Hey everyone, it's Tim. Welcome to think inclusive the podcast for inclusiveness. In this bonus episode, we're talking about our sponsor together letters, a tool that helps people stay in touch with their friends, family, and communities.
So wait, Tim, why are we talking about together letters on thinking inclusive? Well, together letters is a tool that we use for thinking inclusive patrons to stay in touch with each other. Together letters is a simple email based newsletter that lets you share updates with your group members on a regular basis. You can use it to stay up to date on what's going on with your friends lives, share your own news and accomplishments, or just connect with people you care about. Together letters is a great way to build stronger relationships, and create a more inclusive community. In just a second, we'll hear from Adam Walker and Sanjay Park, the founders of together letters, they'll tell us about how they came up with the idea for together letters, and how it's helping people connect with each other in new and meaningful ways. And how educators could possibly use together letters in their schools, or to create online communities. Thanks for hanging out with us. And now my interview with Adam Walker. It's Sanjay part
Adam Walker and Sanjay Park, welcome to thinking clues.
Hey, good to be here
for having us.
So if you're listening to this, you're listening to a very special bonus episode of thinking inclusive. And I'm so happy to have my friends, Adam and Sanjay on to talk about together letters. Because if you've listened to you think inclusive over the last few months, you recognize that name together letters, because together letters is a sponsor of the podcast. And I learned about together letters because I don't know exactly how I don't I probably I like I'm in anybody I talk to. It's like, Hey, I'm Adam, it's nice to meet you. Have you heard of together letters.com. So that's like best the order of things I needed.
Because he likes to do the, you know, like 90s roll.
I mean, I don't want him to have to Google it. When you can go straight there. Why I don't want people to have to go to Google is two steps, going to Google is step one. And then to get letters.com. Step two, no, no, just go straight to the website. You've seen
people do this, they typed together letters.com into Google or whatever.com into Google, before they go to the site instead of just bar. So you actually haven't saved them anything. You just made them tighten on.
Not all of them do that? Almost all of them.
Oh, well, you know, you could use you could ask Siri, right. You could use Yeah, any sort of like voice taxi? Yeah, you could, you could say together letters.com. And then it would type et Cie. Perfect, you know,
but but like, looking at our website through text voice, that's not going to be that great. You're actually going to want to go to the site.
Purple. Okay. Okay. Well, I wanted to have you on because I wanted you all to tell the story about together letters. Okay. I know a little bit about it. But you know, the people listening probably don't
why maybe? Like what together letters is and why people might use it and then tell the story does that does that work? Okay, we do that I'm perfectly Sanjay Do you wanna, you want to jump into your mid to start here, you start. Alright, so So I'll start actually start with why people might use to get a letter. So I personally why I use it. So I got I'm burned out on Facebook and LinkedIn, and honestly, just kind of social media in general. And but I still have people that I want to connect with on a regular basis. And so to give letters is my way of doing that. So I've got a group of people that I want to stay in touch with, say, once a month or so. And once a month, I get an email from to get letters. And it's this, Hey, what's your update for this month, and I click a button, I give a quick update. And then two days later, I get an email that summarizes everybody's update from that email list. And so it's this kind of collaborative mass email newsletter. And so I'm able to sort of keep up with everybody without having to be on some other social media network that they may or may not be active on. So basically, if anybody is able to use email, we're able to stay like keep up with our community via via together. So that's kind of that's kind of the why, at least for me, personally, I think, probably for Sunday, too. And so the, the how I mean, it's kind of what I described, it's this collaborative newsletter, where you can stay in touch with a group using nothing but email and you don't even you don't even have to have a login like you don't even have to have a password which makes it just super simple to use. I use it for staying in touch with book clubs with my family and extended family. So I've got like one for my immediate family, and then one for one for like aunts and uncles and cousins. I use it to stay in touch with like old classmates from high school that I actually care about how they're doing versus the ones that are on Facebook that I don't care about. Sorry, if you're listening to this one It's been great. It's been great Sunday. What did I miss? Yeah, I
mean, I think there's a couple of things that are important to point out. When we built InDesign together letters, it was thinking about how to maintain those connections in a way that doesn't increase your load as well. So one of the things that we did with this email newsletter is there is no way to do a reply all we have all been in those reply all hell's that occur on somebody sends out the mass email, right? Inevitably, you're on one and somebody replies all and says, Take me off this list. And then that goes out to everybody. And then that just snowballs right? So together letters, you cannot do a reply all it is not possible. But what you can do is click on somebody's update and reply just to them with their update quoted, so that you can actually build that one on one relationship, which is really kind of the crux of what we're trying to do with together letters.
Hold, hold up,
hold on, you didn't even know. Right? It's a new it's a feature. It's a it's a not a new feature, but it's a new feature for you to today, it's been around.
Yeah. So if you click on somebody's named him in that email, the newsletter email, it will actually open up a new email address to that person, and it will have their update quoted so that you can actually then reply back just
an employee we indication quite a bit. It's great. Yeah,
it's my mind is literally a little bit,
it was a bit of work to actually make that all happen. Like, if you look at the code, the HTML, it's, it's, it's messy, but it all works. Yeah. But we haven't really publicized that it's almost one of those features that you just kind of stumble upon. If you hover over somebody's name, you're like, Hey, what is this? How do you know, when you click on it? Yeah. And we kind of like it that way. But we probably will make it more obvious in the future. But really kind of the the point of all this is to build community and keep groups together. So the challenge that we see with things like Slack, or even just social media in general, is that it's really incumbent upon the individual users to say something and push something out there. And a lot of times, you just don't have anything to say, and you just sit there and a lot of people just sit there and Lurker mode. Whereas this is different, we act to actively push an email to you and say, hey, it's time to give your update, give your update and list owners, group owners have the option to not send out the newsletter to people who don't participate. And we've seen that be useful in some groups to encourage people to actually say something, even if it's a non update update, right? We I've seen it in some my groups where people are like, Hey, I don't have anything to update, but I'm making sure I supply something so that I make sure I get the newsletter because they want to read everybody else's newsletter, or update. And I you know, I think that's an important feature, because it tells you that this person actually cares, they're actually out there reading. And they're actively engaged with that whole process, even when they don't have an update. So like, Adam, I use this across a number of different groups, alumni, groups, friends, people, I went to business school with whatever it is. And it really does keep people in touch in a way that, you know, if you look at Facebook or something like that, if they were doing the same updates there, there's a very high likelihood that I probably would never see those updates, because they're just in this stream of garbage. Yeah, versus like, Hey, this is a group I know, this is like my ex group. But I know all of these people. And then all of those updates kind of make sense with one another in that in that email.
You know, it related to that, like one more use case, too, that I didn't mention that I'd like to it's great for like internal company or internal department newsletters, like to know what everybody's actively working on like, so I use this for a nonprofit board that I'm on. And so once a month, it's like, I get that to get a letter. It's like, okay, what have you done for this nonprofit for this month, and I give a quick update, I've done this, this, this, this and this. And then everybody else does that. It's like, oh, now I see what people are working on. And I can do this. And hey, oh, I can help with that. Let me collaborate with you over here. So it just it improves collaboration and gets us kind of out of our silos within an organization as well.
And I think we've missed actually one of the most important features of together letters, is the fact that these updates, and these newsletters are never published to the internet. So they're not publicly available anywhere. They are only available via email. And for a lot of people. And I've seen this a lot of people will share things in a together letters group that they would never share anywhere else on social media. Yeah. And I think it gives you this level of like privacy and like just that community that does not exist in other places. I mean, obviously we have access to those updates on our back end, we're soon actually going to be rolling out an update that deletes gives group owners the option to delete out old updates. So once we send the email, we will actually delete them out of our database and we will not have access to them any any longer. And this is not like just recently there was a thing about Twitter where deleted tweets were now reappearing like we're not We're going to be doing that we're not just going to be marking things and not show them to people, we are actually going to delete them. Because we don't need to hold on to that then. Right. But that's just not what
do group do group owners have the option to look back at previous?
Not currently? No. Currently they search for email right now. Yeah, essentially, yeah. Well, if you use Gmail, you're good. Just archive everything. But otherwise, you know, right.
One of the things that we talked about, and we don't have right now is that when you're providing an update to maybe provide your previous update to that same group, as like a, hey, last time, you said this, just so that it reminds you like what you talked about, I have this problem with, you know, when you do multiple groups, like Wait, what did I say? In which group?
have the same problem all the time? Yeah. So
this is the great thing about us, us dogfooding. And using our own product is, we see these problems, too. And we're trying to solve these problems as well.
Yeah. And we should also mention, like, while we're talking about the whole thing, like groups of 10 or less, are free forever. So I mean, if you've got like five up, just want to stay in touch with like, there's there's no cost, which is nice. I mean, even after after that, like to get a grip above 10, it's $60 for the year, so it's not exactly expensive, either five bucks a month. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yeah, if you're listening, please go to together letters.com. And sign up for a free group Check, check it out. And so I was thinking about, like, for people who are listening, they're mostly educators. So school teachers, principals, you know, maybe some administrator or, you know, state education leader, I think that this could be potentially very powerful for for school tones or grade level, see, amazing, you know, because, again, what you said about Slack or, you know, other or like Microsoft Teams, or anything like that, that is a platform based, you have to get on the platform, you have to search through, you have to curate, you have to figure out what's what, you know, I just, I created a Slack group to for podcasters to you know, network, right, people don't know how to use Slack. And
it's remark, I mean, I'm not gonna Slack community online for marketers, and it's got down 1000s of people in it, and no one posts, and it's just like, I don't even know what's happening here. And so I mean, to your point, like, but if you're asked if you're prompted, it really, really helps and like, okay, then you can be thoughtful like, what, what do I need to share? What did I do this month? Once? Yeah, what's pertinent here,
with the groups that you can create on together letters, you can set the update frequency, right, you can do weekly, bi weekly, monthly, or quarterly. So you can get the cadence that you want or need with that particular group, to your example, Tim, if it was educators, I would say like somebody that's teaching, you know, whatever grade, ninth grade, let's say, you should probably find other ninth grade teachers, not just in your school, but in other schools that you're friendly with. And maybe once a week or once every other week, just share what's been going right, what's been going wrong, teaching in your classes, and that might help everybody become better and think about ways, first of all, to help this person, but also take those good lessons and be like, Oh, maybe I should implement this, you know, worked on qYZ. And if I implemented and it doesn't work for me, maybe I know now know, who I should talk to about like, what did I do wrong? In implementing this? How did you do it differently?
And then like, also departments, but then like you said, some like departments within schools, I mean, put everybody in the department on one together letter, and do do a weekly or bi weekly, you know, check in and what's going on. And that way, you've got it in, it's always there.
principals of schools, right? Like, they probably don't get to talk to one another. But just a check in and having that support system of somebody else that understands the situation that you're in and is dealing with the same types of challenges, and being able to get that little visibility into the things that are going right and wrong with what they're doing. helps you just be better.
Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of social media, because Adam, you brought it up at the beginning, feeling burnt out? Or are you all on everything?
I mean, what do you define as on? I mean, like him? Do I have a Facebook account? Yes. Do I check that Facebook account? Maybe twice a month? Do I actually look through the actual Feed and like, see what's happening with the people that I'm friends with? Like, once every month or two? So like, it depends on how you define it, right? Like, I'm on Instagram, a decent amount, like every couple of days, because it's more interesting, and it's honestly, less stressful to be on a phone tick tock to be particularly entertaining someone Tiktok probably every day. I'm not on Twitter at all, because it's just a disaster right now. But I mean, ultimately, like I find myself wanting to engage on my terms, rather than on the terms or the structure of the platforms. And I don't know, I just got burned out on some of those. So and then LinkedIn, I mean, I've never I should be on LinkedIn, but I'm just I'm not.
I think I chose wrong in the early days. I went all in on Twitter. I built up I'm pretty decent following on Twitter. And that was my main social media platform. Last year, I quit. I don't post on Twitter anymore. I don't log in the app is no longer on my phone. I am out. And I have not replaced it really with anything. Yeah, I've got a LinkedIn account. I've got Facebook, I've got Instagram. But if you look at how much I look at any of those on a weekly or monthly basis, it's basically not I tried to put post on LinkedIn, but I don't know. It's just not the same. And I think I've, because of everything that has happened on Twitter, I think I've broken the habit, and social media just does not have the allure for me anymore. And I'm spending my time getting other stuff done. Now,
maybe that's good. Maybe Breaking the Habit is good. You know? Yeah, though, I do find like, like, I'd rather spend my time on like, substack, you know, writing or creating thoughtful things there rather than Doom scrolling on Facebook? I do. I do feel like there are, there are good alternatives. You know, so,
yeah, I think I'm still on everything. You know, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Those are my, you know, the four. But I think that even when I first started, it was a means to an end. Yeah, you know, for networking and professional learning, especially as a teacher. So like, even net like, in I'm not no longer a classroom teacher. But when I was, I was looking for hashtags. And I was looking for people doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts, and then coalescing around, you know, sharing resources and stuff. And that still happens, you know, so it, it is still a toxic place, social media, but I think you have to throttle it. You know, the one thing as a contrast together letters to social media, and we talked about it a little bit, is I spend a good amount of time when I'm on social media, curating Yep. So what I'll do is I'll go through my Facebook feed, and be like, unfollow, unfollow, unfollow, unfollow, unfollow,
I've done that, too. Like you. I
want to, okay, I'll okay. They're fine. unfollow, unfollow. Whereas, in this particular situation, you know, you have a group, and you always want your updates, because you have chosen to be in Exactly, yeah. And that to me,
like, that's the benefit is like, if you're thoughtful, and you say, Okay, who are the 15? People who are the five, whatever they're like, that I genuinely want to connect with, on a whatever basis, weekly, monthly, whatever. Like, that's just a very different experience than who can I randomly connect with on Facebook? And who and what stranger? Can I randomly like their thing on Instagram, or reels or whatever, it's just, it's just different. There's a different level of value there.
It feels like a more authentic connection and strengthening an authentic connection, that could actually lead to something more useful, right? The random person that you can like or whatever, like, you're never going to meet that person. Like, it's very unlike.
I mean, unless you unless you're getting some good hacks, because there's some good hacks on social. There's some really dumb ones. There's some good hacks. There are there are some good ones. So good hack. Some of those there. Yeah, it's good. Yeah.
Well, any any additional updates to together letters or anything that's, you know, going forward that's happening that that people may want to know about? Yeah, I mean,
we have a lot of things kind of in the works. And in the plans, there's some updates and fixes that we're trying to implement. We've talked about doing some things that we think would help a lot of people. So one of the things that's on the list that we haven't gotten to yet is integrating together letters with Zapier and making it so that people then can use together letters to automatically create groups for whatever networks that they're building, right. So people can kind of opt in and things like that. We've also talked about creating together letters groups, where it's almost closer to social media, where it's a little voyeuristic, where you could actually have people that are read only, so you can have a segment of folks that are writers, and also receive a newsletter, but then others that only read what is published into that newsletter, and we think there might be some value for that for groups within companies. So that, you know, like, you know, XYZ department is really trying to keep themselves connected to one each other, but other folks want to actually see and kind of peer behind the curtain to see what's happening within that group. But it might be useful for, you know, just groups of people that, you know, are doing whatever, that other people are interested in what they're publishing, you know, talking about internally. So those are a couple of features that we're talking about. And like the Zapier one is probably much more likely they're the read only one, we're still kind of debating, but these things are on the horizon.
And we're also talking about trying to figure out pushing like like updates to or requests for updates to text message maybe as well to make that that request process a little easier. So that that's that's on the horizon at some point. But we'll see.
Fantastic. All right, well, any anything else that you want to plug while you're here? I know that you have another podcast Tech Talk y'all. Edge wise, anything else?
Well, I mean, Tech Talk, y'all is just the funniest tech news podcast in the land. So I think everybody should go subscribe. If you want to keep up with tech news, and at least a que occasionally about AI and all that insanity. That's that's where to go really, you know,
we actually read Tech Talk, y'all. We just recently launched a subscriber level as well. And we're starting to publish many podcast episodes for subscribers only. But you don't have to do that to listen to our normal weekly stuff that we do, where we do a roundup of the news. So that's that podcast is going on? Is it six years now? I think it's six. Yeah, I
think it's like six years. Yeah, that would have been doing. So already episodes.
If you if you're wondering what happened or was happening in tech news six years ago, you can go back and listen to the earlier you find out and find out. There are some of our diehard listeners who consider themselves OG listeners and they've listened to every single episode since the first one. I cannot even remember what we recorded about last week. But these listeners remember all of it. Pretty impressive. And then if you're looking for help with doing a podcast, we do have edgewise media so edgewise. Media edgewise dot media is our website. And you can go there and we can help you out with anything that you might need if you're trying to launch a podcast. So soup to nuts as much or as little as you need to do this. As you can tell we we love podcasts. We love talking all day long. Yeah.
It's super fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, well, Adam Walker, Sanjay Park. Thank you so much for being on thinking cluesive And go sign up for your free together letters account y'all.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be around next week in your feed for more thinking inclusive. Have a great week and remember, inclusion always works
