I’m joining Milk Road as Head of Growth!

Milk Road originally started as a newsletter in 2021, quickly becoming one of the largest newsletters covering crypto headlines while infusing a humorous tone that made complicated concepts more approachable. I first subscribed to Milk Road back in May 2022, a month after I started writing.

The casual humor stuck out to me as I thought I was the only newsletter in town with the flair for infusing memes into its writing. The feeling was mutual, as I was invited to write a few guest posts, maybe an early sign of things to come?

Since then, Milk Road has grown beyond just a newsletter and evolved into a media platform focused on investing, starting with crypto. The team has launched a podcast featuring the biggest names in the space as guests, and expanded its newsletter portfolio to Macro and Degen verticals (and more soon! 😉).

After multiple discussions with Milk Road on potentially joining the team, I wrote a self-imposed 23 page doc breaking down what growth could look like. The first section was ‘Why Milk Road?’, a question I wanted to be able to answer for myself considering all the possible alternatives. And the answer was broken down into 3 buckets. In its original form:

Mission alignment: Although I don’t know what the explicit mission of Milk Road, it likely consists of elements around providing insights and information to its audience in engaging ways. That’s why I created Web3 with TPan in April 2022, a personal blog at the intersection of growth and culture in this industry.

Product: In its simplest form, Milk Road is a newsletter. However, it is in its fledgling stages of becoming a media brand and platform branching out into multiple categories, a growing and engaged community, and a multi-faceted media company with a presence on every major distribution channel and social network.

Opportunity: Milk Road is in a position to make an opportunistic hire for someone to lead Growth. Through our conversations so far, I realized I am uniquely suited for this role as someone who has extensive web2 growth experience, is a high-conviction participant in crypto/web3/blockchain tech, and is a Milk Road reader since May 2022.

To the average growth or marketing professional, Milk Road wouldn’t be a top choice. It probably wouldn’t even be on the target list for most. And that’s not a knock on them or Milk Road, it’s just different type of opportunity. Yet for me, it seemed like it was meant to be.

The mission alignment piece stuck out to me the most as I believe one of the best ways to onboard new users is through education, something both this newsletter and Milk Road do, and I’ve grown an increasing passion for. Or as I like to say in a different way, onboarding through 1000 ramps, the inverse of a death by 1000 cuts.

Milk Road is one ramp of many, and I want to this ramp much wider.

Well, one thing’s for sure…

I won’t be going anywhere (yay!), but the reality is I won’t be able to continue the regular cadence I’m proud of.

In my 300th piece I illustrated how this newsletter has evolved in terms of growth and ouput, and earlier this year I made the decision to reduce the cadence to once per week for sustainability reasons.

The silver lining in transitioning to occasional longform writing is that I’ll know when a topic deserves to be opined upon, with the same signals that got me through the previous 385 pieces. Frantic idea jotting, following developments feverishly, and shower thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere. So the expectation for myself in this new chapter is that every future post is still worth reading, maybe even more than before.

And outside of Milk Road work, where will all these thoughts live? Where they should have always lived alongside Substack, on X of course! I’ve had this weird aversion to posting more on X all these years, and I hope the void of not writing consistently here will be filled by sharing more short-form thoughts there, with some of them becoming seeds worthy of becoming a long-form piece. I also plan to be more active on LinkedIn again, but that content will naturally be more refined and polished for the audiences that live there (aka probably not you hehe).

To all of you: Thank you for reading for all these years! What started out as a brain dump of thoughts shared to an audience of crickets chirping turned into something that I kept up for much longer than I would have imagined.

And to my premium subs, thank you x100000! You gave me the signal that my content was worth more than just a read and kept me going. Billing is paused indefinitely as of now.

If you want to chat about Milk Road or anything else, you know where to reach me.

See you next week soon! 🫡