---
aliases: ["May 2025"]
Is A: Month
Created at: "2025-05-28"
Belongs to: "[[25q2]]"
Rating: "😐"
---
# May 2025

## Focus

- Execute [[25q2-team-retreat]] in Tuscany
- Push toward [[25q2-reach-70k]] — growth sprint with coordinated content + referral push
- Continue [[25q2-laputa-v2]] — graph view and frontmatter editing

## Highlights

- [[25q2-team-retreat]] in Siena was transformational — 3 days of strategy, bonding, and cooking together with [[person-matteo-cellini]], [[person-paco-furiani]], and [[person-sara-ricci]]
- The community idea emerged from a dinner conversation at the retreat — [[person-sara-ricci]] pitched it, everyone immediately saw the potential
- Newsletter at 64k subscribers — growth strong but the 70k target for June feels aggressive
- [[25q2-laputa-v2]] graph view working but confusing at scale — need to rethink the visual density for 9,000+ nodes
- Two newsletter issues underperformed — open rates dipped below 40% for the first time this year

## Reflections

The retreat was everything I hoped for and more. There's a moment on the second evening — the four of us on the terrace, bottles of Brunello open, whiteboarding H2 plans on a flip chart — where it hit me that this is a real team, not just a collection of freelancers. [[person-sara-ricci]]'s community pitch was brilliant in its simplicity: "Your readers already help each other in reply-all email chains. Give them a proper space to do it." That became [[25q3-community-launch]].

But May was also the first month this year where I felt like I was slipping. Two issues with below-40% open rates is a warning sign. The topics weren't wrong, but the subject lines were lazy — I wrote them in a rush. In a newsletter business, subject lines are the product as much as the content. Sloppy subject lines = sloppy product. Need to get disciplined about this again.

The Laputa graph view at 9,000 nodes is essentially unusable — just a hairball of connections. I need to rethink the approach: maybe cluster by type, maybe progressive disclosure, maybe skip the full graph entirely and focus on local neighborhoods. Technical challenge, but also a product design challenge. Not everything that works at 100 nodes works at 10,000.
