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- Thinking Small, Efficient Money and Micro Influencers
The Weekly Variable
It’s been a week of refocusing, but I still found some time carefully consume some content. Plenty to talk about with a nice, reflective undertone.
Here’s a preview:
divs.direction
I really like the divs brand.
It’s not going anywhere.
I’m just re-prioritizing how I want to approach things at this point, which I’ve talked about in the last few newsletters.
Lately, building a “lifestyle business” is feeling more important to me than anything else.
I value my time very highly, and as I try different business ideas, it becomes even more clear to me how I want to operate things.
I think some of the friction I’ve had with the divs businesses so far is that I’d rather work on my own schedule.
Agency based work will not lend itself to a lifestyle business.
Neither would the consulting life.
It’s a bit of a gamble, but at this point, I’m leaning more and more toward going all in on the software building approach.
I started the software route in the past and talked myself out of because I was consuming too much content trying to persuade me otherwise.
But as I limit my content sources, it becomes clearer where I want to take all the divs and jaypeters.dev brands.
There’s plenty of apps and ideas that I want build that I would find valuable, meaning there’s a good chance others would find value in them too.
And dollars follow value, so I’ll work on building those for now and let the money find me instead.
Also, I snuck that link in to a podcast with Ali Abdaal and Daniel Priestley where Daniel explains the difference between a lifestyle business and a performance business. The full podcast is below:
Thinking Small
I’ve heard Codie Sanchez mention this story a few times now, but I think about it a lot.
She was chatting with her friend Bill Perkins, a billionaire hedge fund manager, and he countered her ideas by asking if “small had infected her thinking.”
He suggested she should be thinking bigger.
I may have fallen into that trap as well.
I’ve been watching too many influencers on YouTube talk about the easy wins and the latest trend jacking opportunities.
But so many of those trends fall into the “uninformed optimism” category of looking way too easy to make money, because they are.
There’s a hidden learning curve that makes the process way more difficult than it might have looked from the outside.
There will always be problems with whatever you end up doing, so really you could look at it as picking your problems.
That’s what changed my perspective on the agency model.
Obviously it’ll have problems, it won’t be easy, but it will have a lot of problems that I don’t find exciting.
I do love complicated, overly complex problems. Enterprise software is full of obnoxious problems and those are the kinds of things I think about in the shower so those problems seem like the right kinds of problems to get involved with rather than figuring out all the problems with hacking together multiple social media accounts that somehow sell affiliate products for $30,000 per month.
Time to think about bigger problems than capitalizing on TikTok brain to pay the bills.
It helped Codie, it’s helping me, maybe it’ll help you too:
The Most Efficient Money
Simple math is what led me down the business path and Alex Hormozi re-reminded why in this business valuation video.
I’m not particularly driven by money, but I do see money as a way to buy time, so I see money as necessary.
Since I like my time, I like efficiency and the idea of finding the most efficient ways to make money.
One of the most efficient ways to make money is the stock market, but the stock market primarily works in percentages.
You need $100 to make $4 per year on average. So if you don’t have a lot of money, the stock market is going to take a long time to produce usable amounts of money and continue to do so after you spend some of it.
Businesses on the other hand, can work in multiples, not percentages.
Businesses are one of the only other ways to take $1 and turn it into $5, $10 or more.
Because of this, the business itself can be sold, producing higher multiples. The details of determining these multiples are really fascinating as I entertain the idea of acquire.com being a core strategy for financial freedom.
I’m not quite there yet, so for now, it’s a great primer on how businesses are able to 2x, 5x, 15x, or 100x if done properly and something to keep in mind during the early business stages.
One nice 50x would be more than enough to unlock the efficient stock market strategy, and not have to worry about money ever again.
Alex’s business valuation explanation here:
Daily Coding
I’m still trying to maintain the Deep 30 habit even if I’m not participating.
I’ve finally gotten back into the habit of daily coding, which I didn’t realize how far I had strayed from it, and how enjoyable it is to be getting more familiar with a new language.
It’s easy to think about code and how to program things, but it’s completely different to actually do the work - the very problem I bring up constantly. Saying and doing are 2 different things. Action over words.
Also, I’ve been heavily inspired recently by Paul Grahams’ essay on How to Do Great Work.
He talks about following your natural interests and that doing great work can feel more like an exploration or a discovery than it would be like work so that’s more of the approach I’ve been taking.
Optimizing for interest rather than income.
It’s risky in the short term but has the potential to pay off in the long run.
Right now I’m accomplishing this discovery process through daily coding.
Programming is a valuable skill in its own right and a nice backup option if I get desperate, but I don’t plan to continue to make it a career focus. A long time ago, I realized I am not the strongest or fastest coder, but I think it’s necessary to stay sharp and keep practicing even if I ultimately don’t have a daily coding role. It’s much easier to think it terms of problems if you’re still working directly on the problems.
I’ve seen this issue way too often where leadership has lost touch with how things actually work.
The goal is to not have too much of a goal. I’ll keep coding and see what I discover. Soon enough I’m sure I’ll have a discovery that will lead to an opportunity or two.
I’ll share my repos soon enough so you can follow along if you like, but in the meantime, I’ve got some Go to brush up on.
Micro Influencers
I did good this week. I almost got distracted with this podcast, but I stopped myself and continued coding instead.
But I did catch the beginning and I liked the idea.
Brett Malinowski is quite good at finding these young, trend-jacking entrepreneurs, making crazy amounts of money in very short periods of time, and I tend to fall for the title or thumbnail each time.
For example: The 23-year-old That Made $2.4M with His FIRST App
That’s a good title and I had to find out more.
What Blake Anderson, the app creator actually did was capitalize on a growing trend of using smaller or micro influencers to market his app.
And he used ChatGPT to code his app so big props to him for making that work.
The app just uses ChatGPT to come up with good responses on dating apps, so I could understand how there’s a huge market of dating app users that want to be successful, but getting those users to know about this helpful tool is the trickier problem.
The idea of being a social media influencer is stronger than ever - how can you go wrong with posting videos of yourself and making money?
But since it’s so easy to get into, there’s an abundance of early stage influencers trying to make it on their own, and most of them are looking for any kind of opportunity to make money.
Blake realized this, and offered $50 to a few of these small accounts to mention his dating app helper. Some of these accounts only have a few 1000 followers so they aren’t huge, but their followers are the exact users Blake was looking for because these influencers were talking about how they’ve had success connecting on dating apps.
Blake said with those 2 $50 promos, they made $80,000 and had 200,000 downloads in a week. The power of effective marketing.
With numbers like that, the micro influencer strategy is something I’ll keep in mind once I’m back in marketing mode, depending on if it fits with the product I end up selling.
For now I’m trying to stay focused. As mentioned, I didn’t end up watching the full podcast yet, but I plan to get through it this weekend. Feel free to check out the full conversation for yourself below:
And that’s it for this week! Branding, thinking bigger, efficient money, great work, daily coding, and efficient marketing.
Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.
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