Community Patch Notes
Mid 2025 Updates To My Content Approach
My publication has undergone another rebrand. It’s now to dantoruno.com I’ve chosen this new insignia ㊥ to represent my personal brand “Dan Toruno”. At it’s core the symbol represents balance, the balance of being and doing in order to live a life in peak flow.
This is the first letter of a new monthly series documenting my recent community developments, discoveries, and ideas related to creative evolution.
📧 Email Marketing Developments
June 11th of last year, I shared my thoughts on all the email marketing platforms in a tier list format. You can check it out here.
✍️ My Email Marketing Playbook Mid 2025
The beginning of this year, I thought I’d rely on Substack for my primary email marketing to keep it community-focused and driven (which I still am)
The appeal was having free unlimited email sends.
However….
One small detail changed everything. The profile photos for email sends.
The only email software I can get behind are the ones that let you properly set up your email profile photo so people get to see your pretty face in their Gmail inbox.
This is very important for building brand awareness while you practice writing, sharing stories, and giving value through email.
Substack used to have a workaround for being able to set a custom profile photo, using the “multiple email senders” in Gmail, but when trying to help my friend set this up earlier this month, I’ve realized it’s been patched and doesn’t work anymore
In my mind, this means I can no longer rely on Substack as my primary source for email distribution.
I have spent too much time revisiting my favorite email marketing platforms. I really dislike email marketing plans that get infinitely more expensive with more subscribers.
Kit(.com) is goated in so many ways, but I can’t stand their pricing model. It gives me growth anxiety, where I don’t want to be stuck paying them thousands a month once my list gets big enough. I know 75k subscribers is only $499-663/mo, with a list that size, it IS reasonable but why pay that when on Flodesk, $38 is the max I will pay and the builder gives me landing page marketing functionality straight from my readers’ inboxes.
Almost every email platforms have this annoying practice like convertkit so I’ve opted to go with flodesk for my endgame but since I have under 5k subscribers I purchased Sendfox’s Lifetime where currently have unlimited sends for a list to up to 5k subscribers so I’m going to keep cruising with this one until I pass that limit.
🌮 AppSumo Lifetime Deal PSA
My favorite digital whiteboarding app in the screenshot above is back on AppSumo, so instead of paying $99 on their website, you can grab it for life for $59! Save $40 and $12-18/mo indefinitely instead of paying for something like Miro. (BMix also has native dark mode)
💌 Email Marketing End Game
$38/mo for Flodesk is still not a small subscription for beginners, but if you are using it to practice your writing/copywriting by sending daily letters and schedule flows to send people back to your best work for people that may not have been following you that long or seen them the first time.
This works better than Substack because you can send shorter emails that just serve as a quick hook to your larger bodies of work. In my use case, maybe an evergreen article that I spent a while crafting on my Substack publication.
I believe from a marketer’s perspective, it can be much better to post your Substack letters quietly and use your recurring email marketing flows to systematically promote your work. These email marketing platforms allow you to have more control over the email sends, having a custom profile photo, email sender, and whenever they click a button, you can segment those readers into lists because you know they are an engaged reader. These engaged readers are much better for sending/testing offers to because you’ve already built rapport.
Substack isn’t out the window, it’s publication pages are still powerful islands of content separate from the noisier parts of the platform.
I like to see publications as cozy corners of the internet where you can publish your best work. Plus it has a genuine and high-quality community aspect where people can comment, engage and quote, and reshare your work.
It also has two unique features that other platforms don’t…
You can copy a link to a specific section in the article since Substack has a Table of Contents that you can grab the links from. You combine this with the fact that you can add a custom domain to your Substack publication, and now you have a viable platform to house your affiliate links because a lot of affiliate platforms require you to use your own custom domain.
I must also note you can bypass this step by using a domain shortening service attached to your custom domain. For example, Rebrandly is quite popular but it’s $12/15/mo so I picked up this Lifetime Deal Alternative called Linkila and have been loving it the past year or so. It even has a domain 404 page redirect so if someone types any combination of characters after flowcreators.org it will still redirect to my primary redirect page www.flowcreators.org.
🐷 Buy Your Domains Here.
If you need to buy custom domains, please do yourself a favor and use/switch to Porkbun. Best prices these days and very intuitive platform with fun branding.
Namecheap used to be my go-to choice, but the only direction they evolved over the years is increasing their prices, making their name not hold any weight.
(Namecheap also screwed me for years because their payment method on file never let me add my card for years support couldn’t resolve the issue either. I could only use PayPal which wasn’t compatible with auto-renewing, so I accidentally lost many of my domains by forgetting to renew them manually. Should be pretty obvious why I left.)
New Posting Schedules
The mission for Substack is to create a library of public evergreen content to support the Flow Creators Collctive.
Shortform content is the real priority that will enable community growth, so these bodies of work are actually more aimed at being enticing CTAs for the shortform content so that my new audience can comment to get instant access to any of these letters, which will be very synergistic when I talk about any of these topics in my shortform content.
⚙️ Workflow Wednesdays
I will be documenting and sharing valuable step-by-step walkthroughs of how to set something up. Think things like productivity, creativity, or AI-related workflows to try for yourself. Some current ideas I have for this: Walking Through My Digital Journaling Setup, My Browser Productivity Frameworks, Favorite Chrome Extension Demos, etc. How I’m using X Tool.
🧬Sunday Synthesis (Weekly 3-2-1) 💬
A simple Micro-Letter that contains a James Clear-like format so that I can build consistency. I haven’t decided 3-2-1 of what yet but we will get there.
🎬 Scattered Shortform Videos (3X wk)
I am aiming to be posting 2-3 shortform videos a week, distributed to all platforms, but in the earlier stages to re-establish my editing proficiency. I plan to have different recurring video series, like the “Using Your Phone, Instead of Letting it Use You Series” that I am in the middle of. However, I will likely be participating in some sort of 30 day posting challenge to experiment with more style and produce some foundational content that informs the audience about my story, experiences, and the vision.
Not currently at this level of output, but this is where I am aiming to upgrade my skillset to be at. It’s more a skill issue of re-building a new editing workflow and a mental battle of me getting out of my own way. Need to re-face some of the shadows most creators will face like the fear of success, visibility, and judgment that results in overthinking and self-sabotage.
The way I see it, shortform video is “The Real Work,” the highest ROI output and skill to be developed, which is content production and commanding authority on social media. ie. The ability to grow an audience on social media which includes many subsets of skills like, editing, outsourcing, time management, storytelling, copywriting, leveraging AI, etc.
Making good content consistently is the real superpower in this modern era and is the real work every creator needs to systemize for their unique style. AKA Creating Your Flow, which is the whole premise of what I curate my content around (for now).
🏹 Community Patch Notes (Monthly) 💬
The second Sunday of the month is the Community Patch Notes (This Post)
🗿 Other Content Formats
Contents fully documenting how to use, set up, and optimize creative platforms for building your brand and community. Evergreen Guides that will get regular updates for tools like — Whop, Substack, Discord, OnlySocial, Boardmix, & More. These will be pretty much mind dumps of my most valuable advice and educational resources for using these platforms so I may end up paywalling these letters that will act like courses.
Have some website platform developments but I’ll save these for another post. I’m currently using 3 different web builders, maybe I can showcase this upcoming Wednesday.
Other formats will be experimented with over time and will likely be released randomly as I finish them.