Pretty soon, many of you will get an email from me. It’ll probably surprise you.
See, when I sketched out the original 4-Hour Workweek site in 2006 (sorely in need of a redesign), I included an email capture field, as that’s what friends said I should do:
Then I promptly forgot all about it. I hated email, so I didn’t want to send you email. Simple as that. Do unto others, right?
But things have changed.
Now, with Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and hundreds of clones, the Internet and mobile are a battlefield of noise. Even if you “like” my Facebook fan page, my updates will rarely reach more than 10% of you.
For years now, thousands of you have complained that Feedburner delivers time-sensitive blog posts days or WEEKS too late. This means missed giveaways, meetups, competitions, Q&As, parties, and all sorts of fun stuff.
Needless to say, this sucks.
So I reluctantly decided to re-examine email. In a world where people change email addresses less often than physical addresses, it just made sense.
My first step was to dust off the keyboard and log into AWeber, which I’d decided was best for me eight years prior. What I found shocked me. I had nearly 300,000 email addresses from sign-ups! Holy negligence, Batman!
Ah, well. Yet another reason for my friends to make fun of me. Enjoy, Kevin Rose.
But better late than never. Within the next 10 days, I will start emailing new blog posts to anyone who’s signed up (on the homepage or the newer blog form), generally around one post per week. Plus, you’ll get VIP treatment, like private Q&As, exclusive content, giveaways, and other things that don’t appear on the blog.
Here’s the deal:
– If you haven’t signed up yet (or you’re not sure), please do so now. Here’s the link. No spam, ever. Just good stuff.
If you sign up now, your first email will also include a link to a free download of the entire 4-Hour Chef audiobook, which includes narration by yours truly and Neil Gaiman (!). And to kick things off, I’ll be doing a 2-3-hour Q&A — for email subscribers only — next Monday night, 8/11. Ask me anything: business, personal, “inappropriate,” whatever. Nothing is off limits. Sign up here to get the details via email. A recording will be made available to email subscribers who can’t make the live session.
I’ll also be giving away a round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world. For details, you guessed it, you need to click here.
– If you’ve already signed up, you’re all set! Please keep an eye out for a welcome email from “Tim Ferriss” within the next 10 days.
It’s not spam. It’s from me. Following that, blog posts and VIP goodies will show up, roughly once per week.
If you’re using Gmail and my email ends up in your “Promotions” folder, please do me a favor and drag it to your “Primary” so it doesn’t get lost in all the OKCupid notifications and whatnot.
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And please realize — I and my assistant get about 1,000 email a day. It’s funking unreal, and it’s brutal. No one is more sensitive to email abuse than I am, so I will NOT abuse your inbox.
If you get annoyed, you can one-click unsubscribe. Easy peasy and no BS.
Things will be intermittent (usually once a week, sometimes twice), and posts will be high-quality (like this or this).
As mentioned, I’ll be doing a 2-3-hour Q&A next week to kick things off, and also giving away a roundtrip ticket anywhere in the world. For details on both, just add your email here.
If you have any questions about all this, please ask in the comments! I’ll be paying close attention and answering as many as I can. I’ve literally put off email for years, but enough is enough. It’s the right thing to do.
And thank you for reading. Whatever this blog has become, I owe it all to you.
Pura vida,
Tim
