Kevin Indig writes Progress Memo, which fits out weekly to greater than 29,000 founders, in-house leads, and advertising and marketing leaders. He spent 10 years as an operator and chief at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian, and now advises Meta, Airbnb, and Reddit on progress.
The Memo runs on authentic analysis into how search and AI are altering — Kevin, in his personal phrases, swims in information all day.
The work is not finished whenever you hit ‘publish’
“Publishing is barely half the job — you additionally want a repeatable technique to distribute your work. Buffer makes that a lot simpler, and retains an excellent put up from disappearing after publication day,” says Kevin.
You spend days on a bit, it goes out, it will get one good day of consideration, after which it is gone. Kevin’s repair is to cease treating a Memo as one put up and begin treating it as per week of them — the identical logic behind repurposing long-form content material, utilized to a e-newsletter.
“A single Memo provides us a number of issues to share. We’d pull out a chart, a discovering, or a query price discussing,” he says.
Substack Notes is the place concepts get examined
On Substack Notes, Kevin posts brief takes, charts, movies, and teasers for Memos that have not gone out but. He additionally makes use of Notes to check a subject earlier than committing to a full article.
A completely researched reminiscence takes a whole week of his time, whereas a Notice solely takes a couple of minutes. It is properly price investing within the latter first, he says.
The concepts themselves come from his authentic analysis, his shopper conversations, and the patterns he sees within the information. The Notes that carry out properly typically get a whole e-newsletter.
Buffer handles the distribution
Kevin and his crew put together the posts across the e-newsletter, and Buffer schedules them from there. Scheduling is important for Kevin, who isn’t at his desk. Some weeks he is touring; some days are booked end-to-end with shoppers.
With Substack Notes now accessible as a channel in Buffer, Kevin can batch prep his concepts to exit too.
“Buffer makes certain each Memo will get distributed with out requiring me to be on-line for each put up. If I needed to put a quantity on it, I would say Buffer saves me 2–3 hours per week.”
Utilizing Buffer with Codex
Kevin’s favourite Buffer function is the Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) integration, which lets AI instruments join on to a Buffer account. He factors Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant, at his personal put up historical past to see which posts landed and pull concepts for what to write down subsequent.
“I really like the MCP. With the ability to join Codex to Buffer, perceive which posts carry out properly, and get inspiration for what to put up subsequent is unbeatable,” he says.
His recommendation for Substack creators
For writers nonetheless deciding whether or not they want a device in any respect, Kevin’s recommendation is to start out the place your readers already are, construct a routine you may preserve, and test what’s working so can repeat (or transfer on).
It is recommendation that applies whether or not you are simply beginning on Substack or 30,000 subscribers in. Kevin’s model of it occurs to run on a scheduling queue and a coding assistant — however the routine is the half that does the work.
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