Some folks think they can finally get organized if they find the right app. What’s more, for some folks, that might actually be true. But if you’ve gone through a slew of to-do list apps and organizational tools and you’re still searching for the right one, the problem isn’t the tools. It’s you.

More specifically, it’s your willingness to embrace one fully and make it a core part of your life. Doing that with task and project management software is tough. It’s a hard habit to build and maintain. You fail to put a few things in that list, or you start adding stuff just to cross it off, or you stop checking that list… It quickly becomes useless.

But I think folks sometimes jump into major task management software projects too quickly. It’d be like if your first day of flight lessons, the instructor said “Okay pal, we’re in the air — you land the plane.”

Start simpler.

One genuine secret to my own success is my ability to follow-up well. I’m not talking about the email sequences that unsolicited marketers use. (“I noticed you still didn’t reply to my second email from three days ago, LEX, so I’m just following up a second time.”) I’m talking about the idea that if we’ve spoken or interacted, and you indicated that you want to do business with me, I’m going to follow up with you.

My system? Calendaring and Reminders. I use the Reminders app from the Apple ecosystem (iOS and Mac), and Fantastical with Google Calendars to sync. These aren’t the best systems for you, necessarily. But they’re the right systems for me. I fire off an email and then set a reminder “Check in with Dan in two weeks.” I can say that to Siri, or type it into a Reminders field, and it’s parsed automatically. Sometimes I use my calendar instead for scheduling follow-ups, depending on what’s closer and what feels right.

Your potential clients and customers have a lot on their mind. They actually want you to follow up, if they want to spend with you. But I don’t automate the nudges, and I don’t write obnoxiously — I just check in, typically on the same thread where we were before.

But seriously: You can win so much business by just following up with people who want to work with you. This sounds obvious and simple, and in my experience many, many people are terrible at it. Don’t be!

I can’t speak for you, but I get too much email. My kids are still young enough that they’re excited about their inboxes, and they’re surprised when they get new messages, because they just don’t get that many. (Of course, they rarely reply to the emails they DO get. And honestly, they’re young enough that they’re sometimes eager to sign up for spammy newsletters. Not like this newsletter. This newsletter is not spammy.)

Anyway, you may rely on email to win new business. The hard part with email, of course, is getting people to read it.

The reason spam never stops is because it’s cheap: You can send tons of emails for very little money, and a small handful of sales — a fraction of a percentage — can be a difference maker. But that’s not your business. (If it is your business, stop reading Your Intermittent Lex, and start questioning your life decisions.)

You already know that every email you send is selling. Even if you don’t think of yourself as “in sales.” And you know as a human who receives email that there are too many emails, that most emails aren’t worth your time, and that emails that are thoughtful and caring about your time make a difference.

I have a whole talk on crafting great, readable emails. But the keys are obvious — you just have to use them, every time: Interesting, non-obnoxious subject lines. Good grammar. Short, to the point sentences. Definitely not too long.

The first podcast ads I ever sold were on my own show, a podcast called Unprofessional. That was a stroke of luck; I could send out emails to potential advertisers like: An Unprofessional opportunity for 23andMe. A marketing person wants to open that email because it’s intriguing without being hacky, tacky, or scandalous.

Now you might not be selling something called Unprofessional. I get that. But it’s still your job to write emails that motivate and reward attention. Your email should ABSOLUTELY be shorter than, say, this very post — if it’s to a new potential customer.

The absolute most important trick, though, is: Be human. In business, people still often cling to a too-formal tone, with the thought that this makes them sound more businessy. It makes you sound less readable more unlikable, less like a person. Success in business comes not just from having a great product or service, but also from connecting with the people you’re selling to.

Write like a human. Write emails you wouldn’t mind reading. And respect your reader.

I promise I’m not going to keep on writing in opposites. This isn’t Great Expectations, folks.

You may know I host a daily podcast called Your Daily Lex. It’s five minutes a day, about nothing and everything — whatever’s on my mind — and I love doing it. It’s a passion project, it brings me joy, and I love hearing from listeners. And, of course, its name inspired the name of this very blog.

I described Your Daily Lex above as, well, daily. It’s right there in the name. Except, sometimes? I miss a day.

(Granted, there have been gaps where I took months and even years off. But I’ve been on a mostly daily kick since May of this year.)

On Tuesday this week, my day was too damn busy to record an episode of Your Daily Lex in the morning. Or during the day. Sometimes if a meeting ends a few minutes early, I’ll turn one out quickly: The whole process typically takes fewer than ten minutes to record, export, and upload a five minute episode. But I was in back-to-back-to-back meetings, going 1000 mph, with meetings running over — the whole bit.

My final meeting ended a smidgen after 6pm. I knew I still hadn’t recorded an episode, and I fired up Logic Pro to get started… and then shook my head and left my office. I was the only parent home with two of my three kids, and it was dinnertime.

I grant you that Your Daily Lex isn’t work in the truest sense, but I do see it as a professional obligation. (I am pausing for the laughter to die down from YDL listeners amused at “professional” and “Your Daily Lex” in the same sentence.) But the best Lex is a happy, well-adjusted, balanced Lex. I wouldn’t have made a great episode that day. I would have resented it.

Still, I felt some guilt about not putting out an episode of my silly podcast. I made a commitment to myself and my listeners that the show is daily. I should feel guilt if I don’t honor that commitment. But I’ve also made a commitment to myself, to do right by me.

I stand by my decision not to record a Tuesday episode, and I think it’s right a little bad about it, too. We contain multitudes. That’s a good thing.

With this blog, though — that “Intermittent” adjective in the name? That was a great choice.

When I was a full-time tech writer, I occasionally got invited to give talks at various conferences. That was fun. One of my favorite talks was “Think Like a Podcast Ad Salesperson.”

The point I made in that talk was that every interaction you have with customers, or potential customers, is sales. (And don’t forget, being a salesperson isn’t a bad thing.)

App developers who ship features are selling. Shipping is selling. Explaining why features don’t exist is selling. Answering support emails is selling.

Those feel more obvious to me. What is maybe less obvious — and I believe was the conference attendees’ favorite takeaway from this talk — was that even release notes are selling. Or, they should be. They’re an opportunity to sell. This, to be clear, is not selling:

This, however, really truly is!

Even just that last line is a far more fun way to say “General fixes.” It’s selling, my friends.

The speed at which you reply to customer emails is selling. The features you offer, the conversations you have, the places you choose to run marketing campaigns, your pricing — it’s all sales.

You want success, and success means closing more deals. More deals means more cash. That’s a nice thing. That’s how business works.

Using the mental framework of remembering that any customer-facing or even customer-adjacent job is a sales job helps focus your thinking. Is what I’m doing in service of winning more customers? There can of course be other important factors to consider, but a customer-centric approach, a customer-friendly and affectionate approach, will almost certainly serve your customers — and thus your business and you — well.

I wrote previously about when I first started selling podcast ads. I’d like to start with a little more color on how that happened: I started cohosting a show called Unprofessional. We were on a then-nascent, now nonexistent, podcast network called Mule Radio. For a few episodes, we just did the show and that was it.

After several weeks like that, Mule sent us an ad to read. That was cool: Now we’d get paid to do the show. Fun! They sent ads every week for several weeks. Then one week… there was no ad.

That was no fun. Now that I was getting paid to make episodes of the show, it was far less interesting to make an episode and NOT get paid.

So I asked Mule if they’d mind if I tried selling ads for the show. Of course they didn’t mind. Also, I had absolutely no sales experience of any kind.

But it turned out that I was good at selling ads for the podcast. Good enough that my pal Glenn asked me to sell ads for his podcast. And then Mule said, why don’t you just start selling ads for all of Mule? And then Marco asked me to sell Accidental Tech Podcast and Gruber had me start telling The Talk Show and friends of friends started reaching out… Three months after I sold my first podcast ad, I was repping 50 shows.

My first year of selling podcast ads, my gross ad sales revenue was $500,000.

Even so, when I was debating whether I wanted to go “full time” with podcast ad sales — I had been limited to nights and weekends with a separate day job in year one — I was nervous. I didn’t want to be a full-time salesperson.

I thought of a used car salesperson. Slimy, sneaky, say anything to get the deal done. That was sales to me. I didn’t want to be that guy.

But then I realized: I’m not that guy. So I won’t be that guy.

I was really freaking good at selling podcast ads. There were three primary reasons:

1. I was transparent and honest.

2. I was extremely disciplined about follow-up.

3. I was communicative.

And really, that’s it. That’s what made me good at it. It helped that podcast ads really work, and that I had great shows to sell against.

I realized that those skills — open conversations, strategically pairing advertisers with shows, executing at a high level with success — they really all speak directly to entrepreneurship. Working with customers, getting them to grow spends with you, building out successful strategies for success… That’s building a business. That’s growing a company.

So I reframed my mindset: I was an entrepreneur flexing my sales muscle. That’s different.

I should add that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with sales, and some of my concerns about being a seller were a bit misplaced. That said, the negative connotations I associated with salespeople weren’t unique to me. The sleazy salesperson is a common trope, and many folks on the buy side approach people on the sales side warily because of it.

Your job as a seller is to convince people from the outset, with everything you do, that you’re not one of those sellers. That you’re a human.

And if you got this far and you’re thinking to yourself, that’s nice, but it maybe doesn’t apply to me so much, because I’m not IN sales, let’s correct that.

If you ever deal with customers or potential customers, in any way — you’re in sales. More on that soon.

As I write these words, it's fewer than 24 hours since I left Twitter. I'm sad about it. I loved Twitter. Different people like Twitter for different reasons. I liked Twitter as a source for news, as a place to see funny and insightful posts from friends and strangers, and — and this is important — to be heard. I can own this. I’m Lex Friedman, and I love an audience.

I promised my focus in this quick post would be to do three things: Explain who I am, what I’m doing here, and why you should care. So let’s start with the easiest one:

Who am I?

I’m Lex Friedman. I’m a dad in New Jersey. I’m a startup entrepreneur. I’m a podcasting executive. I’m an improviser. I’m a writer. And I host a few podcasts, including Your Daily Lex, which is five minutes a day of whatever I’m thinking about.

My career includes a job at MySpace, where I had a cubicle next to Tom for a bit. I was hired there as the company’s first full-time PHP developer, and I quickly realized I wanted the job of the people who told me what the website should do, versus being the codemonkey to do it. So I switched to the product side.

After NewsCorp bought MySpace, I knew I didn’t want to work for Rupert Murdoch, so I cofounded a diet-tracking startup called The Daily Plate. This was still pre-iPhone era. We got acquired by a company called Demand Media, which went public. With three startup successes under my belt, I took a passion job — cutting my salary by more than half! — as a full-time writer for Macworld, writing about Macs and iPhones and iPads and Steve Jobs.

When a friend asked if I wanted to cohost a podcast, I said yes. That led to my eventually selling podcast ads for my show, and then the network I was on, and then for friends’ podcasts, and then for friends of friends. I eventually started my own podcasting business, which got acquired by Midroll, where I became a cofounder. There, I was the Chief Revenue Officer (and later, Chief Business Development Officer), leading first our sales and later our partnerships teams, selling podcast ads and bringing in massive partners (Marc Maron, Conan O’Brien, My Favorite Murder, Bill Simmons). I worked with many great folks there, including my friend Korri Kolesa, — now the CRO at Veritonic — whom I’d first met when we worked together back at Intermix, then the parent of MySpace.

Midroll was acquired by Scripps and eventually renamed Stitcher. After a total of seven years there, in 2019, Korri and I joined ART19 — a podcasting technology company — with me as its Chief Revenue Officer and Korri as its COO. We were brought in to introduce multiple brand new products there, which we did successfully. Amazon acquired ART19 in June of 2021. Amazon also owns Wondery, where I’m now the head of podcast strategy.

So what am I doing here?

Well, like I said, I love writing. I loved Twitter. I’m of course on Mastodon (at @lexfri@mastodon.social). I want an audience, and I’m building one on Mastodon and saying goodbye to one on Twitter. At least until some serious changes there.

My friend Liz just launched her Substack , and I loved her first post. I don't want another email newsletter, but I recently learned you can subscribe to Substacks via RSS by attaching /feed to the end of the URL, so now I can read Liz’s posts in my favorite newsreader. That’s awesome.

And I’m going to launch a secret thing soon. I mean, it won’t be a secret when I launch it. But I’m going to launch a thing, and I’d like a place to talk about it, so it might as well be here. I mean, you could also argue that it shouldn’t be here; it’s often significantly better to own your publishing than to use a third-party service. But this is easy, and popular, and I’m enjoying typing in this window, so I’m going for it.

What I’m doing here is specifically this: Sharing thoughts. Reaching an audience. Writing about whatever is on my mind that feels worth sharing.

Why should you read it?

I mean, no pressure. I have a few things to share! Jokes to make! Wisdom to impart, if we’re lucky. (It’s funny to me that I’m more confident I can be funny than wise, but that’s for me to figure out.)

But this will be where thoughts that are too long for Mastodon or Twitter go. You’re welcome to ask me to write about certain topics, and if I feel like I have something to say about them, I will. But over the next couple months I hope to write about various topics I’ve gotten pretty smart on: podcasts, growing businesses, sales, revenue, improv, why billionaires keep proving that they’re actually not smarter than the rest of us, why puns are great, etc. The important stuff.

Anyway, you’re great. You read 800 words that I composed on a Sunday whim. I appreciate it. Have a good one. Be my audience. Love me. Is that too much to ask?