Being Interesting at Scale
Hey everyone,
If we’ve had a conversation recently, you probably know that I’m working on building an audience online (which is part of why I started this newsletter).
You see, one of my biggest goals in life is to start a business. I haven’t felt inspired by any of my business ideas though, so I decided to focus on building an audience in the meantime. I figured doing so would a) help me still make forward progress b) give me a potential group of customers when the right idea does come along.
That said, it can feel gross to talk about having a “personal brand” or anything in that neighborhood. However, I came across a short blog post from Pat Walls this week that spoke about “being interesting at scale.” Essentially, the idea is that there’s something interesting about you, and that interesting-ness is a form of value that you can put into the world.
This resonated with me, because the only way that I’ve been able to stomach that gross feeling I mentioned is to focus on providing value to the people that follow me/the online communities that I’m part of.
Ultimately, we buy stuff, follow people, watch things, etc. because we find them valuable. More than anything else these days, I’m focused on finding more ways to add value to the world, and I’m looking to take a solid step forward there this week.
Pete’s Picks ✅
Course: In keeping with the above, I went through Daniel Vassallo’s Twitter course. Vassallo was an AWS employee earning $500K/yr who left to do his own thing, and in the process went from 0 to 24K Twitter followers. He had a substantial amount of insight about audience-building on Twitter that I found very valuable (again, it’s all about providing value).
Article: I mentioned being stuck on the idea phase of building a business. But via the Twitter course, I came across Peter Askew, who builds businesses based on coveted domain names. He allows the domain to determine what the business will be - here’s an article on his process. Fascinating model that I’m looking forward to trying out.
Series: I was fired up that The Last Dance finally came to regular Netflix. I was in elementary school during the 97-98 NBA season, so I only vaguely remember it, but it’s been fun to relive the whole story and get the player perspective.
Tweet of the Week 🐦
Cheers,
Peter