Right, It Is Crazy Ideas Time!

Welcome to the Daily Beagle Feedback newsletter!

First of all, allow me to thank you for taking your time to sign up to this newsletter. Your feedback — and ideas — are absolutely necessary if The Daily Beagle is going to survive.

This won’t be like the main newsletter — so no fancy thumbnail and no references — but me spitballin’ any and all ideas that come to mind and you telling me in the comments what you think. You boo or cheer whichever ideas you like the most.

What Rewards Would You Like To Win For Referrals?

Currently Substack offers Substackers the opportunity to offer prize emails (containing links to goodies) if readers hit a specific number of referrals.

However, it only offers a fixed number of milestone slots — 3, to be specific — it cannot be reduced nor increased, and I am absolutely stuck on what people would want from The Daily Beagle could offer.

Currently the budget is non-existent, and as you may have seen, I’m still dealing with the fallout of a bereavement (on top of the usual running of The Daily Beagle), so my free time to make stuff is extremely limited.

I could offer shoutouts for the highest scorers, and Substack does offer the ability to give away paid subscriptions for free — but they’re fixed (3, 6, 9 or 12 months) — and you only win the prize once per milestone for a maximum of 3.

My concern is the paid-subscription-for-free could be gamed by malicious actors using sock accounts (read: pharma shills), especially at low referral numbers (say 9 to 100). But on high referral numbers (say, 1000), my concern is people will be discouraged by the difficulty.

I was also thinking of offering digital art that I make myself (similar to the background of the Ban the Jab article thumbnail), as that isn’t as intensive as research and writing, or even an audio recording or voice chat.

But are you readers interested in any of these rewards? If not, what would interest you? Leave a comment below with your answer.

What Milestone Numbers For Referrals Should I Use?

So there’s three slots maximum. My first thought are the milestones should be:

• 9 referrals (free, not paid)

• 100 referrals (free, not paid)

• 1,000 referrals (free, not paid)

Why these numbers? Well, according to my calculations (pushes up nerd glasses) every free Subscriber would need to make 9 referrals each if the free:paid conversion ratio holds for The Daily Beagle to become financially ‘stable’ (I.E. operate at least breakeven).

However, the reality is, not every free subscriber will make 9 referrals. So for a single free subscriber to have a chance of hitting the free:paid ratio solo, they’d need to make 100 referrals. Makes sense. So why the 1,000?

Well, because Substack does not give me the ability to add additional milestones (and I’ve stopped bothering to ask for features as Substack is guaranteed to ignore them if I endorse), I need to set the last one reasonably ‘out of reach’ so there’s a meaningful challenge. You know, for the hardliners who seek a bit of a thrill - and I’d like to add a meaningful reward to it somehow.

But, it’s easy setting big numbers. It doesn’t mean what I’m asking for is reasonable, so I need feedback from the community.

What I want to know is, how many referrals (if you were asked) would you actually want to try to do? Leave a comment below with your answer.

Would Another Substack Interest You?

Part of what is consuming my time right now is how exactly to ‘reinvent’ the approach The Daily Beagle uses.

An alternative might be a fully paywalled ‘Programming and Innovation’ Substack where I publish everything from my innovative ideas (I come up with a lot) to snippets of programming code and functions. You know, something that might be a ‘return-on-value’?

What Thumbnails Do You Like (And Secretly Hate)?

Working out what makes a good and eye-catching thumbnail is extremely difficult.

Whilst producing The Daily Beagle, I’ve attempted my hand at various art styles, visual depictions and approaches. But the truth is Substack offers no feedback on ‘click-through rates’ (how many people click through on a given article), and I genuinely do not know what thumbnails people like.

I imagine most see them as ‘interesting’, however, thumbnails need to be ‘eye-catching’ in order to draw people in to read. What’s your favourite thumbnails? And what thumbnails do you secretly loathe? Feel free to refer to the article in the comments below.

What Titles Do You Like (And Loathe)?

Similarly, it is really hard to phrase a title. Again, titles need to be a little-bit sorta-clickbaity-ish (it’s how you get people to click on an article), but as of late the titles The Daily Beagle write seem bland and very ‘broadsheet paperish’, and I think it hugely undersells how explosive some of the discoveries are.

Similar to the thumbnails one, let me know what titles you love and hate from the list selection?

And A Small Status Update

The Daily Beagle is going to be experimenting with a novel advertising technique soon to see if we can drive more eyeballs to the platform, but as it’s still in experimental phase, more on that later.

That’s All For Now Folks

Don’t worry if you miss anything and need to write a follow up comment; throw as many comments as you like, any and all feedback greatly appreciated. And if you have any ideas or unrelated suggestions, go for it!

Any gripes as well.