Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

·      No material struggles last week

What I learned:

• Ben Thompson founded Stratechery, a “subscription-based blog, newsletter and podcast that provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media.” Stratechery’s subscription model is what inspired the creation of Substack (according to Ben, Substack said in its seed deck that it’s Stratechery in a box). His platform is wildly successful, with tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Many tech CEOs subscribe to his blog, and he has interviewed CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg (see here). The core of his business is written blog posts. These posts, or their content, are distributed in various ways (email, RSS, SMS, etc.) so subscribers can consume in the way that’s easiest for them. Ben teamed up with Automattic to create custom software that powers all this. The software is called Passport. It’s not available for purchase just yet, but they’re registering interest via their waitlist.
• According to Dan Martell, a personal brand can be thought of as a combination of reach and reputation. If lots of people know who you are and think positively of you, everything you want to do becomes easier. It can be a force multiplier of growth, especially with the distribution of entrepreneurs’ products and services. See here for Dan’s explanation of this concept in a segment of an interview he recently gave.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.