Building Leverage On The Internet 8/23

Hey there,

Hope you’ve had a great week. Life got in the way and I’m a bit late this week and publishing on Sunday instead of my typical schedule on Saturday. My hope with this edition is the same as always: to share/teach you a thing or two about building an audience as a creator/founder in case you ever want to give it a shot!

Since the last edition, my subscriber count has gone up from 167 to 187 people so join me in welcoming the new readers :) 👋

Let’s get rolling with this edition:

䷉ TOP ESSAY ON MY RADAR:

Seek, build, and grow Leverage to build wealth 

The single word ‘leverage’ is a fantastic summary of ways to extend your impact beyond a linear, hourly input-output. If you can only earn with your own hourly time, the only way to build wealth is incredibly deep specialization (doctor, lawyer, etc). By creating and using leverage (through money, employees, or products) you can create more value for more people in the same amount of time. 

The tools of leverage help you accomplish more: 

Small example (Product): Instead of doing 5 hour-long 1:1 meetings, spend one hour writing a document about priorities and principles for them to read. 

Medium example (Employee): You have taught yourself how to purchase fresh ingredients, create an incredible sandwich, and sell lunch delivery service to companies. You are earning $40,000 year doing this. By hiring an employee to purchase ingredients and make the sandwiches, you can focus on selling your lunches to more companies (your most valuable skill). The business grows. Now, pay your employee $40,000, and now you earn $60,000.

Bigger example (Capital): A friend is starting a very promising company. Rather than working there to get equity, you can invest your money and/or help bring in other investors, earning a % of the value of the equity that capital bought.

Naval’s Original Quote from the book: 

“Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage. If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output. Now we’ve invented leverage — through capital, cooperation, technology, productivity, all these means. We live in an age of leverage. As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible, so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.

A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.“

Source: The Four Biggest Lessons I've Learned From Naval

🐦 TOP TWEETS ON MY RADAR:

Pim Ruhe | Visualizing @RuhexLabs

It isn’t 10,000 hours that creates outliers, it’s 10,000 iterations. — @naval

Daniel Vassallo @dvassallo

Your ability to convert your time to something useful is an asset, just like any other. More people should invest their time the way they invest their money. 👇

Jay Kapoor @JayKapoorNYC

Here's a secret no one tells you — just getting an A-List athlete or celebrity to join your startup won't magically help your message resonate with your audience Your messaging is likely flawed & celebrities can't solve that problem for you... But you can, with this Thread 🧵👇🏽

Greg Isenberg @gregisenberg

4 tricks to building products for a community are: 1. Build demand. Use waitlist + limited access to drive demand 2. Design boldly. Bold design stands out 3. Write simply. Easy-to-understand ideas win 4. Data = your friend. Use Junglescout, Redditlist to gain intelligence

Sven Schnieders @SvenSchnieders

Ask for what you want—it's their job to turn you down, not yours. h/t a great call with @JamesClear

💰 TOP RESOURCES ON MY RADAR:

Will Bachman @willbachman

Great advice from @jspector "26 Ways To Get Twitter Followers And Write Better Tweets" Key messages: 1) "Tweet about the people you follow" 2) "Concentrate on replies" to tweets by those with larger followings 1/8

fortheinterested.com26 Ways To Get Twitter Followers And Write Better TweetsTips to help you get Twitter followers including what to tweet, what to say in your Twitter bio, and how to format your tweets.

• Finding Signals Among The Noise: (by Austin Calver)

• One of my favorite resources is Anne-Laure’s interview which I published on the Build In Public newsletter. Check it out here.

Highlights of the Week

This past week, I’ve extended the beta invites of LetterDrop beta to around 150 users [up from 20 in the prior week]. It has been so great to see people participate in upvoting/commenting each day. The waitlist has grown to nearly 700 people now without a proper Product Hunt or Hacker New launch yet. Feels surreal! Quite serendipitously, we had @nbt on LetterDrop to do a little Q/A with the community. We also had Polina and Dru join us and do the same too!

For the next few weeks, beta will be open so visit here and join the early club.

For the next week, I’m planning to ship my 5th interview for Build In Public on Wednesday.

I always love sharing my playbooks openly and answering specific questions people have around building an audience, shipping products consistently and building communities. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions that I can help with.

That’s all for now. Hope you have a fantastic week!