The experiment that was RLFO
If you’ve followed me for a while, which most likely is the reason why you’re reading this, you are familiar with my RLFO newsletter. If not, RLFO (Ralph-o) was my Random Links Found Online newsletter; a newsletter on software and engineering and everything related to it, comprised of articles I found during my usual online scrolling on different platforms, read, and considered interesting enough to share with others.
obligatory backstory
It all started on June 2022, when I first decided to keep track of these links and publish them on LinkedIn, one link per day. I used Publer, a SaaS I helped build some 5 years before that, to schedule these links a month in advance, and everyone was happy. People have approached to me on meetups and mentioned the daily shared links – I don’t think I had settled on the RLFO name back then – and how they really enjoyed reading them. “Quality material” they would call it.
On September 2023 I decided to formalize it into the RLFO newsletter: a weekly collection of 5 links, one meme, and a few words of wisdom by yours truly, to make the newsletter funnier and a lighter read. I even set up an Instagram page for it, which I kept for 12 weeks and then decided to stop (more on that later).
The newsletter was written on Substack, scheduled as an email a month in advance, and also scheduled via Publer to be published on LinkedIn. The Instagram posts were created on Canva, and scheduled at the same time as the LinkedIn one, and manually shared as stories. Eventually I decided to mirror the Substack newsletter on LinkedIn, for better reachability: Substack sends you an email, LinkedIn sends you a notification on new articles. Since my main audience was on LinkedIn, that seemed like a good idea.
It wasn’t too much work to manage all of it, and I got generally good feedback on RLFO. I even reached 85 subscribers on Substack, about 600 on LinkedIn, and I don’t remember (nor care tbh) how many Instagram followers.
Now, on September 2024 – which is not the current date for you, but it is for me taking the decision and writing this – I decided The Big RLFO Experiment is going to end. I have even written most of the final entry, adequately titled RLFO#-1, to follow the same numbering style as the first one – or should I say the zeroth one.
what went wrong
Scheduling things a month in advance gave me some buffer time to write new entries and keep discovering new articles. I kept a backlog of articles I found interesting and once 3-4 of them seemed related to the same topic, I’d put them in the same RLFO issue.
Instagram was a bit too much work: once the RLFO issue was written, I had to create posts on Canva and make sure the wording wasn’t too long, so the image was readable. Then I had to remember to share it as a story, which more often than not, I forgot. Social Media Manager BS, I’m not cut for it. The feedback on Instagram was lagging. A friend of mine told me that Instagram is not the right platform for RLFO: the audience is either too inexperienced for that kind of content, or they’re not interested in it. I agreed with her, so I decided to ditch Instagram. For a while I even considered Reddit, but the Reddit rules were too uptight to fit my schedule.
I was left with Substack and LinkedIn. And initially, the LinkedIn reach and feedback was good. People seemed to be reading the newsletter but they weren’t clickling on the links, which was the whole point of the newsletter. I wanted to share interesting articles with people, not just write a newsletter for the sake of writing a newsletter. I wanted to spark discussions, and there were none.
I noticed a similar pattern with offline meetups: either the meetups disappeared and weren’t being organized anymore, or the audience on the meetups weren’t interested in asking questions or discussing the topics, which is the whole point of a meetup. I even considered organizing one or two meetups myself, but I didn’t have the time nor the enthusiasm to do it after that. Maybe the audience is not interested in these topics, or maybe the topics are too niche and/or advanced for most people.
To conclude, the reasons why the RLFO is ending are:
- RLFO and it’s readers have skewed interests: The good ol’
Apples vs Orangutans
problem. Links I’m sharing are too niche, or require too specific skills, or they don’t show you how to use the newest/fanciest/shiniest JS framework to build a To-Do app. - The medium is not the right one: Substack asks for your email, which most people don’t want to give away. LinkedIn is filled with spam and clickbait articles from self-proclaimed all-knowing gurus whose main goal is mental masturbation, and I just can’t compete with that.
- Not enough time and energy: I have a full-time job, a family, a house to take care of, and a few other side projects I’m working on. I can’t keep up with the newsletter and the social media BS. I’d rather spend my time on something that brings me joy and satisfaction, and RLFO is not that thing anymore.
now what
Nothing. I’m not going to delete Substack, it’s still gonna be out there for you to read or me to reference. I will probably not post on it anymore, there are no items in an array after the -1th index. I might write a blog post once in a while, and that’s going to be in this blog you’re reading right now. I’m probably not going to stop reading articles, I have a long backlog of interesting links. I’m just not going to do it in the RLFO format anymore. The experiment is over.