🔍 How many of them are actually people?

This week I did something I’d been putting off. I looked properly at my own subscriber list.

I’ve been telling myself I write for about 3,400 people. That number sat at the top of my dashboard every morning. I never questioned it once. You don’t question good news.

Then I checked. Most of them aren’t people.

By the end of this you’ll:

My open rate has been running around 70%. In this business that’s a wonderful number. Most newsletters see half that.

Here’s what was underneath it.

Most of the addresses on my list are work addresses – people at companies, schools and banks. Company email systems scan every message before it reaches anyone, checking it’s safe. That scan gets recorded as somebody opening my newsletter.

Nobody opened anything. A machine checked it for viruses.

When I sorted my list by how often each address opens, 847 of them opened every single issue. Every one, never missed. People go on holiday. People have busy weeks. Machines don’t.

And I’ll be honest about the part that stings. I’ve been doing this for nearly a year, and I didn’t know any of that existed. Not the scanning, not that it gets counted as somebody reading. Nobody’s hiding it. I’d just never thought to ask what an “open” actually was.

So if this is news to you too, you’re in good company.

Here’s the part I liked least. I had a tidy-up running that quietly removed anyone who hadn’t opened in a while. Sounds sensible. But the machines open everything, so they never got removed – and real people who read without their email loading the pictures looked dead to it, so they did.

I’ve been keeping the machines and deleting the readers. For about ten months.

For you real readers, first of all thank you. Second, please confirm you still want to receive Retire & RISE.

You’re not running a newsletter. But you’re shown numbers like mine constantly.

Every course, every programme, every “here’s what I built” post comes with a figure attached. Subscribers. Followers. Members. Downloads.

I wasn’t lying to you about 3,400. I believed it. That’s the thing worth noticing – the person showing you a number usually believes it too. They read it off a dashboard the same way I did.

So you’re rarely looking at dishonesty. You’re looking at a number nobody checked. And it’s always wrong in the same direction, because the easy things to count are the things machines can do.

When somebody shows you a number, ask one question:

What had to happen for that number to go up by one?

Then judge the answer by how much effort it took a human being.

That’s the whole check. Count the things that cost somebody effort, and ignore the rest.

Run it on anything you’re thinking of buying into. If the impressive number is opens, views or followers, you’ve learned nothing yet about whether real people are there. Ask what the smallest number they’ll tell you is, and notice if they change the subject.

You’ll be less impressed, more often. That’s not cynicism, it’s accuracy – and it’ll save you money, because the numbers used to sell to you are the easy ones by design.

If you don’t, nothing bad happens today. You’ll just keep weighing offers by figures that were never really about people, which is how I spent a good few years and a lot of money.

I’d rather know my real number than keep a flattering one. It’s smaller than I thought. I’d still rather have it.

Which brings me to the awkward part.

I’m cleaning up my list this week, and I can’t tell from here which of you is a person.

So I’m asking instead of guessing. If you’d like to keep getting this, hit reply and send me one word. “Yes” is plenty. It doesn’t need to be a message. (If you answered above, you don’t need to answer again. Thank you.)

No form, no link, nothing to click. A reply is the only thing I can be sure a machine didn’t do – which is rather the point of everything above.

And if you don’t reply, nothing bad happens. You’ll just stop hearing from me, which is fair enough if you never asked to hear from me in the first place.

See You at the Bank 💰
Bob