- Episode AI notes
- During times of disruption, innovative ideas and business models can emerge as new needs are identified and met.
- Necessity and resiliency often drive people to start their own businesses during difficult times.
- Defining success based on individual needs and goals is crucial, rather than conforming to traditional business models.
- Productivity should be seen as energy management, prioritizing activities that preserve and grow one’s energy.
- Focus on maximizing the things within your control, such as your own story and audience connection.
- Allocate time for side projects and experimentation to explore new opportunities.
- Building a successful newsletter requires defining the audience and value.
- Create a concise and engaging newsletter that provides valuable content in a manageable format.
- Consistently produce content by centering each issue around one key idea.
Keep evolving and exploring new directions to meet the needs of your audience. Time 0:00:00
Opportunity in Disruption: Meeting New Needs Summary: During times of disruption, it is crucial to remember that everyone is being affected, creating new needs that may not be met by established incumbents. This presents an opportunity to identify how to be useful to others and has historically led to the emergence of innovative ideas and business models. Moments of major disruption have given rise to new solutions, as seen in the case of Airbnb, which originated during an economic downturn. These adverse moments often drive necessity and exploration of new solutions, leading to the birth of innovative businesses and models.
Speaker 1
You know, and I just want to double click on what you just said there about how this can be a really important time and a big opportunity for people. Something that everyone should keep in mind in a moment of disruption is that you are not the only one being disrupted. Everyone else is too, which means that people have new needs and those new needs are not going to necessarily be met by old incumbents, which means that now is actually a great opportunity To look around and say, how can I be useful to other people? And that’s the reason why you see in moments of major disruption really interesting new ideas come to the fore that may not have really been able to ever get a foothold in earlier times. Classic example, of course, is Airbnb, which came out of the O809 pandemic, which came out of the O809 recession. And the idea of letting somebody stay in your home, the idea of renting out a room in your home would have just been way too crazy to people until the economy was such that people were scared Into trying new things and exploring new solutions and amazing new business and model was born.
Speaker 3
That can happen in large and small ways right now. And I think it speaks to some of perhaps the underlying motivations in these harder, more adverse moments, one being just necessity.Necessity and Resiliency Drive Entrepreneurship Summary: Hard times can trigger the necessity to take control of a situation and the resiliency needed to overcome challenges, leading people to start their own businesses as a means of replacing lost income and operating on their own terms. This contrasts with traditional definitions of success in the entrepreneurial landscape and publications.
Speaker 3
That can happen in large and small ways right now. And I think it speaks to some of perhaps the underlying motivations in these harder, more adverse moments, one being just necessity. There’s this, my gosh, again, had a part of your story, I believe, right? It’s like I need to now positively kind of try to take control of the situation that maybe I feel like I’ve lost control of. I’ve lost my job or I feel like I might lose my job and there’s increasing uncertainty. So there’s a necessity driver. And then also like a resiliency driver. Like I need to somehow get myself through this moment, my family through this moment. So maybe I should start building something on my own as a solo printer in just bootstrap something. It doesn’t have to be raising venture capital or kind of going that route. It can just be and we’re certainly seeing and hearing this consistently and increasingly just on the SPI side is we want to form or sort of the average person and member coming into our Communities like I want to create a calm business for myself. But I want to raise money. Like I just want to create something that replaces my income, can operate on my own terms. I can grow it comfortably. And those are their definitions of success. So I’m curious Jason, like again, in terms of the readership across the entrepreneur, publications and landscape, how do those themes kind of compare or even contrast?
Speaker 1
Oh, well, first of all, I love that you were talking about personal definition of success.Define Success on Your Own Terms Summary: The insight emphasizes the importance of defining success based on individual needs and goals, rather than following traditional business models. It encourages considering what success means personally before making decisions. The focus is on pursuing financial independence on one’s own terms and finding a balance between work, life, and creativity, rather than adhering to external expectations of success.
Speaker 2
It was $150,000 she needed a year, which is a completely different business model. She could just have 20 to 25 clients paying her a certain number per month to get to that level versus building the next Uber or whatever. It completely changed the direction of what decisions she was going to make from that point forward. So I really appreciate this conversation about just before you even jump in, you have to jump inside of yourself and understand, well, what is success mean to you? So hopefully all of you listening can take that and run with it before you start, you know, just diving headfirst into this.
Speaker 3
And we try, I’d say with great deliberateness on SPI to, you know, describe her suits in terms of, you know, our audiences own terms of success, you know, pursue financial independence On your terms or find success as a creator on your terms and not attempt, again, with deliberateness to forecast or portray, you know, what success should be necessarily for them. There’s certainly a common denominator, again, finding a full-time income that can support yourself and your family, but there’s no hard number there. And we also, we’ve been, you know, talking about just work-life balance and energy levels and, you know, how can we still maintain joy, you know, the fun side of working for yourself And not lose sight of that as well as the part of the creative process. You know, these things are important as, I’d say, like, inputs.Reframe productivity as energy management Summary: Productivity should be reframed as energy management, where activities that preserve and grow your energy are productive. This includes prioritizing sleep, spending time with friends, and taking breaks. The focus should not only be on maximizing time but also on preserving energy for future tasks. Building something without the ability to maintain it is counterproductive.
Speaker 1
I have to share a conversation that I had recently, which just builds really nicely off of what both of you actually just said, which was that I was talking to a psychotherapist named Catherine Morgan Schaffler. She just wrote a book called The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control. And she has a chapter in the book about how we should reframe productivity because the mistake we make is that we think of productivity as how many tasks did we accomplish? What did we do with our time? We need management. But what we really need to do, she says, is we need to, and she credits to Tony Schwartz and some others in work. She didn’t come up with this herself, but she’s really processed it and sharing it in this way, which I found really powerful, is to talk about how productivity really should also be About energy management and that things that preserve and grow your energy should be thought of as productive. Sleep is productive. Anytime with friends is productive, taking a break is productive because, of course, if you just burn yourself out on trying to maximize time, you won’t have the energy to do more with Future time. And so I, when she said that to me, I said, oh, this is really interesting and powerful, but what would you say to somebody who’s listening and says, okay, that’s great in all. And I understand the point of energy management and thinking of different things as productive. But also I started my own business and there are 16 hours worth of things to do. And I only have 12 hours to do them. What am I supposed to do to which Catherine said, what’s the point of building something if you can’t maintain it? And that to me was the gut punch. And I’ve thoughtMaximizing What’s in Your Control Summary: The key insight is to focus on maximizing the things that are within your control, such as your own story and the way you relate to your audience, rather than worrying about things you cannot control, like others’ actions or opinions.
Speaker 1
And I think that he largely attributes this to his willingness to constantly reinvent, to work on the parts of himself that he wasn’t in touch with. And he Lewis has a very dramatic personal story. There were lots of a lot of therapy and things that he had to work on with himself. But I’ll tell you the part of our conversation that stuck with me the most was him talking about how he recognized that there are a lot of people in this space. And you cannot control what other people do. You cannot control what other people say. You can’t control how much like the things that you were doing are going to be kind of like somebody else. But what you can do is identify the things that are in your control and then maximize those. And for him, the thing that was most in control was his own story and the way that he related to his audience. And so he decided to build upon that and understand his story and understand how to tell his story and how to refine his story and connect and connect and connect with people and not worry Nearly as much about the things that he couldn’t control. And when he said that, I just started thinking back about all the things that I have grappled with myself. You know, I had a book that came out in September that I was on your show to talk about.Balancing Time for Side Projects Summary: The speaker allocates 80% of their time to committed team-related tasks and 20% to experimentation. Their past experimentation with a physical product called the SwitchPod was successful and mostly automated. In recent years, they started a YouTube channel about Pokemon, which has grown significantly in subscribers and views, generating revenue and involving a small agile team. They are also organizing an event for the Pokemon community and creators to connect with fans and each other. They connect this side project to the core principles of building community and creating a specific language to engage with a dedicated fanbase.
Speaker 2
And then maybe the other thing on the side that I am very much open about that a lot of people on SPI, especially those who come to my office hours talk about because I always give people Updates is my sort of side project. I like to spend 80% of my time doing things that I’ve already committed to said yes to team related things as PI. 20% of my time is like experimentation. In 2017 to 2019, that experiment was a physical product called the SwitchPod with my videographer Caleb. And that did very well. And that’s still running. And it’s mostly automated at this point being fulfilled by 3PL, et cetera. But starting in 2020, 2021, I started a YouTube channel about this little thing called Pokemon, which many people knows. A game, cartoon, trading card game. Well, this channel has kind of gone bonkers. It’s now approaching 600,000 subscribers, 130 million views. It’s generating revenue now. And it’s a small agile team. And more than that, I’m going to like Japan this summer to go to the world championships and stuff, which is really neat. But it is super fun. But what’s really interesting is I tie it back into SPI and especially super fans of the book I wrote, it’s like building, it’s all about building community. And how do I create a specific language there? And how do we, you know, lean into who these people are? How do we build for them? And one thing I am building is an event. In June this year, I’m hosting an event for the Pokemon community and the creators there to meet the fans and the fans and to meet each other and the creators to meet each other.1min Snip Summary: The narrator struggled to grow their newsletter beyond 20,000 subscribers. In a conversation with Lenny, a successful newsletter writer, they learned the importance of defining the audience and value of the newsletter. Realizing their own communication mistake, the narrator decided to rebrand the newsletter with a clear purpose.
Speaker 1
And so I got it to about 20,000 subscribers, but it really, I just couldn’t get it past that. I had hit an absolute ceiling. And then about a month and a half ago, I was having a conversation with Lenny, whose last time I always forget how to pronounce, of Lenny’s newsletter. Do you know how to pronounce his last name? I don’t. Yeah, so Lenny, he writes this newsletter for product people and it’s got north of 325,000 subscribers and he does very well with it. And we were talking about how to build a successful newsletter. And he said, and you guys know this well, because your master’s at it, that you really need to define your audience and the value and make it, it doesn’t have to be a kind of ultra niche product, But it has to have a very, very specific audience so that there are people out there who say, ah, this is for me. And it doesn’t take a lot of work to get them there because they just see it and understand it. As he was saying this, I was thinking, this is the mistake I’ve made all along. I have never really been able to communicate that. And in fact, because I haven’t been able to communicate that to others, I haven’t even figured out how to communicate it to myself. And so I said to myself, I am going to rebrand this newsletter one more time and it’s going to have a specific purpose and it’s going to be very clear what it is.1min Snip Summary: A concise and engaging newsletter called One Thing Better was created to provide weekly tips for improving work and building a fulfilling career or company. Rather than catering to a specific audience, the focus is on delivering valuable content in a manageable format. This approach makes it easier to consistently produce the newsletter, with each issue centered around one key idea. The latest edition explores the concept of disagreeing and committing, which was inspired by a conversation with Matt and the problem solvers series. The newsletter has been well-received since its recent shift in direction.
Speaker 1
And what I came up with was a newsletter called One Thing Better. And it would be each week, one way, this is the line I came up with, one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love. And now, yes, that’s still very broad in that it’s not just for product people or for some very kind of specific audience, but I’m thinking, you know, I already reach a fairly broad audience. So what if I just narrowed in on the value prop instead? And then also built in some expectations that I think people have of newsletters, which is that, oh, I get too many of them. They go on too long. So I wanted One Thing Better to be like, look, I’m not going to hit you with a million things. It’s going to be very, very manageable. It’s one thing. And then also that gave me a way to think about the content. It made it easier to produce this newsletter because now I knew what I was looking for every week instead of some random essay that I would have to write. You guys, I mean, Matt, I texted it to you. You guys have been in it already because the conversation that we had for problem solvers, which then I put in Entrepreneur Magazine, I then had further thoughts on and put into One Thing Better, which was about how agree to disagree is the wrong way to think. And the one thing better would be disagree and commit, which is something that’s you guys taught me and is I know foundational to to your relationship. And we can expand upon that. But anyway, it’s been very interesting. It’s only been a few weeks since I made that shift.
