Lessons from 250 Blog Posts

This week marks a momentous milestone (for me, at least): this is the 250th post that I’ve written on chrisneumann.com.

I never thought I’d actually write for this long, so I thought I would take some time this week to reflect on it. How has my content evolved over the past four and a half years? Does it still resonate with readers? And where should I go next? (If you’re currently reading this on the website, you may have noticed a new look — I’ll dive into the rationale for that shortly.)

Here are some of the lessons I learned after 250 blog posts.

The Backstory

When I moved to Canada in late-2020 to join Panache Ventures, I noticed that there was a lack of entrepreneurial content available for founders there. I had spent the better part of the 5 years prior teaching founders around the world strategies and best practices used by leading Silicon Valley startups (first at 500 Startups and, later, through Commonwealth Ventures). So I thought I’d write about some of them.

But there was one problem.

Over the years, I had written a handful of blog posts, but I could never figure out how to publish content on a consistent schedule. I knew it was possible to write with a weekly cadence (after all, I wrote weekly investor updates for nearly five years at DataHero), but I had never done so with creative or longer-form content.

I mentioned this dilemma in passing to one of my mentors, Marvin Liao, who told me about a course he had recently taken called Write of Passage. The program was the brainchild of an exceptional young writer named David Perell. Despite its name, Write of Passage wasn’t actually a course about writing. At least, not in the strictest sense. Rather, it was a bootcamp designed to teach you how to build systems and processes to support writing and publishing new content on a regular basis (like weekly blog posts). It was exactly what I needed.

It turned out, I wasn’t the only one. The participants in my cohort included many residents of Startupland™, like founders and VCs. But there were also professional athletes, academics and a wide variety of other writers and aspiring writers.

How It Started

Write of Passage was one of those programs that unapologetically threw you in the deep end from the start. The very first session kicked off with a firm dictum from David: in order to stay in the program, you had to publish your first post within one week.

The prompt: “What is the definitive answer to the question that people ask you most often?”

At the time, it had been about six months since news of my joining Panache and moving to Vancouver was announced. In subsequent calls and coffee chats I was repeatedly being asked the same question:

“Why did you come back to Canada?”

On April 13th, 2022, I published the answer to that question and launched this website.

How It’s Going

It’s now been 229 weeks since that first post (for those of you wondering how I reached 250 posts in only 229 weeks, there were several periods of time when I published multiple posts each week — such as during my brief side quest into food blogging.) Over the past 4 ½ years, readership of both my website and the corresponding newsletter have steadily grown (thank you all for that 🙏).

I have no idea what happened in early 2024…

But it hasn’t all been “up-and-to-the-right.”

While website traffic and newsletter subscribers have steadily grown, open rates for the newsletter have slightly declined over the years.

The open rate for my newsletter has held steady around 60% for the past two years (a rate that is generally considered pretty solid, though with AI preview and summary tools becoming so prevalent, it’s increasingly hard to tell). That said, I still wanted to dig into the performance data for both the website and the newsletter.

First, a few thoughts on open rates:

1. Year 1 open rates aren’t meaningful in any way. The early subscriber numbers were so low (and so heavily skewed to people who already knew me personally), that they were unnaturally high.

2. A better metric for overall relevance is unsubscribe rate. With agents making it easier-than-ever to ditch newsletters we don’t read anymore, are people still keeping me in their inbox? It turns out the answer is yes (the 90-day rolling unsubscribe rate for my newsletter is ~0.1%, which is considered very strong — thank you again 🙏)

That said, despite a steady open rate and strong retention, there has unequivocally been more inconsistency in content performance over the past few years. So I started to look at what I’ve been posting and how that’s changed:

1. The content I posted in Years 1 and 2 was overwhelmingly instructional/educational in nature (fundraising best practices, posts about how venture capital worked, etc.). In fact, more than 70% of the first 120 posts I wrote either taught the reader how to do something or explained how something worked.

2. In year 3, I started writing more posts about startup trends, observations about different ecosystems and topics related to mental and physical health. Last year (2025), only 37% of the posts I wrote were instructional/educational in nature.

3. The last 2 years have also seen an (understandable) uptick in posts related to AI.

4. Many of the posts I wrote in years 1 - 3 had an overtly Canadian slant to them. That was very much a by-product of my role as a GP at a Canadian-focused Pre-Seed fund. Since leaving Panache at the end of 2024 to focus on [Redacted], most of the posts that I’ve published were written independent of geography (though I’ve still made a point of writing about trends in the Canadian ecosystem as part of my quarterly 5 Things I Think I Think posts).

What Comes Next

The biggest epiphany going through 250 posts’ worth of data was the degree to which the type of content I’ve published has evolved over the years. The first few years were overwhelmingly educational/instructional in nature because I had a massive backlog of topics that I wanted to write about. Now that I’ve written about most of those, my posts are more focused on trends and observations.

But I’m not done yet.

For starters, it became abundantly clear as I went through Google Analytics data and spoke with founders that a significant portion of my older content had become difficult to find or access. That’s where this redesign comes in. In addition to a cleaner, more streamlined design, there’s a new Topics page that more effectively organizes all of my posts (driven by a complete refactoring of post tags).

I’m also working on a further refactoring related to AEO/SEO/GEO. But I’ll save details of that for a future post.

In the meantime, as I look ahead to (hopefully) another 250 posts on chrisneumann.com, expect more insights, more data and more in-depth posts to help founders, investors and ecosystem supporters around the world make sense of Silicon Valley and beyond.

Thanks for reading 🙏.