The underdog story
Thoughts on intensity | Notion tools| A makers investment strategy | The underdog story | AI isn't a feature + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
Firstly, a huge thanks for all the messages and feedback for my new project Validation Co. I wasn’t expecting anything near the amount of responses and signups. For all of you who signed up for early access, you can expect some semi-regular updates but don’t expect anything too quickly, this is going to be a slow build throughout 2024.
Lastly, if you're looking for some fresh music to wrap your ears around while creating I’ve curated this low-tempo, fun and funky playlist. If you prefer something for deep work, check out this deep and dark playlist.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Top post last month: Competitor Research and Strategy Playbook
📓 Articles
Make something to learn more about what's inside you
This post by
really encapsulates the mission of the Creator Club newsletter “consume less, create more”. It’s one of the core value propositions and why I spend countless days per month sourcing and summarising inspiring, thought-provoking content to save you time sifting through various algorithmic feeds yourself when that time could be better invested into creating something.More and more, I’m realizing pulling myself and others out of passive consumption mode and into creation mode is something I really care about and am willing to work very hard on.
If there is one passage to read in this post which I guarantee will make you rethink how technology has evolved our consumption habits and time spent each day let it be the first quote in the post. It’s a pretty scary thought.
Have you committed to consuming less and creating more in 2024?
On going for it
shares an extremely candid and vulnerable account of his personal origin story, including his trials and tribulations of fundraising, mental health, his struggles and wins and his new project. if you’re dreaming of pursuing something this year, I think you should go for it.
It’s so refreshing to read content like this. The type of content which lifts the fake veil of success porn and exposes the real people behind the accounts you follow, the business they create and the harsh reality of life grinding to make something out of nothing.
A few thoughts on intensity
In this post, Tyler Hogge shares what he thinks is the most important trait of a successful startup. It’s not intelligence, charisma, or positivity, although these three traits are required.
Tyler believes the most important trait of exceptional startups is intensity.
Startups are default dead and it’s only intense, focused people who can will them to survive.
Doing each of these three thing to an intense degree:
Raise the quality bar
Increase the speed
Narrow the focus
Have you ever worked with someone who operates with a very high level of intensity? The type of person that’s always in 5th gear and on it! It’s infectious. It makes you want to join them and subconsciously drags you closer to their level of passion.
🎁 Bonus content: Check this fantastic post by Tyler titled ‘Sardines and the magic box’. He uses a fantastic historical example as an analogy of what is happening to startup valuations.
🔗 Hyperlinks
Sticker Image
I have a confession to make. I’m 36 and I still collect stickers and apply them to my laptop. Does my beautifully designed Macbook Pro look like a teenage hackers laptop? absolutely. In fact, I have an old 2017 Macbook Pro I have only kept purely because I love the stickers on it and it’s now on display in my office. Neeerd alert!
So how about adding virtual stickers? Creator Florian created a neat 48h project which allows you to add stickers to your own Memoji.
There is only a small selection of icons to use currently, however, you can upload your own and he plans to release an extended icon pack that you can download and upload on the site soon. Check out his tech stack below:
Hosting: Vercel
Framework: Nextjs
Poof animation + confetti: Rive
Icons: Saman Icons
Pieter levels Investements
Shocker horror, I’ve featured Pieter Levels again in this newsletter. This time he’s gone and open-sourced his investment portfolio for all of us to follow consider.
Currently, he’s making a whopping $120k per month in returns from this portfolio from a somewhat basic strategy primarily made up of EFTs. As he pointed out in this tweet he’s taking a conservative slow and steady approach and not looking for short-term gains.
I don’t have a fraction of his buying power but I’ve been taking a similar approach over the last 3 years and using the majority of profits from side projects and reinvesting them. Anyone else done something similar?
The House that Tim Cook Built
Apple nerds assemble. I have a fascinating free documentary I think will tickle your fancy. However, it’s not the classic Steve Jobs legacy doc, there are plenty of those, no, this time it’s centred around the lesser-known Tim Cook despite him being the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies.
This short doc is about Apple, but mainly; it’s about Tim Cook. His journey, and how he carried a legacy to greater heights than anyone thought possible. Apple, completely and utterly, would not exist without Steve Jobs; and though his gifts to the world can be seen in the incredible technology of his legacy, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone… The greatest thing he ever did… *for Apple*… was Tim Cook. Steve was the visionary, the enigma, the polarizing leader that bent the world, and the people around him, to his vision of perfection… but Tim… Tim is the workhorse in the background, the logistics genius, the leader that finds perfection in the people and technology around him, and gets the job done. Steve Jobs made Apple. Tim Cook made Apple the most successful company on the planet. This is how he did it.
The Underdog: From His Parent’s Basement to $25M
This video interview by Starter Story delves into how David Park went from a broke kid in his parent's basement to building a company now worth over $25M. It does make a great headline, but it’s certainly not clickbait. David started creating a business at age 16, however, it took him a decade of failures to get to where he is now and it certainly wasn’t an easy homerun. In fact, traction was poor to begin with, until one day one tweet changed his fortune and his company’s trajectory. Additionally, if that wasn’t a story in itself, he was diagnosed with cancer while living alone in a foreign country which forced him to make a tough decision.
🎁 Bonus content: This HN post, titled ‘Im done. I give up’ from 2022 has gone viral on X again with various folk sharing their challenges. Some examples can be found here and here.
📱 Products
Inky | Convert your notepads to Notion
If you're a purest still rocking that ol pen n paper but also dabble with Notion this tool might be a handy means to quickly digitise your written notes into Notion by simply taking a photo. Admittedly I have yet to give it a shot myself so I can’t vouch for its ability to detect and transcribe shocking handwriting but the demo videos seem pretty impressive. If you give it a shot let me know and report back.
🎁 Bonus content: While we are on the topic of Notion, here’s another handy tool for those who have a blog or content hosted on Notion but want to supercharge their SEO. NotionSEO is a handy plugin which triggers a neat popup which analyses your Notion page and provides real-time SEO recommendations, readability issues and keyword density with one click.
Animstats | Showcase your stats
Sharing static images of your build in public metrics and stats is so 2023. Slick-looking animated GIFs/videos are going to grab attention and bring your data to life. Created by serial makers Tibo & Audiencon Animstats is the solution to transforming dull statistics into animated GIFs/videos in seconds. With a user-friendly interface. Choose templates, and customize backgrounds, colours, fonts, and more. Perfect for sharing on socials, websites or embedding into content.
Once | Bye-bye SaaS
Today Software as a Service (SaaS) is the holy grail of software models and distribution since Salesforce pioneered it over two decades ago. But it wasn’t always this way. There once was a time when you bought software with no monthly subscription fees. Well, Jason Fried and DHH (founders of 37 Signals) are taking their contrarian approaches once again and launching a suite of tools which you pay for once with no sales team and no monthly fees to worry about. We’re going back in time baby! to a time where software is yours to own - bye bye rental, hello ownership.
Today, most software is a service. Not owned, but rented. Buying it enters you into a perpetual landlord–tenant agreement. Every month you pay for essentially the same thing you had last month. And if you stop paying, the software stops working. Boom, you’re evicted.
Taking that rental model into an ownership model. But you might be thinking, why on earth would you challenge the status quo and not take those lovely monthly fees?
There have been mixed opinions about the viability of this model, however, I’m fascinated to see how this pans out as from a consumer perspective it seems like a great deal. Their first product is their version of Slack called Campfire which makes me think this could just be a great marketing strategy to acquire more Campfire customers in a fierce B2B market. Let’s wait and find out.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest tech products
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Aboard: if Airtable and Pintrest had a baby.
typlr: Create new fonts without software.
Just a brain dump: An elegant personal timeline to record your life.
🎁 Bonus content: I discovered this handy Twitter account which monitors in real-time founders who have been building in stealth and recently announced their latest projects. Check out Stealth Startup Spy.
🐽 Other links to consume
👾 Friends of Creator Club
Zlatko launched a new personal project - Figarc. When I first moved into my new house I painstakingly recreated the floorplan on Figma to plan our remodelling work. Figarc is a design system built in Figma but for floor plans. It helps you use your Figma knowledge and apply it systematically to visualize home or office spaces.
🎁 Bonus content: Couple Figarc with Spacely.ai and render your interiors utilizing generative AI.
🔮 Flashback
This month I’ll leave you with the Sony Aibo first released in 1999. It was designed by the same team behind Sony’s Qrio, which you may remember as the dancing robot that showed up at tech conferences in the mid-2000s.
It was certainly one of the most advanced toys created and featured an evolving personality and behaviour which evolved over time. It could even recognize its owner's face, detect smiles and words of praise, and learn new tricks. Its creators felt that the robot's behaviours needed to "be sufficiently complex or unexpected so that people keep an interest in watching or taking care of it.
However these aren’t cheap toys, they retailed for £1,000 and that was the early 2000s so as you can imagine this wasn’t a mass-market toy. In fact, today an Aibo will set you back about $3k with today’s latest generation.
That’s it for this month!
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
🚀 Advertise on this newsletter to get in front of 8,000 monthly readers
💬 Need some advice on building products. Grab some time with me.
🧪 Looking to validate an idea for a new business or side project? Check this out
If you liked this issue and fancy some free goodies, consider referring someone to the newsletter and get rewarded for doing so.
Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻