Every Startup Investor Will be a Content Creator
Every Startup Investor Will be a Content Creator
Startup investing and content creation are converging
Hey Subscribers,
Trying something new this week. Instead of my deep-dive, I tease my weekly deep-dive, and also include three complete, smaller ideas. I would love to hear your feedback on the change.
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Weekly Deep-Dive
Every Startup Investor Will be a Content Creator
Startup investing and content creation are converging
A few weeks ago, I wrote Packy McCormick’s story. He rose from 0 to 80K subscribers and buzzy venture capitalist (VC) with an $8M fund in less than two years. In today’s piece, I want to talk about how Packy’s story is not an isolated one.
Across the business content creation ecosystem, an increasing number of participants are getting into the startup investing game. Similarly, across the venture capital ecosystem, an increasing number of participants are getting into the content creation game. I call this the convergence of startup investing and content creation.
My prediction: In a few decades, every startup investor will be a content creator.
Head to the blog for the full story:
History of content creation & startup investing
Why content creation provides an edge to investors now
Why the future will see increased convergence
Next Time
We will dive into part 3 of the series. All tech careers are headed the same way as VC. They will converge with content creation.
Complete Short Idea: 1
How to Turbo Boost Your Product
The race car growth framework:
⚙️ The (Growth) Engine
💥 Turbo Boosts: One-off events
💧 Lubricants: Optimizations
⛽ Fuel: Input
How can you turbo boost your product? Lenny Rachitsky and Ali Abouleatta wrote a beautiful piece, which I will summarize here. There are seven common types of Turbo Boosts.
1: Viral video: Startups like GoldieBlox, Monet, Dropbox, Poo-Pourri, Man Crates, mmhmm, and Dollar Shave Club released viral videos that helped turbo boost growth. Surprise, mystery, controversy, being personal, being different, and leaving an impression are the recipe ingredients.
2: Mini-product, aka "drop": Non-core product offerings that generate attention work. Calm's do nothing for 2 minutes web page generated over 2 million unique visits and facilitate 100,000+ email captures in 10 days. The challenge? Don't move your cursor for two full minutes.
3: Limited time offer: Give your customers free money temporarily to generate mad impression volume and engagement. Coinbase gave away $1.2M in free Doge on Twitter. Cash App dropped a 99% off anywhere boost, up to $50 for the next 20 minutes.
4: Influencers: Influencers can help you punch your marketing budget and product usage up to another level temporarily. Teen Banking app StepMobile was the #1 followed TikToker's (Charli D'Amelio) FIRST startup investment - this generated huge amounts of press.
5: Co-marketing: Partner with an adjacent business. EG MicroAcquire, a marketplace to sell and buy businesses, partnered with Pipe to help buyers fund acquisitions through future recurring revenues.
6: Offline experience: The real world creates hype and FOMO. For instance, over 2,500 people attended Hinge’s (re)launch party. The following day, the company made more matches than it did throughout its entire history.
7: Picking a fight: Fights can generate positive press. How have you heard most about my former employer Epic Games? Is it their Epic shooter with over 400M players, Fortnite, or is it their battle with Apple?
Complete Short Idea: 2
Roblox Surpasses Minecraft on Google Trends
Roblox is one of the rare game businesses that just keeps on growing. It just surpassed Minecraft in worldwide Google Search Trends. Years ago, Minecraft had a big lead on Roblox. But, Roblox has not stopped closing the gap. The company has consistently invested in product features.
The core products on the creator and consumer sides both keep getting better.
The Roblox Studio continues to close the gap with higher end game engines. Recent product growth feature releases include:
Script Version History
Universe Level Asset Manager
Context-Aware Autocomplete
Player discoverability & expression also keep getting better. Recent growth features on the consumer side include:
Automatic Translation for Games
Experimenting with Voice Chat
Leaderboard added to Mobile
Display Names
Reorganized Friends List to Recency vs Alphabetical
Plus, additional metaverse experiences like concerts (like Twenty One Pilots) are continuously being layered on. They recently released listening parties.
The team is a great example of ship, ship, ship to grow through product continuously. It’s no wonder they surpassed Minecraft.
Read more: Roblox is the Shopify of gaming
Complete Short Idea: 3
Build a Second Brain
As David Perell said, the goal of building a second brain is to "Optimize a system outside of yourself so you can remain unoptimized." Here are my top 7 learnings from a private session with Build a Second Brain Founder Tiago Forte:
1. The 1000 step, not 30 step, journey: You are closer to the starting line than you think. Writing is a longevity game: only see 20-30 steps of your idols, but they had 100s or 1000s.
2. People are too strategic too early: Stop switching & try to optimize a strategy. In early days, it's just volume. Looking for 400-500 shots on goal writing online, not 40-50. Every iteration is a shot on goal.
3. Treat everything as a small project: Writing a book feels like years of your life. But project managing - the quintessential life skill - into small projects, like 20-30 becomes a manageable chunk. Tiago has used this technique to complete his manuscript.
4. Test like a building engineer: That's how much your ideas should be tested when you write about them, as much as a building with people living in it would be. It starts from conversation → then to a tweet → then to a newsletter → then to an essay.
5. Embrace the rant! Rants can drive you to write some of your best and most resonant ideas. Hatred to tags led to an Evernote guide which eventually led to Tiago eventually building his course which is now his main gig! The piece is amazing.
6. CODE skills:
C - capture - people good at collection
O - organize - putting things into order
D - distill - find the essence & throw away the rest
E - express - looking to share
Strengthen where you are weak. Focus there. Tiago's course is organized that way.
7. Create intermediate packets: Every time you have 1-2 hours to sit down & work, create something you can share. Maybe a tweet, or a short essay. Use everything.
👋🏾 That’s all for this week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding to a friend, so they too can subscribe: