📰 Single opt-in vs double opt-in – the definitive answer to the age-old question

I'm 35 years old, married with kids, and working from home in a small Turkish village while having a little home farm with veggies and rabbits.

I run 24 products with no employees. I'm obsessed with productivity and simplicity.

Complexity isn't an asset; it's your liability.

Over the course of a few hundred interviews, we’ve learned a few things. For one, interviewing doesn’t always come naturally. It can be intimidating, time-consuming and awkward.

But learn to embrace the interview and wonderful things happen. Writing becomes faster and easier. Your content gains the competitive edge—expertise and authority—required to rank and stand out. You begin to build a network of experts from around the world, people happy to improve and advocate for your work.

To help you become a better interviewer, I chatted with Whitney Rhodes, a former journalist and Animalz alum. She shared four simple strategies—covering research, interviewing, writing and publication—to help you interview someone for your next article.

It’s been two months of running Podscan for real. So let’s take a look at what happened, what didn’t happen, and if I already spent all that funding money.

First, because it’s quite likely the most interesting topic, let’s talk money.

I never disclosed the full amount, and I likely won’t for a while, but let’s just say it’s a 6-figure number. That’s not a surprise, as it’s pretty usual for the Calm Company fund to invest this much into bootstrapped companies like mine.

So, did I spend 6 figures on the business already? Of course not. I spend around $10.000 so far — and that’s all GPU compute. The plan was to ramp up the computational power behind Podscan’s transcription and AI features much faster than I could have done with a purely self-funded business. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Single opt-in and double opt-in are the two most commonly used methods of obtaining consent from your subscribers.

Single opt-in (or SOI) is a straightforward and simple process, consisting of only one step. A user subscribes to your email list by providing their email address through a signup form on your website, blog, or social media platform. Once the user submits their email address, they’re immediately added to your mailing list, ready to be used in your email marketing campaigns.

The double opt-in (or DOI) process, on the other hand, involves two steps. Just like in the single opt-in process, the user submits their email address through a signup form. However, before they’re added to your mailing list, they receive a confirmation email with a link or button they need to click to verify their subscription.

Both methods have their pros and cons and you will find well-known marketing gurus on both sides of the debate, arguing tirelessly over which process is better. So, we have two hypotheses

“Why do people buy milkshakes?”

This was the question that dumbfounded McDonald’s executives. They had interviewed countless customers on how to improve their milkshakes. Should they be bigger? Smoother? Sweeter? Chocolatier? But despite customers answering as best as they could, none of the changes increased milkshake sales.

But when McDonald’s people observed customers in the store, they found something interesting – half of all milkshakes were sold before 8:30 AM. Moreover, these customers would come alone in a hurry, buy only a milkshake, and then drive off with it in their car.

What did all of these customers have in common?

A long, boring work commute.

The customers needed something to help them pass the time while driving to work. That was why they were buying a milkshake instead of a banana or a Coke – a milkshake takes more time to finish.

With this insight, McDonald’s realized they should make their milkshakes thicker to last longer, and thus better keep people engaged. They also created a prepaid swipe card so people could just dash in, grab a milkshake, and go without waiting in a line.

The result? McDonald’s sales of milkshakes increased by 7X.

Content marketing can be a powerful tool to drive customers, but many business owners find that their content earns little traffic and engagement.

Over time, many small business owners give up on content marketing as it simply doesn’t drive enough business to justify the investment.

Yet content marketing can be one of the most effective methods to drive new customers at minimal cost. Underwhelming results are almost always the result of a few subtle issues within the content strategy.