This newsletter began on Substack in August 2021. Things started out slowly, but they’ve ramped up pretty quickly since:
We’ve now crossed 240K subscribers. And it’s been over a year since I talked about what I’m doing here, or gave you a way to explore what I’ve done recently.
So that’s today’s post.
If you’re new here and mostly want the reading list, skip to section 5. That’s where the four roadmaps live.
Today’s Post
I wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain:
What I’ve been up to this year
What I plan to cover over the next year
Growth lessons in hitting 1M followers
How I hit $2M/year in revenue, and where I go from here
Four roadmaps to explore my content, with all the links to explore them
1. What I’ve been up to this year
Part 1 - The Newsletter
People might be surprised by this. But I actually give 75% of my time to the newsletter deep dives. It’s my main focus, and everything else I run exists to feed it.
That focus produced 67 deep dives this year. I know it can be hard to navigate, so here’s a quick way to click through them all:
In addition, I launched two new programs for paid subscribers who commit annually:
The Founding Plan with quarterly digital product drops
The goal with both is to create a long-term relationship with you, rather than a subscription you reconsider every month.
I’m super proud of the tools we’ve partnered with to give you 1 year of their paid plans in the bundle. These are tools I personally use and like:
Linear for task management
Mobbin for real-world design inspiration
Dovetail for AI customer intelligence
Arize for AI evals and observability
Bolt.new for full-stack AI building
Descript for AI video editing
Magic Patterns for front-end AI prototyping
Speechify for dictation at 3x typing speed
I’m also quite happy with how the digital product drops in the founding plan went:
The PM OS was the runaway favorite, so I’m already cooking its follow-up. The plan is to keep dropping regular bundle partners and products so that this continues to be the most no-brainer yearly subscription in your life.
Part 2 - Everything Else
I also built two new lines to the business:
I created the AI by Aakash newsletter to help you stay up to date with AI
I launched the Land a PM Job cohort program to give you a higher touch outlet
Both of these launches were designed to make this newsletter better:
For AI by Aakash, I used it as an opportunity to move out news content from this newsletter. I found that you guys engaged with that type of stuff least.
For the Cohort program, I used it as an opportunity to get closer to how real job search candidates are experiencing the market, so I can turn around and coach you. Now my articles on job search have even more real world grounding.
Across everything new this year, I also hired very specific, very talented people that help me with each business line. There are now 8 of us. So the only time of mine pulled away from the newsletter is time that comes back to it.
2. What I plan to cover over the next year
My plan for the next year is to not add any more business lines, but to grow and optimize what I have.
That means more focus on you.
I also want to slightly shift the aperture of focus. The past year, AI has been all the rage. But I’ve sensed the pendulum swing back, and so I’m going to go back to more classical growth, PM, and career content.
You saw that last week with my piece on Stakeholder Management. Here’s what else is already in motion:
The State of the PM Hiring Market
PM Salary Benchmarks (fill out my survey!)
Guide to Trust & Safety Product Management
PM’s Guide to Design Taste
AI won’t disappear. But it also won’e be everything.
The bar I’m holding myself to is simple. If you could get the same take by asking ChatGPT or Claude, I haven’t done my job. So expect more original research, more first-hand guests, and more of my time spent on the writing itself.
3. Growth lessons in hitting 1M followers
Growth across my portfolio has been strong this year:
LinkedIn: 250K → 321K
X: 116K → 331K
YouTube: 17.2K → 45.8K
Product Growth: 184K → 240K
AI By Aakash: 0 → 140K
In total, I went from 567K followers to 1.08M followers. Here’s how I did it.
Lesson 1 - Flow with the algorithm
The most important principle for growing my followers has been to treat the follower count like a product metric.
I consistently look back at a dashboard of what’s working. This has been by far the most effective tactic available (‘Meta’ in gamer-speak). Because only your account data shows you the map of what works in your niche, right now.
Paying extra close attention to what topic, post content style, and length is working was how I managed to create this massive, 2,700 like LinkedIn post last week.
And it’s how I tripled my X with timely explainer quote tweets like this yesterday that received 1.3K likes.
Lesson 2 - Bring AI in (the right amount)
I did this all inside my Content Operating System built in Claude Code. It's been a big win for me this year.
Now here’s the caution. The output from the OS is good enough to publish, and that’s exactly the trap, because people don’t like to read “AI slop.”
So I take extra care to consistently:
Play a huge role in the original idea for any piece of content, usually via a “dictation ramble”
Always go in with my human touch to further edit
On social media, I use the Claude Code outputs a bit more readily. But here, in the newsletter, since this summer, I strive to be all human:
Lesson 3 - Don’t Overstretch
I was, at a time, trying hard to increase my following on Apple Podcasts, and Medium, and Instagram, and TikTok.
I since abandoned those pursuits.
I realized that I probably could grow my following on those platforms, but I’d need to spend a lot of time learning them.
In my experience, learning any particular platform requires a really long dedicated push to learn how to succeed on that platform. Typically a year per platform.
That’s why I have 5 platforms at the top of this section. I could do one a year. But it’s very hard to do more than that.
4. How I hit $2M/year in revenue, and where I go from here
It was a pretty good year. My cost basis nearly doubled moving from Durham to LA, and revenue managed to keep pace. How did I do it?
The Creator Revenue Equation
One thing I’ve found as a creator is that how hard you work + how well you cultivate your brand + how good a team you hire = your revenue.
This is quite different from a normal corporate job where, even if you vastly outperform your OKRs for a quarter, your income will only be increased a portion of that on a lag.
What this has meant is that I’ve been able to, in particular, work hard to increase my revenue to ~$2M, 89% above the $1.05M I was at last year.
I’ve done this by adding two new businesses and growing my existing two businesses (Newsletter +48%, Podcast +31%).
What’s Next
My eventual dream goal 5 years from now is to be positively impacting 5x the people I am now.
And I have a specific vision for how it plays out as a lifestyle:
I want to have an office
I want it to be filled with smart, fun people
But to have an office itself costs a minimum of $200K in LA. Having a team of American staff costs about $1M. So I actually want my revenue to go up, but margins to go down.
My hope is, with that, the quality of content you get is even better.
5. Four roadmaps to read my content, with all the links to explore them
The most frustrating thing with a newsletter is it’s hard to search the content. So I wanted to end today’s newsletter with four roadmaps to help you get the most out of the content:
Roadmap 1 - The PM Course
Roadmap 2 - The AI PM Course
Roadmap 3 - Two Years of the Podcast
Roadmap 4 - Five Years of the Newsletter
Final Words
Thanks so much for being part of this journey. It means the world that I can share this space in your inbox. Reply with any feedback you have, and tell me what you want covered next year. I read every one.
Talk to you tomorrow 👋
Aakash
Congrats!! You are an inspiration man :)