I had a small back-and-forth with a long-time reader a short while days ago (not sure he wants me to name him).
To give some context:
He’s a passionate game dev and has been thinking about starting his own email list about game design.
Note: “thinking about starting”.
When I asked him what’s been holding him back he gave 2 reasons:
(This is how I summarized it based on his response
1) He doesn’t believe he’s “big/successful” enough to have something to offer. So why should people listen to him?
2) He prefers creating games more than writing about them, so why waste time with an email list when he could create more games instead?
Both of these are valid and popular, but ultimately flawed, responses—making this a great opportunity to share my answer publically.
So let’s talk about why those two reasons aren’t as important/valid as you might first expect.
First off, if only the biggest and most successful people could build an email list, then there’d only be a handful of lists and every market. Which simply isn’t the case.
The truth is…
People care more about people than anything else. Someone might be a lot more successful and have 10 more years of experience. But if you’re the more entertaining person while caring about your audience and actually, from the bottom of your heart, want to help your audience succeed as best as you can, then you’ll be the one they want to be around and listen to.
That’s just how it goes.
There’s no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.
Secondly, and this might not seem directly obvious when looking at it at first glance. But building your email list actually helps you free up more time (making it so he could create more games in this case).
Here’s how that works:
Instead of focusing all his effort on writing articles, social media marketing, reaching out to people, “networking”, taking on projects you don’t care about just to make ends meet, and god knows what else… You could instead focus solely on building and writing to your email list, which will take care of all your financial issues if done right, freeing up your schedule of all other things you had to do till now.
Now you’ve freed up so much time. Time you can choose to spend on creating more, writing emails (if you so choose), or just plain relaxing, whatever you choose.
Anyway.
If you haven’t started your email list yet, now’s the time.
And if you’d like some help figuring out how to get everything up and running, then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla