I sometimes buy locally-grown peaches from a couple of college students selling them out of a stand down the street from my house. A full box runs $18, but I usually get half so the rest won't spoil.

Today the seller told me, "It's actually our last day doing this, in case that changes your decision." She was heading back to college, and the line was really a question: did I want the full batch instead?

I passed, but I'd guess that upsell landed with anyone who has a bigger family or more ways to use a whole box. A simple ask coupled with the scarcity of it being their last week will likely put a lot more money in their pocket by the end of the day.

That's basically the whole argument of today's deep dive. Sometimes more revenue isn't a bigger campaign or a smarter strategy. It's just having the nerve to make the ask, right when it counts.

Let's get started.

I started this newsletter in April.

Four months later, I'll be straight with you: it's not a massive success yet. The list is still small, and I don't know yet whether this becomes a real business unit on its own or stays something I do because I like the discipline of it.

But here's what I do know. This month is closing out as the most profitable month for Fruitful Events, and almost none of it would have happened if I hadn't started writing every week.

Three things happened this month

First, I was commissioned to build event recap microsites for a major entertainment distributor. I can't say much more than that right now because I'm under an NDA, but when that site goes live, the twelve-year-old kid in me is going to be genuinely thrilled that I got to work on it.

Second, I landed another client, and this one is different from the rest. Every client I've had since starting Fruitful Events has been project-based. Get the client, do the project, go find the next client. That makes for lumpy revenue. This is the first retainer client and that matters more to me than the revenue itself.

Third, I found someone to build the SaaS platform I've been talking about recently. Yesterday he showed me the first version of what he built, and I was blown away. I'd sent him a handful of my deep dives so he could see how I think about the problem/opportunity and what I thought the solutions might be. He told me the reason he agreed to build this with me wasn't the idea itself. It was that I clearly understood the market I'm trying to serve. He knows I'm building this to solve my own problem first, which means I can speak to it with more specificity than most people pitching a product in this space ever could.

Where all of this actually came from

Every one of these came from the same source: sharing my weekly thinking in public and being forced to distill it clearly enough to say out loud on a call. By the time I'm on a call with a client or a partner, I've already stress tested the idea with you. I know which parts land and which parts need more work, because you've told me or replied to me.

But writing alone doesn't create opportunities. Asking does.

I got on a call with the website clients I mentioned above and showed them what I'd been building. I asked if they wanted one of their own. A few days later, they hired me to build it for their event.

I asked another client if they had any need for a biz ops or biz dev person. Their answer: "Write me a proposal, because we already love working with you on our events."

For the developer, I texted about twenty friends and had roughly a dozen calls with people who could plausibly build this. I picked the person I felt was the most technically sound and also had a business background, because I needed someone who could fill the gaps I have on the technical side without hand holding every decision.

None of these outcomes happen if I don't ask in the first place.

So I'm going to ask you something.

How can I make this newsletter more valuable for you? What stories, insights, frameworks, or strategies do you want me to dig into?

Whatever comes back is going to shape what I write next. Every person who opens this email each week, I don't take lightly, and I want this 5 minutes to stay high signal.

Just hit reply and I'll your responses to decide what content is worth sharing next.

This newsletter might never become the biggest part of Fruitful Events. But four months in, it's already been the reason for a client relationship, the website I have to keep under wraps (for now), and a piece of software I get to build for myself first. If that's what starting small gets you, I've already gotten more than I expected and I’m excited for what’s ahead.