Write2Lead Report #1: The First Six Months of Building in Public
What I’ve learned — and unlearned — in six months of writing, experimenting, and building a creative project from the ground up.
This week, I’m trying something new — a format I’ve been considering for a while and that a few readers have encouraged me to explore.
Each month, I’ll publish a behind-the-scenes report on what I’m learning as I build this project — the decisions, mistakes, and small breakthroughs that make the process worthwhile. My hope is that these notes help me see the path more clearly and offer something useful to those walking their own.
The report is divided into three core areas:
Writing
Growth
Monetization
Each section covers what I’ve been experimenting with and what’s working (or not). This first edition spans the past six months, so it’s a bit longer than future ones will be. If you’re short on time, feel free to jump to the parts you’re most curious about.
Since this is the first issue, a bit of context before we dive in.
Context
I launched Write2Lead as a side project on April 24. At first, I published my essays inside a private community on Circle. I liked the idea of creating a small, intimate space where readers could engage with the work directly.
But I quickly realized that asking people to join a separate platform just to read was too much friction. So on May 19, I moved everything to Substack, where essays could land directly in readers’ inboxes. Six months in, that decision still feels right — even if I’ve started to notice a few limitations with Substack (which I’ll share in the Growth section).
The last six months also made something else clear: this project was becoming more than a side experiment. It was starting to feel like real work — the kind I wanted to give my full attention to.
So in September, I made a big — and slightly terrifying — decision: I resigned from my role as CMO of a fast-growing company to focus full-time on Write2Lead. It’s a shift that opens more space for writing and building, but it also brings a new challenge — figuring out how to sustain both myself and the project financially. I’ll share more about that in the Monetization section.
Right now, I’m in a transition period that will likely last through the end of 2025, so my attention is still split. But I made one non-negotiable promise to myself: to publish one essay every week, no matter what.
By 2026, I’ll finally have the space to go deeper — refining my creative process, exploring alternative ways to grow, and seeing how far this project can really go.
Writing
When I started writing, I had a lot of questions on my mind:
Why am I writing?
Who am I writing for?
What topics should I cover?
How do I find my voice and style?
How often should I publish?
What’s the right structure for my essays?
Can I make my writing financially sustainable?
Six months in, my biggest realization is this: the act of writing itself is what brings the most clarity to these questions.
Sure, I had tentative answers when I began, but they turned out to be more like seeds than fixed directions — ideas that grew and changed through the process of writing.
Here are a few of the insights that have taken shape over the past six months:
The Why
Two years ago, when I became CMO and started leading the marketing team at my previous job, I handed over my role as the writer to the teammates I was now managing.
It was the right move for the team — but it also left an unexpected gap in my day-to-day.
A few months later, I began to miss the creative process. I was still editing other people’s work and contributing to the ideation stage, but I wasn’t writing myself anymore.
At first, I thought that feeling was natural — just part of adjusting to a new role. But over time, the urge to get back to the page, to wrestle with ideas and words, only grew stronger. Eventually, I decided to launch Write2Lead as a side experiment.
Still, having only the desire to write isn’t enough. For a long time, my biggest struggle was the question: What do I care deeply enough to still want to write about years from now?
Looking back, I see how futile it is to try to find the perfect answer before you begin. For years, I tried to think my way to clarity, but it never came.
So this time, I approached it differently. I started with a single problem that kept resurfacing again and again for me — algorithms have turned online creation into a chase for metrics — and over time, through the writing itself and through conversations with readers, I let that problem evolve.
Today, I find myself framing it less as a statement and more as a question:
How can thoughtful writers find their voice online and create meaningful impact with their writing?
Audience
When most marketers talk about finding your audience, they usually offer a simple formula:
Your expertise + audience demand = viable niche
It’s a useful approach if your goal is to prioritize growth over creativity — but that wasn’t my case. I wanted to start from a different place.
I began with a problem: algorithms have turned online creation into a chase for metrics. Then I asked myself, among all the groups affected by this, which one would I truly love to serve?
Being a writer myself, I naturally gravitated toward the group I cared most about — the one I knew I’d want to be around for years to come:
Writers who care deeply about their craft and its impact.
That’s the one decision that hasn’t changed since day one.
I could have taken a more commercial path — one with higher demand or faster growth — but that would’ve meant building something that didn’t feel entirely mine.
Another priority for me was to reach a diverse readership. Having worked with people across Brazil, Malaysia, the United States, and Europe, I’ve seen how much richness different cultural perspectives bring to the conversation.
And so far, that diversity has started to take shape: readers now come from across the world — North America, Europe, South Africa, Oceania, and South America.
Topics
This part of the project is constantly evolving.
In the beginning, I gave myself permission to go broad — to follow my curiosity and write about anything that caught my attention, even if it didn’t clearly connect to the problem I had defined as my why.
To help me find direction, I tracked two simple metrics:
Internal: How did I feel while writing about this topic?
External: Did this piece spark meaningful conversations?
For the internal metric, I looked for writing that made me feel alive — ideas that were fun to explore and turned the process into something engaging, not just another task to check off a list (“1,500 words by Tuesday”).
But writing only for myself wouldn’t help me engage meaningfully with the larger problem I’m trying to unpack. So I also paid attention to interactions — not likes or shares, but thoughtful replies that revealed how readers were connecting with the work.
With these two metrics guiding me, I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding the themes I want to keep exploring. And, just like the central problem, I’ve started framing them as questions:
How do you find a voice that’s authentically yours, not an imitation?
How do you align that voice with the change you want to create?
How do cultural and technological systems shape the world writers create in?
How does psychology influence the way readers respond to words?
How do you communicate ideas so they truly resonate and spread?
Writing Process
The first thing I want to say about the writing process might sound obvious, but I’ve realized how much my reading shapes the way I think and write.
If a week gets busy and I don’t have much time to read, I actually feel dumber. It’s like the ideas stop flowing smoothly, and I have to work twice as hard to connect the dots.
So yeah, that old saying that the quality of your writing depends on the quality of your reading feels pretty spot on.
Another thing that’s been critical to my process is organization.
Yep, I know — most of us writers like to run free, like wild horses, letting creativity and imagination take full control. But I’ve learned that when organization actually serves the creative process, it makes things easier, not harder.
A couple of months ago, I built a Workstation in Notion divided into three parts:
Resource Library: where I collect external sources — books, articles, videos, podcasts — that relate to the problem I’m exploring.
Knowledge Vault: where I store my own insights, plus anything I’ve pulled from those resources.
Writing: a pipeline divided into ideas, drafts in progress, and published pieces.
And I’ll tell you, having everything in one place saved me more than once during those chaotic work weeks.
I still need to get better at turning what I read into my own insights — that’s what would make the Knowledge Vault even more valuable. But, you know, one thing at a time.
AI: The elephant in the room
Even though this is part of my writing process, I felt it deserved its own section — since it’s a pretty polarizing topic in our world right now.
I was watching Rick Beato interview Justin Hawkins the other day, and something Hawkins said about a producer he nearly worked with made me think a lot about my own relationship with AI.
Beato asked him about his experience almost collaborating with Mutt Lange. Hawkins said, “Mutt Lange would only work on something that was a guaranteed super mega smash.”
Then Beato pressed further, and Hawkins explained why the collaboration never happened:
“Lange said, ‘Send me everything you have — even if it’s just a song start, a riff, a word, a bit of singing.’ And I just had this image of him creating a patchwork song, a collage of all these fragments. I’m sure that’s how he works, and it’s clearly effective. There’s probably a blueprint for making a Mutt Lange-style mega hit. But is it art? For better or worse, I’d rather not have a hit than one that’s cynically put together.”
In a way, many writers and creators use AI as their own Mutt Lange. They throw prompts at it and expect it to produce magic.
Fortunately, AI isn’t cranking out “mega hits” like Mutt Lange — at least not yet. But if you’re a true writer — someone who loves the uncertainty, the struggle, and the slow uncovering that comes with creating — outsourcing that to a machine strips away the one thing that makes your work unique: you.
So yeah, I’m with Hawkins on this one.
That said, I don’t ignore the value of AI when it’s used in the right way.
What are the “right ways”? I don’t pretend to have the final answer. But here’s how I’ve been using it in a way that helps me — without giving up control of the creative process.
1. AI as Research Assistant
Notion has ChatGPT integrated, which means I can be writing a new piece and ask:
“Based on the themes and ideas I’ve outlined so far, can you look through my Knowledge Vault and surface any related insights?”
That gives me quick access to all the notes and fragments I’ve saved over time — helping me connect dots I might’ve missed.
I also use Notion’s AI to scan my Resource Library. I’ll ask it to check if any books, articles, or videos I’ve stored are related to my current essay. When something stands out, I go back to the source, dig deeper, and extract ideas that feel relevant to the essay.
Outside of that, I use ChatGPT for external research — essentially, what we all used to do with Google, just faster and more focused.
2. AI as Editor
I’ve always believed that every writer needs an editor — someone who can see the work with the distance you lose once you’re deep inside it. After a few days in a piece, it’s easy to fill in gaps subconsciously or assume meaning that isn’t actually on the page. An editor offers that fresh, objective perspective — helping you see what’s really there, not just what you meant to say.
The problem is, having a great editor is an expense most of us can’t justify early on. So I use the next best thing: ChatGPT.
The only difference is that I keep full creative control. If I don’t like the feedback, I simply move on (sorry, ChatGPT — I know I’m not the easiest writer to work with).
Essay structure
A lot has changed in the way I approach essay structure.
When I started this project, I was well aware of my Achilles’ heel: writing to persuade instead of writing to invite thinking.
I’d spent years writing to sell — crafting messages designed to convince. But one of my key intentions with Write2Lead was to flip that approach: to write to discover, not to persuade.
Naturally, the structure of my essays evolved to reflect that shift.
The first thing I noticed was how often I felt drawn to begin with a story. Essay by essay, it became clear that storytelling was my strongest starting point. It gave both me and the reader an engaging entry into the ideas that would follow.
From there, I move into the core idea — expanding the story into a broader frame, whether cultural, psychological, or philosophical.
And finally, I close with reflection — the part where I invite both the reader and myself to ask better questions, to consider how the idea shapes us, and how we might shape it in return.
Put together, my current structure looks something like this:
The Story (hooks the gut)
The Idea (engages the mind)
The Reflection (lingers in the soul)
If you read through my essays, you’ll probably find a few that don’t follow this pattern — and that’s okay. Like most creative systems, this one is meant to guide, not constrain.
Frequency
You’ve probably noticed I publish one essay a week — usually every Tuesday.
When I was deciding on a publishing cadence, the main thing was to be realistic: I’m still working a full-time job, and I want each essay to go at least a thousand words deep. Do I actually have the time to do that every week?
The answer back then was a cautious “yes.” Six months in, it turns out I was right — though just barely.
There were a few hectic weeks where I wasn’t fully happy with what I published and wished I’d had more time to refine it. A few essays even went out on Thursday instead of Tuesday. But overall, I’ve managed to keep the rhythm, and I’m happy with where things stand.
If I hadn’t been able to, I’d have accepted it and adjusted to publishing every two weeks — at least until I have more time to write full-time again.
Growth
Writing is at the center of the Write2Lead project.
But without readers, it would probably feel unbearable.
Yep… I care that others care — it’s a human condition that’s hard to escape.
So in this section, I’ll share how the newsletter has grown to 977 subscribers in six months, and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Meta Ads:
When I started thinking about ways to grow the newsletter, my goal wasn’t just to reach more people — it was to attract the right readers: writers who care deeply about their craft and its impact. And I wanted a system that wouldn’t drain the time and energy I need to dedicate to writing.
One advantage I had from my day job was experience running ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram). The good thing about those platforms is that they reward upfront effort — if you put in the work to write strong copy, design good creatives, and set things up properly, a well-performing ad can run quietly in the background with very little ongoing effort.
Of course, getting it right is rarely that simple. I ran dozens of experiments — tweaking target audiences, images, ad copy, and even the signup page — to see what actually worked.
The challenge is that Meta ads perform best when you’re offering something with clear, immediate value. But a newsletter from a writer no one has heard of doesn’t exactly fit that mold. It’s harder to communicate the value of a weekly essay than it is to promote a quick freebie to someone scrolling by.
Still, iteration by iteration, I found a way to express what Write2Lead offers without making overblown promises — and managed to keep the cost per new subscriber under €2.
Right now, I’m investing about $600 a month, which feels like a fair trade for the results I’m getting. But it could also work on a smaller budget — even €80 to €100 a month — if you’re willing to test and refine.
There’s a lot more I could unpack about how these ads work and what I’ve learned from them. I’m keeping it high-level here for readers who aren’t interested in the details — but if you are, just hit reply and I’ll happily go deeper.
Substack Deliverability Issue
Believe it or not, this one’s important enough to earn a spot in the report.
In plain terms, deliverability means how many of your subscribers actually receive your emails in their inbox.
If you have 1,000 subscribers but only 300 of them get your newsletter delivered, then, realistically, you have 300 subscribers.
I won’t get too technical here, but let me explain what’s been happening so you get the picture.
Because all my new subscribers come through Meta ads, I have to manually import them into Substack — the platform I use to send these newsletters. And… Substack doesn’t love that. It prefers when people subscribe directly through its own system, since that guarantees you’re not uploading a “cold list” (emails added without consent).
Now, Substack isn’t exactly being a noble guardian of readers’ inboxes — it’s just protecting itself. If too many users upload questionable lists, it risks damaging its email reputation. So, to play it safe, the platform sometimes suppresses sends, meaning your emails quietly stop reaching as many people.
In my case, I noticed my open rates steadily dropping. After digging into the data, the signs were clear: I had a deliverability problem.
It’s not the problem I wanted to deal with now, but it’s also not one I can ignore. I’m working on a fix and will share the results in the next report.
P.S. If you haven’t seen my emails in your inbox lately, I’d be grateful if you could reply and let me know. A quick note like “I haven’t received your emails in a couple of weeks” would be a huge help — it would confirm my suspicion and help me fix the issue faster.
Substack Growth
Substack is one of the few newsletter platforms that’s managed to do something unexpected: it built a genuine community within itself. Many of the people there are thoughtful writers and readers.
That means when you send a newsletter, you’re also publishing your essay directly to the Substack platform — tapping into its internal ecosystem by default.
I liked that idea. I was already writing these newsletters, so why not reach a few extra readers through Substack? I had nothing to lose.
Six months in, though, my essays usually get around 10–15 reads from Substack itself, and I’ve probably gained only two or three subscribers directly from the platform.
What I’ve learned is that to actually gain traction there, you need to participate in Notes — their slightly better version of Twitter (and yes, I still refuse to call it X).
There’s a lot of noise there too, but I’ve seen some writers use Notes in interesting ways: sharing rough ideas, sparking conversations, and posting fragments of their essays. I plan to experiment with it myself once my transition period at work ends and I can focus fully on Write2Lead — probably around January 2026.
I’ll circle back on this at the start of next year.
Community
I’ve built different kinds of communities in the past — some where I was deeply involved, and others where I simply set the structure and let conversations unfold. The first takes a lot of time and energy; the second, not so much.
Since time was my biggest constraint, I chose the lighter approach this time. But it hasn’t really worked out.
I set up the community on Circle and invited people in two ways: through the “Thank You” page after newsletter sign-up and at the bottom of each email I sent. To make onboarding easier, I wrote a welcome post encouraging members to ask questions, share work from writers they admire, and post first drafts for gentle feedback.
Around 200 people joined — but most introduced themselves once and then disappeared. Over time, I realized the issue wasn’t just participation; it was also the platform itself. As one reader put it, Circle feels like a “high barrier” — something you have to intentionally open rather than naturally check, which makes engagement harder to sustain.
Taking all that into account, I’ve realized that, for now, the community needs more of my active involvement to build real momentum — energy I simply don’t have to give at the moment. So I’ve paused promotion for the time being and may temporarily close it until mid-2026.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the idea. A safe, meaningful space where writers can exchange ideas and support each other feels central to Write2Lead. I’m just pressing pause to focus on what’s most essential. The community isn’t gone — just waiting for the right time to come back to life.
Monetization
This will be the shortest part of the report — because, well, I’m not currently monetizing the project.
But — and that’s a big but — I’ve already decided how I’m going to approach it.
If you look at most “art” today, you’ll notice how heavily it’s shaped by business interests. The creative process often ends up serving the business, instead of the other way around.
Since I see Write2Lead as a form of creative writing, I’ve chosen the opposite path: to make monetization a byproduct of the work, not its master.
I believe that if I keep writing, keep listening to readers, and stay genuinely focused on helping others, the right way to monetize will reveal itself naturally.
This approach is both freeing and, honestly, a little scary. On insecure days, I catch myself worrying about money — wondering if I should be thinking about it more. But once my head clears, I always return to the same conclusion: the creative process has to come first.
So I’m giving myself until at least June 2026 to focus fully on the writing — without worrying about monetization.
We’ll see. Time will tell if that choice was wise.
That’s a Wrap (For Now)
Sheesh — that took longer than I expected. But I had fun writing it, and I hope you found something valuable in it too.
Now, I could use your help to make the next report even better.
Is there anything you’d like me to include next time — maybe more details about the tech stack I’m using, its costs, or something else entirely? Anything you’d like me to dive deeper into, or drop altogether?
Another great way to guide me is through your questions. If there’s anything you’re curious about, just hit reply and ask.
Whatever thoughts you have, your feedback is invaluable in shaping future reports.
Thanks for reading all the way through — I’ll see you next week with a new essay.
Gianni
P.S. If you haven’t seen my emails in your inbox lately, please let me know. It’ll help me troubleshoot the deliverability issue I mentioned earlier.