Morning friend! ☕️

In our last business update (Business Update! Where is Scary Management 1 year down the road? ) I laid out what felt like a reasonable plan.

Grow our audience from 100 to 500, then 5,000. Launch the comic. Build organic momentum through other social media platforms and paid growth via Meta ads. (Linkedin was just the start, and in fact, more my accountability partner).

At the time, it felt necessary.

Looking back now, that goal reads like something a lot of managers write at the start of a new project: well-intentioned, forward-looking, but missing a few things you only learn by actually doing the work.

So what went wrong?

What was the signal in the noise?

What’s the way forward?

Grab your coffee.

Let's chat!

In August 2025, Scary Management looked like it was finally working.

Subscriber numbers were climbing. Fast.

The chart was looking like a bitcoin bull run. And for a moment, I felt that quiet, dangerous feeling: relief. Like the effort had been validated.

We were funneling the revenue from Ads into Beehiiv Boosts (paid growth), and seeing new subscribers trickling in.

A growth flywheel in action.

Suddenly, email delivery rate dropped to 57.33%.

I remember staring at that dashboard longer than I want to admit, frustrated. People I thought were new subscribers… weren’t even receiving the email.

At first, I assumed it was something boring: A configuration issue, a platform quirk, the email equivalent of "the dog ate my homework."

But when we dug deeper, we found something else.

A large chunk of the growth wasn't real. It was fake or low-quality accounts.

Bots created to exploit Beehiiv boost incentives. Numbers that looked flattering but meant nothing.

The tempting option was to ignore it and keep posting. The right option was to clean it up, even if it felt like two steps forward, 1.99 steps back.

Poor email deliverability is death for an email newsletter business.

After working with Beehiiv support, fraudulent boosts were reversed, fake accounts were removed, and the list reset to 206 active subscribers. Our most recent post delivered at 100%.

Watching that number shrink stung more than I expected.

But it also clarified something: Scary Management is not a growth project. It's a trust project.

And trust is about quality and consistency, not chasing numbers.

If you’ve ever watched a KPI climb while the underlying system quietly goes to ****, you know exactly how this feels.

We started 2025 with 111 subscribers. Through advertising and boosts, we peaked at 463. After cleaning the list, we ended the year with 206 real, active readers.

On paper, that looks like a crash. In reality, it was a correction.

Because once the noise was gone, something became obvious: I'd rather write for 200 people who open, read, and think than 5,000 who never open the email.

That insight reshaped everything: We are now optimizing for a highly engaged audience.

1000 true fans. That’s all you need for your business to generate sustainable, recurring income.

Judging by VIPs, we’re 4.5% of the way to 1,000 true fans. That's the real target now.

In 2025, Scary Management earned money through newsletter advertising. If a reader clicks an ad, we earn a small amount. No signup required.

We made $513.98 from Ads in the last 12 months. It helps with, but doesn't cover all operational costs.

Advertising has been fuel, not the engine.

The real revenue engine is our own Scary Management digital coaching/training products.

I’ll be honest - I wanted the comic badly.

Not for revenue. For proof. A physical thing I could hold, point at and say: Scary Management is real. I have built something great from nothing.

In last year's update, the comic was very much "on the cards." It didn't happen for two reasons.

As the year progressed, feedback on the book became clearer: The idea was strong. The characters had potential. But the story architecture wasn't ready.

Not strong enough to anchor a comic. Not strong enough to justify multiplying it across formats. Not strong enough to turn into a paid product without regret.

The only honest response to that kind of feedback is to stop and rewrite. So instead of forcing a comic into the world prematurely, we made the harder call: the book needed a proper rewrite first.

We could get a great comic panel. But we could not get the same exact character look again tomorrow. And comics don’t forgive inconsistency.

Could we have shipped something? Yes. But it would have violated the core principle of this project: don't sell what you wouldn't buy yourself.

So again, we chose patience over output. And now, the tools have caught up. Character consistency is solved.

I underestimated how much storytelling craft matters when you're trying to teach without preaching.

So in 2025, I went back to school. I studied narrative structure more deliberately: how tension is carried, dopamine ladders, how scenes earn meaning, how characters change through action instead of explanation.

At the same time, I started leveraging Claude alongside ChatGPT. Its strengths in long-form writing helped push the quality bar higher than I could on my own.

The result wasn't just cosmetic. Over the festive period, I moved the book from V1.3.0 to V1.5.7, with real structural changes:

Most importantly, the cast evolved.

Lebo was written fully into the book as the third pillar of the Scary Management leadership triumvirate, alongside Anand and Werner, shaping how Thandi builds her leadership identity.

Lebo is not a mentor. Not a subordinate. But as the peer-mirror: the voice that grounds, challenges, and humanizes Thandi’s decisions.

That change alone strengthened the emotional spine of the story.

And once that spine was in place, everything else, including the comic, finally has something solid to stand on.

scarymanagement.com started as a basic signup page that just listed blog posts.

When Beehiiv released their new builder, we organized posts into series (First 100 Days, Broken Team, Emotionally Intelligent Leader) so readers could follow ideas over time.

We are continuing to refine the website to match the quality of the blog and preparing to make it a proper storefront for our paid products that are coming soon.

Last year's growth targets were explicit: 500 subscribers, then 5,000, largely through social reach.

This year, we're deliberately not doing that.

There's a simple idea that now anchors our strategy: You don't need a massive audience. You need 1,000 loyal fans.

People who open consistently, click intentionally, reply occasionally, and actually use what you publish.

For us, that means: readers who don’t just consume the story, they borrow the language in a difficult conversation at work.

Viewed through that lens, 2025 wasn't a failure. It was a calibration.

This is year 3 of a 5-year arc for Scary Management. And in year 3, the choice is restraint.

We're not chasing aggressive list growth, paid acquisition, or social media spikes. Growth will remain organic only.

The focus is elsewhere.

Instead of list size, we're optimizing for engagement: open rates, click-through rates, replies and feedback, and depth across series.

Because Scary Management isn't an audience business. It's a craft business.

Up until now, revenue has come from advertising. In 2026, that changes.

The primary goal this year is to release work that has earned the right to be sold:

Not rushed. Not hyped. Built properly. Consistently.

The immediate plan is intentionally narrow:

No launch theatrics yet. We’re just doing the product work.

2025 taught us something metrics alone never could: Scale without signal is fragile. Output without readiness is technical debt.

So 2026 is about finishing. About restraint. About trusting that if the work is good enough, it will earn its audience slowly.

If you’re still here, you’re the kind of manager who prefers signal over comfort. That’s who this is for.

PS: If you’re one of the 45 VIPs reading every post - I see you. And I’m gonna figure out how to reward you 🎁

Until next week,

Vaugan ☕