• 0:00:00 Intro  
• 0:00:27 Watch Noah go through the different split tests they tried to pick out the book cover.
• 0:02:10 The way to design a book cover is look at it like a tiny little thumbnail, as if someone is browsing on Amazon on their phone. 
• 0:05:05 People don’t usually randomly get “lucky” with success, there’s often a ton more methodology behind those people. Tim Ferriss and James Clear examples.
• 0:07:07 Most people are shy about marketing.
• 0:08:18 If you build something people want, it’s easier to market it and tell people about it because you’re proud.
• 0:08:34 Noah lists products he’s tried that DIDN’T work, easy to forget when you have success that tons of stuff didn’t work.
• 0:10:19 Make sure people want the thing you’re about to sell. Start Today. Ask People. Stick With It.
• 0:10:40 Cliches are true. 
• 0:11:35 Example: Guy built a podcast guest research tool for $20/mo. Meh. BUT if you send people more podcast listeners that’s more valuable. When you don’t have to convince someone to buy it, that’s when you know it’s valuable.
• 0:12:22 I validated a newsletter writing service (or dis-validated). Get closer to the money. Help people save more money or make more money. 
• 0:14:00 The right answers are often simple and boring. The complex answers are more exciting. Keep things very simple. Complexity is not better. 
• 0:15:58 I’m calling it TwitterX from now on.
• 0:16:11 Companies will do things end customers don’t care about, like new logos. Instead just gimme a cheaper price!
• 0:16:37 Why did you wanna write a book? I wanted to embrace something that will take a long time. Have done self published books before, but wanted to do full publisher route. Started writing proposal on March 2020 and book came out February 2024.
• 0:20:30 Noah’s book goals: 1,000 reviews. 25,000 sales in first 7 days. 
• 0:21:42 We got a publisher to agree to publish a book, and they didn’t care what it was about so long as you can sell 10,000 books. 
• 0:22:50 Almanack of Naval Ravikant self published, crossed a million in sales, but won’t appear as a NYTimes best seller.
• 0:24:35 A book proposal needs stuff like how big is your audience, first full chapter, table of contents and market differentiation. 
• 0:25:00 Self Publishing vs traditional publishing. Traditional feels like you have to swing for the fences and take it more seriously. Self publishing is probably the future, but for now traditional still feels different.
• 0:25:53 Noah asks Neville what he saw from his vantage point when creating this book.
• 0:28:19 “Yesterday we did $284,000 in sales, but that originally started from a PayPal button and Gmail.”
• 0:30:07 Find things that don’t feel like effort to you. Craft your life to include more of those things.
• 0:32:56 Seinfeld said he loves the boring “long Shawshank slog through the sewer” which is why he lasted in comedy.
• 0:35:44 Copywriting Course email marketers and freelancers making more money. 
• 0:38:29 We watched two of Noah’s videos, the supposedly “cheesier” one about asking yacht owners what they do was far more educational.t
• 0:44:23 The Ten Year Rule: Can I do this for 10 years? Will it be easy or hard for me?
• 0:46:05 Do you write much? For the book launch 30 days of content for social media, plus 5 emails for launch week, plus a weekly email. I really enjoyed doing the actual writing and marketing. Creating an email that’s so f’ing good that even if you don’t buy you enjoy it. 
• 0:47:05 There’s an absence of really good long-form blog articles. Seems like newsletters have taken over. 
• 0:47:43 I started writing on NevBlog again. No comments. No distribution. But it’s a cool place I can write in semi-peace.
• 0:49:25 “The Artist’s Way” book. When you just sit and write stuff you can come up with more ideas than you expect. 
• 0:51:42 Where do you come up with ideas? Mostly just shared Google Docs 
• 0:53:43 How do you develop taste? You taste a lot of dishes! 
• 0:57:53 Do more of what works over a very long period of time. 
• 0:59:25 Noah’s guiding star to keep focus. “I hate losing. I like competition. I need an enemy.”
• 1:01:55 Noah likes having a team because then outputting a lot of stuff is sustainable.
• 1:02:28 Noah actually works very hard. Knowing him for years I see that when he works, HE WORKS, and he’s locked in for long periods of time.
• 1:03:10 There are certain days I don’t do anything…but systems in place keep things going.
• 1:03:58 “Anger is a gift.” Use frustration to work harder. Don’t mask it.
• 1:10:15 Internet allows you to live way different lives than a few years ago that weren’t possible. You can live in a small town in Ireland and be the creative director of Red Bull.

I never realized what a monopoly on mountains the West had till I saw this color coded topographical map!

I’m more used to seeing maps like this which don’t convey much information besides state borders:

Checkout this image of a San Bernadino locomotive factory from 1928:

Thoughts that come to mind when I see this image:
• Capitalism
• Hard Work
• Commerce
• Engineering
• Job Creation
• Elbow Grease

This is what built America.

I’m very thankful people in this harsh work environment paved the way for me to sit in air conditioning on a laptop while I'm sick with flu and working from bed:

Woot! I hit 100,000 subs on YouTube!

Do they still send out those silver plaque thingies?? Hope I can get one still!

Here's the lifetime channel stats, with most of the action happening only recently:

This is the best office ever: Laying in bed on a rainy day finishing up a book 😁

P.S. Yes I realize there are TWO pictures of me working from bed this past week 😂

I was down with flu so there was a lot of bed hanging out time!

Wow…since 2019 there are roughly 60,000 more design agencies listed on Clutch.
This is likely caused by: 
• More solopreneurs entering the game. 
• Remote work makes this more possible. 
• Starting an agency is very low effort thanks to the internet + organizational tools like Slack, Notion, Google Docs, AirTable etc.

Original thread on Reddit

It's been really cool to watch the barrier to entry to starting a business (like an agency) drop so low. 

It used to take lots of money, time, and employees to start something like this 20 years ago....now with a laptop and a few hours you can get it done. 

Paul tells this cool story about how his daughter started in online shop in 26 minutes:

Compared to blog posts and social media, there's something about a BOOK that feels immortal.

Today marks the day my friend Noah Kagan's writings and teachings are cemented in history with his book Million Dollar Weekend 🙂

There was a book launch party, and here's @noahkagan hitting a piñata during the party....can you guess what's inside it?!?!

This is kind of fun, look at this “Visual Style Guide” used by the animation team for the King of the Hill TV show:

It's neat to see all the very-intricate details for every tiny movement and gesture!

Here’s a few more slides of the style guide:

This cool illustration shows how much you learn from theory, from practice, and from mistakes:

Best office ever: Laying in bed on a rainy day finishing up a book 😁

I really love laying in bed reading (when I have a good book I'm into). One of the best feelings!

I spent last weekend in Palm Springs and it was awesome 😎

We stayed at one of those big crazy AirBnB's for a friends bday and it was very cool.

One interesting tid-bit about Palm Springs was the airport is 90% outdoors, felt more like a farmers market or festival than airport!

The view from the airport entrance alone was amazing!

Toughen up.

There’s a lot of talk about mental health, and that’s great. But like any movement, some people take it too far.

It’s starting to get common for people to take “mental health days” anytime they’re sad, don’t feel like doing something, or something is even remotely hard.

Well toughen up.

Being sad sometimes is normal.
Being tired sometimes is normal.
Being anxious sometimes is normal.

These are not always mental disorders. There are normal, everyday, human feelings.

If you just tell yourself whilst feeling sad, “This is a pretty normal human emotion. Many people have experienced it. It’s usually temporary. It can almost always be solved by hanging out with loved ones, getting some exercise, taking a walk outside, or making a concrete plan on how to get out of your funk.”

You will then be able to bear this emotion like a big boy or girl.

A story in my mind that sticks out:

Someone once asked Arnold Schwarzenegger whilst he was going through a nasty divorce, and a cheating scandal, and other political stuff how he was holding up. And he replied, “Well it’s better than being in the coal mines in Austria.”

I always dread finishing a good book, because then I go into a LACK of having a gripping book to read!

I just finished a hard-science book called House of Suns (my brother recommended it):

I asked people some other book recommendations and they came up with:
• @henhaohank Pushing Ice
• @theryanhelms Spin, Three Body Problem
• @MouyyadA The Expanse 
• @JohnJBlatchford The Windup Girl
• @Ldnbox Under the Dome
• @loganletsgo Anything from Ted Chiang

Do you have any other book recs for me, (hard-science fiction or just great books)??
 

• 0:00:00: Intro
• 0:00:08: Copy.ai was one of the first companies to make GPT-3 easy to use. 
• 0:01:05: GPT-2 could barely put anything readable together, but SOMETIMES it would sort of work.
• 0:01:30: During the GPT-2 days Paul originally thought full AI writing was 7 to 10 years away, but then 6 months later GPT-3 came out and it was obvious this was the time to start building. 
• Was originally using GPT-3 to create science fiction stories. 
• He had 5 original MVP products before Copy.ai such as a Slack Bot you could chat with and one that just created headlines for agencies and ad people. 
• One client was an ad buyer for garage door sales companies, and could only come up with so many headlines. AI was great at making 100’s of headlines quick. 
• Who is this most useful for?
• “We thought this is going to re-shape how every company works entirely.”
• Reduced cost in, Faster, More Context, Models Get Better Over Time. 
• Could either buy copy.ai domain name for $5,000 or Rent-To-Buy for $180/mo so they did that. 
• Eventually built 75+ tools for Copy.ai
• 09:40: KK to CC, it’s cool to gave a fun brand.
• 11:05: They had instant Product Market Fit with Copy.ai
• 12:00: Get on Twitter, engage with people, and launch, DM everyone who follows you.
• 2,000 signups in the first 2 days. 
• “The biggest problem of startups is no one cares about what you've built.”
• 15:25: Our top SEO things were generators. They took it further and released AI-enabled generators. 
• 75+ different tools originally. Had to prompt and feed data to each and every one. 
• 18:06: Most commonly used tools were Paragraph Generator and Instagram Captions Generator. 
• 18:43: AI has replaced a bunch of supporting content. 
• 20:23: A lucrative part of copywriting is mid-level writing and AI has enabled many people to just automatically generate it. 
• 21:20: They actually didn’t sell a lot to copywriters. It wasn’t even the same market. 
• People who are really good with words are great prompt engineers. 
• 22:13: “Will AI Take my job?”
• 23:33: “I think everyone will become a creator because the tools make it so easy.”
• A lot of what you get paid for is: Doing what other people can’t (or don’t want) to do.
• Everyone should be using AI tools as helpers. 
• 32:40: It’s cool to see how easy AI is to use for anyone young or old. 
• 34:10: It used to be the smaller companies were capturing much of the value, now it seems like bigger companies are making some of the biggest strides in AI. 
• 35:03:” Where have you seen smaller companies sneak in?”
• It takes about 2 years for incumbents to implement a new technology. 
• Easy for someone like Microsoft to just bolt on AI to their existing services. 
• With the way B2B works, Microsoft could probably coast for 3 decades and be fine.
• If you take the software people are trying to do and what they’re trying to do, you can optimize that flow.
• Content production might be very different with AI workflows: It can go scrape all the current content automatically, create all the new content, then post it.
• 43:18: What’s going to happen to SEO when everyone has AI workflows helping them improve?
• 46:25: You will get rewarded for “Net New Information”
• Best use of time is just having a bunch of calls with customer and AI handles all the stuff on the backend. 
• 51:10: Paul sent me a present, a mechanical typewriter, so you can THINK before typing. 
• 53:49: 100,000’s of jobs were in newspapers. 
• 55:45: I can’t see a way we don’t all just become robots. 
• 1:01:25: What skills are you instilling in your kids to prepare for an AI world. 
• Entrepreneurship, Curiosity, High Ethical Standards, Physical Activity seem like the best skills to learn. 
   

• 0:00:00 Intro: Jason started two unicorn companies.
• 0:00:11 What is Smart Bear?
• 0:00:53 What is WPengine? Largest managed Wordpress host in the world. 
• 43% of the web builds on Wordpress
• 0:01:42 How did you know you could charge 10x or 20x more than the competitors. 
• He had the problem so he fixed it for himself, but most of the time that’s not really a business. 
• To make a company out of a problem you have, it must be cost effective enough. 
• 0:03:35 He did 50 customer interviews and 5 months later, he found out people would pay 10x more for a Wordpress host if it was fast, scaleable, secure, and have engineer-level tech support. 
• 0:05:15 I’ve personally used Wordpress for 15+ years, and every few years I’d get hacked until I moved to WPengine then it stopped.
• 0:06:11 When a company is small if you call their “support line” you’ll likely get an engineer or the founder themselves….it’s a huge advantage for small companies over bigger companies with bigger support teams.
• 0:07:47 “Inciting Moments” or “Inciting Events” = When someone gets hacked all of a sudden they really want a more secure website….but maybe it takes them several times of getting hacked before moving.
• 0:09:35 They found their biggest allies in getting people to signup was SEO people. Their recommendations caused people to take action. Those were the keywords and niches they first went after. 
• 0:10:23 It’s like selling burglar alarms, you don’t need one 
• 0:10:35 WPengine had an office next to me, and had a TV on the wall with their MRR which was $2,000/mo (Now it’s…well, WAY higher) 😂
• 0:11:19 “It’s fun to put your most important number on the wall and say we’re going after that.”
• 0:13:35 I like optimization. “Here I am in a great market doing something I love.” That’s a good place to start as an entrepreneur. What are my assets, talents, experience sets, and what in combination is unique, what do I love doing so much you wouldn’t have to pay me? Now figure what in there an actually be a business (not all of it). 
• 0:16:04 It was easy to go after the Wordpress market because even at the time it was 11% of the internet which is just soooo big and still growing. Large and growing markets are great because there’s always niches to service within that.
• 0:18:43 How do you come up with business ideas? Do you write a bunch down? “I don’t build too many 1st products, but we build a lot 2nd and 3rd additional products to our main product.”
• 0:23:04 Talking to customers is the only way to figure out the right product. “If you can’t get them on the phone now, how will you get them on the phone ever?” You can be creative and use platforms like LinkedIn to reach out. “I’m building a startup that’s supposed to be for people like you. I know your time is valuable, so I’m happy to pay even more than your normal hourly rate to get your feedback. 40 out of 50 people agreed, and only one person charged him. 
• 0:24:52 It’s hard to go look for a problem, you generally stumble upon it. So the answer is exposing yourself to stuff. Then try to validate. Doing something like McKinsey Consulting will exposure you to all sorts of businesses and industries.
• 0:27:11 Talking about Wordpress. 
• 0:31:30 Forums → FB Groups → Private Communities 
• 0:03:30 What platforms do you use? Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads…standard stuff. I post the same thing everywhere. I don’t primarily do social media but I write longform that’s unique to me. That’s where I want to spend most of my time. I have hundreds of drafts. 
• 0:35:33 How did you get your first WPengine clients. “I had 18,000 RSS feed subscribers, I launched it, and only 2 people signed up.” You have to muscle your first customers in. 
• 0:37:20 Why did you first start writing online? “Started the blog for Smart Bear and wanted to be the voice of the company like the 37 Signals blog, but no one wrote on it but me.” It became the largest driver of traffic to the corporate site.
• 0:38:39 Personal Brands vs Corporate Brand? Write under your own name or company name? There’s a macro-trend of younger people not having personal secrets as much. If the goal is to sell the company you have to have a corporate blog.
• 0:43:44 Using AI? Using mainly for coding and it’s so good it’s frightening. 
• 0:44:14 Writing for me is personal expression, trying to hone my craft, and my own ideas which are new. Using AI to write that is completely counter to that. I sometimes use it as a super-thesaurus or to generate social content angles from a longer article.
• 0:46:46 Are you afraid of where AI is going? “I’m afraid of it’s impact on everyone. I think longrun its net impact will likely be good, but it might happen to quickly.” The speed at which it happens is the issue, not that things change. In the 80’s people thought robots would take their jobs, but what happened was the jobs moved to other countries. This time instead of blue collar it’s the writers and accountants and such. It’s frightening how fast and uncertain things are and nobody has a comprehensive answer.
• 0:49:37 Are things moving faster and changing…or are we just old?
• 0:54:45 What skills are you teaching your children to future proof them for AI? “Kids are better than this stuff already. THEY are going to be deciding what skills will be important, not us.”
• 0:55:35 The most popular Wordpress trend? Block based themes. You’ll be able to drag and drop everything.
• 0:56:49 How would you go about starting a new business? Take what I currently know about and see where I could solve a problem and need.
• 0:57:37 Are there any marketing hacks you tried that worked or flopped? Going to events did a lot better than we thought…you don’t even need a booth. You can walk around with a logo backpack and talk to 100 people.
• 0:59:48 A book that’s changed your life? Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• 1:13:33 Being around people with extreme levels of wealth, where do people get the most fulfillment? Internal fulfillment, some have external purposes like religion or other causes. Teaching gives you some ego plus feels like you’re paying it back. 
• 1:16:47 Generally many very rich are not happy, not fulfilled, and don’t have a good family life. Leaving a company often leaves you directionless. “Life After Exit.” 
• 1:18:35 The Seinfeld story after the end of the show, Seinfeld was a hardcore road comic, and that saved him.
   

IKEA: "We want you to design a simple ad."

Copywriter: "Hold my beer..." 😏

This Ikea billboard was seen on Oxford Street in London....I love it because it's soooo simple, yet everyone knows what it's for because of IKEA's iconic big blue bags.

Hilarious side note, a few years ago New York made a policy where you couldn't bring dogs on the subway unless they could fit in a bag.....and people used big IKEA bags to skirt this rule 😂

On January 15th I completed 2 months of eating no added sugar (and had a bet with my friend Sam Parr for $1,000 to keep us honest)! 

On that day we pigged out on sugar, then committed to another few months of no added sugar.

I ate a huge slice of cake, ate 5 cookies, around 3 cups of ice cream, and at least 15 pieces of chocolate....and I felt very sick after it all 😂

TO BE HONEST.....this was not that hard.

All through Thanksgiving and Christmas I didn't have a single bite of cookie, cake, pie, or dessert.

I didn't even try the cookies and cake I decorated (I'm especially proud of my Grover cookie) 😂

Once I stopped eating added sugar for 2-3 days the cravings went away. The HABIT is hard to kick (not eating dessert when everyone else is).

This may become more of a permanent change for me in the next year.

Sugar is my uncontrollable vice. It's hard for me to "just eat a little" and stick to that. I always eat wayyyyy more than I intend, and then feel bad about it.

I'm slowly seeing less-and-less benefit to it.

I see more benefit in drinking alcohol (because it's fun) than consuming added sugar.

Check it out, this guy built 20+ tools over 4 years before finding one that’s starting to work!

Look at his list of projects:

Lesson #1: Try lots of stuff. Pivot quick. Act fast.

Lesson #2: The real winner here is GoDaddy for all those domains 😂

"The post-economic nerd" is one of my favorite people...because even with wild success and no need to work, they remain curious and creative and active and often still code or go down rabbit holes of interest.

One of my favorite ones is a guy named Jason Cohen. He started TWO unicorn companies:

• Smart Bear: Finds bugs in software -and-
• WPengine: Managed Wordpress hosting

These are both billion dollar companies, super profitable, and still growing. His blog is one my favorites on the web: longform.asmartbear.com

I recently did an interview with Jason I'll send out on Monday.

We asked some people where they plan to write more in 2024, and here's what people said:

The answers were in this order:

1. Blog: 36
2. LinkedIn: 31
3. Newsletter: 29
4. Twitter/X: 25
5. Facebook: 23
6. Journaling: 21
7. Instagram: 17
8. Medium: 17
9. YouTube: 15
10. Other: 13
11. TikTok: 8
12. None: 6
13. Reddit: 3

Blog, LinkedIn, Newsletter, and Twitter/X were the big winners:

Super interesting!

My favorite category of fiction books is “Hard Science” where the story is obviously fake but the physics are real.

My current read I'm super into is “House of Suns.” 

I’m halfway through the book and gripped!

I'm open to more hard science suggestions if you have them.