One of the more interesting robot-assisted tools I’ve built in the last few months is tracking the various metrics for Rands-related properties. Think social like Mastodon, BlueSky, and
Threads. Think blog analytics like new users, session duration, and popular articles. I’ve been plopping this data into a spreadsheet every month for the last two years. This month, I decided to have the robots take a swing at a dashboard.

And suddenly, the weekend vanished, and I had multiple dashboards, including basic and advanced analysis, as well as a system where I set monthly goals for the metrics. The advanced analysis was mostly robot-suggested metrics, such as:

• Compound Annual Growth (The average annual growth rate over the entire period, accounting for compounding)
• Volatility (Standard deviation of monthly growth rates. Higher values mean more erratic growth)
• Momentum (Compares recent growth acceleration to previous periods)

Did all of this robot wizardry give me major insight? No, it gave me a refined view of data I could already intuit by skimming the dashboard, but the addition of sparklines put a clear picture on two stats. Both Rands Leadership Slack members and newsletter subscribers grow steadily like nothing else.

While I invest daily in the Rands Leadership Slack, the newsletter is an afterthought. The subscription link is buried at the bottom of the About page, and while I post most new articles there… sometimes I forget. Sorry. Doesn’t matter, subscriber growth isn’t a flood, but it’s constantly up and to the right. Every month. For years.

I moved to Substack after years of attempting to twist MailChimp into doing something it didn’t really want to do. Substack was easy to set up — someone had clearly done their design work — and the buzz about the product was intriguing. Once set up, I promptly forgot about the newsletter, and subscribers continued to grow.

There’s another buzz about Substack, and I’m not going to go into details because others have… competently and loudly. Here’s the thing about this buzz: as far as I can tell, Substack has done little to nothing to counter that buzz. Actions. Words. Zip. I’m sure they have told themselves they’ve done work, but… as a distant outsider, the original damning buzz still bouncing around. My internal monologue: “They don’t believe it’s important enough to counter-program the buzz.”

Ok, so, bye then.

Ghost has all the knobs and dials I need (and more¹) for a new home for the Leadership Newsletter. The migration was trivial. The design options were rich. And they charge customers for the service, which means the customers aren’t the product… the product is the product.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you there’s lots more content coming for the Newsletter. Maybe? I think newsletter subscribers and I have a good deal worked out. I’ll post occasionally, and they’ll just keep showing up.