Gus

Nobody says no to your face. The only no you can trust is an unaccepted calendar invite or a declined card. Book seven more and end each one with a request.

Worth adding that Gmail proxies and caches images too, so an open can be logged by infrastructure before a person reads anything. Between that and MPP the pixel is a delivery signal at best, not an engagement one.

The list email also works after the day ends. The board resets, your email doesn't.

Also check what happens to your UTMs on redirect. Mine were being stripped by a redirect from the apex domain to www, so a chunk of paid and referral traffic was landing in direct. It made organic look better than it was and made a newsletter placement look like it did nothing, which nearly cost me a renewal on a placement that was actually working.

Split it by source before you rewrite anything a fifth time. Directory traffic scrolling at 3% and search traffic scrolling at 25% is a completely different situation from both sitting at 6%, and right now you're averaging two unrelated populations.

Nine seconds with half your traffic from a directory sounds exactly like people opening tabs from a list and closing them. Look at the search third only. That's the traffic with intent, and it's the traffic you can get more of.

The four to six second loop is the right call but check the file size. I have seen people put a 12MB gif above the fold and lose more to load time than they ever lost to the video.

The order matters more than the pricing. Productise the delivery before you productise the product.

For your next three engagements, do the work using only the scripts, with a fixed scope written down, at the same price. No custom detours. If you cannot deliver a happy client that way, the software is not ready and no amount of landing page work fixes that.

Once three consecutive clients have been delivered purely through the tooling, you have a product with nineteen case studies and a very short list of things to build. Most people skip this and end up building the general version of a thing they only ever did specifically.

I did daily narration for five months. About 150 posts, some genuinely nice conversations, zero signups I could trace, and by month four I was inventing things to have done in order to have something to post, which is the point at which it started distorting what I worked on. That is the failure mode nobody warns you about: the format quietly becomes the roadmap.

That's mostly normal. A twist converter can't fill completely in one go because you're pulling against an air bubble with nowhere to go, and 60-70% is behaving as designed.

To do better: fill, then with the nib still submerged twist the piston back down a quarter turn to expel some air, and fill again. Two or three cycles gets you nearly full.

If it stops at half and doesn't improve across cycles, check the seal. A converter not fully seated on the section nipple leaks air and never builds vacuum. Push it on firmly with a slight twist and you should feel a definite stop.

One drop of dish soap in the soak water. Not more than a drop, rinse thoroughly afterwards, but it lifts the film that plain water leaves behind.

Mild disagreement with the pure day-rate approach: for small local clients the day rate conversation goes badly because they have no reference for what a day is worth, and they do have a reference for what the video is worth to them. I quote a package with a deliverable list: one 90 second cut, one 30 second cut for socials, vertical crop, licensed music - and the price sits against the value of the thing, not against my calendar. Same number, much easier conversation, and the extra deliverables cost me twenty minutes.

I took a sixth because it was interesting and I lost two within the quarter, both because I got slow at replying rather than because the work was bad. That was an expensive way to learn that responsiveness is most of what small clients think they are buying.

Strong agree. Half the Glue jobs I have inherited are twelve lines of pandas paying Spark prices.

Weight has almost nothing to do with fountain pen friendliness. It's about sizing and fibre. A heavily sized 68gsm paper takes ink beautifully and an unsized 120gsm sketch paper wicks like blotting paper. Thick and coated get marketed together and they are not the same thing.

What you can do with the notebook you own: use a finer, drier nib, since an EF steel puts down a fraction of what a medium does, and pick drier inks, because the well-behaved document inks and most iron galls feather far less than saturated dye-heavy ones. Writing slower helps more than you'd expect, since contact time is what lets it wick.

What you can't do is fix the paper. Nothing you apply to it helps enough to be worth the effort.

The heel is always the tell. It is the last part they get to and the easiest to lean on.

And do not send them a link that asks for a vote. Send them a link that says here is the thing, tell me what you think. The behaviour you want is engagement, and the other kind is detectable.

Confirmed the hard way. I moved my desk so the window was in front of me instead of behind me and my cheap camera immediately outperformed my expensive one in the old position.

I dumped the peel from a big batch of marmalade into a bin that had been running perfectly for a year. It went sour within days, mites exploded, and I had to strip the bin back to bedding and start again with about half the worms I had before. It took three months to get back to where it was.

Worth also asking what happens to the policy while it is a half finished building site, because some will not cover a partially converted van at all.

Second the paper point strongly. A 30 pound pen on good paper beats a 200 pound pen on whatever pad the office buys, every time.

Direction-dependent scratchiness on an otherwise fine nib is usually alignment or rotation rather than a defect.

Under the loupe, look at the tines from directly above with the nib pointing at you. They should meet with no step. A tine sitting even slightly higher than its neighbour catches only when you pull in the direction that digs it in, which matches what you describe.

Then check rotation. Most people write with the pen rolled slightly and have no idea. Deliberately roll it a few degrees each way while doing an upstroke and see whether there's a position where the drag disappears.

Steel nibs do smooth a little with use, but break-in is doing far less work than the internet suggests.

Then you choose: retrain the grip, or have the nib ground to how you actually hold it. Neither is wrong, plenty of people write beautifully at a rotated angle with a nib ground for it.