Keyboard warriors who don't leave their basements: Texas is becoming Calif! No!!

Having lived in Calif for 10 years and now Texas 3 (and travel between both often) they're nothing alike. One big diff between the two is def building: TX builds, Calif NIMBY culture does not... Calif has unspoken expectation you must be rich and buyout previous RE owners to be part of their club. Note you will still not live that well even if you do. Texas they want you to have a nice home in suburbia. American dream achievable. Neighbors here also bring you brisket...

Alright before too much else happens today, let's do this. Personal news coming... Excited to share I’m joining @AdQuick, the easiest way to plan, book and measure OOH (out of home) advertising around the world as VP Marketing

I'm 35

If I were 18 again, here are the 39 things I'd do differently:

1. Realize college is a scam. Use this knowledge to run a counterfeit textbook ring and get in on the grift, why should the university be the only one to profit? 2. Bet on myself as often as possible, in fact am so lucky I'll start splitting kings
3. Cut negative people out of my life. I studied the blade
4. Watch less sports. You should be gambling on them instead.
5. Unlearn the food pyramid and eat more protein. Mostly bacon.

For a long time being a nerd was free alpha. PM software is really just a spreadsheet for people who don't know how to use one. That company that put backup USB power in luggage is for people who didn't realize you just cheaply could buy backup chargers. Gap mostly closed now... The problem here is if you were a nerd you hacked together solutions for a lot of things and were like "that was so easy, everyone must be doing that." But it was the wrong attitude. People were very bad at computers and internet things for long time. Worse than you could fathom

Alright think worked up courage to share v personal story on Substack. Thx @Jack_Raines & @jposhaughnessy for giving feedback. Not anything controversial I've just not shared this publicly. Hope personal ex can help persuade you on some things. Will run when get through security Tried to make readable/tell my story genuinely without making guru-style self help-esque pleas-we have a surplus of that already. But stick with me it's long bc the context matters. I didn't include this part but is perhaps only reason I'm even alive today after my father's death

Apologies in advance I'm back on my pop culture shtick again. Today's Substack shares how the top players at your startup or digital team embody the same characteristics & attitude of everyone's favorite scrappy 80s/early 90s hero: MacGyver adamsinger.substack.com/p/how-the-best… The show was pop-culture phenom, leading to the popularization of the phrase “to MacGyver something” meaning of which is implied. While Mac was ofc fictional, his thought process for problem solving is critical for digital pros of all variety & something to look for while hiring

A fav early prediction was @kylascan & @DoombergT would become 2 of the best, can't-miss voices in finance space online. They both have zoomed past 100K followers here recently via 100% organic growth- easiest call ever they'd get there. Love to see it. Lucky to call them friends What can you learn from them? @kylascan is 1/1 unique individual - no one else creates short-form videos like her on macro. AI can do a lot but can't re-create her wit, creativity & ability to make complex topics easy for all to grasp. By far the most difficult skill in comms...

New Substack for this morning, sharing insights on what modern marketers and meteorologists have in common and some lessons to learn from the commonalities here. Post open to all free and paid subscribers. adamsinger.substack.com/p/what-marketi… Scientists, hedge fund managers, analysts are respected, but weather forecasters are parodied. Yet forecasters have *far* fewer illusions or god complex re: ability to predict future events. Too many variables at play, impossible to be perfect. Marketing online is v similar...

This graph by Galloway gets it backwards. Future of all things physical+digital is abundance. Those who crave control keep wanting to break the internet, and scarcity mindsight is self-constructed prison. We are evolving a free, open creative culture (is actually very authentic!) Many of us on Napster used it to share original work we were happy to finally have place to distribute. Music industry killed that, called us all pirates and then abused DMCA to take down works they didn't even own. Media ignored the internet & let Craigslist etc eat their lunch.

"It is an enigma we only come to understand technology's latent cultural function once it is no longer necessary. With the dawn of television, we came to recognize cinema was not about moving pictures, but an opportunity to have a night out." adamsinger.substack.com/p/the-latent-c… /new substack You don’t need to send letters anymore, you can just email. But interestingly email made the handwritten note -something that should be quaint & unnecessary- special & timeless. There's even startups that create+ship notes that looks hand-written to recipient(s) on your behalf.

It's weird how you can make a lot of $ w/ just your voice, talking, but almost no $ spending days if not weeks on a piece of music. Both are just vibrations if you think about it. The one that's simple to do is valued highly & the more complex one we also enjoy but value at zero Wrote a post not directly about the above but tangentially related to fact music is blood from a rock as a creator [adamsinger.substack.com/p/most-of-the-…]. Think smarter to create in free time as hobby & not to feed your family. The market def is telling us it is passion not a profession.

Excited to share my newsletter just crossed into the top 100 Substacks in the technology category. To thank you all for subscribing (hit fresh ATHs this week!) I've put together a quick primer on growing a media brand for indies & brands alike -> adamsinger.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-… Life of long form, beyond the flighty and cacophonous world of social streams is thriving. There’s a renaissance happening w/self-publishing for indie creators in no small part thanks to beautiful usability of @SubstackInc (which helped make writing a joy again for me).

New substack for today, providing a brief, in plain English intro to CLV (Customer Lifetime Value to non marketing geeks). Critical metric for every company to understand from large enterprises to small SMBS (I share some ex incl one from @petershankman) adamsinger.substack.com/p/a-brief-intr… There’s no single metric for understanding a user’s economic value to a brand, but one that comes closest is CLV. More critical than things like CPA, bounce rate, site conversion, NPS (fuzzy) etc-those of course matter too and should be worked on but are ultimately more tactical.

Or mid level bloggers, or YouTubers, or Twitter users, or TikTok creators, or...

https://twitter.com/AJAmmirabilis/status/1494294246064537601

This is why I actually love seeing washed up celebs shilling NFTs. It's final nail in macro 'influencer' coffin, they’re just peeling onion for everyone to see the truth, crypto shills accelerated existing trend: (mass) scaled trad influence is dead-we now trust our friends more.

Woke up with this guy next to me staring. Channeling his inner doge today - same energy. I wonder if we rescued a Shiba if the cattle dog would get along with him or not. Fun fact: @Purple sent us a free mattress because of some of @dashthedingo's Tweets so my dog is technically an influencer. I thought they were nuts but since this we've probably sold $300-500k in product for them through referrals. Their SMM guy is smart.

https://twitter.com/dashthedingo/status/1262532876366741504?t=XPTosqy8uraqRMQmFFvvUQ&s=19

[New Substack to start the week]: Digital analyst skills are now table stakes for all: ideas on how you can be dangerous with data adamsinger.substack.com/p/analyst-skil… 1. Find a passion outside work which involves developing hypotheses: whether this manifests as fantasy sports, investing in startups/stocks or some other activity which involves future predictions (& cool datasets!), this can be a fun way to see analysis problems in a new light.

AuStIn ReAl esTate HaS bEcOmE As sCarCe aNd exPenSiVe As BaY aRea!! 🤪

[guess having 2435% more single family in $100-500K range is exactly the same, also don't look at apartments/multi fam might ruin the narrative even worse] Now to be fair, looks like Bay Area has around 15x more homes available for sale in the $10-50M range than Austin. Checkmate. Supply and demand isn't real though, as soon as you step into California it flies out the window (the NIMBYs there legitimately do not believe it exists).

A multi billion $ sector of future will be day spas where you go for 6-10 hr psychedelic retreats - combo therapy of mdma and/or LSD with potential md-administered and observed IM ketamine for subset of patient population who are unable to reset. 6 mo of psychotherapy in 1 day. Burnout, PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction could be things of the past or at least greatly soothed and put into perspective. We might be able to take half the people currently on SSRIs completely off them. Could shortcut healthy people to next stage of their life. Why not now?

Related to a bunch I've linked today this pod on financial nihilism was great finished while working just now (h/t @mitchell_knight). 1 if not the issue of our times is inequality which we must manage better. People need to feel the game is worth playing. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/finan… This from @NickHanauer was so so prescient from 2014 -- something almost no one took notice of -- predicted so much of what's happening. The manifestations of specifics aren't the point no one can predict those but a lot of people sounded the alarm early. politico.com/magazine/story…

My financial anxiety has dropped 90% since leaving Calif. And I could afford it. I'm not sure why it's worth doing that to yourself. It's beautiful, I get it, the people are lovely and the food is great. But why live like that? Free up your mental bandwidth for the impt stuff. I've worked every day since 15. My parents had no money. My father died before I knew him & couldn't take care of us. I love having a craft and contributing to world, before going to Calif I never spent extra time with financial anxiety as long as I worked. Calif destroyed it.

For sure all the really talented product people are going to leave ad tech for fintech. Feels so inevitable. Far less to do with market cycles or upside or whatever it's just clearly a more interesting challenge than iterating on winning products that already just work. Also biotech/diagnostics is great path for a lot of folk buried under org charts checking boxes at <big co> for the easy 250k+RSUs. I mean, at some point you have to wake up, realize your life is optimizing at the edges/watching a clock. We need the top people on other things.