What’s good young and eager mind?!
Apologies for the radio silence.
I’ve been working on a new project so the newsletter moved to the back burner. I hope you’ve been doing well? Reply and let me know what you’ve been up to, I’d love to hear it. Btw, have you seen the new Dune? Or the three body problem? Good lord… how sick were they?
I’ve said this before but a daily writing practice (at least for me) is easier than an intermittent one.
There’ve been several times when I had an interesting essay in my mind but felt like it might not reach the threshold for posting so ultimately I didn’t.
The quality/quantity debate is one that hasn’t been settled because there’s no literature (or controlled experiments) and the ones that do exist may not generalize.
So for now, all we have is our opinions.
The benefits of writing daily (quantity) is that it might lead to quality and you’re often not the best judge of what is or isn’t useful to your audience.
The benefits of writing when you really have something to say is that you can truly focus on maximizing certain levers. The Mr. Beast approach of content if you will.
Anyway, let me quickly update you on some of the things I’ve been working on and thinking about.
Designing systems
I’ve been trying to cut body fat.
As a Tricker, I’ve always been Tricking around 3-6 days a week and lifting around 5 days a week.
When I dislocated my knee (entire knee, not knee cap), had the surgery, was doing the rehab, emigrated to Belgium, had a kid, and had a company to run, my priorities changed.
And for the first time in my life, over that 2-year period, I became a chonky son of a gun.
I consider myself a disciplined person so my new body doesn’t reflect my values.
So I’ve been cutting body fat.
Growing in the wrong direction! Whoopsies.
There have been times when a thought creeps in like: “Man, why didn’t I ‘just’ do XYZ” or “I should’ve done [blank].”
While I’m a STRONG advocate of extreme ownership, ultimately there’s a finite amount of time and resources… when you got a lot of shit on your plate, something’s gotta give.
And considering the circumstances, I think I made the right choices.
For those of y’all with newborns, just accept that the next 1-2 years are gonna be somewhat out of your control and deal with the consequences later.
Anyway, what I’ve noticed is that I have a tendency to pick a system and then when I inevitably hit the first road bump, try to fix it with willpower and adherence instead of just iterating the system.
That’s like running a marathon in workboots and when it gets hard, instead of changing your shoes, grinding through it.
Takeaway:
Design a system you think will effectively help you achieve your aspiration.
Try to become a slave of your system.
When it’s not working, don’t try to fix it with more adherence, instead fire the system and hire a new one.
Don’t bother figuring out the ‘why’ behind your failure to adhere. [1]
Instead, just iterate.
And the best way to do that is not to make a microscopic change to your existing system but rather to do something completely different.
Then once you’ve got something that kinda works, you can optimize.
But optimizing is a tool designed to take smth that works and improve it.
It’s not designed to get smth that isn’t working to work, which ironically is how most of us use it.
I think this is partly why the ‘12 startups in 12 months’ works so well.
It prevents solopreneurs from falling in love with their baby and spending a year on it even though no one wants it.
Alex Hormozi said he once got a bit of advice that deeply resonated with me:
You’re putting in 10/10 effort on a 2/10 opportunity.
I, and probably you as well, have been guilty of that on numerous occasions.
My new project: subscription-based marketing
Like I said in the beginning of this piece, I’ve been working on something.
A project called ‘periodt.’ which is essentially a productized service for marketing.
A productized service if you’ll remember, is a service that’s sold like a product.
This means the scope is fixed and not custom.
That’s a useful property because it means the more you do the same work, the more efficient you’ll become.
That drives down your cost.
But you’ll also get better which means you can charge more. So that price increase ups your profit! [2]
I’m targeting startups who’ve raised capital (so I know they can pay) and who might be hiring a CMO or have marketing work they need to outsource.
I’m trying to keep it ghetto as much as possible instead of '“playing business.”
I spent about a month on the site which is honestly too long but at least I learned a bunch of stuff which’ll drastically reduce the time needed for the next project.
There are still plenty of bugs in there (e.g. some responsiveness issues) but I love that cuz a site that’s 10/10 perfect means you fucked around for waaaay too long instead of actually validating demand.
The plan for the immediate future is to get this in front of my target market and see if I can close some sales over the course of a few weeks.
I’m reaching out to all my warm connections and I’m doing cold outreach as my main marketing channels.
If no one buys, an acceptable alternative would be doing a few customer discovery calls with prospects to get a better understanding of the fit between their needs and this service.
But I’m deliberately treating it like a pet project that I’ll kill if it isn’t a downhill project (boulder rolling downhill).
You can give periodt. a look here.
If you’re a solopreneur/bootstrapper who wants to offload some of their marketing work, hit me up! I got special rates for y’all.
And if you know of a startup who might benefit from this, I’ll give you $1K if they become a customer. I’d rather give you that money than the Google Gods.
That’s it for me.
Talk soon,
RJY
Notes
[1] This seems counterintuitive but think of it as the difference between an industrial engineer who’s building a bridge and just needs it to work vs. a solid-state physicist who studies the fundamental properties of materials, including their behavior under stress, strain, and various environmental conditions.
You just need your system to work. The nitty-gritty of why it works is secondary.
Even seemingly innocent questions like: “Why do I get cravings at night” are so much more complicated than they seem at first glance.
And since this is a marketing newsletter, I’m hoping you see the neon-yellow connection between this idea and business.
Btw, I think it’s smart to treat yourself like a scientist studying a mouse. When your experiment doesn’t work, you can’t ask the mouse any questions so you’re forced to design a new experiment. But when you’re the subject [mouse], your first inclination is to ask yourself a bunch of questions. In my experience, that vastly increases the likelihood you’ll stay stuck because your mind can come up with tons of rationalizations, especially if you’re clever.
Better to create a gap between you the scientist and you the subject [mouse].
[2] Don’t you mean revenue? Well, no! The special thing to realize here is that your costs are relatively fixed. That means that an increase in price is almost pure profit. The corollary of this is also important for you to remember: You can never discount costs, only profit. That’s why it can be dangerous when mom&pop stores start throwing around huge discounts in an effort to attract more customers.