Yem Jam (Vol. 8)

Hey team, Hope everyone is enjoying the long summer days. 🌞 To kick things off, a few updates across our key work streams:

• Providing benchmarking and insights. Over the last month or so, with heightened summer travel, we've seen downward pressure on new user traffic, signups, and engagement. These headwinds are present across most mediums (i.e. newsletters, Twitter, YouTube). Our customers seem to value this type of context, even at a small scale.
• Working with first ConvertKit customer.

Yem Jam Vol. 7

Hey team, Hope everyone had a lovely 4th! 🇺🇸 🎇 🇺🇸 And welcome to this week’s Yem Jam. I’ve been searching for the right one-liner to describe Yem. One of my friends called us a "customer data platform, owned by creators". And one of our customers called Yem a "growth team in your pocket". I like both these taglines. The first hits on how hard it's been in the past for creators to access and use important data (let alone "own" the data). The latter hits on building products that have value for creators.

Yem Jam Vol. 6

Hello friends, We're continuing to see some exciting signals from our experiments. But we've definitely swung and missed as well. Below is an update on our learnings and progress so far. Let us know what you think, and please share with anyone you think may enjoy it!

• Reducing churn for paying subscribers
  There's two main flavors of paid cancels: voluntary and involuntary. Involuntary is usually due to payment issues. Voluntary is when the sub chooses to cancel their auto-renewal.

Yem Jam (Vol. 5)

Hello friends, A bit of a digression this week — an origin story of sorts. I was catching up with a friend and we ended up talking about our early exposure to the "creator economy". And how that led to Yem and trying to use our experience to help creators grow their businesses.

Starting as a Fan

At some point, I remember trying to pay a bit more attention to my inbox and what I was reading. Less news, more focus on learning. These newsletters became early obsessions:

• Farnam Street - mental models

Yem Jam (Vol. 4)

Hello friends, Welcome to all the folks that recently signed up! For those coming over for the first time, if you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing!
This week, we'll cover some growth experiments we're running with our newsletter customers.

Tests & Learnings

Early on, we noticed newsletters share a common, sizable challenge. A large group of subscribers are dormant. These are folks that have not engaged with any content (emails, web).

Yem Jam (Vol. 3)

Hello friends, You may notice a new look & feel this week! We've migrated from Ghost to Substack, which is great for newsletters with no intention of monetizing. A quick bit of housekeeping: Yem Jam is at least 10x more enjoyable when it’s easy to find in your inbox. Please move us to your Primary tab or out of your spam folder. 🙏

The Updates

The image below is a high-level view of what we’re working on:
We're making progress on setting up the database and are pulling data from Stripe.

Yem Jam (Vol. 2)

Hello friends, Welcome to volume 2 of Yem Jam - a weekly summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. We hope everyone is enjoying MDW. 🇺🇸 🌭 🏖

The Only Thing That Matters

We're now working with 5 newsletters. Even with a small group, we're getting great feedback and learnings. The only thing that matters at this point is creating something customers want. We're searching for the "killer use case". A point at which customers would pay for Yem, or maybe even miss us.

Yem Jam (Vol. 1)

Hello friends, Thank you for signing up to receive updates on Yem. And for those of you who didn’t sign up, I’m stretching our friendship and assuming you won't mind the spam too much. 🙏
Welcome to Yem Jam - a weekly summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem.

Why do this?

We’re inspired by the creators and businesses that are building in public. Especially in the "creator economy". Folks like Lenny Rachitsky and Packy McCormick. Perhaps most of all, Li Jin, who brought a voice to the creator economy.