Dickie's Digest - Shipping, Profiles, Creators, Life Advice, and What Matters
Hey there, happy Sunday!
What a wild week. Glad to see we are picking up right where 2020 left off.
A handful of things from me this week I want to share with you:
Ship 30 for 30 is off to an epic start. We had 171 members join the January Cohort and have 71 signed up for February already. The business passed $25,000 in revenue in under 60 days! The goal for February is to have 1,000 members in the community, a goal I definitely think we can reach. If you want to start writing every day in February, check out Ship30for30.com. Digest readers can use code DIGEST100 to get $100 off enrollment in the February cohort.
If you want to follow all of the essays the community is writing, check out the #Ship30for30 hashtag on Twitter. There are hundreds of essays on every topic you could think of.
If you want to read my daily Atomic Essays, you can follow along in this Twitter thread.
That’s it from me! In this week’s Digest
🎧 Ram Parameswaran - Internet Scale Businesses | Invest Like the Best
🎧 The All-In Podcast on the US Capitol, Georgia Runoff, and Vaccine Distribution
Have an epic week!
Dickie
⁉️ My new favorite rabbit hole: waitwho.is
This week I stumbled across what is potentially the deepest rabbit hole I’ve ever found. I had to shut my computer off to keep me from staying up until 4 AM exploring the entire site
waitwho.is: a curated website with the best essays, tweets, podcasts, and videos from some of the world’s most fascinating thinkers. Every person has their own page with a short bio and curation of hand-selected links to their best content. You can also sort by top-rated and most-recent to see their best stuff or their current stuff.
Here are a few that I am particularly excited to dive into:
My goal: become well-respected enough to have my own link on this page.
Explore more: waitwho.is
🧠 The Creator Economy Reading List
This week, Ship 30 for 30 member Ryan Gum put out what is the de-facto curation for learning more about the creator economy. This Twitter thread is an absolute gold mine of reads to keep you occupied for the next week.
Here are my three favorites from this list with a quick summary.
Product abundance has led to commoditization. All the world’s products and information are essentially commodities. But this commoditization has removed status signaling from most products. Creators have stepped in to add nuance and status back into the equation.
Creators monetize in three ways: promoting other people’s products, selling directly to their audience, or exchanging their audience’s attention to a product’s founder in exchange for equity. The last of the three is leading to the rise of the “solocapitalist” — an idea that resonates heavily with me.
With the three monetization pillars of promotion, sales, and investment defined in part I, part II dives deep into the currencies exchanged in these transactions.
Between the creator, audience, and product founder, each is paying in their effort, attention, money, or ownership (of their product/company).
“I believe the most successful creators will figure out how to share, splitting the "currencies" mentioned above. Effort, attention, money, and ownership can all be distributed within an audience. For the audience, distribution creates opportunities to learn, gain status, earn money, and accumulate equity. For creators, it deepens intimacy with an audience, aligns interests, and solves scale.”
The Creator Hierarchy of Needs
Every creator has a hierarchy of needs for them to go from 0 to full Personal Monopoly:
Publish: To get started, creators need to find a niche and publish frequently. Most creators give up before finding an audience, so staying motivated and avoiding burnout is key.
Grow: To grow an audience, creators need to understand what's working, interact with fans, and collaborate with other creators.
Monetize: To make money, creators need to add multiple revenue streams and learn how to run a business.
Read more: The Creator Economy Reading List
📖 Life and Career Advice You Probably Don’t Want to Hear
One of my favorite real estate follows on Twitter @sweatystartup dropped a thread that went nuclear viral this week, receiving over 45,000 likes.
It’s about 10 full pages worth of life advice he gathered in one of his recent off-the-grid reflections. It quite dwarfed my thread on 30 lessons I learned in 2020. Here are five of my favorite lessons (but I highly recommend reading through the whole thing)
There is a difference between rich and wealthy. Rich people buy nice cars they bought with their first check. Wealthy people buy assets that send them money every month so they can work less.
The key to success isn’t intelligence. It’s sales. If you can get uncomfortable and put yourself out there you’re half way there. If you can be compelling and attract others to your way of thinking you’ll win. LIFE is all about sales.
The key to success isn’t intelligence. It’s sales. If you can get uncomfortable and put yourself out there you’re half way there. If you can be compelling and attract others to your way of thinking you’ll win. LIFE is all about sales.
90% of folks in life play defense. Other people make decisions and they react. They are totally out of control. They complain, blame others and continue to react to their surroundings.
10% play offense. They make decisions that control their earnings, where they live, who they spend time with. They are in control. They don’t complain and they own up to their situation. It takes time to move from playing defense to playing offense. One decision at a time for a long time.
Read more: Life and Career Advice You Probably Don’t Want to Hear
🔥 Last week’s most popular link
🎧This Week in Podcasts
If you love the Digest and its weekly podcast recommendations, consider checking out the Digest Podcast Compendium. It’s a curation of my favorite podcast episodes ever recorded, tagged, and summarized with three key takeaways. Supporters get three new podcasts and summaries every week plus an invitation to a private Slack group to chat about the best episodes.
Ram Parameswaran - Internet Scale Businesses | Invest Like the Best [HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
This episode of Invest Like the Best was a masterclass in first principles thinking. Equity investor Ram Parameswaran breaks down “what matters” for all types of internet businesses: media businesses, subscription businesses, software businesses, hardware businesses, everything. His simplicity is something I want to replicate in how I think about the world.
The All-In Podcast on the US Capitol, Georgia Runoff, and Vaccine Distribution [HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
When this podcast hits my feed, I listen immediately. It is simply the best podcast in the game right now. Four of the best thinkers in tech, business, investing, and macro sit down and have a conversation at the bar about what’s going on in the world. And it’s such a refreshing mix of both liberal and conservative ideals. To hear these guys respectfully disagree and have a civil conversation is something the world needs much, much more of. Again, I highly recommend this one.
🧠 Tweet of the Week
Thanks for reading!
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