New year, new ideas
A quick announcement on some upcoming changes to my Substack
I wanted to let you in on some changes I’m thinking about making.
(By thinking, I mean it’s going to happen but I haven’t put the tech together just yet.)
Yesterday I was chatting with a mentor, someone who has a ton of experience using emails & social media to make money for his solo business.
He gave me a game plan for how to run Substack to build this business.
Something I’ve learned the hard way over the years:
When experts give you advice — and you’ve never done it successfully before but they have — just go with their advice, as close to word-for-word as you can.
I’ve seen waaayyyy too many guys listen to advice, tweak it (just because) and then complain that it didn’t work.
...
Well, yeah.
You changed the advice.
Of course it didn’t work right.
Which is easy to say in hindsight, but hard to implement in real time.
Thus, I’m holding myself publicly accountable to implement some expert advice in real time.
Here’s the advice I got:
“I would recommend a sprint right now. 90 days, Substack. One article per week. 3 “notes” per day. Scroll and comment 15 minutes per day on people in your niche (to get exposure)
Run that play for 90 days and see what worked what didn’t and what to change.
Tweak to your liking.”
Notice he tells me to tweak the gameplan AFTER the 90 day experimental sprint.
Not before, like so many people do.
Anyway, here’s the changes I’m going to make that affect you:
Create once per week, long-form articles for this Substack.
Continue these shorter, daily emails, but using a different email sending software.
Write & publish 3 “notes” per day on Substack.
Spend daily time (15+ minutes) commenting on other Substack posts.
This will be the core of my first quarter this year, and I’ll evaluate to see how it’s working at the end of March.
Then I’ll make tweaks if needed.
I know this doesn’t have much to do with trading, but I wanted to let you know for a couple of reasons:
Because I hate it when people make big changes and don’t tell me about them
You can do something similar for all kinds of things in life, not just running a Substack. The principles for success are inside this little case study email.
If you have questions, feel free to comment or reply to this email.
Otherwise, there shouldn’t be anything you “need” to do, I’ll take care of everything. I just want you to be aware.
Also...
Thanks for being patient with me as I continue the experiment of building this business.
I’m excited for 2026, I think it’s going to be a fantastic year.
— Ricky Ketchum