Hello internet friends ❤️
It has been around two months since I sent out my last newsletter. I accidentally took an unplanned hiatus because life hit me like a bus.
But now we are back, baby and better than before!
As you may or may not be able to tell, I have migrated my entire operation over to Beehiiv, and going forward, I will be using this space to share my latest Marketing Operations mistake every Sunday so you can steal the lessons, skip the chaos, and sharpen your ops game.
For this very first newsletter, I'm going to tell you about my disastrous migration to Beehiiv (which is frankly a huge part of the reason that I took a two-month hiatus.) This is not at all about shading Beehiiv. This is about sharing how even somebody like myself, who spends all day, every day project managing marketing technology teams can still bamboozle herself when she fails to project manage and roadmap her own work.
Let's jump into this mini dumpster fire.
The Scene
Early in June, I realized that I was genuinely enjoying this whole newsletter side project and wanted to get more serious about investing in it.
All of you marketing operations people who may have stood up some scrappy technology initially and thought, "yeah, we'll just use what we can and then we'll figure it out later," will absolutely understand the crossroads I stood at. I had officially hit the "figure it out later" point.
What I realized very quickly after doing some research into newsletter audience building best practices was that my current toolset was not at all equipped to do the things I needed it to do.
So as us marketing tech folk are inclined to do, I tried to hack it together. I explored Zapier + a few other tools to see if I could duct tape a solution without changing my then newsletter platform.
Alas, the answer was no. All the duct tape, all the disparate platforms, all the slightly different branded experiences meant that I was not creating the user experience I wanted for my readers.
And again, this is going to sound really familiar for a lot of marketing ops teams. When we are thinking about upleveling our technologies, our North Star needs to be the end user experience. If we do [insert tech stack change here], are we introducing too much friction for sales? Are we making the data too complex for our reporting? Are we making it too hard for our marketers to launch campaigns?
After hitting this exact same roadblock, I started researching new newsletter platforms and eventually landed on Beehiiv. So far, so good. Research done, technology selected, time to migrate!
Where It Went Sideways
I have no shame in admitting that I thought I could make the transition in basically a week.
In my head, I would take one weekend to sign up for Beehiiv and do the configuration > another weekend to migrate my content and users > then boom! magic! I would start sending out newsletters from my new platform with maybe one week skipped at most.
Clearly, I was delusional…
How It Played Out
Because here I am writing this newsletter on August 13th, almost two months to the day from my last newsletter.
That's how long it took me to finish the migration and FINALLY feel ready to start focusing on my actual content again.
I had to get somebody on my team at Intrisphere to help me manually migrate the content because Beehiiv’s content migration tools did not work for me.
It took me almost a month to get the website designed. I went through dozens of iterations, and honestly, all the different versions were all perfectly fine! None of them were ugly. All of them could have gone live. I don't even want to think about how many hours were wasted here.
Lastly, I got weirdly intimidated by having to move the domains around, which makes zero sense when you think about how many domains I have monkeyed around with in the course of my marketing career.
Next Time...
So with all that glorious hindsight, here's what I would do differently for my next migration:
Focus on the big picture details that are actually critical to the launch and not on the random, inconsequential details that matter to very few people.
Build in dedicated scoping time to fully understand the lift before I do any of the actual migration work.
Only commit to a (realistic) timeline (with buffer) after scoping has been completed.
Now, for all three bullets above, I absolutely knew those concepts in advance. I just failed to apply them to my own personal projects. However, here's the learning that was genuinely new to me:
Next time I have a big project, I would be religious about bringing in extra hands. Maybe all of us in marketing operations have a little bit of a hero complex. I thought I could do this migration myself when I have a business to run, clients to deal with, a toddler routinely trying to break his face, etc. etc. If I had tapped somebody else to help me, this would've gone a million times faster.
Let me know what you think about Beehiiv and the new newsletter format so I can convince myself that all of this angst over the past two months was actually worth it.
See you next week,
🫶🏽 Alysha