Has anyone had success with affiliates?

Hey y’all, Alright, I have a question for y'all this week. Have any of you ever had success with affiliates? I went to lunch with a friend and he was trying to tell me that we should be doing affiliates for our courses. And I'm just wondering if I've never done it correctly? We've done affiliates in the past and each affiliate has sold like one or two courses. In that regard, it's not even worth doing. But then I look at the internet marketing world and people are talking about how the best channel they have is affiliates. What am I doing wrong? How do I find affiliates that are pros and not just friends of mine that want to put a link on their blog? --- ### Thoughts from the week A lot of my work, and honestly, my whole career, has followed this expand-and-contract rhythm. I’ll go through a phase where I say yes to every project and idea, trying to do everything, and then hit a point where I realize I’ve taken on too much. That’s when I contract and start cutting projects that aren’t working, or that are taking too much energy for too little return. I think I'm currently in a contract phase. Right now, we're really focusing on producing courses and making videos for YouTube that can hopefully drive sales. That's it. I'm taking a step back from open source work. I feel like I got a little burnt out on that and now I’m trying to just focus my energy on things that move the revenue needle. Because as a small business, that’s what we have to do. --- ### Tweets from the week [](https://x.com/cloudflare/status/1920735486974337420?s=46) Cloudflare continues to be the most interesting cloud platform to me. This week, I released a new video (linked below) where I talked with a Cloudflare engineering manager about how their platform actually works. When Steve and I published [our article](https://screencasting.com/cheap-video-hosting) about serving 15 terabytes for $2, a bunch of people said, “Hey, you’re breaking the rules.” But we weren’t (which we knew)*.* Egress is free from R2, which is insane to me, but continues to prove why we love Cloudflare so much. --- [](https://x.com/FredKSchott/status/1922413757344416194) Databases are hard. I know that might not seem like the right text for the image above, but this tweet is from the creator of Astro. Not too long ago, they launched a database product, Astro DB, I think, and it seems like that went nowhere. Now, they’ve pivoted to building an email client. To be fair, the email client looks gorgeous, and I will absolutely give it a try. But between Astro DB disappearing, Neon getting acquired, and a few other database startups shutting down, it’s a clear reminder: the database hosting space is extremely difficult. It’s a space I don’t want to play in! --- [](https://x.com/VividVoid_/status/1920874377425416462) This is a pretty good life strategy. Not just for asking people out, but for anything you're afraid of doing. If you do it a hundred times, after that it's not really gonna be scary anymore. If you make a hundred videos, you're not really gonna be scared of making videos. If you tweet a hundred times, you're not really gonna be scared of tweeting. --- [](https://x.com/AskYatharth/status/1855751544110756077) Patrick McKenzie’s idea of the dangerous professional voice has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Basically, it's a way of proving to the other party that you're dealing with that you are a rational, reasonable, and very dangerously professional person. So you do things and say things to prove that they should take you seriously. Instead of just getting super mad, you say things like in the screenshot above that indicates you're not just a common member of the public and you're not a hysterical customer. You are someone who is ruthlessly capable of navigating the situation. --- [](https://x.com/paulg/status/1921133997188415806) This has happened to me a couple of times mostly with conference talks. It’s exactly why whenever I have something big and meaty that I need to write I start as soon as possible. If I have a conference talk in a few months I will try to start it a few months ahead of time so that my subconscious mind can work on the talk. I'll see things or think things or hear things on podcasts that will help fit into that talk. Then by the time it's it's time to actually sit down and write the talk, I've been stewing on it for a couple of months and it all comes out very naturally versus waiting until the last minute and saying, “Okay, I have to write this thing right now.” That just doesn’t leave enough space for subconscious inspiration to do its thing. --- [](https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/1922330870490312951) This is something that I'm trying to instill into my kids is that you can feel the fear and do it anyway. I constantly tell them that there's no such thing as faking bravery. If you feel really afraid and you do it anyway, that's being brave. It's not the absence of fear, it's the acting in spite of it. So while I am trying to teach that to my four-year-olds, I'm also trying to internalize that myself basically every day. --- [](https://x.com/shreyacasmalert/status/1922505860926046240) The deal we make with companies, at least in the US, is you can fire me at any time and I can quit at any time. Unfortunately that appears to be true even if you are the individual responsible for making TypeScript ten times faster at Microsoft! It's not a great deal, but that is the deal. That is the agreement that we sign up for. I think where a lot of people get lost or a lot of people get frustrated is they forget what the terms of the deal are. They think that because they are loyal to a company, the company will be loyal to them. I think you should always do the best work that you are capable of and fulfill your duty with integrity, but do not give yourself to a company. If you want to go above and beyond because you think it will benefit you in some way, that's amazing and I think that's a great idea. But you have to understand that at that point, you are making a bet. You are making the bet that giving more of yourself to the company is going to pay off in a positive way. And that bet may not come to fruition! It's still fine to take the bet. You just have to understand clearly that the rules are still, you could get fired at any time for anything. --- ### This week at Try Hard Studios 🎬 **YouTube** **How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard** Josh Howard joins me to explain how Durable Objects and D1 work under the hoodand why Cloudflare’s approach to stateful serverless infrastructure is so unique. We get into V8 isolates, replication models, routing strategies, and even upcoming support for containers. [Watch the episode on YouTube](https://youtu.be/C5-741uQPVU) or listen on the [Database School Podcast](https://databaseschool.transistor.fm/episodes/how-durable-objects-and-d1-work-a-deep-dive-with-cloudflare-s-josh-howard). --- If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and think a friend may enjoy reading it each week too, please forward it to them! They can sign up to receive it weekly here: . That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know. Talk soon, Aaron {{ ENV.unsubscribe\_personal | default: visitor.unsubscribe\_url | hyperlink: "Click here to unsubscribe." }}