as much in terms of emails chat messages Etc so like the downside is I felt very guilty and a little bit frustrated for myself for you know feeling that I was locking off that's one and the other thing it is surprisingly stressful so when you start off it's it's kind of lonely not many
people do this what we do you know that's also one of the reasons that we connected because it's a very small community and even within the community I feel in the the news that our community is different you're all running your own business and there is some level of competition so you might not be because it's it's a
little bit of attention economy as well you know like people are not going to subscribe or pay for 10 different or 10 newsletters on the same topic so that that makes it a little bit more you know it's it's not not the same as when you work in Tech and it you just kind of share exactly everything that you do
because you can only win so there's that part but there's a lot of external validation so like whenever you know looking at your subscriber numbers which brings up a bunch of stress that I didn't expect and I'm I'm a successful newsletter like I I think my successes is quite rare you know there will be one or two or like a
handful of people who have similar success but I'm kind of an out of liar so that's another thing that I think is just good putting out there and the downside is you don't really know how well you're doing there's external goals are kind of meaningless internal goals either you smash them or or you don't reach them so
there's this constant sense of where am I how am I and how do I judge myself did I make a mistake for leaving my job I actually asked myself for like several months actually after I started or or did I make a good one that I think for a lot of these kind of questions and doubts having past professional
experience working at a company is really really useful to kind of set yourself grounded I actually want to ask you about that but I'll add a couple things that I also find are major downsides of this life because it's not all rainbows and butterflies one is with a paid newsletter especially but even with a sponsored newsletter you
basically have to get something awesome at every week in theory for the rest of your life uh people are buying an annual plan every day so that means at least a year you have to write something awesome if you want to stop but it's hard to stop because as you pointed out the income is very meaningful and that's a hard thing to
give up and so I'm not sure exactly the exit path that there is that exists for us where we might have to keep writing something awesome for the rest of our life but I imagine something will emerge and we'll think of something else that we could do yeah and that's it's a really good example because for a
lot of companies and you know I'm assuming a lot of listeners are working in Tech typical thing is you work hard you build equity at a company or you build the value of the company and then you can sell that company and then you could have an exit and you can do whatever for what we're doing it's
really tight to us so however much or little of my my newsletter will make you know it'll have a value let's say four or five times the annual revenue as a business but you cannot really sell it like that and you cannot really walk away so that's that that makes it unique it makes it harder to compete with which is cool but
it does not create that much of an exit path unless you you start to build a company around it build an organization that can run without you for example you know this is what a lot of book publishing companies so basically either you build a Publishing Company where you start to hire people who start to write
some of the Articles Edition and then later more of them but that's you know it's not one person use that anymore or you keep doing this and then you know until you need to stop and then the revenue stops or you might be able to to sell it but it really undervalue yeah I I really don't want to manage people I don't want to like have
employees and so building like a media company with writers that doesn't sound too fun but maybe that's where this goes that is one route for sure the other downside I'll just add is the fact that you have to write something awesome every week it's hard to take meaningful time off because if you stop producing
great stuff people leave and I invented this PTO policy for myself where I take four weeks a year off or I don't do a newsletter but that means I can't take more than like a week off usually like two weeks in a row I don't know people probably won't care but it feels like things start to not go great if I just don't keep producing great stuff so
that's that's another downside just while we're on the topic yeah but a lot that were very early so I think the whole concept of pain user is new so I think we're gonna do a lot of experimentation and and also a lot of it I think you need to figure out what your needs are so in the first year I did not
take a holiday like in terms of or even when I did I was writing and and you know it caused a bit of friction with let's say my family and and now I I I'm solving it for in a different way so I am trying to take more time off now and I am I'm doing it by by working ahead with some of the less time sensitive things but it is
tough so the downside we haven't mentioned but I'm just gonna call it out is holiday like the the great thing at I never felt well I felt a little guilty sometimes taking holiday but when I went to Holiday I took it off when I when I had my son born at Uber they gave me a four month paid holiday I took the whole
four months I just logged off it was great it wasn't my company I was still getting stuck you know the stock price was independent of mostly what I was doing just being honest and that was that was really really good so this might be true by the way if you start any business especially while it's just
yourself it's it's hard to to turn off and I think most people don't mind I don't mind but it gets to you you know like we should be conscious about burnout as a whole so you need to solve for that and I'm I'm starting to solve for that as well yeah okay enough about the downsides overall it's pretty amazing making hundreds of thousands of
dollars writing an email once a week slash twice a week so just to wrap up on that I'm curious where do you think this goes long term for you and then I want to talk about just like what it takes to be successful but before there where do you think this goes long term I start making long-term plans because
you know three years ago you would have asked me what I wanted to do and I was like I want to be I don't like like a manager of managers and then I became one and then then I would have asked what what is my dream I would have been like what was the stretch but maybe I want to be a psych lead and I didn't
become one per se but I never thought of you know writing a newsletter or now writing a successful newsletter so I'm kind of going with the flow I'm I'm seeing this less by the way as a newsletter or Creator or Creator economy as people like to see it I see this as as a business and I'm trying to put on that business hat like I'm building a
one-person business I want to make it sustainable I want to make it successful and I find that this thinking really helps me kind of detach as well I can actually enjoy my weekends as opposed to like you know thinking oh I need to write this I need to write that so I also want to make it work for me and I'm
not going to marry to the idea of like hey it needs to be like it always needs to be in user Etc right now it is but you know where I see is going is is I'll keep building the business I'll keep playing to my strength which is I love talking with people I love uh writing a bunch of stuff I love software engineering so this is a great format
but over time it might shift so I'm kind of keeping my my options open and what I've learned from this journey is you need to create time to to be able for that spark to come so one of my goals for the last few years is to not spend 50 hours a week on a newsletter which I'm doing right now but spend 20
and then maybe take a few weeks off and have that spark come because the reality is this user only came because I gave myself six months of unpaid I'm not going for work I didn't answer any LinkedIn emails and it kind of just the idea came and the inspiration came and the motivation came there's a lot of similarities with my
Approach I don't think too far long term I have no idea what's going to happen I just kind of take it to I see where Paul is coming from and if it feels like an interesting opportunity and something that I'd be excited to work on I I explore it like the podcast for example and on that point I will say once you
find that you can spend maybe 20 hours on a newsletter I guarantee you'll find more work to fill that Gap because that's what I've been doing but uh one one last thing to touch on you said something really important to poll and I want to double down on that one of the one of the biggest best things about doing what we do when
you're in charge of your time is you can double down on polls so what I could Uber like I said my plan was I'll write this book for six months two months in I just put a draft about a really long blog post about mobile engineering and I got like a lot of messages like a lot like I might I I usually get like used
to get like three or four messages on Twitter per day I got 20 in an hour people saying can I read the draft and I was like oh that's interesting I just felt this pull of like this huge interest of people caring about this it was this really long blog post about how mobile engineering at scale and someone
suggested on on a private business you could probably turn this in the ebook and I was like oh that's a good idea because it's really long blog post so I said it's going to be an e-book and it'll be pay what you want and then people start to buy it and I was like that's interesting so I didn't have much else to do so I was able to double down
and said like you know what for the next two months I'm gonna write this book because it seems there's an interest in it and I can iterate it I I turn it into a book that was free for two months but I got sponsorship the point was I was able to double down on this pull and same thing with the newsletter so we're
going to talk about you know how I got the first few thousand subscribers but the point was I was able to double down on on something that I felt like this is super interesting I never expected I never expected that people would care about building a large mobile app you know more than a few hundred people
turns out they do thousands do let's actually jump to that let's talk about just how to get started for folks that are like hmm this is cool I want to do a newsletter let's talk about just how you got started briefly and then what you think it takes to be successful in the life of a newsletter person so how'd you actually
get your first thousand subscribers well I mean I I I I I'll tell the story that it's kind of true and people will think it's amazing and I'll tell the real deal behind it okay great I mean I announced my newsletter I told people I'm gonna go full time on this I had maybe 10 000 Twitter followers and I don't know like maybe a thousand I'll
link to or something like that and people started signing up the next day I had 100 subscribers in the first day before I published anything and within six weeks when I published my six news that I had a thousand paid subscribers and this this sounds like a fairy tale and if you do this I guarantee you're
you're not going to get the same results in fact you'll you'll probably see way smaller numbers what I didn't tell is that there was at least six years of kind of accidental work behind this I started a Blog six years before I actually I was I've always been blogging since I graduated I had this like personal blog where I just published all
sorts of random things about software engineering but like well like it was really like sometimes it was about an app that I published sometimes it was a problem that I came across it which is all over the place and I kind of got fed up with this it it the blog wasn't going anywhere and I was just writing for
myself by the way but I didn't like how it was just all over the place and I said you know what I'm going to start a blog it'll be about software engineering and I'll call the promatic engineer I bought the domain and I read this blog post from um Jeff Atwood who's the founder of stack Overflow and back in 2010 or 2000
I think in 2007 when I was still in college um he had the most popular blog on the internet for software Engineers it was called coding horror and all the software Engineers I knew Reddit like and were drinking it like it was it was like next level wisdom every single week like twice reading videos a week yeah
you read it as well yeah I used to be an engineer and I was all up in that and I think coding came from uh forget the book but there's a book with that graphic there's a book and there's a graphic yeah yeah yeah and and he wrote a post which really stuck with me for years he said how to be famous on the internet I said like
there's three simple steps there's one write a blog post two do this like three times a week three you can do it for two years and I guarantee if you do this you're gonna be famous and I always saw this kind of ironic but the more I read it the more I thought he actually means something with it and when I started
this Blog the pragmatic engineer I said I'm kind of tired of my old block being all over the place and there's no focus and no one really cares about it I'm gonna do what Jeff said I'm gonna publish okay so I gotta be twice a week but I like for every two weeks I'm gonna publish a article and I'll do it for a
year so I started to do this I published six blog posts about software engineering kind of you know going into topics that I care research and all that and and then I gave up and I'm saying this because I kind of gave up and I looked it for for a few months but then something interesting happened I had a huge traffic Spike and
it crashed my my shared hosting at the time and it came from the site called Hacker News that I ever heard about and people were discussing my posts and they were adding well at least a lot of things and I was like oh that's interesting people care about what I wrote like six months ago what was that post by the way it was called a comment
is an invitation for refactory I wrote my my view that if there's a comment and a code that means a comma should be deleted I just refactor the whole thing and it exploded Hacker News some people called me an idiot some people called me the absolute wisdom like and it was these two crowds battling it out and I
was like wow I actually made you know software engineers in Silicon Valley argue about my stuff like I saw some of the karma people some really high Karma people were really you know it's going for a Recon so that's my thought life interesting buy writings some people might read it it's not guaranteed and I
searched her right on that blog like once every few months depending on kind of my mood but I never stopped doing it and I partially did it I always hoped that it would get on this site called Hacker News but by the way for a while I didn't even know you could submit it so I never submitted my own things but the
other thing was I just kind of liked it and I kind of it's had this habit and over years like I had this blog from 2015 for six years I was writing the blog and in the last year when I worked at Uber I I on the side I kind of wrote about my work like in terms of the things that I could write about like not
about the details that we did but some of the learnings that for example distributed systems and more and more of these posts just started to just pop up on happiness people would either submit it or sometimes when I submitted it it would just do well and I was thinking just so people I started to get this valuation people care about what I what
I write and to your to questions the success of the newsletter by the time I launched a newsletter I had a lot of posts that a lot of software Engineers red eye and there was a very famous post about performing sense of management like healthy performance reviews I wrote one about the trimodal nature of software new salaries where I observe
that there's kind of three different tiers that are like there's big Tech and there's like local companies and I think what happened is what I announced that I'm going to write this newsletter I also put it on the blog a lot of people realize that they oh I've been reading this pragmatic engineer I don't know I
don't know who's behind it but I I like it let me sign up like I I do want to get like an email every week and instead of the things that were every now and then so there was years of work and I wish I could tell you you know how to build a successful newsletter but the best advice I have is still what Jeff Atwood does except I have less
conviction but if you start writing and you do it regularly you know two things will happen first of all you're gonna anything right for yourself and you keep improving you'll be a better writer that's for sure if you're lucky or if you're right about stuff you might start to attract people who think similarly so
you know Step One is get started step two is keep it up and my solution is definitely drift for yourself like the weird thing is until I started my newsletter I never thought I would turn this ever into business but it always thoughts rewarding so I never like if you're starting out writing a user to do what I'm doing one day you
know like it might work out but interesting enough I I never even thought that this was an opportunity so so people listening to this that are thinking about should I explore this life I think if you think about your story you wrote a book you blogged for a while before this you worked at Uber for
a number of years in a sense it comes across a little bit like man there's no way I can be successful if that's the background I need to have I have to have written things and worked at an awesome tech company what advice do you give folks that are coming to you being like gergay should I start a newsletter does this
make sense for me do you need the kind of background that you have do you think well don't forget the what I started like my blog I didn't have any of this so and this is while you're at Uber this is before you started the newsletter it was before before I was a dreamer so I was maybe a Skyscanner or maybe at this
guy but I was even blogging before so I was talking to conferences before so my advice really would would be is like if you think you have a newsletter or something similar start teaching and sharing what you know and what you're observing this could be a newsletter this could be a YouTube video this could be going to meet up by actually 10 years
ago I went to a lot of meetups where I presented also says I met a lot of cool people I would say you know share your knowledge one way or the other and as you're doing it you're going to learn a lot more so what I find this is true when I was a manager I people you know we have to set goals and I told people
there's like two sets of goals you can set one is good goal you know people will set this goal I want to be promoted the next thing where I want to lead this big project and those are bad goals because it's not in your control so setting similar setting a goal that I want to have a successful newsletter with like I don't know 20 000
subscribers that's a goal where you're not in charge a good goal is what you can do so a good goal for example is I want to learn this new language in the next year which I'm going to spend time on work or I I want to you know leave a work at 5 pm on Friday so to be home family so set those goals that you can't
control and this is how actually my my you know my blog started initially my goal was like I want to write like once a month and I did that for a while and I was I was proud and proud about that or I whenever I learned something I actually want to share it every now and then so I would say set those goals and
and the rest will come probably again like don't get me wrong like I'm not trying to talk people out of doing it but for me a lot of this was luck and the other thing that I would suggest is be curious and look at your professional career as well one thing that definitely helped me is getting pedigree if this
was some some more conscious I I come from you know a small country from you know a really good University which no one knows about but you know I I didn't grow up in let's say Silicon Valley so I actually kind of made a subconscious point to try to work my way up and after I got to let's say JP Morgan in London I
was pretty picky of where I would go next so that's why when Skype came along I was this is great like everyone knows guy by I love Skype and it was the same thing with Uber so there's especially these days like a lot people would not pay nearly as much attention to me if I if I worked at you know small parts limited so there's that part as
well so you need to kind of manage some some of these things you know figure out what you want to do for a long time I pretty much thought that I just want to climb the corporate ladder and prove that I'm good enough at all these companies I was just doing all those stuff on the side it's interesting how
style flipped and now doing these things this is my main thing which you see me in my side project and I guess one last advice is do some side projects like all of this starts as a side project like at work no one's really going to appreciate that you're gonna doing a newsletter or this or that you know try stuff on the
side assuming that you have time or or if you don't have time try to to make time because I feel a lot of what we're doing is this pre-entrepreneurial and the only way you're gonna get these muscles if you if you start some small things you talk about the pedigree being important I think there's also an even
deeper point that you actually need like real experience doing real things that scaled and worked and mattered and worked with amazing people to actually build the foundation to write about share wisdom from and that's really important there's a lot of people starting newsletters and tweeting who like haven't done much and don't have a
lot of real life experience to share and I think that's the core of a lot of what we do is it needs to be based on real things that have that worked and that you've learned or that you have access to other people who have learned these things I would say that but you know one thing that that I'll I'll double down
that's a really good observation this if you actually if you're serious like one day I will want to you know write a book or a newsletter it's kind of the same thing or teach people about stuff you know look at look at the people that you look up to that you actually trust you know this maybe it's me or maybe it's
huge but it's more it's more likely people like Kent back for example he's the creator of tdd and he's risen a lot of books he's one of my favorite kind of people I think he's coming up like 50 or 60 uh if he listens to the sorry if I don't want me to take me to signal but what I love about Ken Beck is he's been
the middle of it like he he has always worked kind of in the industry and that he kind of wrote about it but for example he he was he invented I think he invented or he was a co-inventor of uh uh it was a tdd or extreme program anyway one of these methodologies and then he went to work at Facebook he kind of took a
a title cut to be a software engineer and then he hosts the tdd workshop that has driven development workshop and no one showed up at Facebook and Facebook did no testing which went against all commercial wisdom and he took that risk joining this company were you know he he could have been like you know like
people would have knelt down to him anywhere else but but he wants his company works just wants to learn he is his lifelong learner he's right now writing a book but what I think away from is if you want to be someone with people listen to like yes do cool and interesting stuff push yourself to to get into the places that do these
interesting things that's how when I went to Uber in 2016 it was one of the highest regarded places back in 2016 and 2017 it it was uh the other way around but back in 2016 people were turning down Facebook and Google offers to go at Uber which we all thought would change the world so yeah you know like you do
need to get into those teams that are doing interesting stuff prove that you can do that and you'll have a lot more interesting stories to share that's for sure if you had to boil down on advice for how to be successful in this life of a newsletter you have to boil it down to just like one or two key pieces of
advice what would you say one is have enough depth in the field whatever field you do so you know this this might mean that I I think I don't say that if if you don't have experience don't starve them but it's kind of true so like become an expert somewhere somehow before you start because you'll be a lot more credible I think there's no
shortage of of reporters and journalists who don't know about stuff but they can interview people but that doesn't give anything extra and I think people feel that so you know I I say choose a field that you're gonna be good at and you you can start on the side if you know doing this assuming you have something you're
you're someone who's experience in the industry or you have kind of insights wisdom observations to share start doing so in whatever format you know I do newsletters there's actually YouTube A lot of people are are becoming pretty successful on YouTube Share sharing their thing three have a Cadence and and
stick to it to some extent because you you do need to keep repeating it and then four don't be afraid to try out new things a good example of a person who did this uh have you heard of obsidious yeah he wrote some epic long he used to work at Amazon and then at Google he wrote this internal email about platforms about how
Amazon is great at platforms Google was terrible and he was really well known at Google and because he wrote stuff inside Google so he's experience knows a lot of stuff and I put Google and he started to do a podcast that's on that's on YouTube you can check it out it's called Stevie's podcast and what he did is
every week he recorded an episode and he talked about a bunch of his learnings a lot of stuff and he was pretty clear up front 23rd the first one he said like what I'm doing is I'm gonna do this for six months and I'll see if it sticks see if people care about it or for people watch it now this guy had a lot of experience really fun play I think it's
really fun to listen to in India and you know it was I think successful it was like it got a couple thousand or maybe even 10 000 subscribers but it wasn't just like this rocket ship and I think what he did he just stopped that for six months and he's now he's actually started the head of engineering at
source graph he actually went back in industry but what I love about this you know it shows that you know you cannot guarantee having success but you can do what what he did which is like you know start something do a Cadence see if it sticks if just an off-theater pivot or do something else I feel the world is
kind of about that as well if you think about you know take a step back of you know what is a successful newsletter what is a successful podcast what is a successful YouTube channel and it's stuff that's kind of interesting it's it's either entertaining or educational but all these things you can't really
kind of put a finger on like if you watch YouTube you know Mr B says someone who you probably came across I actually like watching his videos on news how good he does it but it's not something you can anyone with a version in the book so there is a sense of trying to understand what people care about and a good way to to understand is either
experiment or observe or just try out stuff this is great I feel like I could boil this down even further from everything you just said which is build depth in an area then write a blog post twice a week for two years and good things will happen I'm pretty sure and here here's an interesting thought as well just as for closure
I was talking with someone on why my newsletter is so successful it's just really successful and I honestly don't know why and this person told me something interesting this is a person who had a really successful YouTube channel with about 200 000 subscribers so more than my newsletter and he said
this he's like what I notice is you started your blog in like 2015 2016 and I started my YouTube channel like in 2019 or something like that and instead on YouTube there's so much quality there's like super high grade Productions there's like everyone is doing YouTube and he said you know what I don't see I don't see many blogs that are are
writing in-depth stuff regularly I feel everyone went over to YouTube or Tick Tock so there is the other angle of the medium and I'm kind of saying that's not say but you know it might be an advantage these days fewer people right because I think a lot of people find it hard and more people will do videos and
you can take advantage of some of these these ships you know like which which might be good or bad so if you're if you're going to be really well known person on YouTube you might get more people watching you but you'll have a lot more competition and the last thing is that for me writing especially with with software Engineers it's it's really
efficient because I can scan through it I don't like YouTube videos especially for learning about stuff because I can't even scan through the whole thing it just really time consuming so I think you decide if you want to do you know entertainment which for these pocket listeners I don't think that's kind of
in the question you're competing with the likes of Spotify Netflix education which is a little bit more dry but it's really useful or edutainment which is you know entertaining and entertaining education and and once you figure that out either if it's education or edutainment you can figure out what format might work both for the medium
and for you and then at another day you need to enjoy it like I personally have learned over time to love writing like I love being in the zone so for me it's not really work but it's it's fun and once you find that thing whatever that might be it just makes it easier gergy it's always so fun talking about
newsletter stuff I don't have many people to talk about this life with I hope this was useful to people who are exploring this path thinking about it or even the different Creator kind of path just two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out or learn more and how can listeners
be useful to you you can find me at pragmatic engineer.com there is a bunch of stuff listed there from from the Twitter LinkedIn my talent Collective some of the companies that I invest in ETC everything's there and you can also sign up to my newsletter illustrous being useful to me if you work in Tech consider signing up to my
my newsletter I mean I always tell people like where complimentary newsletter if you work in product or have interest in product your newsletter is an awesome Choice with software engineering Engineering Management it kind of goes goes the other way and it's not just people are telling me like when
they're data scientists or or even product folks sometimes they get some value out of it if you know I write this column called the scoop every Thursday if you hear any interesting scoop happening especially for for techies this might be some changes in the workplace like you know your company is just rolling out agile like team at
Twitter that feel free to ping me it's just a short search for sending scoop to the pragmatic engineer I treat everything as Anonymous so you can you can tell me interesting stuff I'm super interested in the stuff that you might not read about in the traditional media but we as techies really care about and finally if you work at Google and
you want to add enemies to talk to me just ping me because I'm one of my next articles will be Google's engineering culture I wrote one about Facebook one about Amazon and I I tried to talk with mostly software Engineers to get a sense of you know how these companies work from uh from a software engineer an
engine manager perspective awesome I hope this comes out before that post comes out but if not then enjoy that post ergay thank you so much for being here this was awesome and maybe we'll do a V2 as things continue to grow awesome it was great being here Lenny thank you so much for listening if you
found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]