 how is everyone doing? Doing good? Yeah pretty good. Awesome. We're recording this on a Friday afternoon and it's well it's not that nice outside but you know it's just bringing a good energy to things I think. Friday's always do. Yeah that's awesome. Glad to be with you both and thanks to everyone for joining us for the very first session of our flex course on ghosts and creating your newsletter with ghost. Today's session is called what is ghost so we're keeping it real basic just to start things out here. You may have noticed in our marketing for this as well as you know just joining us today that we've done this flex course before. This isn't new to us it's not new to those about those who have been following us but there's actually there's a pretty solid reason why we wanted to do it again beyond the fact that we at Reclaim really love ghosts and we have lots of you know our age-old reasons for it but if you've been kind of paying attention to the latest and greatest on the web you may kind of have an inkling as to why it's particularly relevant now and so we'll talk through some of that kind of why some of the juicy gossip around why we might want to be talking about this again. The hot infrastructure goss. And then a little bit about how we use it at Reclaim and then how we think you might be able to use it you know yourself if you are interested in either starting a newsletter or switching up your newsletter platform so with that I'm gonna take it over to Taylor. Yeah so I mean the really relevant thing that's been happening now since I don't know last I shouldn't say happening now but has been written a lot about now in the last few months is sort of substack and which is a is a pretty easy to use and starts at free newsletter platform so if you're unfamiliar it's it's a substack you can go there you can make a free newsletter and then they're paid stuff like if you want to have a paid newsletter where you have subscribers pay for it they take a chunk of that of course and then you can also do things like map a domain to substack and things like that but it is a proprietary platform so basically if you want to use the software that is substack it's a software as a service thing so you go to their website you pay them and you're you know using their tool on their platform by their rules and there's a lot of a lot of newsletters that are run on substack and there has been a lot of enthusiasm for that platform because I they did I think do a lot of things right when creating it in terms of maybe ease of use and the pricing I think model seems fair they did a lot of like appealing to independent journalists and the idea of like hey you know the ad market is crumbling and even when it wasn't wasn't necessarily the best thing for journalism or the internet or pre-internet journalism I guess and you know why don't you get paid for your work basically I think that's a great point about the strong beginnings of substack and I remember having you know at least a couple friends who were very proud when they moved over to substack and were like you know maybe they had content they were posting on Instagram and they were like I want to get away from Instagram I'm going to go to substack and that's kind that was their like their move to feel like they were more in control of their of their content and at the time that was like that was a pretty legitimate move for them well and in some ways they were right like one of the things it's funny like we talk about this a lot and sometimes we even talk about it directly with customers and I literally came from something where I was to this and like you know there there's nothing inherently wrong about a proprietary platform but there are trade-offs and risks and those trade-offs and risks are different than the ones that you have with an open platform and that's kind of what we're here to talk about in in some ways of like why we are basically always going to advocate that it's the smart move to go with open tools and so the thing with substack is there was a lot of controversy recently about Nazis on the platform and you know people posting harmful stuff basically on the platform and should that be allowed you know and all that stuff and I mean we're we're pretty reclaim we happen to have a pretty you know a policy that basically says like look we anything harmful we can and will remove from our our services and you're welcome to go host those things elsewhere and in some ways that conversation is a lot easier that policy is a lot easier for us to have because we're a coasting company that hosts open tools right so you can take your stuff and leave if you want to but that calculus is very different with a large social media platform or a large proprietary platform you can't take your Facebook profile and host it on somebody else's Facebook like no only Facebook is Facebook right and same thing with substack right so only substack is substack now they've made some promises about allowing folks to like export their list of subscribers and things like that and again kudos to them that's a really great move and a customer centered move and frankly if they didn't allow that god I can't it seems like a horrible idea to do business with them but but that's great um but you know a lot of the controversy about who's on the platform and you know uh their stance was hey well we're we're substack we we have to allow everyone to have a voice no matter how harmful that voice may be um not one I agree with not one a lot of people agree with um one thing I also am thinking about is uh that they one of the benefits of substack as I saw it was that there was a sort of network effect of your on substack your content will be recommended alongside other popular newsletters or alongside relevant or similar newsletter substack has features to make that happen and people saying I don't want to be I don't want to be listed alongside yeah yeah that what are you doing uh and substack going well you know we want to give everyone a platform that we actually we did a whole stream about this a couple yeah we won't we won't go into it too too much more but it's a it's an inherent problem with that model right yeah it's an inherent problem with that model when you're the only game in town for your particular thing you are by default you have a a different you're gonna look at things differently basically is is what I'd say there um so uh a couple things if in case uh you want to read more about this in a couple different ways um I would highly recommend platformer which is actually a newsletter about like social media platforms tech platforms in general and um but they they were on substack and they left um to uh go to ghost um which is what we're going to talk about today I think this um this by or this uh subtitle kind of explains it all like we've seen this move before we won't stick around to watch it play it out and the we're not going to go through the whole article but you know they're basically look like we if we're on substack we have to play by their rules and that doesn't really make any sense basically um and so they they go into all of this it's a very good read I would highly recommend checking it out uh we've got the link on screen um and uh yeah it's a very well written well-informed article another one I would really recommend checking out is um Molly White's newsletter citation needed which is fantastic in general um but uh Molly also made the transition from substack to ghost and in Molly's case it's the self-hosted so like we're going to do in this newsletter uh version of ghost and this one's really interesting for a lot of the same reasons one of the things I like a lot about Molly's writing is the balance between sort of philosophy and the technical um and and kind of where those meet and what it means and being kind of direct about it so um it goes into sort of what's substacked is like why why make that move and some of them are things we talked about some of them are just general like having ownership some of them are not being um on a platform that's backed by you know a large uh in uh venture capital firm things like that but then Molly goes right into like the all right here's why and here's all of the technical steps that I did to get my stuff out of substack and what I needed to do to set that up and all these things it's it's very elaborate and um is kind of in my opinion in some ways even a somewhat technical cautionary tale of like you know does substack let you take your um your subscribers with you yes but uh getting a list of subscribers out of substack and doing anything with that is is can be a challenge so if you're starting a newsletter from scratch you may want to go with the open thing to begin with is what I would argue um and and what do we even mean by that I guess is probably the what what what's open about ghost so uh ghost is a open source um publishing tool um it's a it's for great for blogging and newsletters it is very specifically designed around especially nowadays newsletters in particular um ghost can be uh self-hosted and it also is available via the company uh ghost to be hosted through them this is very much like wordpress right the difference between wordpress.org the open source project and open and wordpress.com a hosting platform for that project um you can host it there you can host it with them you can of course host wordpress with us on say reclaims shared hosting or reclaim press um or you can host it with a different company same thing with ghost so you can host it with them their pricing starts pretty reasonable um it it is kind of limited like they're they're hosting only lets like one login unless you pay for their much more expensive plans um and so some people do go with this um but uh honestly there's definitely benefits of doing that you know if you're looking for like better well like they're the experts they're you're hosting the platform you're hosting your newsletter with the people who built the platform so yeah they built it a lot of the technical stuff we're going to do in session two you don't have to do right because um so for instance we're going to talk about how to set up mailgun to send mail and um one other thing you would have to do we're not going to touch on it because frankly we haven't done it ourselves um but uh you if you want to take payments for your newsletter you would set up stripe integration or an alternative and they have that all taken care of so if you want to have a newsletter that has paying subscribers you don't have to set up really anything other than your domain name for ghost so you get kind of the benefit of that like proprietary almost soft touch right where you don't have to get as in the weeds with everything but at the same time you can still move your stuff out the way you can with like a wordpress.com hosting account and you can you know it's very easy to move from that to a different hosting provider um or to a self-hosted option um so it's very much not like you know locking yourself into something but you still get the benefit of some more uh expert level uh support around it. Yeah and it's it's a crucial and I think important thing like I personally really love this business model right like they're um they're not the only contributors to ghosts but they are the major contributors is is and and they sell hosting for it and that's great and then that lets you know um companies like us who specialize in other markets right maybe smaller um sites educationally focused things uh working with technologists who are also working with with like faculty and students um it it it enables a lot so I'm a big fan of this type of of tool in a way we can kind of turn um the platformer line on its head and say we have seen we've watched this movie play out and we do like it it's a good movie yeah yes exactly um so that that's I think that the fundamental difference here right is hey you're using a tool that you're not locked to a single company and this is one of those things I always say like if you're watching this you've probably heard of reclaim hosting maybe you like some of the work we do I hope you do I think we're a good company to work with um but you shouldn't take our word for it like like you should own the tools that are most important to you right and if you're writing a newsletter um and maybe even making money on that newsletter you have to think steps ahead here what would I do if you know ghosts pricing changed drastically for their for their hosting product what would I do well I would just host it someplace else it's a pretty easy question in that case so that's why we think this stuff is good and to use and is empowering um so that that's what ghost is on a on like a high level um and you know if you've used a content management system like wordpress it's going to look familiar in some ways to go so you know we'll we'll go into like how to use ghost um but um and and like the back end stuff but maybe we want to talk about like how we use it here at reclaim a little bit yeah um and Amanda and I can sort of hop in on this because we're both uh on this sort of the same in different angles um Amanda you do more work with our announcements blog I do sort of more management level stuff for our monthly newsletter but reclaim runs uh two different ghost instances one is the roundup it comes up it comes out once a month on the last weekday of the month um and that's it uh and then there is also the blog and we'll get to that in a second but the blog is our sort of uh breaking news announcements um and the roundup is meant to be a collection of everything that's happened over the course of the month you don't have to tab back and forth Taylor I'm not going to make you do that uh but the the roundup is meant to be a collection of um there's all the announcements for the coming month so our uh new product launches our upcoming events this flex course in Taylor if you scroll down a little bit you'll see this flex course in the announcements for yeah there it is uh uh you'll see this this flex course in the announcements for the march roundup um we have uh any new support guides that come out in the month we'll do that uh our streams all the streams from the past month and then schedule of the upcoming streams blog posts that we've put out staff picks the roundup is meant to be like if you only see one thing from us this month make it this thing because it'll have everything um but the uh so that makes it good for uh sort of you know we put it out once a month that's a very sustainable schedule for us reclaim the blog like I said that's more breaking news uh type stuff yeah reclaim the blog is more has the opportunity to be more breaking news but it also um like you can see the top thing that we have here since you know as of today is um Noah our uh top security agent uh is had posted something about um our top security agent I'm sorry the game show is leaking into our other content now I love it um yes so Noah posted about reclaim uh reclaim security update something to do with you know our new policies around remote um my SQL and um so that is kind of like an easy way for important information like that to get out to all of our subscribers as many people as are on the list um but then we're also able to post about some fun things like um Marin posted you know just before that her OER 24 conference highlight so you can kind of see that um we have uh our case studies are published here case studies are like a quarterly thing that we do where we choose um you know one one topic from uh either something that we've done or something that a community member has done and we kind of just go through it and tell its story so that you know the rest of the community can see um what people are doing with us and also what we're we've been doing ourselves um and it's you know supposed to kind of be a narrative of how projects get to where they've been um but you can also see we've got um the mid month the mid month which is like a mini little bite size newsletter um where you can see kind of the most basic of basic announcements um and things to keep an eye out for that month as well as things that are coming up um so that's there it's just like it's a really a an opportunity for us to just chat more with um and and ping the community a little bit and um it's relatively new too we really only spun it up and I think it was February right January it was January it was December technically December but yeah things started to pick up more I think actually it's been pretty consistent I don't know either way it feels like it has been very short because um we've just been you know time has been flying with it I guess um and we really enjoy it and it's so easy for us to use and it is as you can see easy to be like really consistent with it and we love it so yeah and I mean like it's it's not like we've never had announcements like before right we we we did have a category on our main website for announcements but this is kind of taking that place and because it's a dedicated space it allows us to integrate the email part of it right like this is we were thinking about sort of for instance the mid month this is an email that's been around for a lot longer than this blog but at a certain point we're like what aren't these shouldn't these be in the same place and we can even show later on too like um ghost can actually have more than one newsletter list so you can have people subscribe to different things which is really cool and we can for instance for the mid month we have a different checkbox for those so basically you can go in here and actually let me just uh log in I think I have a um I think I have a like on my personal email and account here yeah not going to show the email part but um yeah so I'm now signed in with my personal account and if I click on the little account thing here I can go in here and the you know someone can just go in and manage their their subscription so I can get I can say oh you know what I only want mid month emails or um I only want these right so this is this is a really nice kind of tool that we just sort of get for free by using ghost um and I'm now realizing that I even did a blog post specifically about that because I have been a feature because one of the other reasons that we started doing this series is because ghost has added a lot of features since the last time we did it but yes right Amanda I interrupted you no I was just gonna say this is the great feature definitely knew about it before right now and um it reminds me that we should go in and make sure that all of our other types or categories of posts are probably marked so so that if folks want to subscribe to only security updates for example they'd be able to do that yeah yeah we definitely could break it out further we could have sort of like you know right now we conceived of this as just one thing and then we added mid month to it but now that we've done that it may make sense to reevaluate this and go like let's put a security one let's do a general announcements and a mid month right maybe that's as far as we go for now but um that it's super nice and this is this whole unsubscribe workflow is actually kind of crucial right like so could could you do something like this in WordPress with plugins yes there are plugins for WordPress that will let you do a newsletter so it's not like ghost is the only game in town but the great thing is ghost is very much designed for a newsletter so this stuff is just how ghost works uh we'll in the last episode of the series we'll actually go through the ghost backend and like set up a newsletter and stuff like that um but it's it's not very many clicks it's not very many steps and most of these things are just kind of taking care of for you which is really nice um and uh and on top of that the the way that ghost is to use to write is is nice too so the actual editor is I mean there's not a lot to say about it I think it's somewhat similar to the WordPress block editor actually uh it's it it is missing some features from the WordPress block editor but there's also some things that it does really well like I like that ghost has a specific focus on the images where it will say like put a caption and alt text and that's all right in line which I really like substantially easier to put alt text on an image in ghost than it is at least in my experience in WordPress in WordPress you have to go into the media library or you have to figure out how to open the media library pop-up or something like that in ghost it is in the editor uh you can't see it right here but like if you just look at that picture that's up front and center in the editor there would be a little space underneath it that says like put your caption here and if you don't then it's empty and then there's a little button next to it that says alt and if you click that it flips over to an identical space where you can put alt text yeah and and you know it's not like it's um terrible to do alt text in WordPress but it's a little bit hidden you have to you the process in WordPress is you have to say I want to put alt text on this image where do I do that and you can probably figure it out pretty quickly once you've once you've done that right once you've had that process in ghost it's a little bit more in your face it's kind of like mastodon when you post a mastodon there's like an alt text thing right there and you can even set a preference in mastodon that says alert me if I forget to put an alt text on an image and those types of like accessibility minded features are awesome and is the kind of icing that ghost likes to put on its open source cake you know like it is I think opinionated about its design in in usually really good ways so but also when you do when you write your post you know of course it's set it can send them out as new email newsletters and they look great they're very very rarely is there a large difference between I'm sure I can't say there's never a difference I I'm sure even we have run into an issue where something looked a little bit different in email format but um basically you can write your blog post hit the preview button and and be assured that your email is going to look the same which is really nice especially when we were using a different service for mid month that you know is affiliated with a primate and sometimes that those wouldn't look great when I would go to send them out and it would kind of be like a surprise yeah which is fascinating because that tool only does email yes I don't know maybe I just wasn't good at it but it um I would be sending multiple test emails to make sure that things looked okay before actually hitting go and I've never had to send a test email for this yeah perhaps I should be but I never do on our blog so no I mean there's so much I think what the beauty of it for me is is that it's so much simpler like there's not so many like oh you got to like toggle this thing over here and format this with this particular button lock thing um you have some some formatting options and ghosts but it's really just like it keeps it simple for you and there's not a lot of ways that it can mess it up um or that you can mess it up in terms of design and formatting so it I think that's part of what makes it translate to email so well yeah and then on top of that you're using a good blogging platform for your newsletter which is I think something people should do right I personally would not suggest you use an email only tool for your newsletter unless you have a I guess completely subscriber only newsletter even then though having folks have the ability to log in and see your newsletter in web page format is a really good thing right if you have to issue a correction or something or update something you can just do it right you don't have to send out a second email necessarily unless it warrants it you know unless you want to um it also means people can find stuff and link to stuff later right so this was this was a thing that was always not great about the way we did the mid-month emails was like well that went out to people but you don't really have a great way of referencing it later whereas now we can just easily go to our blog and and find the last mid-month email um and actually even we could use categories I'm realizing right now that we I do have these categorized but we could even put in the menu here mid-month emails and it would show you a list of them right yeah cards on the table um I don't know how to work the tool that we used to use for mid-month so I never added myself to the mailing list so I never got the mid-month emails uh and I can't go back and find them now because there is no archive well it was also really hard to add people to the lists with the way that they were I mean you had like sets of limited you know you were limited with your audience size and people would ask me on the team like hey can you add me to the list and I'm like I don't really know how um so it was just it's and again here self-service ridiculously easy to add people self-service or if you have like an import that you need to bring in ghost is very good yeah we'll we'll show the back end way of this in a future episode but the the good story here for most people is we can just now point them to and say like hey go to the blog dot reclaim hosting dot com hit the subscribe button it's gonna ask you for your name and email that's it like it's very simple um it's all integrated and then people can also opt out if they don't want them they can also just go here and opt out or do it if there's I think an unsubscribe link in the email but that's really crucial like I mean I you know I am an rss fiend so I don't actually want your newsletters in my inbox typically from from other folks I would prefer to receive them in my newsreader right um and so because this is a website I can do both you know you can people can choose how they want to receive that information which is really great yeah so I I think I mean you now that we've kind of talked about a couple things we've we've kind of covered like what is ghost why we think it's important to use an open tool for newsletter stuff and you know owning your audience owning not your audience owning owning the list of your emails that is your audience and owning the platform that's that's um that you're using with that and um next time we're gonna talk a little bit about you know the technicals of getting all this stuff set up and the time after that we'll talk about how to use ghost before we even get there say you're falling along at home um you do need to think about sort of what your newsletter is gonna look like what so what what where do we start there yeah um I can uh sort of take point on that um but basically this is something that we talked about a little bit in our last ghost flex course as well but it's something that I want to revisit and think about in part because we've talked about reclaim the blog has a different focus and point than the roundup and it didn't exist last time and so now we have sort of a good example of two very different things that use the same platform to achieve related but not the same goal um and uh basically uh this is sort of stepping away from ghost as a platform and thinking more about what it is to start and to run a newsletter um and some of this we'll get into in uh one of the later sessions um but as Taylor said if you're following along at home uh maybe you've gotten this far and you've gone well this all sounds awesome but what do I what why would I would what would I do with it I know why I would use it but I I don't know what I would do um and so that's sort of where this theoretically comes in is thinking about what you want your newsletter to look like or to do um and I've got got links uh from before somewhere saved in google drive somewhere but essentially there's a lot of different types of newsletters and approaches the roundup is a collection or a collation um we talked about that is uh you're only going to hear from us once a month but it's going to have everything so it's going to be longer um it's going to be uh more varied um maybe we include a staff pick section because that's not our stuff that's a collection of things that we found on the internet that we think are cool I think the articles that you shared Taylor may have ended up in the January or February roundup I don't totally remember but that's our sort of way of saying hey we want to give you all of the reclaim news and then bring you a little bit of the larger internet um and I I'm thinking now of old school blogs having like here's a list here's a list of links to sites that I like um just on the sidebar nothing to do with what blogs I'm what I'm blogging about but here's a list of my recommendations um but that's uh we have the announcements um sorry I do have well I pulled up notes somewhere and now I look like a chump because I had to reference that I have the notes but one one thing that um we recommended last time that I would definitely recommend folks look at this time too is this post actually from ghost themselves oh yeah there it is that's the link called six types of newsletters you can start today yes thank you Taylor yes Taylor's correct that is uh the that's what I used to base my session on last time um but you can just see in the bar on the on the side there's reporting analysis curation artistic practical hybrid time sensitive um the time sensitive one is actually interesting because it's not announcements uh the way that we do it it's the idea of this is something that documents a particular occasion or a particular period in time this newsletter will only run for uh three months while something is happening because that's only expected to last three months um but the roundup is a curation style newsletter uh reporting seems pretty self-explanatory um thinking about what it is that you want to be sharing and bringing to people is sort of the key and we are using our announcements and resources as examples but there's also like you can have a recipe newsletter which I think is in this page somewhere as an example you put out a recipe once a week once a month something like that something that you want to share um there are there's a newsletter on Substack that's going to end up in staff picks for the month of April uh that is called Dracula Daily uh which is just the book Dracula is written in an epistolary format every entry is a letter or a journal uh or a newspaper article they all have dates on them and uh the novel takes place between early May and early November I guess and so Dracula Daily comes out every year and they just put out whatever is dated for that day so you experience it in that format for like six months which is so it's a little bit you could say that's a little bit artistic but uh time-sensitive right the novelty of that one is the time component and and I think really what what you'll find reading this and and also like a commonality between that and pilot's advice here is that having a recognizable format even if it's not like you're literally spelling it out to your readers but it should be evident by the content by what you're writing right um what your format is right it's literally for the roundup it's curation you can tell it's called the roundup comes out once a month and the whole format is this is all the stuff we've been doing and even when it was brand new we're always saying like we do the roundup mostly for ourselves so we can be like oh cool we did do all this this month and like that was really helpful for us but also we hope for other people too um and that that's a contrast to um or that that's a way to make sure that your newsletter is compelling in or or at least is something that people will understand like people aren't going to sign up to subscribe for something to show up in their email inbox if they don't understand what it is right um like a great you know counter example to this could be something like my own blog which is like has no format no regular schedule is sometimes like hear my notes on this weird command line tool and sometimes we're like here's my thought about fatherhood right it's just like there's nothing in common but frankly that's it's it's not a newsletter i'm writing there for me really you know so that and that that's that for me is fun but it is not going to lend itself to something that someone will be like yeah i do want one of these in my inbox every month right because people don't know what they're signing up for and that's fundamentally what they want to know yeah yeah that's that's a very good point thinking about consistency of topic and consistency of form it is how people can look at your newsletter and say oh yeah no i understand what this is and i know that it's what i want and i'm going to sign up right now um as opposed people scrolling through and going i don't really under what is no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna try and figure it out i'm gonna just go find a newsletter that i i will just understand um and especially because people i i think people aren't looking for newsletters and then finding yours and subscribing they're finding your newsletter be from some method they know about you or your work or whatever um and then go oh this newsletter would be a great way to receive that right yeah exactly it's not like people it's not the same way as people say may watch netflix where they may like open the app and go what should i watch it's it's driven the other way around almost always with something like a newsletter um which is yeah which which makes that stuff more important another thing i wanted to kind of mention here just because i thought it was uh a cool blog post that you put out um was your workflow for like how you collect um for the curation for for the round up for our curation focused one um this little emoji hack right where you just put the uh particular emoji in slack and you know if someone's using slack with a team and writing a newsletter maybe they could do this but i think maybe the what's i think most useful here is the thought process you had here pilot which is like this needs to be for a curation based newsletter something that's an ongoing process all month they can't be at the end of the month we all decide to sit down and try to remember what happened you know yeah i did that for a couple months um we don't do that there's probably a ton of work it wasn't great uh well it's it's it's the roundup is also grown um so the roundup used to be shorter uh so it used to be less work uh but either the roundup wouldn't have been able to grow without new workflows or if it had grown it would have been much more of a headache um and that also uh ties into something that i want talk about and we'll maybe come back to but is thinking about something that you can make sustainable for yourself um so there's this workflow blog post that taylor's sharing but thinking about something that you can put out sustainably so Dracula daily puts out things that are of varying length sometimes they're very close together and sometimes they're very spread out because they're using a public domain novel that already exists we put out blog posts on reclaim the blog we aim to do it once a week ish if there's something that has to go out right away it'll go out right away um but those posts are usually pretty short and anyone on the team can write them or be tapped for them uh we say oh no one's got something to say we can get that out um but it doesn't have to be on one person the roundup is really big uh it's four or five people every month um we collect stuff over the course of the month and then there's like a three-day period where we freeze any curation any collecting of links and we just write um and that makes it sound like we're in a three-day lockdown which we aren't but the point is that that's not something that we could do more than once a month oh yeah it wouldn't make any sense it wouldn't make any sense so we have a sustainable pace um for what we're making and for what we're telling people if you got the roundup more than once a month you'd be like well why do you have to send me 25 links every three days this is terrible um so you know so I think fundamentally our advice when you're thinking about newsletters you you need to think about formats you need to think about you know um time frame so how often is this coming out because having a regular time frame is going to be a huge benefit for you in getting people to follow along um and you need to think about your team and your process right is this a one person thing is this a team effort how are we going to split that team effort up our roundup sections work well for us now they you know they weren't actually created you know at one point pilot wrote literally I think pretty much literally every word in the roundup right but that's not as much the case anymore and so it's a little bit more natural for us to split these sections up and and have individual folks work on them so that really works for us too so it's not like you have to make all these decisions and never change them but you should start with some for sure I was just going to say that that works for us because I think the entire weekly team has kind of gotten the same inner monologue um and uh writing voice over the the time that we've all spent together we're getting it checked out it's we know it's weird it's kind of a high I feel like it all goes too smoothly and we all write different all of us writes a different section but it all sounds like one person wrote it that's that's that's the that's the sign that we're keeping it simple well and maybe there's something you know maybe maybe the tone setting right you the the first several roundups pilot wrote most of that sets a tone we were able to emulate that tone so that could be something too like if you are writing a really large newsletter and hoping to have your whole team do it maybe that means uh having style guide or or having a couple that establish a tone that you all can work from you know technically speaking I think we do have a style guide somewhere um but I also wrote it mostly for me uh because I went through and went what am I doing I know I'm doing something but I have to explain it to myself to understand it was also something that you had fun with and that translated to our readership but also to the rest of us and kind of working from that place of authenticity is I think what makes the roundup so successful and can make your newsletter successful too so bringing it back after you join us for the rest of the sessions here in this flex course thanks for joining us for this first one we hope that it got you excited for what's to come and we'll catch you in the next one yeah see you next week bye