The pattern is recognizable to anyone who has spent more than three years trying to build an online business. A new platform emerges, or a new tactic gets documented by someone who made it work, and a significant proportion of the marketing community immediately pivots to that platform or tactic. Six months later, the results are mixed at best, and another new thing has arrived to redirect the pivot.
The person who published this account — running a content and consulting business for seven years — documented his exhausting tour through growth hacks, viral strategies, platform pivots, and tactical experiments. The list was considerable: podcast SEO, short-form video, Twitter-threads-as-lead-gen, LinkedIn personal branding, community-led growth, AI-generated content at scale, joint venture launches, and several more. Each was given a genuine attempt, with real time and resources committed.
None of them produced the results his boring strategy produced. The boring strategy was a weekly newsletter, published every Tuesday, on a specific topic, for seven years. No growth hacking. No viral attempts. No platform pivots. One thing, consistently, for a long time.
The newsletter now has 34,000 subscribers. It generates approximately $180,000 annually in consulting clients who come inbound, products sold to the existing list, and sponsorship revenue. He estimates that the newsletter represents around 70% of his total business revenue and requires around 20% of his total working hours.
The uncomfortable implication of his story is not that growth hacks don't work. Some of them do, for some people, in some contexts. The implication is about where the returns actually compound. Novelty does not compound. A new tactic generates a spike and then requires another new tactic to generate the next spike. Consistency compounds. The newsletter that exists for seven years is not doing something qualitatively different in year seven than it did in year one — but it is reaching far more people with far more trust because of the accumulated history that a new tactic cannot produce.
The boring strategies win in the long run. This is known. The challenge is that the long run requires tolerating the long middle period where the boring strategy is working but not dramatically, and the interesting strategies keep arriving with their promises of acceleration. Staying boring through that period is the actual skill.