How this newsletter came to be

One week ago from today, I did not yet know that I would be here writing this. Okay, so I did know that I needed to come up with a new way to build a connection with the Power Platform community members. Yet I did not have a detailed plan in place.

I’ve been running my personal blog, now called “Thinking Forward”, since 2008. Starting it has been the single most transformative event in my professional career. While it has taken a lot of time and energy, I’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is worth it.

Now, when I’ve decide to go solo and help the world through my own company, I wanted to redefine what “personal” means. If you’ve been following my earlier writings, you might have noticed that I’ve started to also write about things that are not about Microsoft, or even technology.

Last Wednesday, I sat down to create a quick landing page for Niiranen Advisory Oy, my private company. I did it pretty much in one go. Knowing that I only needed a single page rather than a comprehensive WordPress style website, I did it on Carrd. The platform I had used for simple landing pages before - and also for delivering digital gift cards to family members during Xmas and birthdays.🎂

Why did I then choose this newsletter platform right here, beehiiv? Simple: it was one of the built-in options within Carrd. That’s not the whole truth, though. Back when Elon Musk killed bought Twitter in late 2022, he also decided to shut down the Revue newsletter service owned by it. Having relied on Revue as the platform for the newsletter I was running at my previous company, I had to quickly explore alternatives.

While I did not choose this as the platform back then, I had done a quick trial. I still had my notes to analyze the validity of some 20+ newsletter service candidates. Beehiiv had a “maybe” in my OneNote, and no red flags. After a quick check with ChatGPT Plus (“please compare X with Y and recommend what would suit my needs best”) it was easy to keep on moving and creating.

Start fast by building on what (and who) you know

I’m as guilty as anyone on spending a lot of time researching and analyzing the perfect tools and practices before feeling ready to actually commit to them. Procrastination + perfectionism = a life of endless ToDo lists. I’ll never be a “screw it, let’s do it” type of a person - and that is fine. This is me.

Now, the secret formula on how a person like me can move fast is this: use your earlier work and strive to build on top of it. There’s a lot packed behind this idea, which I might dive into a bit later on. The key part is in not letting your earlier preparation and investigation work go to waste. While you are procrastinating and spending time on research, make sure that it leaves a mental mark that you can access later on.

It applies to knowledge management as well as tools. Yet the single biggest area is human connections. Whenever we do something that others A) are aware of and B) creates an emotional response, it leaves a mental mark. The networks that we build with synapses within our brain are not all that different from the networks of life that make up the world outside.

On Tuesday, March 4th, 2024, I posted my announcement of going solo on LinkedIn. I had no time to craft an extensive blog post about it, but I knew that it was better to get it off my chest. There will be time later on.

I had made an agreement with myself that if I get 50 subscribers for the email newsletter that I referenced in the social post, I would write my first post here. In the end, it took 16 hours from the time of my announcement to see subscriber nr. 50 on the beehiiv admin portal.

So here we are now.😊

What to expect from this newsletter

I mentioned that I’d like to make my existing personal blog more personal. This means that my current idea is to use the new professional newsletter as the place where the technology and business topics would be front & center. Microsoft cloud and the many elements of Power Platform will probably be where I spend most of my keystrokes. Having said that, the world around this ecosystem does also interest me.

Another difference that I hope to achieve via this new format and platform is a change in the way how I make my thoughts visible to the world. In the Thinking Forward blog, many of my posts have been very, very long. It has often startled me when I’ve shared the post link and the LinkedIn preview has told me “estimated reading time: 18 minutes”. OMG! Ain’t nobody got time for that!😅

In the past couple of years, I’ve started to use LinkedIn posts as the native platform for typing my text into. The great part has been that it usually took me no more than 30 minutes to write the post. Another great benefit is: there is a strict limit on how many characters will fit into the social feed post.

It’s been great in terms of engagement - but it’s not exactly what I’d like it to be. I hate the fact that LinkedIn ends up owning my words and offering me very crude / almost no tools to reference old content I’ve posted. I’d like to be more in charge of my own thoughts.

My idea is that I would change the workflow a bit. I want to be able to do shorter observations on Power Platform and low-code topics, without having to spend hours on crafting the perfect blog post. Again, no one is forcing me to uphold the existing format on my personal blog - but mentally it is a different place. I do things in a completely different way between a LI post and a blog post.

Taking ownership of our own tools is a big part of the magic behind low-code and citizen development. I believe the same applies to tools for thinking and communication. This newsletter is my latest experiment in proving to myself that I am right.😁