I kinda bungled the lead-up

This edition is brought to you by our friends at beehiiv.

Alex here with an update on how I’ve been using beehiiv lately.

If you’ve been a subscriber for more than a few months, you’ve seen me document moving this newsletter to beehiiv and try out a bunch of beehiiv’s features.

But my log ended before I tried out the beehiiv MCP, which, in the past two months, has completely overhauled my process for writing our Superpath Pro Monday emails.

Formatting the upcoming events, announcements, and action items and double checking the links was a huge pain every Monday morning.

But now it’s super easy. My Claude is synced to Airtable, which is the source of truth for events, programs, etc. And now Claude is synced to beehiiv too through the MCP.

It knows my template, so with the simplest prompt it will spin up the Pro email. The draft gets the email 80% to 90% of the way there. I just fill in my blurbs and it’s good to go.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, I’m writing this on a Monday and this is what my conversation in Claude looked like to spin up this morning’s email.

Interested in using the beehiiv MCP? Use code SUPERPATH30 when upgrading your plan.

Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Quick thought experiment: if you had to disappear from work for three months, starting nine months from now, what would you do differently tomorrow?

I just experienced this scenario (I'm one week into a three-month paternity leave, and mom and baby are doing great), and I'll be honest: I kinda bungled the lead-up.

This week’s reader question comes from Beloved Superpath Community Member Rachel Bicha, who asks:

Here are some reflections that may help you:

1. Stop waiting for a "good time" to leave. My plan was to “wrap everything up” before I left. But every wrapped-up project spawned a new project. For example, a few small landing page tweaks turned into a full website architecture overhaul the week before my leave. Classic. There's never a clean stopping point, so don't build your plan around one. Just do your best and cut yourself some slack.

2. Results > everything else. A few weeks ago, I proudly showed my boss a massive list of everything I'd completed before leaving. He (rightly) reminded me that my job isn't to do stuff, it's to grow leads, pipeline, and revenue. I'd been asking, “What content has to get out before I’m gone?” rather than “How can I use my time between now and then to make the most impact possible for my company?” For example, I’d stuck to my usual overly elaborate product launch process just because it’s the way I make them—rather than shortening them up so I can focus on more long-term value tasks.

3. Don’t build yourself into an AI silo. I had built a lot of high-value stuff with AI that could theoretically help the rest of my company or theoretically help me create content at scale (e.g. a self-updating competitor database), but there was always just one more tweak I wanted to make before I’d consider it “perfect” to share internally or “turn on.” My leave was a great forcing function to share the MVPs of those projects and build some of the set-it-and-forget-it stuff I had been putting off.

4. Document a little now so you don't have to document everything later. We don't document much at Dock. Things change too quickly for it to be worth the time. Our philosophy is to hire high performers and let them work independently so we can stay small and nimble. And as our only marketer, I've never had much reason to write down the stuff that lives in my head. Documenting my processes before my leave was a nightmare. I still don't think heavy documentation is worth it, but if I could have a redo, I'd set aside an hour here and there for the tasks I do on autopilot instead of cramming it all into the week before my leave.

5. It’s good to take a breath. I like to think I'm a well-rounded chap, but most of my waking hours for the past decade have gone into marketing, and a lot of my self-worth is wrapped up in it. Case in point: my wife and I were both more stressed about leaving work than about having a baby. I've decided that's actually a good sign— I'd rather love my job and stress about leaving it than dread coming back. But after five working days “off” with bébé Doty, I can already tell this break is going to make me better at my job. With some distance, it's a lot easier to see where I actually add value and where I've just been staying busy.

K, that’s it from me. But I'd love to hear from you: when's the last time you took a real break from work, and what did it teach you? Just hit reply so I have something to read when I’m up at 3 am.

Cheers,

- Eric

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✍ New on the Blog: AMA with Hayley Cornwell Steinberg Recap

Hayley Cornwell Steinberg’s career began in content, but she now runs a whole marketing operation for a Series B startup.

Her team recently ran a process to hire for an in-house journalist role. We invited Hayley to join the Superpath Slack community for an AMA specifically to chat about what she’s seeing as someone trying to hire a full-time content marketer in 2026.

If you read nothing else, grab onto these three key takeaways:

🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Are newsletters too long?

It’s rare that I agree that a content hot take is actually a hot take, but Alex brought a truly hot take to the podcast this week.

Inspired by Francis Zierer's piece in Creator Spotlight, Alex argued that everything that lands in someone’s work inbox is a task, and therefore every (work-related) newsletter is a task to be completed, and therefore most newsletters are much longer than they should be.

I wasn’t there to yell at Alex, but luckily Chloe, Ruth, and Rachel were there to push back.

They argued that a newsletter has to earn the time it asks for, whether that's two minutes or twenty, which I totally agree with. I think that’s true of all content. Nearly everything should be made to be skimmable, but that doesn’t mean nothing should be made for deep, careful consumption too.

They got into fun topics like:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:

💼 Who's Hiring?

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This week’s featured roles:

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