Reddit's humble beginnings
And why there's trouble in (governmental) paradise
There was a nice variety of topics this week, each with their own unique takeaways.
From modern challenges in the creative industry and Reddit’s launch story to why libertarians are still doing it all wrong and Dickie Bush’s climb to 40,000 followers in 6 months, there’s something for everyone.
“If you want to be in the Inner Ring, you’ve already lost”
How often have you sought out an inner circle? We’re all guilty of it. At school, at work, within friendship groups… there's something mysterious about an exclusivity, so we obsess while we try to climb up into it. The truth is, no one really knows who belongs to the inner ring, the rules are always changing and our naturally creative brains are crumbling under the pressure.
This week Ali Montag wrote a beautiful piece on the struggles we often face when building and creating things today. We all relate to it in some way because each one of us has felt the pressure of the inner circle pressing down on us at some point in our lives. Here are some of her best takeaways:
Creatives are encouraged to place popularity above genius, to create as much as possible: tweet, post, film, write, no need to edit, just work the algorithms in your favor. This is damaging.
In our quest to reach the inner circle, the attention marketplace, we cannot escape mediocrity. “...fire and passion are gradually drained away as original ideas and voices are subsumed by commercial concerns.” (John Logan)
The answer: just produce. Drown out the noise and fixate only on the fires that burn inside you, on everything that is superb and true to you.
Build something great, not something liked. Be accountable.
Perfect the why of your creative work, not just the what. If your why is profit, your creation won’t be worth much.
Reddit’s rocky beginnings
Have you ever had your first coffee date with a startup mogul lead to millionaire status? Probably not. It doesn’t happen very often. For Reddit founders Alexis and Steve, it did happen. When Paul Graham convinced them at their coffee date to pitch their food delivery business at Y Combinator, the friends' lives changed forever. An initial rejection led to a change in heart. They were quickly invited back, not for their business idea, but for their smarts. Their mission, Paul told them, was to “build the front page of the Internet.” Along came Reddit. The launch, however, was by no means smooth sailing. Here are two key lessons from Reddit’s journey:
1. Don’t launch before you’re ready
Competition was steep at the time and Paul told the pair they had 2 weeks to launch. When they did not meet the deadline, an unimpressed Paul forced the launch after mentioning Reddit in a published essay on the new startups entering the market.
“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” - Reid Hoffman
Only a day into the unplanned launch Reddit went over the 1000 user mark, but their fortunes quickly changed. The site was slashed by tech bloggers and there was nothing in place to engage or retain the first users. Within 2 days, Reddit lost those first 1000 users and went back to 0. The space they were entering was an established one, with set customer habits. In their case, it would have been wise to take the time to build the right product for the competitive space.
The solution: Alexis and Steve created lots of posts everyday as fake users, publishing links and adding legitimacy. It allowed them to show users how the platform should be used and made people feel part of something authentic, “a vibrant emerging community.”
2. Don’t lose trust
Trust is crucial for success, whatever your business may be. Yet rather than considering how to ‘establish trust,’ a common line of thinking, Reddit worked extremely hard at the beginning to try not to ‘lose trust’ amongst early users.
They did this in two ways:
Removing any form of censorship (this has since changed a little)
Not taking any identifiable info from new users, all you needed was a username and a password.
Libertarians: stop selling something no one wants to buy
Libertarians seem to keep losing. Even after hearing about them, people still don’t want what they have to offer. Libertarians end up only appealing to libertarians, because they fundamentally fail to solve core human problems.
“The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” - HL Mencken
‘Freedom’ is a rather vague outcome and, when met with a concrete risk of removing the safety net of the government, the appeal is low. It also goes against marketing 101: if people aren’t buying, you’re selling the wrong thing. It’s a product only for themselves. This comes from failing to understand human nature. We are not logical thinking individuals, we come in groups and tribes and we like being led. We want a leader leading us to safety.
So their marketing is flawed. What about sales? Unfortunately they skip past that department all together. As a system which stays far away from centralized power, they can’t actually sell effectively. We are not in a post big-bang clean slate society where selling any idea is easy. Our systems are hard-wired into society’s fabric and that’s when the right kind of selling becomes vital.
There’s also a hypocrisy to libertarianism that is unattractive: “They want to use a political party to tell people we don’t need political parties.” What they don’t see is that government can in fact work, that they are not all bad. Power itself is not bad, its unaccountable power that’s the problem. Instead of abolishing authority, they should try to abolish corruption.
Dickie Bush’s road to 40,000 followers
The Jungle Gym, by Nick deWilde
This week in The Jungle Gym, it was all about Dickie Bush and the 40,000 Twitter followers who came to him in less than 6 months. Audience building can be scary. Where does one even begin? Here’s Bush’s strategy:
He started by posting threads with book summaries and podcast summaries. This appealed to a small group of people with similar interests. A small audience is great for increasing momentum for growth. If you can attract 50-100 compatible people, you can attract 50,000-100,000.
Every post leads to some reaction that you can use as an idea for the next post. If one small tweet resonates, you have something worth exploring for longer. If there’s no reaction, you have saved yourself some pain.
When starting out, find the 5-10 people who tweet on topics that interest you the most and explore their older work. On twitter you can add value by simply organizing a person’s best tweets without having to expect something in return. The process will also get you thinking in depth on what interests you.
Tweet 35-50 times a week. The twitter algorithm likes this.
5 minutes of extra work on your notes can make them publish worthy
Listen to your audience
A long walk is magic for coming up with new ideas
The future of political governance
Politics vs Business
Evolution in the American government is slow and inefficient. There is only one government employed at a time. In business, a new idea can rapidly be brought into action, be tested and then used. If something better comes along, it will be replaced. Continual improvement is halted only by the people’s capacity to spend money. The businesses with a ‘majority vote’, are not the only ones to get tested.
Slow governmental innovation
The government may have different political parties, but this still causes deadlocks. The parties can only change government within their own governmental systems. It’s a limiting cycle. And when a political party wants to test a new way of doing business they have to replace an old system, they can’t just test it out alongside. Innovation and disruption is slow in government and if we take note of disruptions in the business world, safe roads, never make it out on top.
Enabling faster progress
VR, AR and cryptocurrencies are yielding compelling frameworks with the potential to tumble political structures by sidestepping geographies and testing ideas in a networked world. Could you conceive of a digital political party? Supporters give money through crypto and with a minimum donation, they get a token for voting. If they decide to support a different party, you lose the token. Majority vote decides everything. A digital side of a nation, which is not bound by geographies, could be a guard against the risk related to a geographic nation state.
VR could be used for testing whole governments by having a set of rules for people to test, such as the effects of a smaller police force or a different road system. It would certainly be a lot easier than actually changing the government.
Extra Reading
Optimism around climate change (The Flywheel, by Jake Singer)
Drake tries to please everyone (Trapital, by Dan Runcie)
Kickstarting supply in a labor marketplace (Lenny's Newsletter, by Lenny Rachitsky)
Introducing Not Boring Capital (Not Boring, by Packy McCormick)
“If web 3 is coming, what’s web 2.5?” With Jarrod Dicker (Means of Creation, by Li Jin and Nathan Bachez)
What’s happening with micro-saas (Trends.vc, by Dru Riley)