My Favorite New Social Network

I’ve spent most of my adult life on social media.

I was early to blogging, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.

I’ve written newsletters, run communities, hosted events, and watched every generation of “this is the new way to connect” rise and fall. I’m not anti–social media by any means—but over time, I’m lamenting how anti-social it’s all become. I don’t have Threads friends the way I used to have Twitter friends—and in an algorithmically driven experience, following doesn’t really mean I get to see what the people I care about post anymore.

Finally, I found something that feels like the next social network for me.

E-mail.

Not newsletters. Specifically, what I call Heartbeat E-mails.

A Heartbeat E-mail is a periodic update you send to a small, curated group of people you actually care about. Friends. Former colleagues. Mentors. Peers. People you’ve had coffee with and genuinely want to stay in touch with. It’s not marketing. It’s not a public broadcast.

It’s a way of saying: here’s what’s been happening in my life lately—professionally, personally, humanly, and please… write back.

What surprised me most is how effective it’s been—so much so that it’s now a part of our Visible Work curriculum. (Visible Work is a small, structured cohort starting next week that helps thoughtful operators, investors, and founders turn what they’re already thinking and doing into clear, consistent writing and ideas people actually engage with. E-mail me if you’d like to see the details and the syllabus. We’ve got two spots left.)

First, it keeps me top-of-mind for people I care about—and that has had a very real effect on my friendships. I’ve noticed that when I send these e-mails, friends follow up with actual movement toward getting together. “Oh, I meant to reply to this earlier—want to grab lunch?” I’m seeing people more often because I’m present in their mental landscape more often. Not through an algorithm, but through intention.

Second—and this one matters more—it creates space for real conversations that don’t quite belong on LinkedIn.

At one point, I shared something deeply personal in a Heartbeat E-mail: that my dad had suddenly gotten very sick. He was dealing with memory issues caused by CNS lymphoma, and it upended my life in ways I wasn’t prepared for. After he passed, it sent me down a rabbit hole of asking friends a hard question: “Do you know what you’d do if your parents became incapacitated tomorrow?”

The response was overwhelming.

People wrote back saying it prompted them to finally have difficult conversations with their parents. Others shared stories they hadn’t really talked about out loud before. One person I deeply respect—someone I don’t get to see often—reached out to say she was going through something similar with her mom, and it led to a long, honest conversation about family, illness, and navigating changing relationships with parents.

I probably wouldn’t have been on her call list otherwise.

That’s not a story I would have posted on LinkedIn:

“What I learned about B2B Marketing when my dad kept forgetting he had brain cancer.”

Heartbeat E-mails live in that middle space: semi-professional, semi-personal. And it turns out that’s where most meaningful relationships actually exist.

There’s another reason I’ve come to love them: they extend the half-life of a coffee meeting.

You know the pattern. You have a great conversation. You talk about what you’re working on, the thing you might need help with, the idea you’re excited about. And then… nothing. A year goes by. When you finally reconnect, you find yourself re-explaining the same context all over again and the other person has no idea what happened to that thing that was so important that it demanded one on one time.

Heartbeat E-mails solve that.

They’re the natural follow-up to a good conversation. Instead of that coffee being a one-and-done interaction, it becomes the beginning of an ongoing thread. People get to see what you actually did with the ideas you talked about. They see your progress, your pivots, your questions. You don’t have to reintroduce yourself every time—you’re continuing a conversation instead of restarting it.

Over time, something else happens: You become more three-dimensional.

Most people in our lives exist as two-dimensional abstractions. A job title. A company. A vague memory. But humans only have the cognitive capacity to keep about 150 people in meaningful orbit—their Dunbar number. To earn one of those slots, you have to feel real.

Memorable.

Human.

Heartbeat E-mails do that quietly and consistently.

When people know not just what you do, but what you’re thinking about, struggling with, learning from, and occasionally laughing about, you stop being a name in their inbox. You go from a dot to a line. You become someone they root for. Someone they think of when opportunities arise. Someone worth keeping track of.

This also scales.

Not infinitely, and not artificially. I started out with 100 people and the list has grown. When I have a good meeting or catch up with someone, I manually add them. There’s no sign-up page or CTA.

That discovery is one of the reasons I teach this practice inside Visible Work.

So many smart, thoughtful people want stronger professional relationships—but they don’t want to become content creators. They don’t want to shout into the void. They want a way to be seen and remembered as themselves.

Heartbeat E-mails offer that path.

They’re not about going viral. They’re about staying connected. They’re not about personal branding. They’re about being human at scale.

And for me, after all these years on social media, they’ve quietly become the most meaningful network I’ve ever built.

If this resonates—and you want to learn how to build a practice like this in a way that feels natural, sustainable, and true to you—that’s exactly the kind of work we do in Visible Work.