Podcast Notes

Steph Smith: How to Make Your Writing Stand Out

Episode metadata

• Episode title: Steph Smith: How to Make Your Writing Stand Out
• Show: How I Write
• Owner / Host: David Perell
• Episode publish date: 2024-04-10

[19:52] Incorporate visuals into your writing

✨ My Notes

To make writing more understandable, use images. Even more efficient is to use moving infographiics. Made me thing of /r/dataisbeautiful

📚 Transcript

David Perell To be able to story tell in this new way. Yeah, we’re really onto something interesting here. And if I’m a beginner writer and I’m thinking about how do I distinguish my work, maybe one answer is I’m going to get really good at using Canva or really good at using Photoshop or Figma. I don’t know what people use these days. And I’m going to get really good at having a distinct style and some unique way of telling stories through visuals. And then I’m going to share through the prism of those visuals. And that’s what people are going to know me for.

Steph Smith Yeah. And there have been a few, a few people I’ve seen. I think there’s this guy James Eagle and this guy called like pie chart pirate, where if you go find them, I can, we can share the links, but they’ve just created these moving infographics, But they did it at a time where they had to create it themselves, they had to use, you know, Python or R to actually code the movement. However, there’s tools now like flourish where you can actually do this in seconds. And I, when I say it’s easy, I’m not just like, oh, it’s so easy and it’s not. You literally can within a few minutes go create these moving infographics as long as you’ve got a data set. And that’s by the way, also easier than ever.

[40:07] Expose yourself

✨ My notes Exposing yourself, your interests, your desires, you fears, your resolutions, and every other thing that makes you human, is how people connect with you. In the end, this is authentic personal branding.

📚 Transcript

David Perell The other thing that I’ve come to appreciate is to go back to Kevin Kelly, he has a line where he says, just tell your story with uncommon honesty. And I think that I’d spent so much of my early writing time trying to be smart or trying to look impressive or seem knowledgeable, oh, I need to learn all these things. Like, I’m not enough. I have to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, and then the residue that learning will turn into my writing, all that sort of stuff. But a lot of the things that people resonate the most with is, here’s what I struggle with, here’s the stupid mistakes I made. I was an idiot in this way and that way. And I grew through this. And let me just tell that story.

And it’s actually fairly easy for me to express that. And I don’t even feel like it’s very insightful. And yet people seem to really resonate with that. And that is truly astounding to me. It is.

Steph Smith But I also think that’s why people, including myself, had things go viral in their very earliest of days, right? Because that’s when they don’t care who’s reading, listening, because no one in theory is. And so I think that that true, like, honesty, rawness, where you’re just like, I have something to say. And it could be about your life or something happening in the world. And like you’re saying, there’s no intention to rile people up because there’s this expectation that no one is listening. This is more an exercise for yourself. When you do that, I think that’s why those early pieces are really important.

[01:01:27] Crafting Messages with Musicality

✨ My Notes

Made me think of the days I was making repetitive music. Writing in a manner that is repetitive and hypnotic, but not boring, is something I could explore in my writing.

📚 Transcript

David Perell Well, I think all these things are interconnected. And one of the major lessons from music is that there’s a lot of craft in the way that you encode a message. And music, having things, the way that things are structured, the way that things are written, almost having a lyricism about it. And the flow, the pacing. So you listen to lose yourself by Eminem. This is the lamest thing that I’m about to do, but whatever. His father’s sweating knees, weak arms are heavy. There’s vomit on his sweater already. You just remember these things. And to go back to what we were saying, I think music and poetry, there are a lot of lessons in terms of how you encode ideas. Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Speech writing, hamlet to be or not to be. That is the question whether it is nobler to suffer slings and arrows about rages, fortune or bi opposing, and them to die to sleep to sleep or chance to dream. These things are when you memorize them, you get a sense for rhythm. And it is so easy when you’re writing to only focus on substance and forget about style. But poetry and music and speech writing is more about the style than the substance. And what does it say that I first read these pieces of poetry or listen to these songs? Sometimes 20 years ago, 15 years ago, and I still remember them. It makes me reconsider what my priorities are as a writer.

Steph Smith It makes me, as we’re talking about this, think through because I am a creator that cares about a long term horizon. I’m a terrible singer, so that’s not a path for me. But to your point, incorporating musicality, and that doesn’t mean turning it into a beat, but how do I create something? These taglines that stick, these ideas that stick, even that line is that sticky. How do I create something that actually isn’t just a moment in time that happens to trend on Hacker News? That not just I’m proud of, but has this rhythm, has this thing that people into it and internalize for longer than the few minutes of they spend with you?

How I Reverse Engineered A $100 Million Exit - Jason Lemkin

Episode metadata

• Episode title: How I Reverse Engineered A $100 Million Exit - Jason Lemkin
• Show: My First Million
• Owner / Host: Hubspot Media
• Episode publish date: 2024-04-10

[22:52] Anchor Around the Comps and Remove Friction

✨ My Notes

Simple SaaS pricing. Check the competition and price your solution the same way. If you deviate too much you confuse the customer (because they know what’s in the market) and it adds friction. And the main thing, in business, is to remove friction. Remove friction.

📚 Transcript

Jason Lemkin I think that pricing is over-discussed. And I’ll tell you why. There are, we have all now bought 200, at least most businesses have bought over 200 SaaS apps. Okay. It’s 200 pieces of business software.

And we all kind of know what stuff should cost. Like we know what Notion should cost. We know what hub spot should cost. We’re on Riverside. I don’t know what Riverside is. What do you guys pay? 300 bucks a month. Okay. Like, okay, let’s say you pay 300 bucks, 400 bucks a month. Now if someone else has a better version of Riverside and they want 50,000, you’re going to like a month, you’re going to kind of b*t, right?

But what if someone had something that was better than Riverside? It was $30 a month. It would seem too cheap. Right? It would seem too cheap.

My point is there are organic price points. And what you want to do is anchor around them, go figure out the couple of products out there that are most similar to yours and charge the exact same way and either charge the same pricing or if you’re nervous, charge a smidge lower, 10% lower, 20% lower.

If you charge too much lower, you’re telling the market you’re not as valuable as Riverside, right? Or you’re not as valuable as hub spot. And you can actually, customers will bounce off you if you’re too cheap. If you’re too cheap, they will get confused.

So anchor around the comps.

If you’re truly 10 times more valuable than Riverside, okay, and Riverside’s very good. We’re using it to record the session. If you’re 10 times more valuable, maybe charge twice as much because you’re telling the market we’re 10 times more valuable than the leader, right? We’re 10 times more valuable.

But whatever you do, founders that say there’s no one like us, there’s no comp, try harder. It doesn’t have to be the same as you. Just it feels the same. It feels a similar amount of value, a similar type of utilization. Do I use it eight hours a day? Do I use it once a month? Do I use it as an API? Is it metered? Is it per seat? Just there’s hundreds of apps like you.

And if you price similar to similar value apps, you remove friction. You remove friction from the sales process. And that’s what you want to do until you’re really big.

This is why we also under-price founders because you want to remove friction. We want every deal to close in the early days, don’t we? We want every deal to close. And so your job as a founder, if you want to scale, if you want to reverse engineer things, your job, because no one else in your company will do this, your job is every day to relentlessly Remove friction from your customer acquisition process, remove friction.

And people added it scale. The classic one is contact me. You go to a website. You’re all excited to buy on your own. And I got to talk to a rep. Well, there’s a couple reasons. One reason is they’ve gotten to hundreds of millions of revenue. And they actually want to add friction to the sales process. But you don’t want to do that until you’re at tens of millions of revenue. You want to every day come into work. And if you can’t do anything else on your company, remove friction. How can I make sign-up easier? How can I add single sign-on? How can I make an easier to check out from my e-commerce thing? How can I make the bundle easier? How can I make support better?

Remove friction. Remove friction.

The support that happens automatically in seconds rather than waiting five minutes on the dumb bubble, that removes friction, doesn’t it? Whatever it takes, remove friction.

Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities

Episode metadata

• Episode title: Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities
• Show: Huberman Lab
• Owner / Host: Scicomm Media
• Episode publish date: 2023-11-27

[26:33] Topic: How to Make a Boring Assignment Interesting & Better Grades

✨ My Notes

How to get interested in everything: Find curiosity gaps

📚 Transcript

Dr. Adam Grant Now, I think obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect. But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right, I’ve got to find something about this task that’s interesting to me. And then in the process of explaining it to somebody else, I’m going to convince myself because I’m hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust. I’ve also chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else’s reasons. And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if you’re trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you’ve got to figure out, okay, what is it that would make this Fascinating to me? And in a lot of cases, what you’re looking for is a curiosity gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch. So there’s something you want to know and you don’t know it yet. So I would say I tell my students often, like, take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle. Like something that you just do not know the answer to. Like, actually, I’ve talked with our kids about this. Like, what really happened to King Tut? Do you know? Can you get to the bottom of that? And all of a sudden, you’re like, I wonder, I need to Google it. And then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this. And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes. And I think that’s the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation.

Andrew Huberman I see. So inherent in your answer is the idea that there’s something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking Information where, well, and I should say, I define curiosity and I hopefully you’ll disagree with me or agree either way. It doesn’t matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding. I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome.

Shaan Puri: 3 Principles to Master Storytelling | How I Write Podcast

Episode metadata

• Episode title: Shaan Puri: 3 Principles to Master Storytelling | How I Write Podcast
• Show: How I Write
• Owner / Host: David Perell
• Episode publish date: 2024-03-20

[45:59] *** Viral/Retweetable Writing: Start w/ the Emotion (LOL, WTF, WOW, etc)

✨ My Notes

What emotion do I want my piece of content to give? Start with that. Then make sure that it truly delivers that emotion. Impact.

📚 Transcript

This guy Chris Quigley, he ran an advertising agency that would make videos go viral.

And at the time I was like, going viral is like a lottery ticket. Like, how do you do a viral video? I don’t know. It’s just like something amazing must happen.

So I go, what’s your hit rate on virality? Like one out of 100, two out of 100. He goes, no, like eight out of 10. I go eight out of 10. And he’s like, yeah, look, he showed me their their views. I was like, how do you do this?

He’s like, well, you know, over time, the more viral videos you make, you have like a base of an audience. But he’s like, that just gets you like some people will see it. But how viral goes is how much they share it.

He goes, so what we do is we work backwards from an emotion. He goes, the only things people will share is things that are L O L W T F O M G . Like all the acronyms for all the emotions. So like, oh my God, wow, like, ha, ha, right?

Like if it doesn’t do that, nobody will share it. So he goes, we first start with this is the desired reaction we have. Then we’ll write a script or write a blog post or whatever. And then we’ll go check. Do we think that’s going to create this reaction? Somebody? No? All right. Plus, juice it up. How do we make it more funny? How do we make it more? Outraging. How do we make it more? Endearing and heartwarming, like whatever those are.

And so once I heard that three times, I was like, okay, I get it. I need to create a reaction of reaction out of the average person just in the bedroom or at the desk. And I need to start with the emotion, my target emotion, and then work backwards from that. Write the thing that will create that emotion.