Episode 50:Dirk’s Friday Fresh Fish Flash
Summary
Nick and Kai use Dirk’s Fish and Seafood Shop in Chicago as a case study in email marketing that actually works. Most newsletters are indistinguishably bland, and the fix isn’t better design: it’s a confident, unself-conscious point of view. Dirk Fusik’s Weekly Fresh Fish Flash is Nick’s only remaining email subscription because Dirk writes like nobody’s watching.
Highlights
- Kai describes email marketing as ‘a sack of money button for any business that invests in it.’
- Most newsletters are ‘the color beige’: no differentiation, no personality, no unique voice. Kai admits he’s guilty of this himself.
- Nick’s one remaining subscription is the Weekly Fresh Fish Flash from Dirk’s Fish and Seafood Shop in Chicago’s Clybourn District, written by owner Dirk Fusik. It covers what’s in season, fish sustainability, and why Dirk beats the Whole Foods five blocks away.
- Dirk’s website has a trout in a tuxedo, distorted images, and a lengthy digressive aside about his stepdaughter. The newsletter works because Dirk has a confident opinion and doesn’t calibrate it for approval.
- Nick’s inverse typography rule: in non-fine-dining restaurants, nicer typography signals worse food. A Comic Sans menu means the owner cares only about the food.
- Kai’s point: consultants who over-focus on marketing polish take time away from the actual product. The goal is a voice so natural it doesn’t require deliberate effort to maintain.
- Kai notes that the default enemy for consultants isn’t a competing consultant, it’s the client doing nothing. The same applies to newsletters: the default is boringness, fitting in, staying ‘on message.’
Read the transcript
So last year I unsubscribed from every single mailing list that I subscribed to. Except for one. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But one thing that I just kind of want to talk about for a moment is what are Kai, what are our views on email marketing?
It is a sack of money button for any business that invests in it. Right.
I’m pretty pro email marketing. I took somebody aside who runs a meetup for fancy business entrepreneurs. He’s one of the most well-connected and wonderful humans that I know. And he’s just so generous and warm and outgoing and optimistic about life in the face of life being horrible for basically everyone right now. And I’m like, you should start a mailing list. And he’s like, well, why? And I’m like, well, because it’s a sack of money button for your business. And he’s like, well, and then you trotted out excuses. Right. And I systematically Eviscerated all the excuses. And eventually, you know, he’s going to start a mailing list, and it’s going to be great. So we’re pretty pro-mailing list. And yet, I unsubscribe from all mailing lists. What would you characterize Others’ mailing lists as? Like when you go and read them? Like what? What’s your feelings as you go through them?
The color beige. The color beige comes to mind. There’s. It’s all blurry together. There’s no differentiation between most of them. There’s no unique voice. There’s no There’s no personality. And I’m guilty of this as a motherfucker.
Like, there’s nothing not only, beige can be your favorite color, right? But you gotta fucking own beige. Mm-hmm. You gotta own beige. And some people own beige. They are very unapologetic and outspoken in their beige-iness. But the people who own beige aren’t really even the people I’m thinking about. It’s the people who are beige and don’t realize that they’re beige, and they can’t help but be more beige. And when you ask them to be beige, then they just kind of go hard on the beiginess. And that’s what really sucks. That’s what really sucks about it. I unsubscribe from your email list, dear listener, because it’s boring. It’s boring. It does not have a point of view. Let’s talk about the one mailing list that I remain subscribed to. First, I’m going to tell you about a friend of mine. His name is Dirk. It’s not actually a friend of mine, but I know him. I feel like he’s a friend of mine because I know a lot about his family and his business. Dirk is his last name is Dirk is Dirk Fusik, his whole name. And he runs a fish shop called Dirk’s Fish and Seafood Shop in Clyburn District around like If you live in Chicago, it’s like Clyburn and Webster. Make good salmon burgers. You can get the real reason you’re there is to get like raw fish. To cook at home, like nice salmon, scallops. God, they’re the best fucking place for scallops in the city. They’re so good. It’s so good. And if you go to dirksfish. com. It’s his website. And you might look at that website and be a little bit taken aback at the aesthetics of it. But if you looked at a store and the inside of that store was like that, you would view it as quirky and fun and Like unlabored, you know, it’s just what it is. Like, you could think of like a mom-and-pop sandwich in porium. I mean, even like pot belly, right? Dukesfish. com kind of looks like the inside of a pot belly. Like the sandwich joint potbelly, not an actual potbelly stove. And I find that interesting, right? And people view that there’s kind of like an absolutism about what constitutes quality and design. But get past that, right? And focus on the fact that dirksfish. com is a It’s a confidently held point of view. He talks a lot about how should I put this? Sustainability in fish, which is obviously like a really big controversial thing that’s that’s all that you know people always have to care about. He’s talking a lot about Quality in fish and what makes him better than, say, Whole Foods. And the biggest Whole Foods in the United States is five blocks away from Dirk’s fish, right? The Kleibert District, Whole Foods, takes up six city blocks and three floors, right? And it’s bed its bedlam every day.
I’m just astounded that we have yet to go to said Whole Foods.
Kai is referred to among my friends as the hell mouth. Do not go when you talk about, oh, I went to the Hellmouth today, everyone knows what you’re talking about because you went to the Clyburn District Whole Foods. No. I’m not taking you there. I’m taking you to Dirk or a smaller Whole Foods, of which there are a numerous number in the city. Anyway. If you go to the right-hand sidebar of DirksFish. com, you will see Dirks Friday Fresh Fish Flash. That is the greatest mailing list of all time. Every Friday, you will receive a unique and special missive from Dirk himself, and rest assured it could be by no one else. About what he’s doing, what’s in season and what you should be getting that day.
I I just want to point out for the listeners that I know are about to immediately go and sign up for Dirk’s newsletter. It’s actually a it’s not referred to as the Friday Fresh Fish Flash on The sidebar, it’s signed up for our monthly email newsletter. In the center column, then there’s a call to action of the weekly fresh fish flash.
Oh, okay. So it’s the weekly fresh fish flash. Okay, well, just Google Flash. You’re going to get Dirks Friday Fresh Fish Flash. Dirk’s Friday Fresh Fish Flash is the greatest newsletter of all time. And people don’t believe me when I say this. And they’re wrong. They’re straight up wrong. But I genuinely believe it to be the case. And I actually talked about this at a conference recently. It is the greatest newsletter of all time because it is unself-conscious, it has a strongly held point of view, and it doesn’t give a shit what you think. And it works. It sells fish. It doesn’t even use good photography of fish. It’s probably on Dirk’s Android phone. That’s crappy. I don’t believe that he has an iPhone. I would be shocked. But it comes off with an unself-conscious. Unpretentiousness that reminds me, and I mean this in the most positive way of GeoCities in its heyday, where people were just earnest and honest and they didn’t care. And they just wanted you to sign their guest book and join their web ring. You know?
Yeah, I was going to say web 1. 0, like the advent of blocking when. You’re creating because you want to create, and there’s no thought about holding back because who would you hold back from? You’re hanging out with your friends on the net.
Yeah, and God, I terribly miss it. I terribly miss that you could put a GIF of Felix the cat pacing back and forth randomly on your website and get away with it. I miss the community that it engendered, where people were plowing a new frontier. And Dirk’s Friday Fresh Fish Flash looks like that. But more importantly, I think even if it were in Times New Roman, it would still feel like that. And I think that’s what’s more important. And the most like, possibly the most important thing, is that he’s not afraid to be controversial or Confident, you know? Like it’s not boring. And that’s really what’s important. So in this episode, we’re going to spend about 10-15 more minutes talking about what This means for your consultancy because it’s nice to like talk up Dirk, but not all of you live in Chicago, unfortunately. And not all of you can go and eat at Dirk’s every day. So I’m not even this is really unpaid advertising for him. But what are the takeaways from Dirk? What can Dirk teach us? What would Dirk do?
I think the first thing that comes to mind on my side is, like you’ve called out, he has a confident opinion. He’s not afraid in saying, like, I view the world this way. I think we have the best fish. And let me tell you why. There’s. No hesitation on his part, and there’s no. But it’s not him being a braggart. It’s just him saying, we do this wow. We believe in sustainability. We’re creating something great here. Let’s tell you about it. And there’s no hemming and hawing on his part. Every time I get one of his newsletters, it’s like, we just got some awesome salmon. Here’s some photos of the salmon. Let’s talk about how awesome the salmon is. And it’s not me-too-y. It’s not bland. It stands out.
Yeah, he doesn’t care about tone. He doesn’t care about. He doesn’t care about being on brand or off brand because Dirk is the brand, right? And we spend so much time. Wondering about how other people are going to judge us and evaluate us, that it paralyzes us and it makes us beige. And, you know, I didn’t get into this. To be boring. The world wants you to be boring. They try and censor you. And that’s scary to contemplate, but also really dumb.
No, I completely agree. And I like what you’re saying about the default being Boringness. We’ve talked about before on previous episodes about how the thing you’re fighting against as a consultant isn’t them choosing another consultant. It’s them doing nothing. And I think it’s true. Like the default is we’re just not going to do anything about this problem and not invest in solving it. And when we look at something like an email newsletter or a voice or the type of content Dirk puts out, The default is to be boring, to fit in, to use the same template, to follow this calendar, to figure out what your message is and be on message. With Dirk, It’s just Dirk. I mean, I’m on his website right now, and he does sophisticated parties with sophisticated spelled F-I-S-H. It’s. It’s sophisticated. It’s 100% dirk. It’s authentic.
There’s a huge photo on the front page. Of him and his wife. And you know, looking at this, that is not a joke. It is genuinely a family-run business. There is no veneer here, right? I’m scrolling down and in the right-hand sidebar, literally seeing what looks like a trout dressed up in a tuxedo. with a cumber bond holding what looks like a waiter napkin and holding a menu that says Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet shop just like in ITC Bradley hand in all caps. And that’s just there for some reason. There’s a counter. There are a lot of distorted images, a lengthy digressive aside about his stepdaughter. And and like there i it’s a lot of stuff about Chicago. You see photos of the Sears Tower in the background and just weird, random crap. And I tell you, you know looking at this that the fish is fucking delicious. You know that. I have a rule in Chicago. That’s called the inverse typography rule, where unless you’re doing fine dining, which doesn’t count, the nicer typography, the worse the restaurant. Because it means you have something to prove and you’re trying to paper over your business problems by like setting everything in Gotham. Fuck Gotham. Times New Roman. Comic Sans. You know, if I come in and your menu is in Comic Sans, I know your food is going to be awesome because you care about nothing but the food.
Right. Right.
You have given up on aesthetics.
There’s a really nice parallel here I want to make where I think, as consultants or product creators or service providers, we could get too focused on Making sure what we’re providing looks great, making sure our marketing is perfect, and that’s time that we’re not spending on the product. Not that we shouldn’t spend time On the product or marketing, but there has to be a balance between the two. And it’s when you reach a point where your voice naturally comes through in the marketing, that you don’t have to. Let’s say intentionally apply a lot of hard effort to mimic that voice or create that voice. That voice is just naturally you. That’s the point you want to reach.
Yeah, yeah. And I think the second that you start like overly obsessing about color and typography and arrangement on your website, you’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
There’s something more important you could or should be doing.
Absolutely true. Like actually doing the work for your clients or like trying to get in front of other people more effectively, like getting out of the house, writing more. Some of the best independent consultants that I know have like Times New Roman garbage and word art. and just clipart on their website. And I don’t think Dirk is paralyzed with anxiety about how ugly his website is. I’m actually, I scrolled all the way down, and I can tell you, Dirk is literally wearing a giant king crab on his head. While grinning and holding another king crab. Dude is having the time of his life selling you fish We should all be so lucky to find our calling in life, right? Like, oh, gosh, yes. I have no interest in selling fish. I love fish, but I don’t want to smell raw fish every day, you know? Like. Right. But he does it unashamedly.
He does it with full enthusiasm. He does it because it’s something he loves. And That comes through in every single newsletter he sends. I mean, on a previous episode, we talked about creating a voice for yourself and I think it’s intriguing to look at Dirk as a really out-of-left field case study of somebody who has created a voice for themselves, is using their authentic voice here. And it works really, really well. It plays really well. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway, if you ever find yourself in Chicago, dear listener, And uh you want to hang out, um go to jerk sometime. We’re we’re gonna We’ll take the Bloomingdale Trail over or get off in North and Clyburn, and we’ll go through Big Box Hell. Clyburn District is one of my absolute least favorite neighborhoods in the city. It is one of the most bike-hostile neighborhoods in the city. I’m still going to jerks for you. We’re going to go and get some salmon burgers. Eat them on the curb because they don’t have seats in the middle of a strip mall. And you and I are just going to talk about independent business for a little bit, and it’s going to be good.