If you only read one newsletter

_{Day 215/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I opened my sprint board, and realized Wave Two isn’t “coming.”
It’s already on my desk, tapping its foot.

The scramble of the work needed to do next

I’ve got a stack: homepage polish, Search Score UX tweaks, a messy backlog of “tiny” bugs that aren’t tiny, and a not-so-tiny plan to make Penfriend feel more like a game you want to play every day.
It’s a good problem.
It means we shipped enough to see what breaks under real weight.

If you only read one email this week, here’s the hit list - with the one-line why.

Mon — Site design, live.
I build on live pages because fake stakes create fake feedback. Shipping is research.

Tues — I use my own tools.
Database says I’m the power user. Good. If I won’t live in it, why should you?

Weds — Keep writing.
My favorite thing I’ve written in years. Not because it’s pretty—because it’s earned.

Thurs — I make mistakes.
Five clean misses. The list makes future me cheaper and braver.

Fri — Full homepage rebuild.
Every choice had a job. If a block couldn’t win a click, it lost its seat.

Sat — SEO news chaos.
Google’s shrinking real estate. Rank trackers wobbling. Answer engines care about citations and clarity more than cleverness.

Sun — No title, best performance.
I forgot the title and it out-performed the last nine sends. I don’t understand.

Everything is an experiment.

If I had to draw one thread to link everything together this week, it’s that nothing is done.

Nothing is finished.

Anyone that knows me, knows I enjoy tasks that can’t be finished. But as I get more and more into this, I’m questioning that.

Regardless. Your job as a marketer is to try and try and try again. Find a few things that work. And even then, they’re not done.

You must make them better.

It never ends.

Which, as bleak as that sounds, I think is a good thing.
You have countless opportunities to improve.
Even when it’s a 0.1% improvement, it’s still better.

At least, this is what I tell myself.

✌️ Tim "I forgor the title" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. The biggest improvement I’ve had all week, from the smallest change. Subject lines with less than 6 words are regularly hitting +49% open rates. Anything over that drops as low as 37% which is painful to see. But a lesson learnt.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.