7 months of Perspectives – start of my newsletter journey

It’s hard to put an exact date on when my Perspectives on Power Platform newsletter was actually launched. In the very first issue, “Start somewhere”, I wrote about my decision to sign up for beehiiv and quickly put in place the foundation on which I could build something.

At that point, in March 2024, I did not yet know what exactly I was going to build. After the health challenges I had just gone through, I knew I needed to stop doing things in a way that kept me from getting better. The 11 years of being in the Microsoft MVP program had taken their toll on my mental wellbeing. Co-founding and promoting a Power Platform consulting company alongside my voluntary community activities turned out to be an unsustainable model.

Not a big surprise, and not anyone else’s fault either. I had chosen this path, now I just needed to find a new path forward. Today, it feels like this is indeed happening.

To write again

After taking a break, I quickly discovered that I still have a burning passion for writing. I just needed the right place and format for it. With Twitter now gone (to s***), I developed a habbit of creating quick posts / hot takes on LinkedIn. Regardless of their algorithm being a similar jerk as any other big social media, I learned to live within the limits imposed there. The higher character limit of a LinkedIn post suited me well, allowing me to express complete thoughts rather than just a couple of sentences.

My audience started to grow. Much faster than what I ever experienced on Twitter. At some point, due to the poor analytics that LinkedIn themselves provide, I chose to pay for a 3rd party tool, Shield Analytics. The most important feature turned out to be the ability to search for my past posts (yes, LinkedIn is terrible with basic content management). As a nice bonus, it draws charts on how the engagement levels are doing compared to previous time periods. You could even simulate what a similar audience reach would cost you if you paid for it via sponsored content campaigns rather than just writing catchy posts.

Social media companies are not your friends, though. They aim to own the content that is created by the users and choose how/when it is presented. More importantly, they want to own your network – so that they can charge money for selling it back to you, should you want to reach them with your message. Connections, followers – those are just numbers shown to keep you hooked on the potential audience.

Newsletters, on the other hand, are about forming the direct connection between the publisher and the subscriber. Algorithms won’t determine who sees what – the humans on both ends get to choose that. I think it’s a much healthier basis for communication, rather than relying on the gamification mechanisms in social networks that can change on a whim.

While the themes that I write about may be the same regardless of the channel, the newsletter offers me a way to think deeper. I’ve developed the habbit of looking at what I personally react to online, what my network is saying, what type of social posts I create – then analyzing it from the different perspectives as part of writing my long form Perspectives into the newsletter.

I feel that it’s started to work pretty well. I’ve allowed myself to take time in exploring new themes around GenAI and cybersecurity, as well as reflecting on the past/present/history of Power Platform. Many of the topics are either the result of talking with new people or they have resulted in new connections being formed. Those are crucial KPIs in the end. 1) Does it feel meaningful to myself? 2) Does it activate others to do something new? And last but not least: 3) does it gain traction from the online audience in general?

I’m not going to disclose the exact stats on how many readers there have been for the newsletter. Let’s just say that I’ve been delighted to see a constant flow of new subscribers that have intentionally said “yes, please, send me more emails like this”. It feels special, every single time.❤️

More recently I’ve had the courage to say “if you want to read this article, please do me a favor and create a free subscriber account”. After all, this ability to stop just any AI bots from scraping your content and using the data for providing answers without zero attribution to the original source was one stated reason why I chose to transition from blogging to writing a newsletter.

The conclusion is: these walls do work. If on a normal day I’d get a beehiiv daily growth recap message with 2-4 new subscribers, requesting a login can make that grow 10x.

Is AI really eating the tech blogging world then? I believe it is happening on some level. This insighful article from MVP Tony Redmond who runs sites like Office365ITPros.com explains the impact that LLM generated answers to tech questions are having on website traffic. If you used to have a business that relied on people discovering your site via “how to” queries on Google, that model is becoming less and less viable every day.

The tools that shape us

Regardless of what we as individuals think about generative AI, it exists. It changes the world around us, whether we use it for a particular task or not. I haven’t yet fallen in love with Microsoft 365 Copilot, but I talk a lot with my ChatGPT every single day. It has become a virtual personal advisor in exploring areas that are less familiar to me in technology, business and life. It would be difficult to live without it. But does it replace online searches, though?

I have already mostly abandoned Google. However. I did not replace it with AI, but rather a search engine that I pay for with money – not with my data and privacy. Kagi has been an awesome experience that not only meets my everyday search needs; they also sent me a beautiful yellow T-shirt! I’ve learned that an ad-free search engine that doesn’t try to actively deceive me into clicking sponsored links is still highly useful in the year 2024.

These shifts in user behavior resulting from advancements in the field of AI will mean more & more people question whether their de facto digital tools they’ve relied on are the right choice anymore. This is happening all around me. Even on this very place where I am now writing this text and you are presumably reading it (unless you are one of the remaining RSS feed fans): WordPress.

I have been a WordPress user for as long as I remember. Well, okay, so I do still remember my initial blogging experiments with Blogger and Drupal. Once I went with WP, though, there was never a true reason to look elsewhere. It did everything I needed, and was able to adapt to whatever new requirements I came up with. Not only did it serve as a personal blog engine, it also powered many professional websites along my journey.

When all you’ve got is a WP hammer, every problem looks like a blog post nail. While being a versatile and broadly used platform means there is a huge community around it to give tips, build plugins and sort of keep all your options open – you are still thinking within that WP box. You keep publishing openly available blog posts as web pages, like you’ve done for 16 years already. You can’t just stop doing what you’ve always done, right?

The big wake up call for WP bloggers came from the mothership. The founder of WordPress has shown that even though the wordpress.org side is operating as a non-profit, the commercial arm of wordpress.com has the ultimate control over the software. The public dispute that Matt Wullenweg started in September by calling WP Engine “a cancer for WordPress” has since escalated into a complete collapse of trust in WP.

Automattic (the creator of WordPress, led by Matt) and WP Engine are both big hosting providers for WP sites. Now, they’re only talking through lawyers, with WP Engine having sued Automattic for “abuse of power, extortion and greed”. In response, Matt and Automattic decided to literally steal a commercial plugin developed by WP Engine and publish it as their own. It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in the CMS space yet the proof is everywhere in the source code.

With beehiiv, I had already taken the first step to publish content somewhere outside of the WP kingdom. During the past few months, there’s been a steady stream of product updates that make me miss the WP ecosystem less and less. Most importantly, I feel that the mechanism of a newsletter is providing a better connection not just between me & my subscribers – it also makes me want to write more. That’s not exactly a plugin you could just add to a WordPress blog. It’s about a whole different product design approach.

Will I still be maintaining this WP blog then? That’s a good question. Since my regular content posting is on the newsletter site anyway, I technically could get everything I need from a static website. Briefly exploring the world of SSG’s (static site generators), I tried spinning up a Hugo site, running on Netlify. However, I very quickly realized that the Git repo driven content management workflow was not something I would replace my WP site with.

I decided to give this SSG approach a go in a different context, though. When developing an alternative way to visualize the release plans for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 than what Microsoft’s own Release Planner site offers, I ended up publishing releaseplans.net as a Hugo website. Now, that site lives as a GitHub repo for the source code, while I do the content updates in Visual Studio Code.

I have of course already covered this topic in my newsletter:

• A better way to view Release Planner data: the origin story of the report & site
• Gotta Git with the times: exploring how a pro-dev tool like Git could get “democratized”

I’m in the process of creating a “proper” website for my company, Niiranen Advisory Oy. That will also not be a WP site but something different. Stay tuned for an update in the not too distant future.

What’s coming next

The idea behind the domain perspectives.plus was always to make space for something more than just a direct replacement of this blog. Today, that idea has reached the state where Perspectives Plus is a real thing anyone can subscribe to:

There will always be a free version of the newsletter available. In addition, I will keep on sharing as much as humanly possible on social media channels like LinkedIn, Mastodon and Bluesky. Because that’s just who I am and how I work: with extreme transparency.

What the paid version of Perspectives Plus offers is a commitment from me to the subscribers. Rather than merely using these publishing platforms as my own strange form of public therapy, I will now aim to deliver something worth paying for. Right now, it will consist of weekly emails covering recent news and events in our ecosystem (see free example issue). There will also be premium-only articles that dive deeper into the persistent challenges and possibilities in and nearby Microsoft Power Platform. Leveraging my lessons learned and observations made during my 19 years with this ecosystem.

It is again the start of a new phase for me. Previously it wouldn’t have been either possible or sensible for me to launch a paid newsletter. Now it is, so it has to be done. Then, make adjustments along the way as you learn more about what the audience wants and what I can deliver.

This is also the first time ever since I can launch an actual Black Friday offer!🎉 For a limited time, you can get 50% off the annual subscription price of Perspectives Plus. Tell your friends and family that this is the perfect Xmas present for them (if they happen to work with Microsoft technology, that is). Use this offer link.

One final tool related thing. In the last 4 years that I was in charge of creating the everyday visuals for social content of a boutique consulting company, I learned to enjoy Canva. It’s a great example of a citizen tool that allows people with little professional skills yet enough determination to create graphics for whatever purpose. So, to close things off for this blog post, enjoy the promotional video clip I created for spreading the Black Friday offer message in my social feeds: