Your signal… in my noise

I spent twenty years reading signal in noise. That’s what a petroleum geologist does. You never get the whole picture. You get fragments, incomplete data, a lot of static. You learn to find the thin true line running through it and trust it enough to drill.

It can be maddening.

I just ran an offer launch. Six weeks of co-writing a business plan. Mine, in the open. Fellow planners writing theirs alongside.

I’ll tell you what I did and what I found.

Here’s what I did

I cleared the calendar. Got quiet. Wrote a survey. Listened.

I built the offer inward first, for me, before I ever opened a seat. I priced it at the honest intersection between what felt real to me and what was in reach for someone else. I rewrote the sales page into first person when I couldn’t honestly write to a stranger I didn’t know.

I held the line when someone asked me to sweeten the pot, because sweetening it would have built the opposite of what I wanted. I closed enrollment on joy instead of a countdown.

And on the last day of enrollment, before I was even awake, I stood on my porch in my pajamas and let the whole thing become a story about me.

Nobody new had signed up. Am I alone in this? Is there something wrong with me? The old questions.

I paced and muttered until I noticed how bad I felt. Then I stood there and let it be bad. The joy came back on its own. There was already one person coming. I wasn’t alone. I went inside and wrote the last email of the launch.

That’s the part I can speak to. My side.

And its a lot of noise. The churn. The seven names and formats I’ve tried in two years. The machinery of a launch. The weather inside me on a porch at 6 a.m. Loud, and mine, and mostly invisible to you.

Now the other side.

Here’s what you did

You opened the emails. Steadily, all the way through a sales sequence, which is the stretch where most lists go quiet. You answered the survey in your own words. A few of you wrote back. One of you told me, kindly, that you weren’t a fit, and I got to tell you that you were. One of you came all the way in, and will be writing your plan next to mine starting June 2nd.

And most of you stayed exactly where you were. Reading. Not buying. Which is its own clear answer.

I’ve watched this for two years now. I keep changing the container. You keep staying for the one thing I never change, the writing from my own experience.

You have been telling me the whole time what you’re here for. I keep almost believing you.

Here’s where I have to be careful

I know my side cold. I was there for every choice. Your side I can only read in the data, not know.

I can see what you did. The opens. The replies. The one yes. That part is fact. Why you did it is a guess, and the guess is only mine.

So I’ll tell you what I think it might mean, and you can recognize yourself in it or not. That part is yours. I’m not going to tell you where to land.

My best guess is this… you don’t come for a plan or a format or an offer. You come to be near someone learning out loud. Naming what’s true, including the parts most of us keep quiet. When I do that, you feel a little less alone.

The part I’m still sitting with is that you seem to do the same thing back. You give me a room to be the person I want to be. The one I am when I’m alone in the wilderness. We are both less alone in it.

Might that be the whole exchange here?

Which leaves me a knot

This publication that now feeds my soul pays about a hundred dollars a month.

I didn’t set out here writing with my soul in mind. I set out wanting a business. An asset bigger than me, one that might outlive my ego and actually take care of my family.

But it’d be nice feed both.

So I’m carrying this tangled knot into week one of The Business Plan Co-Write. Six weeks of space to let it untangle itself. And I won’t be the only one there.

That’s the signal I could find in my own noise from this launch. There’s more tuning to be done in our relationship.

So I’ll keep reading the data.

Onward!

Brad 8-)

P.S. If a line here was signal and not just my noise, tell me which one. You don’t have to. I read the data either way. But your words read clearer than your clicks.