Creativerly's anniversary is in January, however I felt like writing and publishing this post now, as we are nearing the end of 2024, and I usually use that time to wind down a bit and reflect on the past months, my work, projects, any events I attended, places I have been, and so on.

It is still remarkable to me how Creativerly has continuously been a passion project of mine for over five years. I know that kind of sounds like that I don't think I would have been capable of doing that (so, I surprised myself in actually maintaining it that long), but since I was surrounded by people who started working on side-projects just to abandon them shortly after and heading to the next thing, I do was surprised since Creativerly simply worked. By that, I mean it worked for me. I did not start Creativerly with the goal to create an income stream on the side. Sure, at a certain stage, I started exploring ways of monetizing my writing, to keep Creativerly a sustainable project. As it grew over time, so did the running costs.

I am thankful for some lovely folks I had the honor to partner up with, as they sponsored some Creativerly newsletter issues. Among them, Clay, mymind, Discourse, ahrefs, Walling, Sunsama, Sukha, and others. Thanks to them, Creativerly is a sustainable passion project.

However, my main intention was to build up a writing habit. I adored the idea of having an online space where I can share my musings about apps, software, and the fields of design and tech. Writing is without a doubt the most valuable skill I have been strengthening throughout the years.

On Writing

There is no doubt that starting to write Creativerly, building and maintaining it over the years, and ultimately turning it into what it is today was one of the best decisions I have made for my personal and professional life. Creating a writing habit has helped me to develop writing as a skill. As I am performing daily journaling, this has an incredible effect on getting my ideas and thoughts out of my. Writing helps me tackle any problems and solve them, structure and plan my projects, communicate my ideas, and it also led to loads of connections, and it even helped me land a job in the field of design and tech.

I encourage everyone to start writing, as it only has positive effects, no matter what you are doing or working on. Writing makes you a better thinker, a better designer, a better leader, whatsoever. It is this single skill that can make a huge difference. You do not have to immediately start writing online (although I encourage everyone to set up a personal blog too), but journaling and reflecting on the things you read, see, listen to, or experience is a magical thing to do.

Writing forces you to organize your thoughts systemically. When you are writing often, you are thinking often. Systematical thinking helps you understand complex ideas more deeply. Since when you are writing you have to articulate concepts logically, even when you are writing just for yourself, you improve critical thinking, which is another skill that is so incredible valuable for all sorts of things.

If you ask me, writing is a meta-skill that amplifies your ability to think, communicate, and success across personal and professional spheres, and therefore, I do believe that starting Creativerly over five years ago, was without a doubt one of the best decisions I have made.

On Monetisation

Although I am accepting sponsors for Creativerly, I am not forcing myself to sell those sponsor spots for every single newsletter issue. There was a time, a three months to be precise, in which I wrote a lot of cold emails to different companies of which I thought that they would be a good fit for the Creativerly audience. Either because I was using the apps developed by those companies, or because I used them in the past and would still recommend them.

Some of those cold emails actually worked and the companies I messaged became sponsors for Creativerly. Once I stopped sending out those emails regularly, it was hard to sell out all the available sponsor spots. Some companies did return for a couple more spots, and some other companies converted through word-of-mouth, but there were simply too many newsletters in the realm of Creativerly that were much bigger and therefore more interesting for those companies. Writing those emails consistently took a lot of time. In case you are asking yourself why, well, to me it was important to write personalized emails rather than reusing a specific template over and over again. I wanted to create meaningful connections and partnerships by connecting with those companies, rather than just selling them something.

At that point, it felt like the work on Creativerly was taking over, in terms of, there was not that much free time to work on other projects, since writing, curating, maintaining, and growing Creativerly took most of it. Although I love working on Creativerly, I wanted to keep it lean. There are too many other things I love to work on to rather only focus on a single project.

So, I wanted to find another way to monetise Creativerly, without investing too much of my time contacting folks to sponsor the newsletter. Therefore, I decided to add affiliate links to my writings. Now, there are a bunch of downsides of that, as the income from them is unpredictable, some of them pay higher commissions and other pay lower ones, and just because an app offers an affiliate program does not mean they will keep it running forever, which means you can not fully rely on it as an income source, since they can always shut it down. I still decided to implement affiliate links in Creativerly, both in the newsletter and my posts, however, again I am not forcing myself, which means I do not plan my content around them. Whenever I write a post and mention a tool and I then suddenly remember that I am an affiliate for that tool, I add the link. But I am not on the hunt for apps that have an affiliate program and only then write about them.

While affiliate links sometimes get bad reputation, in Creativerly's case I can fully curate those affiliate links, which means I am not linking to everything just make some money. When there is an app I can recommend, I check if it has an affiliate program, and if so I apply to it, so I can use the affiliate link whenever I mention it again.

The perfect example for this is Horse Browser*. I stumbled across it and got intrigued. I bought, and tested it thoroughly. Since I loved the experience so much, I decided to write a deep dive about it. At that point, I checked if Horse Browser has an affiliate program, and well, yes it does, so I applied to it, got accepted, and used the affiliate link for an app I highly recommend and am using myself. Although the income I generate through those affiliate links is irregular, and quite lower compared to the sponsor spots, it still helps a lot keeping Creativerly sustainable.

On Growth

Creativerly's newsletter subscribers have been stagnating for quite some time. Whenever I gain a couple more subscribers since one of my posts got shared somewhere, I usually have lost a similar amount before that. And to be honest, I get that. I would not say that I have newsletter fatigue, but with all the content that gets published every single day, I did some serious housekeeping when it comes to my newsletter subscriptions. So, it is just fair that others do that too. At the same time, I have contributed to the stagnating subscriber numbers of Creativerly myself, since every single newsletter issue is also available immediately as a post online after sending it out to the subscribers, folks can simply follow the website via RSS and read the newsletter on their own timeline, in a more focused space rather than their email inboxes.

But again, that is completely fine, since as Creativerly's newsletter subscribers have been stagnating, the traffic to the website has been consistently increasing over the years. In the end, this is what matters most to me, that people get to see and read whatever I am writing, since I simply want to provide value through my words. It does not matter whether people doing that as a newsletter subscriber or a regular visitor of the website.

Besides that, I haven't really done any serious marketing over the years. When I started writing Creativerly, I regularly did cross-promotions with other newsletters. Sometimes, this worked really good, but sometimes it hardly worked at all, since it seems like other newsletter creators were not that honest about their newsletter stats.

On the Future

Although I had some plans for Creativerly in the past, I no longer do that actively. Whenever there is a specific idea I would like to explore, I simply do that, but I am not sitting down and thinking about the next steps I should take. I really enjoy my work for Creativerly as it is right now, so there is no need to change that. It is a lean project, I get to do what I love, and it is the icing on the cake to see that other folks enjoy reading what I write. I could not be any more thankful for that.

The only thing I am sure about when it comes to Creativerly's future is that it will go nowhere and stay where it is, I will keep publishing the newsletter, writing the deep dives, and sharing my notes and thoughts about apps, and the fields of design and tech. And if you will be here in the future too, reading my musings, I deeply appreciate it.

Thank you for everything.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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