do yourself a favour

Asking someone for a favour makes them like you more.

It’s a weird psychological quirk (called the Ben Franklin effect). The theory is that they will have trouble reconciling having done you a favour with any negative impression they have of you.

I’ve seen this in practice by framing cold networking requests as a favour. If I’m reaching out to a stranger I want to talk to, I ask them if they could do me a favour by sharing their experience with me.

Same deal after a call - I ask if they wouldn’t mind connecting me with X person they mentioned during the call or Y type of person that might be in their network.

They’re tiny, almost imperceptible favours that for some crazy, reverse-psychological reason have the effect of making people like you more.

So don’t be afraid to ask people for favours - it will have the opposite effect you think it will!

It’s Wednesday, which I’ve arbitrarily decided is “build in public” day. Building a newsletter is very slow and challenging. In case any of you ever decide to try it, I want to document the process.

Here are some stats from the last week:

27 new subscribers joined.

I had a LinkedIn post reach 50k impressions, which led to exactly 0 organic traffic to my website - although it did result in a few DMs that led to subscribers (hi!!)

I had 300 people visit my site from a Hacker News post. None of them became subscribers, but the CTA was buried in a link at the bottom of the blog post.

I’m no longer doing cold LinkedIn outreach. It was a huge time investment and felt like spam.

I have a question for you - where does freelancing or consulting fit in your long term career plan (if at all)?

Otherwise, have a great Wednesday and I’ll see you on Friday.

— Clark