Not So Tiny Experiments

If you're serious about knowledge management, Anne-Laure Le Cunff will appear on your online PKM radar sooner rather than later. And now it can also happen in your favourite bookstore.

Anne-Laure le Cunff by Mark Dykeman. Source: howaboutthis.substack.com.

You might remember her from one of the earlier issues dedicated to the first PKM Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands:

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

, a neuroscientist, ex-Googler, Ness Labs founder, business owner and now a published writer.

[Upcoming Event] PKM Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands

The cover above features Anne-Laure’s avatar semantically connected to her Personal Knowledge Management Olympus peers,

Tiago Forte

and

Nick Milo

. To my question about how she got into the intimate circle of US-based knowledge management gurus as an Algerian-French neuroscientist, she said their friendship preceded their ascension to the top of the abovementioned PKM top-of-mindness. As always, overnight success takes ten years on average.¹

The Encounter of the Third Type

I followed Anne-Laure’s work for a few years before a coveted one-on-one online meeting with her was finally cemented into my calendar.

It was both a fanboy event and a Q&A session. Indeed, the abovementioned note-taker archetypes paradigm made it into some of my PKM writing and even evolved into a potential fork of the idea that I needed to run by her to let her poke some holes. After all, she spent a lot of time researching its origins and discussing it with Tiago and Nick, who also allowed themselves to tweak the concept somewhat.

…

Then we met in person.

Anne-Laure le Cunff and yours truly.

I was surprised by her newsletter's popularity in Singapore, far away from her main base, London, when many devoted readers showed up because of a subtle footnote in one of her issues. It wasn’t a humongous meetup by design, but the core of fans was hard. A hardcore, if you will. If you’re not on that mailing list yet, here it is.

She writes beautifully and consistently, and to her fans’ ubiquitous question about how she achieves such prolific, high-quality creative output, she humbly replies: “Guys, don’t forget, I’m doing it full-time”. Fair enough.

Tiny Experiments

Many years of grinding and hustling paid off. As she mentioned over our call and wrote in one of her last newsletter issues, the big news arrived unexpectedly. As she was about to close the laptop lid, a characteristic notification sound provoked a dopamine spike she knows all too well as a neuroscientist and urged the reptilian brain to satisfy the craving. It didn’t disappoint. A short message from Penguin Random House would validate years of intense research and sacrifice: a publishing deal offer.

Tiny Experiments’ book cover. Source: https://nesslabs.com/book.

“I always wanted to write a book”, she admits, as I’m sure many avid readers would. Though, unlike many aspiring writers who fall prey to the “if you build it, they will come” cognitive bias², Anne-Laure focused on proving the concept first. Her YouTube videos and digital mountains of newsletter issues carefully polished over the years were her Eric Ries’s equivalent of an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product³, allowing her to run experiments, collect feedback and iterate upon it, further crystalising her content niche—a respectful engineering approach.

In the modern creators' economy, digital real estate in the form of a YouTube channel, a newsletter, or a blog (or even all of the above) is a foundation for a successful book launch. It’s a launchpad and an experimentation lab. Not only does it reduce the risk of a “flop” upon publication, but it also shows you the path to follow. There’s a big gap between what the author thinks the audience wants and what it’s genuinely interested in. Asking your friends and family is counterproductive. You need unapologetic feedback grounded in data.

Substack’s darling

Lenny Rachitsky

from The

Lenny's Newsletter

, for example, recently released a book creatively called “The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter”, which is nothing other than a collection of the most popular issues printed on paper.

In Anne-Laure’s case, it was a great way of picking the core topic of a future book based on data from her most-read blog posts. It was anything but a tiny experiment.

The wait is finally over, and the book is now available for pre-order. I’ll be listening to it in audio form, but you can choose the format of your liking through the button below. I’m not affiliated with Anne-Laure, Nesslabs or Penguin Random House, and I don’t know what to expect from this self-help book. But I know Anne-Laure and her work, and that’s plenty to justify spending my valuable Audible credit. Happy reading.

1. https://www.inc.com/empact/why-successful-people-take-10-years-to-succeed-overnight.html

2. https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-the-motto-if-you-build-it-they-will-come-is-bs/227850

3. Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup. Currency.