It's out!

A seven-year story and a business experiment

Last week, I published a story that’s been seven years in the making and I’m excited to share it with y’all!

You can read it here, hear about the reporting process here, and read more about the business decisions that allowed me to keep on a project for seven years here (paid — you can access it at any subscription level). If you found this story interesting, I’d appreciate you sharing it with your networks and tagging me on your social media platform of choice!

I’ve alluded to this story multiple times in my last few posts, and I’m excited to stop hyping it up so much and move on to other things. (Although please don’t ask me now or in the next few months what the Next Big Thing is. The truth is that I don’t know, AND — hot take — there doesn’t have to be something that is immediately Next, contrary to what capitalism tells us!)

The last few weeks has felt like a blur — the team at Undark was working with me in finalizing photos, fact-checking, and captions down to the wire, and once the story ran, I’ve been sharing it like crazy.

In May, I started running a month-long ‘always be marketing’ experiment. (If you’ve read my last post, I really love running time-bound experiments in my business.) What this meant was I was committing an average of one act of marketing every day - whether it was emailing an editor I knew, posting newly published projects on social media, or checking in with contacts on potential projects. Here’s a glimpse of what that entailed (screenshot of my iPhone notes)

I went through my work backpack, looking. at business cards I collected over the years. After a very slow four months of work, I decided to aggressively flag to people that … hi! I’m here in the corner, I am very hire-able. Let’s talk.

That marketing spree did not immediately pay off. I got on a few clients’ rosters and got the conversation started. Most of the time it was just nice to be back in touch with people I liked. But I did get inbound client leads throughout the course of my experiment, and every time it happened, I asked the client how they found me. Somehow, all of them pointed to work I had produced journalistically and it was because of those features that they thought to reach out.

I had never really thought about my journalism being the strongest beacon to attract work, but I started gathering evidence that told me otherwise. And in a way, that’s super valuable to me, and reminded me that it’ll be a net good if I spend time promoting my journalism work — which I never used to do very much!

So that’s what I’ve been doing the last week with my turmeric feature, and I’m not mad. In the meantime, I have a few other shorter stories in the hopper.

But first, it’s time for a vacation.