Adam’s Daily Post

“Post 64 times a day”…

“Inbound is better than outbound”…

These ‘takes’ are missing the point.

Here’s the point:

• You don’t pick friends based on ‘who went first’
• You don’t connect the loudmouth or the mute
• Everyone’s best friend was once a stranger
• So many would-be-great-friends still are

So whether you do inbound or outbound,
Whether you post every day or not at all,
Remember what two wise men said:

“Be excellent to each other.”

After gardening all day…

And now I write this while everything aches (ha!)…

Some product design observations hit me while riding around cutting the lawn:

• Everything takes longer than you think it will
• Rushing can make the lawn shorter, but not nicer
• Everyone has a short lawn, not everyone has a nice lawn
• The difference between ‘short’ and ‘nice’ is patience and care
• You can’t do everything in one go, but you can make progress
• Ship progress, and enjoy how it looks out the window
• Ship progress on top of progress on top of progress
• Eventually, you’ve shipped ‘nice’

Yesterday’s newsletter issue generated a lot of positive responses.

That’s great!

One concern I hear when people are challenged to be great is this:

But that takes a long time. Everyone is moving so fast, I don’t have time.

I think that’s sad.

If you don’t ‘have time’ to be great, you certainly won’t have time to be mediocre. After all, mediocrity is a crowded space, and diffcult to win in for long.

Great work, on the other hand, does take a long time… but the competition is almost non-existent.

That affords you all the time you need.

This week’s issue of The Productoon newsletter dug into how we don’t need to be limited by social media platforms and their algorithms.

But to be free, we need to be great. Here’s an excerpt:

Make things so good they’ll
randomly check elsewhere for you.

Ever flick over to your favourite store or channels?
Just to see if there’s something new or interesting?
Most of us do.

Great experiences live rent-free in our minds.
Optimise for it.

Make things so good that
media covers you cross-platform anyway.

The media covers interesting and noteworthy things.
So make interesting and noteworthy things.

Then tell them about it.

Leverage smaller-by-design channels.

Email newsletters. Discord servers.
These work because you’re the moderator.
Not an algorithm trying to sift through billions of posts an hour.

Now you’re the one responsible for your people seeing the best stuff.
And you’re far better equipped to do that than Meta is.

Okay okay… so it’s clear: we have to make really great things.

What does “really great things” mean?

Here’s the formula for that in this context:

Give more than you ask + Make it enjoyable.

The more you give than you ask, and the more you make it enjoyable, the greater your results should be. Do that and extend your time horizon, and you’re golden.

Don’t entrust the health and wellbeing of your creations, projects, or business ventures with platforms and gatekeepers that don’t give a hoot about you.

The safest, smartest, and most fun thing you can do is to be bigger than the platforms.

To read the full issue, go to TheProductoon.com and subscribe!

3 ingredients of great content.
Which are you missing?

A) Know your audience’s tastes
B) Have great ideas for those tastes
C) Implement them

Not easy…

But at least it’s simple!

So no more researching.

Execute your ABCs + partner with those who can help.

What great videos & driving a car have in common:

You need these 3 things for both to work:

1. Eyes. See what’s ahead, develop good taste

2. Brain.
Process opportunities based on what you see

3. Car.
Systems & teams used to act upon opportunities

No eyes? You fly blind. Who knows what’ll work.
No brain? You just copy others. No advantage.
No car? You can’t strike while the iron’s hot.

Get all 3 and enjoy the ride.

Can you advertise without Meta?

Yes… If you do it right:

You’ll struggle if:

• You’re chasing eyeballs
• Your content isn’t missable
• We won’t de-platform to see you
• You don’t induce enthusiastic shares

You’ll thrive if:

• Your work is worthy of interest - We’d miss you if you were gone
• We’ll de-platform specifically for you
• Sharing your work makes us look good

You can’t trust Meta (or any ‘platform’).
They are not your friends.

Your best lifeline is to make things people share, seek out, look forward to, and would miss if you stopped.

Some say it’s the best ad ever made.
Why?

No one was offended.
No one was alienated.
No one was pushed away.
No one connected with it.
No one clicked or purchased.

But at least no one was excluded!
…Right?

Wrong. Everyone was excluded:

• You didn’t help anyone.
• They’re still suffering/stuck.
• They needed you. You weren’t there.

Don’t play it safe.
You owe it to them to push the wrong ones away so the right ones can find you.

It feels like a weekly occurence at this point.

Each week, I see behind the scenes of a ‘super-successful’ business that’s silently suffering.

Or I wonder where they went, seemingly on top of the world, but quietly liquidating.

Or I get a message asking to solve the very problem they outwardly proclaim to be a master of.

It’s everywhere, all of the time.

Nothing is as it seems.

Don’t believe what you read.

Commit to your craft and elevate your space.

You’re rarer than you realise.

AI generated images impress at first sight.

When DALL-E and Midjourney revealed a year ago, the world gasped.

“This will change everything!”

And it did… if you were a stock photographer, relying on mass orders of average images.

To the rest of us, it hasn’t really changed much.

“Impressed at first sight” doesn’t always translate into a substantial long-term relationship with a brand or technology.

Even ones that are supposed to ‘change the world’.

And so it is with our brands:

Why dazzle when you can illuminate.