Notes and Takeaways on Why You Should Become Internet Famous
Source: perell.com
When I watched it: August 2020
Why I watched it: I recently sought Tyler Tringas’s advice on how to build an initial audience for my new venture, LegUp Health. Tyler is the Founder of Earnest Capital, a new type of investment firm focused on providing capital to entrepreneurs who do not want to raise traditional venture capital. Earnest Capital has an enthusiastic following. I’d like to create something similar at LegUp Health over the next few years. Tyler’s primary advice was to focus on being “generally helpful” on the internet. He recommended this video podcast interview between David Perell and Patrick McKenzie on why you should become internet famous. It’s an interesting talk and well worth the 1.5 hour watch. Here are my notes and takeaways.
Go to the youtube listing for details and to watch or scroll down for my notes.
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My notes and takeaways
About David Perrell
David Perell is a writer, teacher, and podcaster. He believes writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. David’s online course, Write of Passage, has been taken by more than 500 students from more than 40 countries and from companies like Intel, Google, and Twitter. His podcast guests include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, author Seth Godin, and economist Tyler Cowen. David is internet famous.
About Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie is a writer and entrepreneur. He’s written extensively (2.9 million words and counting) since 2006. A good essay gets 100K to 200K readers per year. He’s also spent about 10 years running small software companies like Appointment Reminder and Starfighter. He currently works at Stripe and he’s well known around the internet as Patio11. He’s internet famous. David describes Patrick as “the Michael Jordan of online writing.
Why you should become internet famous
Net net, everything gets easier with your startup when you are personally internet famous in your target market.
World of Warcraft as a leadership training
Patrick ran a World of Warcraft “raid guild” pre-2006 ⇒ it let him run a 40-person multinational organization. This was where he learned how to lead.
Writing online
Writing online takes you from “being illegible to legible”
Writing is valued by high-status employers.
But blogging has a bad brand in high-status employers ⇒ better to brand as a memo, essay, or articles ⇒ also don’t put a date or use the word blog.
Early learnings about writing online
You need to write to avoid decay of the skill ⇒ Patrick started blogging for this reason. At first, he wrote about whatever he wanted.
After a couple of years, Patrick realized it was better to get more focused on “the overlap between marketing and engineers” ⇒ this led to more focused writing and a meaningful personal brand development which eventually turned into a flywheel.
Questions to ask to find your niche:
What is working?
What are the opportunities that hit both my interests and help my target readers
How to solve the chicken and egg problem of online writing
First, you need to start writing. Start writing before you have an audience because you will build the skill and you build assets online. Worst case, these assets can be used for resume add-ons.
That being said, there still is a challenge when you’re starting cold. Find where your crowd hangs out ⇒ e.g. social media, forums, communities, groups, etc. ⇒ participate there and inject your stuff thoughtfully.
With social media, introduce your stuff into your replies to other people’s stuff. You have to do this without being annoying… i.e. it has to be additive. Also, you can DM (direct message) people who want you to promote good stuff.
Use this script or something similar for reachout: “I have an interesting take on this… here’s some of this… [ask]”.
Balancing writing on your website with third party websites
My takeaway: A way to think about this is a water cooler chat vs a deep deliverable. You want the deep deliverable stuff on your website and the water cool chat on third party sites with links back to your website. E.g. If a tweet storm turns into 15-plus minutes of interaction, it’s a good sign that the tweet storm could form the basis for an article or other deeper form of content on your website.
How long should your writing pieces be - long or short?
This depends on the person who you are writing for ⇒ core audience.
Understand who the audience is, what your goals are, and what the incentive structures are for those goals.
As soon as you put metrics on the dashboard, it can affect your thinking. Google analytics makes some metrics easy to measure, but the metrics you want to measure are not easily measured: That is, the impact of your writing on the reader.
People underestimate the value of writing ⇒ writing can help you get where you want to go. It helps you get better as a person, it helps you improve your knowledge and skills, and it helps expose you to people who can help you.
Patrick’s process for writing
He’s all over the place ⇒ shower thoughts (angles, anecdotes) at first until he has the rough outline in his head… and then he sits down and writes from top to bottom. Then he rereads to finalize structure. Then he rereads and edits for style and typos. Then he publishes.
For motivation, he relies on conversations with interesting people or reading interesting things for writing inspiration. More input (reading and conversing) = more output (writing).
How to grow your following
Start with Email ⇒ it’s something you own and no one can take away from you. Folks who raise their hand for what you’re delivering are going to read your stuff more consistently and over a longer period of time. It allows you to control the cadence, the brand positioning, and who gets your thing and in what way. It’s also shareable by your audience ⇒ they can forward it.
What makes an idea worth publishing
What is the use value? Will the audience be able to use this and put it to work?
What is your explanation value? Will you be able to explain this in a way that is understood by the audience? E.g. Taking ideas that are well known in one audience and sharing them with a different audience who would benefit from that idea (e.g. Patrick brings marketing ideas to engineers). E.g. Marketing for salespeople.
What is the biggest obvious marketing secret that best people miss?
A lack of appreciation of craft ⇒ Caring about quality is underrated. Often deadlines and checking the box trump quality.
How do you maintain an appreciation for craft?
This is ultimately a culture question. But when people say it’s a cultural question, it means they don’t have a structural explanation.
So how do you create a culture of caring more about quality? 1) Say it and model it. 2) Incentivize quality over deadlines. 3) Be willing to back people and listen to them when they make quality calls or offer quality feedback.
Building a culture of writing at your company
Writing can be the “democracy of the dead” ⇒ it can allow new people to come in, get caught up to speed and add to the knowledge base.
How do you turn your writing effort into a software-as-a-service company?
Write the book before writing the software ⇒ ebook, blog, etc. ⇒ if you do this upfront, it’s easier to get going when you start the business and build the software:
You get to start the clock on google domain authority, social amplification, social media, newsletter subscribers, and they compound over time typically,
More opportunities to go through the learning loops with customer interviews and market research before building software ⇒ which can lead to people ready to buy on the first day,
You’ll make better decisions about the software once you are an expert and have thought about all the angles deeply via your writing, and
You can turn your ebooks into cash flow - people will pay for your research and work.
Net net, become the expert, then encode that into a business / service / software.
Niche businesses built on content
There are tens of thousands of successful software companies who no one will know about ever except their employees, customers, and competitors. Examples: ConvertKit (email marketing for creators) and Moraware (software for countertop fabricators).
Best things about Japanese culture
Disclaimer: The homogeneity of the Japanese culture is overstated (just like there is no one American culture).
One thing that exists in Japan is: a level of earnestness (severe and intense conviction) and optimism about one’s work ⇒ “devoting one’s career to being the best at [fill in the blank]”
Loving what you do makes you get more out of what you do and be happier. This is a choice ⇒ choose to love what you do.
Life’s too short ⇒ If you don’t love what you do, either find ways to start loving what you do or change what you do until you love it.Make obvious improvements as soon as you can and try to become more ambitious and optimistic.
Luck
The amount of your luck is equal to how much value you create multiplied by how many people you tell about it. You have to balance both ends of this ⇒ Being overly modest can get in the way of your luck.