6 figures in just 6 days 🤯

This month 👾 Six figures in six days | Maker annual income report | AI Stock images & podcasts | Convert a website to Figma + loads more…

Online shoppers prefer website checkout over social commerce. The reason is simple. Customers prefer buying on a brand’s website, not their social accounts. Their websites are built to sell products. According to Retail Dive, 71% of online shoppers prefer to check out on a brand’s website over their social accounts. Reactive offers the ability to launch live selling experiences on your website instantly.

📓 Articles

Despite just one tweet being the extent of his initial marketing efforts which brought in a whopping $100k, Traf provides some interesting insights into how his viral tweet brought him so much traffic and revenue. As you might expect it wasn't all down to luck.

Just check his numbers out, they are incredible. He was making $28 every 30 seconds. This guy managed to bottle lightening and he's still humble.

Despite making only $17 back in 2013, Traf quickly learned the principle of making money through selling a digital product online. Similar to Jack Butcher's - make once, sell twice framework, Traf learned the principle of making a digital product and selling it online - “create something once with sufficient effort, then sell it repeatedly with minimal effort.” = Digital content leverage. Basically the holy grail of creating a passive income online.

I'll leave you with this great quote Traf provides in his post “When people buy into whatever it is you're selling, they're not only giving you money, but they're contributing to your future freedom.”

🎁 Bonus content: Check out Jack Butcher on this Gumroad YouTube interview discussing his build once, sell twice framework.

Is it just me or are reading makers' annual income reports fascinating? Especially when they are prolific creators with multiple income streams. Firstly, huge kudos to Charli's for sharing, that's not easy, however, it does help others learn through her transparency. Specifically, what's possible, the types of income streams, the amount earned, what's increased/decreased and why, her expenses breakdown, and plans for next year. If you get really hooked, scroll down to the bottom of the post and you can read other reports dating back 2018.

Is there a site where I can get more content like this? a directory for maker annual income reports? If so, please let me know. If not, fancy making one?

🎁 Bonus content: Check out how much Treyton DeVore made in his first year as a freelance writer & web designer.

🔗 Links

I'm sure you are aware of the drama between Elon Musk and his purchase of Twitter, but have you seen the not-so-private text messages between the two billionaire founders? Due to Musk trying to pull out of the acquisition, it went to court and that means all his interactions regarding the purchase were made public. The texts are pretty juicy, but not in the scandalous sense, and they necessarily show a master at work with a grand plan, in fact, it's quite the opposite. Instead, they are pretty unimpressive, perhaps I was expecting more but it felt more like a blunt Musk chatting with a bunch of groupies egging him on to purchase Twitter. You might recognize some of the names in the texts.

You can skip all the legal fluff and jump straight to page 83. It's surprisingly addictive to read once you started.

P.S Looks like Elon is killing Revue, the platform I use to send this newsletter. Any recommendations I should consider? hit reply.

Ok, perhaps the title is a little misleading. It is Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs and it was just recently published, however, it's actually entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The 19-minute interview was created by training their AI engine with the Steve Jobs biography and all recordings of him they could find online.

The podcast was created by podcast.ai. Each week, they explore a new topic in depth. Whether you're a machine learning enthusiast, just want to hear your favorite topics covered in a new way or even just want to listen to voices from the past brought back to life this a really interesting new genre of podcast. One thing that instantly jumped to mind was the scale this podcast could grow to given each episode is generated by AI so no looking for guests, the mashups of dead/alive high-caliber guests will contribute to viral growth, and lastly the way they can engage with listeners by allowing them to vote.

You can vote on future episodes here and see the top-voted submissions. What mashups would you like to hear? Personally, I would love to hear Elon Musk and Howard Hughes.

Fancy a break from your computer for 5 minutes to reset? Great, I have just the thing. Check out this fantastic game created by Anslo which he just released last week after 16 months of building and refining it. You can select from a variety of vehicles and landscapes and simply use a few basic keys on your keyboard to control your vehicle as you wind around roads and visit new landscapes in a calm sound electric vehicle as your hair virtually blows in the wind before realizing you have zened out for waaay too long and need to get back to work.

No logins, no installs, just roads.

📱 Products

Imagine having your entire state of projects and information in one easily accessible tool. No copying and pasting information from one tool to the other and having to keep them in sync. In Height this is possible. Take for example their ability to mention a task in a Slack message, the message will be cross-posted to the mentioned Height task, keeping all my conversations for any given project in one, central place. No copy and pasting just a streamlined automated process so you can centralize where decisions get made. Check it out for free.

As a wannabe designer, I'm always trying to pick apart some of my favorite websites and remix them in Figma and occasionally try to rebuild parts of them in Webflow. However, it's a painfully slow process of building every component from scratch each time until I recently had a shot at this handy Figma plugin. HTML to design lets you convert any website into fully editable Figma designs. Leverage an existing website and import its HTML to Figma to start your own designs, without building each element from scratch. Now it's not perfect, I had a shot using Stripe's infamous homepage, and some of the text sizes were out of whack but it's certainly the best solution I've found compared to other similar products.

AI seems to be cropping up in all my feeds recently with what seems like a new product or project being launched daily it seems. However, this one is free, ready to use now, and has a load of utility. Think of Unsplash except the images are generated by AI. That means it doesn't generate anything that already exists in the world. If you can't find an image that perfectly matches what your looking for you can create one instantly. It's an interesting move as other platforms like Getty and Unsplash have banned AI photos. The small photos are 100% free to download and the 4K photos are purchasable for a small fee.

🎁 Bonus content: Fancy some fun with your mockups and not looking for the polished, minimalistic image of a person in a coffee shop with their laptop? Get a load of this then! 

This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:

• CreatorSpace: Discover the people and stories behind the most interesting products, and share how you've built yours.

• Supercreator.ai: Everything you need to know to turn yourself into a Super Creator.

• Wist: Step inside your memories – on your phone and in VR.

👾 Friends of Creator Club

This month I want to give a shout-out to Sean McCarney founder of Meco - a distraction-free space for reading and discovering newsletters, separate from your inbox. Add your newsletters in seconds and liberate your inbox from all your day-to-day fluff with fascinating reads. Check it out it's free.

🐽 Other links to consume

• WhatsApp's wild new ad in Piccadilly Circus, London

• How to hide your IP address

• Lessons from my Failed Startup

• The best dark mode implementations on the Internet

🐦 Tweet of the month

This tweet is a reminder of the sheer amount of logic programmed into everyday products we perhaps take for granted. I mean just look at the craft in this decision tree for Slack notifications 🤌 This was originally shared by Johnny Rodgers back in 2017. He recently posted a thread with some more context behind it. However, as Johnny points out, it didn't start like this, they incrementally added new notification preferences as they evolved the product based on the needs and learnings of their customers. I wonder how it looks now over 5 years later?

Wolfgang Bremer @WolfgangBremer

“design is easy” this is how slack decides when to send a notification https://t.co/pmaB59j7fm

⚡️ Flashback

This month I'm going to leave you with this image taken in 1979 of a 250MB hard drive and no, that is a regular-sized man there isn't any camera trickery here.

To put this into perspective, you could fit approximately 6 digital music albums or 79 tracks onto this hard drive.

Although hard disk drives kept improving, state-of-the-art disks were built according to the concept “bigger is better” well into the ‘80s. Hard disk drives were normally used together with big mainframe computers, so this wasn’t such a big deal, in fact, entire rooms were already set aside for the computers.

1979 250MB hard disk drive

That's it for this month!

If you made it this far, hit reply and tell me what you thought of this newsletter. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀

Until next month,

Sam | @thisdickie 👨‍💻