Archive of posts from October 2023

Redos are the kiss of death for creators.

You illustrate a chapter, realise your skills grew as you drew it, and now you want to draw it again.

You animate a scene, realise a way to improve the style, and now you want to animate it again.

You code a feature, realise a way of improving your semantics, and now you want to prune your old code right away.

This will prevent you from shipping anything.

We should look upon our past work with affection, not embarrassment.

It’s a part of our journey, like when we look at baby photos of our children.

We get to look at how far they’ve come.

And so it is with our craft.

I don’t enjoy writing.

I enjoy drawing pictures in peoples minds.

And sometimes that requires writing.

But not enjoying writing means I look for ways to draw those pictures in different ways.

Instead of writing business content, I make business cartoons.

Instead of writing long sales letters, I make gamified experiences.

Find what you enjoy,

Find what you don’t enjoy,

And watch what happens when those things collide.

When I need to think…

I don’t go to the iPhone in my pocket.

I don’t go to the Mac Studio on my desk.

I go to my pile of notebooks… pick one up… and start writing.

A notebook is still, in my opinion, the best thinking devices.

The battery doesn’t run flat.

It doesn’t demand my attention.

It forces me to write (and think) slower (because I type way faster than I write).

And it lets me doodle when I’m unsure, rather than ‘research’.

Doodling beats research.

Try a notebook.

When you’re planning a project, consider asking yourself:

What is the calmer, simpler alternative to this?

Sometimes, the answer might be to cut a superfluous feature, or to extend the deadline to as long as you know it should have been in the first place.

Sometimes, it means lower the headcount down to a number that requires less administrative overhead, so there are fewer moving parts.

Sometimes, it means not doing the project at all, because it’s not really helping move toward your goal.

Sometimes, it means being still, and letting things remain as they are, instead of forcing change.

Sometimes, it means you’ll do what you had planned. Though, in my experience, this is rare.

It’s worth asking the question, isn’t it?

Throw a rock.

And try to avoid hitting a Notion content template with it.

See? You can’t.

Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s making them.

Selling them, even.

And yet not everyone has a successful content or advertising campaign.

Something’s off, isn’t it?

Partially. Man cannot live on Notion templates alone.

But he can live on this:

1. Spend time with your target audience. Hang with them. Expose your worldview to theirs. The combination of market exposure and your brand philosophies will reveal problems, pains, and good taste.

2. Pitch ideas (not products) to them. Show them what you think would be awesome to create (a free video, page, resource, whatever). If they think it’s awesome too, that‘s good. If they think it isn’t, go again.

3. Make the awesome thing and publish it for them (and others like them) to enjoy.

I cover this in more detail in this week’s issue of The Productoon newsletter. Check it out!

I get creators asking me about how often they should post on social media.

I don’t like this question.

Artists do their best work when they create great work and put it out into the world.

Not when they’re on a factory conveyor belt.

If you’re no good, peppering people with more graphics won’t make people like it more.

If you’re good, they’ll eagerly await your next drop.

Create like an artist. Publish like an artist. Nurture your tribe. Make them proud.

If you’ve ever heard you need content templates for your social and ads and marketing campaigns…

You’re being sold car tyres as if they’re the full car.

And if you’ve ever been told you need a ghostwriter for your content…

You’re being sold a gas pedal and a foot that presses it.

All useful stuff, but incomplete.

You need eyes. And a brain.

…and a car.

Your eyes are exposure to the market, so you develop good taste for what they’re all about, and can see what’s coming in their world.

Your brain is your ability to create novel new ways of intercepting those opportunities in a world where everyone is just copying each other.

And your car is the systems and teams you mobilise against those opportunities.

Start with your eyes. Get to know your target market way better than you do now. You’ll be in a way better spot to generate great ideas than you will sitting in the dark with templates.

My heart taught me a lesson yesterday.

And I got rushed to the hospital sock-in-croc because of it.

Here’s what I learned:

Push too hard?
= Your body will push back.

Never slow down?
= Your body will pump the brakes.

Doing too many things at once?
= Your body will add another.

Not prioritising your health?
= Your body will prioritise it for you.

Here’s what we can all learn:
= Build cool stuff, but take it easy.

At the end of some of my videos, I say “Keep calm and create on”.

Perhaps this is a reminder for us all.

My son’s 10 months old.

He teaches me about business & life.

And he’s got a lesson for you:

We recently went to a ‘messy play’ day at a farm. (Apparently super-popular for babies!)

All the babies were playing in slime… Except one.

My boy wasn’t in the slightest bit interested.

He’d spotted something much better: A tractor.

We spent most of the session on that tractor. He was mesmerised. The steering wheel. The huge tires. He loved it.

Know what happened next?

Back home, his toy car became the Best Thing Ever™

Now he’s got more toy cars than any other kind of toy.

We thought he wanted to get messy…

But he found a love for things with wheels.

Now?

• I’m trying to be more curious too.
• To let curiosity lead me to new ideas.

Know what it caused?

• A SURGE of ideas, optimisations and theories.
• And they’re paying off already.
• Both in enjoyment and in dollars.

My son thinks we should let loose & be more curious.

I agree.

Sometimes it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

And in those times, we messed up.

Trying to do too much at once with insufficient resources.

Go slower or get more resources.

Slower is fine.

More resources is fine.

It doesn’t matter which you choose.

But there are enough hours in the day if you make a decision and make peace with it.

It’s cool to upgrade your tools.

It’s cool to get the latest shiny thing.

But you know what’s even cooler?

Working on your craft, rather than wasting time on all that.

Instead of reading the latest product marketing pages, go fullscreen and create.

Isn’t that better?

Best practices.

You’re bombarded with them on social media.

But they fail to factor in one small detail:

Maybe you just don’t care.

There are many best practices I don’t follow. Rituals and routines I don’t adopt. Delegations and systems I don’t use.

Why?

Because I don’t care.

I use rituals and routines that bring my family and I joy, and prioritise my creative output. I delegate only what will be better because of it, not worse. I don’t care to use best practices just because someone decided they’re best.

Best for who? Not for me. And maybe not for you either.

Do you.

Sometimes, when you’re building products or marketing campaigns, you have a choice.

One where you can make one of two choices.

The first: be brave and try that new idea you had.

The second: be safe and just do the normal thing.

If you choose the first, it might fail spectacularly. And if it does, it’ll feel like you wasted your time. “Stupid, you should have chosen the second one.” But it also might be the best thing you ever did, turn heads and change your world.

If you choose the second, it might get the expected result: average, and needs a lot of work to grind it to succeed. And if it does, you’ll only wonder what would happen if you chose the first option.

You can always try the first then try the second.

But starting with the second will always leave you wondering.

There’s no right or wrong answer here.

But it’s worth thinking about if you’d like to be brave and try anyway.

Who knows what could happen?

Isn’t that part of the fun?

There’s a dangerous side of ambition.

“Ambition means tying your well being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6, 51

Perhaps ambition isn’t what you need more of.

Perhaps self-indulgence isn’t a good goal at the end of the ambition trail.

Perhaps sanity is the journey and the destination.

If we choose for it to be.

Social has a lot of shouting.

He who is loudest tends to win: more engagement, more reach, louder.

Louder.

Great.

Except I have tinnitus. Loud doesn’t work for me.

There’s another way.

Lots of whispering.

Instead of pursuing one explosive social post… pursuing lots of personalised invitations to your tribe. Or small collaborations with other brands that share the same worldview as your tribe does, so you can share secret handshakes together.

Lots and lots of whispers.

Both can end up with lots of engagement. But only one of them creates loyal, long-term fans.

Dear creators:

You don’t have to feel ready.

You don’t have to be ready.

You just have to take a shot.

There’s rarely only one shot.

And misses are rarely fatal.

Let’s see what you can do today.

There are a few games in town.

‘Cool’ and ‘Big’ are popular games. They prioritise how others see you, and how much you’ve “dominated” the market.

But there’s a third game. One that’s a little less selfish and a lot more sustainable.

It’s the game of building for ‘falling in love’.

The ‘falling in love’ business doesn’t need to be cool, it just needs to make you curious enough to explore, discover, and experience delight on your own terms.

The ‘falling in love’ business doesn’t need to be big, it wants to be small enough for you to discover it in places you like to discover things, and grow with your interest from there.

The ‘falling in love’ business builds enduring work, like Hello Kitty and Peanuts have. Neither tried to be cool. Neither tried to be big. Both optimised for people to fall in love.

And so they endure.

Forget about survivorship bias.

Forget about celebrating successful outliers at the expense of the vast majority of failures behind them.

Forget about all that.

It’s all based on the idea that you must shoot for the moon and succeed while others fail.

It’s based on the idea that you have one shot to do something insane.

‘Insane’ is focused on building a highly lucrative publicly traded company that everyone has heard about.

But the world doesn’t need you to be insane.

It needs you to choose a small group of people and make something ‘great’.

Something that makes their lives a little bit better because you were in it.

You have many, many shots at ‘great’.

And your people are waiting.

I like cold email.

I get cold emails every day.

You probably do too.

But while I like cold email (the ability to send something of value to someone else in the world, which they can keep or trash, is a good thing)… I hate most cold emails.

And not because of junky offers that don’t interest me. Oh no.

I hate them because of the lying. The fake personalisation, trying to trick me into thinking they took the time to check out my work when they didn’t.

I can see right through it.

They can have the best offer in the world. But they lied to me. So it’s a disgrunted, hard, forever-‘No’ from me.

If you do cold email, power to you. It’s a great medium.

But don’t you dare lie. If you do, you deserve the blacklisting, spam scores, and low response rates you get.

Do better.

One of the big problems that businesses have with video content is they typically need a charismatic leader with free time on their hands and no chance of ever leaving.

• Leaders are too busy to record
• Team members are often bad on camera
• The good ones leave to do their own thing

Fortunately there’s an easy solution to this.

Cartoons.

You can build rapport with the characters.

They’re consistently great on ‘camera’.

They don’t get drunk, demand pay rises, or leave you to for their own thing.

Something to think about if you want to crush video, immerse viewers, tell stories and build without limits.

We spent all day on hospital.

Our son lost consciousness and an ambulance raced us to hospital to see what was wrong.

At every turn, we were served reminders of how inefficient large operations can become:

• Every healthcare professional needed to be brought up-to-date by us, every time
• The hospital has no access to the doctor’s notes, or any other hospital’s notes
• Hours of waiting between every step, some of which required repeat steps because staff members ended their shifts

He’s okay.

Because he’s always been a fighter.

Just like his mama and dada.

Many wouldn’t be so lucky.

It served as yet another reminder that small, nimble teams full of passion for their craft and care for their clients can outperform the largest of enterprises…

…precisely because they’re not large.

Viva la small team of crazies ready to take on the world…

…And fight.

To damage your brand:

• Short-term plans
• Focus on transactions only
• Low-value trip-wires
• Low-quality content

To build your brand:

• Long-term plans
• Focus on audience happiness
• High-value gift-giving
• High-quality content

Long-term players win long-term prizes.

Things I know at 35, I wish I knew at 15:

• Everybody is winging it
• You’ll know when she’s the one
• Obsession is power not weakness
• Strength is found inside not outside
• Edutainment is the future of marketing
• Cut out bad people, they steal YEARS of life

Ask yourself this:

Would what I want from the market and/or for my business be easier to attain if I was more generous with my time, product, service or skills?

Try finding ways to answer Yes.

Let them be generous ideas.

Some of them will leap out at you.

Sometimes, what you want is on the other side of generosity.

Unicorns are cute.

They’re also worth billions of dollars.

Creators get to choose a path:

Option 1: 20% chance of building a profitable business and life they enjoy.

Option 2: 00006% chance of succeeding at building a unicorn.

Option 2 is a fine option for folks who like to play those odds.

But for the rest of us, Option 1 lets creators:

• Build financial autonomy
• Build time independence
• Do things they enjoy all day

Not all of these benefits show up on the balance sheet, yet they are no less worth their weight in gold.

Check the math:

Option 1: Fail five times and you win. Heck, fail ten times and have two profitable projects, if you like to do multiple things.

Option 2: Fail 16,700 times and win maybe.

I explore this topic in more detail in this week’s issue of The Productoon newsletter. Check it out!

Struggling?

Clarity and patience:

Clarity helps you see through the emotions and take a better perspective on your problem.

Patience helps you commit to the right path, rather than look for shortcuts that may not work.

Clarity.

Patience.

You’re welcome.

What makes a good ad or social post, would you say?

Impressions? Clicks? Engagement?

They are if you believe what you read on the Internet.

But here’s the thing about using these to measure success…

Annoy enough people or buy enough likes and the data will make you think you won. But it doesn’t mean people want to buy from you.

So what should we measure instead?

I call it “PoP”: Probability of Participation.

Y’see, ads and social are about one of two things:

1. Helping people become the kind of person who would like to participate in something cool with you should the opportunity arise

2. Inviting people to participate in something cool with you when the opportunity arises

Neither of these things require the clicking of like or comment buttons. All we should require is enhancing PoP.

Because no CTR outperforms having an audience who would be DELIGHTED to participate in something cool with you.

The thing about working with a team is…

People will only let you down if:

• You lean on them for more than you should
• You trust them more than you should
• You need them more than you should

We feel let down when we needed someone to come through but they didn’t. It’s our fault that we were in a ‘need’ position. Don’t ‘need’, don’t feel let down.

We feel let down when we trust people too much. People have to earn trust, and if we give it flippantly, it’s our fault when it doesn’t work out.

We feel let down when we lean on people and they move away. It’s our fault that we leaned so heavily. Don’t lean, don’t feel let down.

It’s tricky.

Especially when you generally really like people.

But it’s a kindness to yourself and to others to not get this wrong.

Cartoons are underrated when it comes to business.

The right cartoon can explain a complex concept in a fraction of the time it would take with words.

They take you to worlds other videos never could.

Don’t tell them how cool your brand is. Show them.

20 years ago, online communities changed how I see the role of a creator.

And that role influenced many of the things I did since, including some really successful products.

Y’see, online communities were still quite new then, but they were tight. If you had an interest, there was likely a bulletin board or IRC channel for you.

Prior to then, if you wanted to make things that spread, you kind of had to be asked, or put it on your little corner of the web and ask people to go check it out, shouting about it in hope people will listen. Which, amusingly, is still what most people do to this day, then complain when things don’t work out.

But when community showed up, this changed. Back then I was able to make an episodic content and distribute it directly to an eager and supportive crowd. I was able to make a community-powered products and access both rapid feedback and easy distribution all thanks to… that’s right, community.

But real community. Not these lukewarm slack channels or telegram group chats where people only show up to get something in return. The kind where people show up because its part of their identity, where they contribute meaningfully, where it’s a source of great joy for them.

So you wanna amplify your work? Figure out who you’re talking to, and what they need. Then don’t sell them… join them. Then just watch what happens when their new buddy has a solution to their problems.

Yesterday, we bought two desks.

Today, we bought two desks twice.

That’s three orders of two desks.

Why did we need so many desks?

We didn’t.

We needed just two desks.

But the marketplace managing the order messed up, twice.

First, they cancelled our order without telling us (the furniture designer contacted us asking what had happened).

Second, they rejected our payment because the second order looked like the first, which they had cancelled.

Third, they accepted the order, then tried to process our card for the other two past orders.

This is 2023.

We’re still dealing with this sort of nonsense.

There is more opportunity in the market to build great experiences than you think.