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You’re receiving this email because you signed up for my personal newsletter about customer research, product design, and personal growth.
Hey, happy Thursday!
First off, thank you for opening this email after so many months without even a whisper from me. I’m so excited that you’re here spending a few minutes here.
I’ve had an eventful first half of 2021 - finding out my wife Brittany and I are expecting our first child (a boy in October), running multiple businesses (with varying degrees of focus and success), building a growing team at Procket, and ultimately coming to the conclusion that trying to do too many things was having a negative impact on everything I was doing from work to family and my own mental health.
This tweet from my friend Charbel couldn’t have summed up how I was feeling much better:
A Lebanese saying:
🍉
"You can only hold one watermelon in each hand, else you drop them all."
A few minutes of automation setup in Zapier later, and I now get a text every morning as a reminder to stay focused.
With a baby on the way, I've been thinking a lot about how to manage my time. I imagine a newborn has no respect for regular working hours!
My goal is not to do more and be more "efficient", but to design my life in a way that makes it possible to spend as much time as possible with family and our new child.
"What can I do today, that will make my future self proud and not regretful."
This quote from Sam Parr on the My First Million podcast has really helped frame how I am prioritizing my time and choosing what to work on before October.
The one thing that I know I can do today to help my future self is to invest in creating assets that:
a) Are created once and sold many times over
b) Compound in value over time
A framework I've found helpful to "create" more consistently is repackaging.
There are 3 steps to this framework:
- Make an amazing original asset
- Isolate small useful pieces inside it
- Present them in a new context. Repeat.
Good content is, at its core, a valuable asset that resonates with your audience.
But not all assets are created equal when it comes to people being able to extract the value from them.
So, if you view every asset you create as an investment, repackaging is one way to make them easier to consume, increase their value and generate the best return over time.
Some examples:
- Podcasts - Blog posts, Twitter threads, Audiograms
- Webinars - Video highlights, Ebooks, LinkedIn posts
- Workshops - Step-by-step guides, Email courses, Downloadable templates
When you repackage something valuable in a format that’s easy to consume and engage with in the channel you’re distributing it in, you’ll also generate new conversations with customers or prospects.
These conversations are a rich source of additional ideas and new directions to explore.
You can also use these conversations to explore the original asset (or parts of it) in further detail.
Ultimately, you wind up with a network of valuable content that’s resonating with your target audience(s), in multiple ways, across multiple channels, and compounding your returns.
As you repackage and redistribute your content, you also make it easier for others to interact with it and re-share with their networks.
This isn’t just a seriously powerful feedback loop — it’s sustainable
Instead of banging your head against the wall searching for “net new” ideas you can look at what's resonating and repackage it in a different context.
This is the approach I’ll be using to double down on content I've already published, create new assets from the conversations I have sitting idle on my hard drive, and ship more consistently.
Do less, better.
What's something you're trying to double down on for the second half of this year?
Talk soon,
- Stuart
PS. Know someone who’d find this newsletter valuable? Please share it on Twitter or LinkedIn or point them to stuartbalcombe.com/newsletter to sign up.
3 resources I found helpful this week:
15 Experts Weigh in on Making Killer B2B Content. Jason Bradwell’s B2B Bite newsletter featured this awesome roundup of tips for making B2B content that stands out.
Meaningful with Rand Fishkin. In this new video series from Typeform, Rand shares marketing lessons that might change how you think about your strategy.
How To Evolve Your Storytelling In Three Phases. Host of Unthinkable, Jay Acunzo writes about a storytelling framework for developing stronger narratives in our content.
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