I was thinking about getting more people to read about my AI experiments. However adding a newsletter that just sends you the full post of the experiment, is not bringing more people to visit the website, as they just read it in their email client. So this would not drive any visitors to my website.
However when I thought a bit longer about this, I came to the realization I am not looking for more people visiting the website, I just want to reach more people. And I don’t care whether they read on the website or via a newsletter.
This shift in mindset was what actually made me consider writing about adding the newsletter in the first place. I like to learn and these small realizations are where I feel I get wiser.
I asked Codex to make a /plan for a weekly digest email newsletter with the option for the die hard followers to have each experiment sent to them daily.
What I really like about these AI helpers is that they come up with the tools that best fit my use case. When I first asked it to create a digest newsletter, it suggested to use Kit. When I investigated the tool it was the perfect match for what I wanted.
Later however I came to the realization that I would also be ok with sending a daily experiment via email and not have those users visit the website as discussed above. When I mentioned this, Codex had a totally different tool for me that fitted my use case way better: buttondown.com.
This new tool surprised me, so I asked for more details on why it did suggest this now. Codex explained that Buttondown had an RSS to email feature that made total sense for my website that already had an RSS feed. Both Kit and Buttondown were new to me. But I love this back and forth with my AI tool.
Key Insight:
Thinking and refining what my actual goals and needs are is what actually makes the results from the AI tools way better. Duh… The AI didn’t get smarter. I got clearer about what I actually wanted. And the suggestion improved because of it.