Here is a mystery.
We have two newsletters, one for educators that includes lesson plans, games, videos, presentations and other resources I send semi-regularly (defined as every two-weeks more or less around the school year). You can sign up for the educators newsletter here.
That’s not the mysterious part. We also have a second newsletter that is all about start-up life and 7 Generation Games. It could cover anything from technical debt to investors to AnnMaria is giving a Ted talk. These are people who are interested in our company, or start-ups in general, but either are not teachers or are in the classroom but also wanted to know the behind the scenes.
There are 363 people on that list. There is nowhere to sign up for the list.
(Well, until now.) Check this website. You will find sign-ups for the educators list, game updates, professional development but nothing for the 7 Generation Games newsletter that is start-up news, until today. So, how did these people get on it?
I have no idea, but someone has been emailing them monthly for years. As they unsubscribe or the email becomes invalid, their email is deleted, so at one point, there were nearly five hundred people. Some names I recognize, as friends, investors, backers of one of our Kickstarter campaigns, but the rest draw a complete blank as to why they are interested in us or vice-versa.
People who managed our newsletters have come and gone. Then, for reasons you would know if you were on our newsletter list, we didn’t send one out for several months. When we restarted it, I sent the same newsletter as our LinkedIn newsletter, The Learning Game , and I wrote a Google apps script to send it, so it was minimal extra effort. I thought it was perhaps redundant, but when I mentioned that to a close friend, she said,
“I like getting your newsletter in my email because I’m rarely on social media.”
I asked her how she ended up on our newsletter list in the first place, and she didn’t know. She’s not alone. I run into people at conferences who say, “Oh, I read you were going to be here in your newsletter.” They seem very nice people but I don’t know how I know them.
So…. if you want to get the inside scoop on running a start-up, the good, the bad and a side of snark … what the heck …