1. Creators are Rewarded: It's basically free to produce and distribute ideas now. Take advantage of that. When you share ideas online, you attract an audience of like-minded people who become friends and business partners. But passive consumers don't receive the same benefits.
2. Creation is Cheap: Joe Rogan is basically a one-man show. He doesn't have an expensive headquarters in the middle of Manhattan. Instead, he has a humble studio in Austin. With a couple of microphones, he has more reach than most big-name media companies.
3. Ideas Are a Serendipity Vehicle: Creating is networking. Every idea you share is tinder for the flame of connection. Ideas spread at zero-marginal cost, and good ones find their way to people you'd never be able to meet with "real-world" networking strategies.
4. Audience-First Products: Building an audience before you launch a product lowers the risk of starting something new. It lets you validate ideas before launch and cultivate a group of passionate early adopters who can give you feedback in the early days.
4. Be Above the API: Either you’re telling computers what to do or computers are telling you what to do. The computer in your fingers thinks faster than you ever will, so make it your partner, not your enemy. Those who put code to work for them have tons of leverage.
5. The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for intelligent ones. Avoid junk like gossip & clickbait.
6. The Paradox of Specificity: Focus isn’t as constraining as it seems. In the age of the Internet, where everybody has Google search and personalized social media feeds, uniqueness stands out. The more specific your focus, the more opportunities you'll create for yourself.
7. Great Marketing Spreads on its Own: Good Super Bowl ads go viral on YouTube. The catchiest songs explode on TikTok. Likewise, Tesla is a trillion-dollar company even though it doesn't have an official marketing department. Instead, it rides the wave of Elon Musk's personality.
8. Own the Demand: Have a direct relationship with your customers. If somebody gets between you and your customer, your margins will fall as customer acquisitions costs rise. One stat: Google pays ~$9 billion per year to Apple to be iOS’ default search engine.
9. The Law of Shitty Click-Through Rates: Marketing strategies have a short window. Click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example, the first banner ad had a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers.
10. The Inversion of Censorship: In a world of information scarcity, you censor people by blocking the flow of information. But in our world of information abundance, you censor people by flooding them with irrelevant ideas and meaningless data.
Eliminate the noise in your life.
Writing online is the best way to take advantage of these laws.
My free email series will give you a step-by-step process for making the Internet work for you.
I’m not here to convert you, and if it gives you any comfort, know that I’m not a believer myself.
This is about educating yourself, not becoming religious.
I do believe one thing strongly though: Reading the Bible is a contrarian activity that shouldn’t be contrarian at all.
Even if the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, the majority of highly educated people today, especially in major cities, aren’t familiar with it.
Instead, they spend their time with contemporary writing that has a fraction of the depth you’ll find in The Bible.
If you've ever wanted to build an online business, this thread is for you.
Here are the principles of online marketing:
1. Out-Teach Your Competition:
When people learn from you, they promote you.
Everybody likes helpful people, so share your best ideas regularly and adopt a service mentality.
The more you help others, the more they'll help you in return.
2. Ride Trends:
The Internet is a global conversation. Nearly every social media promotes trending ideas. Aligning yourself with the talk of the day will serve as turbo boost for your creations.
One example: Mr. Beast's video about Squid Games instantly became a viral hit.
1. Teaching will become an extremely lucrative profession. Salaries will follow a power law. The best teachers will make millions of dollars per year and teach thousands of students every year. In fact, this is already happening.
2. Mass market courses will have Hollywood-level production budgets.
People who teach mass-market subjects like statistics and economics will attract millions of students. Teaching at scale will give them the financial resources to invest in high-end graphics and production.
3. Classes will be big and small.
The education industry is obsessed with the "average class size metric." People think that smaller is always better. Not true. You want scale when you're delivering lectures so you can invest in production. At other times, you want small groups.
When a culture is tight-knit, people don't need to be told what to do explicitly. They just copy what everybody else does, which allows them to be entrepreneurial.
But weak cultures need many precise rules to keep people in check.
(Source: Airbnb)
Christensen's Disruptive Innovation Framework
Innovators win market share when they serve a segment of the market that is over-served by incumbents.
Startups offer the exact level of product or service they need and use this wedge to expand market share.