Jason Feifer

speaker

848 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 12 Jun

Jason Feifer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon · 17 Jan 2025 podcast

And that was pretty good. They were offering a lot of money. So I said, yes. And then I said, oh, you should talk to my friend, Nicole. I bet she would like your money too. And so that's how that happened. So I took this deal and I rebranded my newsletters, Built for Tomorrow, and I started getting paid by Facebook. And a couple of really interesting things happened. Number one was...

The way to grow on Facebook at that time was to write a newsletter that could be promoted inside of Facebook News, which barely exists anymore if it does at all. But back then, Facebook's attempt at being something of a news aggregator. And so they would surface your newsletters inside Facebook News. So that created this incentive to write newsletters that would show up in Facebook News.

which were very different from the kinds of newsletters that were really good to readers as they showed up in inboxes, right? Like I had a different audience in mind. I was writing differently. And so my newsletter would grow only when it showed up in Facebook news.

And when Facebook eventually killed that product and I was out in the cold with nothing but my money jacket from Mark Zuckerberg, I started to think, what works about this newsletter? And I realized that the only time in which I got any feedback or I heard from audiences or I saw any growth in this newsletter was when it showed up in Facebook News. Otherwise, nothing was happening.

And the reason I tell you this story, the reason I think this is relevant to you, even if you don't get a bunch of zuck bucks, is because you have to have the right incentives in order to build something for your audience. So you need to be out there in the cold. You need to be able to see and feel what people respond to and what they don't respond to.

You need to live or die by whether or not people really genuinely like and care about and want to read and share the thing that you make. And if you are not seeing that, no amount of... like paid growth or partnerships or whatever can get you to escape the death spiral that that will be. So I really liked actually getting kicked out of this Facebook thing and having to figure it out on my own.

And what I realized was I was not being something that people were excited about. and the newsletter was not growing organically by itself. And I stepped back and I thought about why. And I thought, if I subscribed to this newsletter, I would not know what in the hell it was. Just like day in, day out, this newsletter shows up. I don't know what this is. I don't know why I'm getting it.

I believe, Morgan, we do a good job of this on the podcast that we make, but I don't know how explicitly we ever think about this. So here's a formula for media that that you inherently know, but that you need to apply to your newsletter and that everyone should apply to everything that they make.

The formula for media, whether you are just thinking about this for your own Instagram channel or a newsletter that you make or anything, the formula for media is the right combination of predictability and surprise. That's it. So predictability, it has to reliably deliver upon something that people want and they know how it adds value to their lives. Surprise.

They don't know what you're going to say next. If you get that balance wrong, if you are too predictable and therefore too boring, or if you're too surprising and it's just like every week a newsletter shows up and it's like, what is this? Why are you writing about that now? That's bad. People will tune out. I needed to figure out what can I do that really lives in that.

I need to establish a promise. I need to pay off on that promise reliably, but I need to do it differently and surprisingly each time. That is what took me away from the old formula and forced me to come up with something that would actually resonate.

Exactly what I had in front of me. Okay, perfect. This is why we work well together. Okay, yes. So that's exactly correct. Let me just read this to you. And for context, my newsletter, for those who haven't read it, my newsletter is about a thousand words. And it's usually broken up into three or four sections.

Sections are just, you know, it's like a big header that makes it a little easier for you to feel like you know where you are in the newsletter. And so this is the beginning. This is what I think of as the opener for a newsletter that I just published. The headline was How to Prevent Miscommunications. And here's how it starts. You're being misunderstood today.

You shared a great idea or made something wonderful or told someone something and they are confused, unimpressed, maybe even annoyed. Now you're upset. Why don't they just understand? But here's the problem. You started in the wrong place. I fall victim to this all the time, including here in this newsletter.

So today I'll share some of my own stumbles and a powerful two-step exercise that will make your intentions and ideas clearer so everyone understands you. So that's the opening. And then it goes on, the thing that you see underneath that is the first header for the first section, and the header says, first, my own mistakes, and then I tell a little story about how I screwed up.

So, okay, now we've established that. Questions?

Yeah. Okay. A couple of things. Number one, as a young writer, I loved stem winders. I loved the idea of like starting in some random place and building with some narrative and eventually getting to the point. I thought that was really fun. And as a consumer, I sometimes do enjoy that style if someone's really, really good at it.

The only person right now who I can think of that's really good at it is the host of this podcast called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s Colon the 2000s, which you must listen to. It's fantastic. And it always it takes for like it takes like 20 minutes to get to the point of the podcast. He's such a good storyteller that it works. But generally speaking.

It's a terrible, terrible way to open something. And the reason for that is because people are very busy. And especially if you are serving any kind of business audience, those people are really utility oriented. They want to know what they're going to get from this because they have very limited time and they have too much coming at them all at once.

And the only things that will survive are the ones that are clear in value. I have this concept that I wrote about in a previous newsletter, which I call the first question. The first question is the first question that anybody asks about anything. And that question is, is this for me or is this not for me? They're always asking that. I mean, think about it. You are asking that.

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