Hey friends - this week brings a new upload + performance review, and a preview of a new style of video forthcoming.

And yes, despite the sharp self-criticism of the last few editions, I do actually talk about joy in this one.

Note: this is a subset of the Thought Liters newsletter where I try and open up the back end of this journey to building a content business. Let me know if you like this style.

This week, my guest was Priscilla Prem, founder and CEO of Pittsburgh Coastal Energy. She’s got a super cool solution to harness wave energy and generate power subsea — enough to win this year’s SXSW Pitch Competition, over every other student startup in the US. We did a proper show and tell of the product as we went in-depth on the problem.

Here are the quick analytics following launch yesterday afternoon:

Here’s how it compares to other recent uploads:

This was the first video with the new style from the jump — see bringing up brand-y for more detail on that — and CTR stayed level, which means I got more brand-consistent without losing interest. Good. Also, happily, the AVD is on the higher side for me. The longer I can get people to watch, the more I figure the videos will spread.

Overall, this is in line with expectations for one day of being live. We’ll see how it lasts.

Let’s talk for a second about joy.

If you listen to any creator economy content for long enough, you’ll begin to hear something common from large creators: that the reward they got from creating was in the process. Journey, not destination — and you won’t get far if you genuinely don’t enjoy the journey. Most entry-level creators get it backwards, tying everything to end-metric success and getting discouraged when it doesn’t happen. That’s been happening to me a lot recently, as you’ll have picked up from the last few notes (especially the anatomy of a flop; I was just pissed).

So, this week, I decided to blow up how I normally put Thought Liters together, and try something brand new to see if I could find the joy again.

On Tuesday, I filmed with Headstrait Labs, which is building the world’s smartest neck brace.

Rather than do a sit-down pod over a flight, I did a few things differently with cofounders Mary Squire and Alyssa Theroux:

It felt like a lot of heavy lifting for one video — I had planning calls, late-night writing sessions, and generally put in way more hours than I had for any other episode.

But man…I had a lot of fun.

For a day, I forgot about everything except making the thing. I never once thought about numbers. I didn’t worry about particular moments. I didn’t fret over meticulously-crafted questions. Maybe it was due to the planning, but I just let go and tried to enjoy the process of telling a good story.

Time will tell if I actually accomplish that — I still need to edit it, after all. And: producing in this fashion is an order of magnitude more expensive, which means there’s a limit to which this is practical or realistic. But I have to admit, I got more joy out of run-and-gun vlog-style Thought Liters than I have out of any studio shoot. (Sorry everybody else.) Hopefully, once it drops, you’ll enjoy it too.

More to come there — but I did want to mention it here as documentation that sometimes, the process is the reward.

The number one thing you can do to help me and the show is to watch, like, and comment on the show on YouTube. If you scrolled all the way to bottom of this thing first, that’s the tl;dr. Consider subscribing as well.

If there are specific aspects of the content creation or business side you wished more small creators talked about, let me know and I’ll try and layer it in to future newsletters.

I read everything, and respond to everything.

Cheers.

Adam