Increasingly, I've been thinking about content along three dimensions:
- Scalability
- Intimacy
- Effort to create*
This is my flawed attempt at a taxonomy.
/quick thread ππ
Why do these three matter?
1. Scale. You (probably) want your work to be seen and appreciated as widely as possible.
2. Intimacy. You want to build authentic closeness with your audience.
3. Effort. You want to do the two things above as time-efficiently as possible.
Disclaimer...
There's lots to pick apart here.
This by no means intended to be definitive and there is lots of grey area.
I expect to change my mind on much of the below through conversation and experience.
Scale v. Intimacy
- Twitter. Moderate to good scale, but low intimacy.
- Newsletters. High scale, moderate intimacy.
- Videos. Moderate-high scale, high intimacy.
- Podcasts. Moderate to low scale, high intimacy.
These are all relative, of course.
Roaming areas
These aren't fixed. Variation within mediums means you can move around.
Which is to say some tweets might build intimacy, while some podcasts might not.
Both form and content matter.
An example: Newsletters
Not all newsletters have equivalent intimacy quotients. A round of links isn't likely to build audience connection beyond a certain point.
Personal anecdotes may have a higher chance. This isn't a prescription, just an observation.
Scale v. Effort
I define "Effort" as the time required from the *creator alone*. When you're starting out, of course, you have to do it all yourself. But at scale, creators start to build teams around them.
Still, you can't have some *create* instead of you, without deception.
Roaming areas
I don't think I did a good job capturing the variation here. Some YouTube videos must require a *huge* amount of effort from creators, while others don't.
Similarly, some newsletters may be trivial to create while others are time-consuming.
An example: Twitter
One simple way to think of the variation is Twitter. The effort from a creator to share a 1-sentence aphorism is likely quite low.
Build a tweetstorm like @kevinleeme or @APompliano likely takes significantly more time.
This is very semi-formed.
Where am I wrong? What dimensions matter more/less? I'd love to think through this together.
Tagging some favorite creators and media thinkers.
Why: I think I captured some of what makes this such a special firm. I also got to talk with a lot of those familiar with the origins which made for a rich story.
Toucan brings carbon-credits on-chain. This unlocks new uses like using carbon as a DeFi collateral. It's a major player in the Regenerative Finance (ReFi) space.
Farcaster is a "sufficiently decentralized" social media platform. Greater wallet adoption and higher-quality usage makes it a good time to start a web3 social network.
As outsiders in Silicon Valley, Coatue won competitive deals by conducting extensive research *before* meeting founders.
Arriving prepared changes everything, making for better conversations and connections.
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