Lessons, Belief, Productize, Launch
☕ Good Morning!
I found this reflective post by Anne-Laure Le Cunff from early January on the 30 life lessons she learned before turning 30. I truly wish I had recognized all these by that time, but I am sure many learn them only in later years as their private and professional lives shape them. I particularly sympathize with her learnings that everyone is interesting (4), that good things are often scary, but that scary things aren’t always good (8), that your habits define you (10) and that writing is a superpower (22). Great insights that can be applicable to many situations! Read the full post here.
🚀 Maker News
An insightful post by KP on the two underrated types of capital, Belief Capital and Social Capital. “Belief capital is what you need to go from an idea to launch” and “Belief Capitalists are those people who actually talk you in to your launching your idea.” He rightly points out that the biggest barrier to Makers launching is the lack of others believing in them and pushing them to move forward. He recently experienced this himself with Cuppa as did Dru Riley with Trends.vc. In that sense, belief capital can be life-changing as otherwise self-doubt can easily creep and destroy the dream. Social capital is critical after launch and is needed to give your product traction. Social capitalists share your early progress, helping generate momentum so that you can “reach escape velocity” and become more widely known. Building and nurturing an online audience and community through Twitter or other means will be crucial in helping achieve this goal. Great insights KP, thank you. Read the full post here.
Lenny Rachitsky shares an in-depth Twitter thread on how his Substack Newsletter has been progressing. He launched 10 months ago and went paid six weeks ago. To date he has accumulated a total of 13,000 free subscribers and 450 paid. This currently gives him an annualized income of $56k per year, before Substack + Stripe fees. He’s converted about 3-4% of his free subscribers to paid, below the 10% average Substack usually mentions. Lenny sees this as a function of price, how long your audience has been active, and your target audience. His subscribers almost exclusively stem from WOM, Twitter, and LinkedIn and early recommendations from the likes of @andrewchen and others who helped him light the spark. His statement that you need to find a balance between finding your audience, but staying close to what you find interesting hits the nail for me. Read the full Twitter thread here.
🏗️ Build + Launch
Tyler Tringas shares some ideas below for productized services, which Luiz then appends with further suggestions. If you want to read and learn more about productized services check out productizedstartups.com by Robin Vander Heyden.
Justin Mikolay has reviewed and summarised Matthew Kobach’s last 3,000 tweets, into a list of key social media learnings. These include among others honesty, writing well, adding value, being niche and consistent, and remembering that great content spreads! You can read this brilliant Twitter thread here or on his Medium page.
🖥️ NoCode
Jack Butcher beautifully visualizes the Visualize Value tech stack, which was built without writing any code. This clear depiction and categorization of the software used will be helpful to all NoCode Makers thinking about their next idea.
💭 Afterthought
The big day has arrived for Elon Musk and the whole team at SpaceX and NASA. The Falcon 9’s launch of Crew Dragon is scheduled for this afternoon at 4.33 pm Eastern Time. The weather forecast for launch is 60% favorable. It will be the first time in nearly a decade that people have launched to orbit from America, and it’ll be the first time that a private vehicle does this. You can learn more here. Have a great evening!
You can also find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow my thoughts in real-time!