Per My Last E-mail #38
Not Boring Has a Website, Debate Club #3, 100 True Fans, WoP, Debt, Minding Design, Stories of Your Life
Hi Friends š,
One of the most fun parts of writing this newsletter is getting to learn and embarrass myself in public.
Last week, for example, I made fun of 2012 Packy for making a website with buttons like this:
whereas 2020 Packy, after six years at a startup, with modern tools like Webflow and Figma at his disposal, makes buttons like this:
What I didnāt realize until Puja pointed it out is: theyāre almost exactly the same. š¤¦š»āāļø
Iāll probably never be a great designer, but luckily, over the past eight years, Iāve made some really talented friends. I asked one of them, Allegra, to look at a couple of color schemes I was playing with, and she came back with an incredible design concept ācolors, fonts, site layout, and more ā that she put together over her 30 minute lunch break. š¤ÆItās better than anything I could have come up with if I spent every breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next year on it. THANK YOU ALLEGRA!
So I took Allegraās design and went back to Webflow to turn them into the Not Boring website. Itās definitely not perfect (because Iām still a Webflow novice), the mobile version is particularly hairy, and itās still a work-in-progress, but Iām happy with the way itās shaping up. Moving Not Boring out of packym.com and into its very own home feels like dropping my baby off at boarding school (or something, Iām not a parent, I donāt know how this works).
Learning in public is half the fun of this whole thing, both to show how unglamorous so much of this process is and to get feedback and input from people who are smarter and more talented than me. To that end, Iād love your thoughts, feedback, and tips.
And today is an exciting one: weāre starting to welcome our first members into the club! So head to the brand spanking new Not Boring website, to check it out and apply to be one of the worldās first Not Boring Members.
Debate Club #3
Debate Club #3 is in the books, and they just keep getting better and better. Last Wednesday, nearly 30 people gathered in NoHo to debate topics ranging from āSuperman would beat Batman in a fight to the deathā to āEnlightened Despotism is superior to Democracy.ā For all of the topics and pictures, head over to the Junto website. Big congrats to our champions: Nick Gidwani, David Lobo, and Tucker Brown!
As Debate Club gets bigger, weāre hitting that fascinating stage where I donāt know everyone who shows up, and where most of the debaters donāt know each other. Thatās the make-or-break point - did Debate Club work because it was a good excuse for existing friends to get together or will it get even better as we introduce new people?
It made me so happy to discover that the answer was the latter. The debates themselves were great - the skill level of the debaters goes up every time - but the thing I heard most from people was how much they enjoyed getting to meet the other people in the room and how impressed they were with the quality and openness of the group.
My guess is that it just takes a certain type of person to dedicate four hours on a Wednesday night to debate with a bunch of strangers. Debate Club #3 made me even more excited for whats going to happen when weāre able to get a club full of that type of person together, repeatedly, in Not Boring.
Debate Club #4 will be in March. If you want to get involved, sign up here and make sure to check out our new and improved rules page, featuring a video of former champion Nick Brown sharing tips and tricks for debating and judging.
Links & Listens
š 1,000 True Fans? Try 100 | Li Jin | a16z
Li Jin is carving out a niche as the go-to thinker on the Passion Economy (a term she coined) - the trend towards creators monetizing their ability to share and teach others about the topics theyāre most passionate about.
In this piece, Jin provides an update to Kevin Kellyās 1,000 True Fans theory, arguing that by going niche and providing tangible value, creators can make upwards of $100,000 per year by generating $1,000 from each of 100 True Fans. Importantly, she sees consumers shifting spend away from businesses, school, and institutions and towards individual creators.
The four keys for building up 100 True Fans:
Premium content and community with no close substitutes
Delivering tangible value and results
Accountability
Access, Recognition, and Status
The big takeaway for me is that itās more possible than ever to make a living by finding the thing that youāre uniquely passionate about and carving out your niche.
š¤Making Friends on the Internet | Will Mannon | Write of Passage
David Perellās Write of Passage embodies the 100 True Fans theory (although the number of current and former students is rapidly approaching 1,000). This week, WoPās Course Manager, Will Mannon, wrote about the steps theyāre taking to intentionally build community and camaraderie as the cohorts grow.
Their current answer is one that I believe in fully: building smaller, private communities within the larger community, which theyāll do by introducing 10 person feedback groups for Cohort 4.
As Mannon wrote, āBuilding real camaraderie online is challenging.Ā Everyone knows how to bond with someone in personā¦The same norms donāt exist for online courses.ā Iām all for experiments to create these norms.
šµDebt is Coming | Alex Danco
I realize that Iāve probably included too high a percentage of Alex Dancoās essays in Per My Last E-mail, but he keeps writing really well about topics I care about.
His latest, Debt is Coming, addresses something Iāve thought a lot about in a slightly different context. His argument is that SaaS businessesā recurring revenue looks like the type of predictable cashflow that should be financed by debt instead of equity, and that later stage startups should construct a mixed capital stack instead of relying solely on equity financing.
I agree with him on that point, but in some verticals, his argument should extend to early stage companies as well. DTC and real estate startups are two that come to mind, both industries with understood business models and relatively stable marginal costs in which slow and steady usually wins the race.
š§ Minding Design | Anja Jamrozik
The newsletter world is dog-eat-dog, so itās not often I recommend the competition. In 37 e-mails, Iāve only recommended five: The Profile, Divinations, Rethinking RE, and Stratechery. I got mouths to feed, and I need to fight for that precious inbox space.
But I feel as if I would be doing you a disservice if I didnāt tell you about Minding Design, the new newsletter from my former colleague and forever one of the smartest people I know, Anja Jamrozik.
Getting to work with Anja was like getting paid to learn - sheās able to read actual research papers (the whole thing, not just the abstract), translate them into lessons that normal humans can understand, and then apply their findings to make things happen in both the physical and digital worlds. While I donāt think Anjaās willing to pay you to read her newsletter, getting to read it every couple of weeks for free is the next best thing.
Iāll leave you with a little snippet from Anjaās post on biophilia to whet your appetite:
What we need to test the effects of green space is a good old-fashioned RCT (randomized control trial) or A/B test (gotcha, theyāre the same thing! But of course thereās a different term for it in the tech industry) in which students are randomly assigned to a green space conditionā¦.
So, what can I do with this?
Are you trying to learn something new and difficult? Get yourself to a calm spot with a view of nature, take a weekend learning getaway to the country, or, at the very least, get yourself a desk plant.
Subscribe here and get smarter.
3ļøā£ Three Things to Know in Your 30ās | Jeff Richards
Because Iām in my 30ās, a lot of Per My Last E-mail subscribers are also in their 30ās. This thread is a crystal ball for the things weāll wish we had known now when we look back in a decade.
A few favorites (in quotes) and common themes (not in quotes).
āEvolution never ends. Pursue your interests, curiosities, and hobbies wherever they may lead.ā
Nothing is more valuable than time.
āWork will take over your life if allowed, but most work doesn't matter. Focus on what matters.ā
Sleep, fitness, and nutrition matter.
Family is everything.
Build trust and donāt do anything to lose it.
Experiences > things.
Time flies and things can change in an instant.
What Iām Reading
Iāve been reading a lot of non-fiction, specifically on community building for Not Boring and history for my Write of Passage essay on Scenius, so I decided to give my brain a break and read some sci-fi: Ted Chiangās Stories of Your Life and Others.
I wrote about Chiangās Exhalation way back in PMLE #4 (I loved it). Stories of Your Life and Others, a collection of short stories popularized when the titular story, Stories of Your Life, was turned into the movie Arrival, was even better. I preferred the written version to the movie, and it was still only my third or fourth favorite short story in the collection, a testament to the strength of the whole thing.
My top three were about the builders of the Tower of Babel, animating automatons and humans with words, and a drug that turns its previously vegetative recipients into supergeniuses, in reverse order.
Iām not normally a fan of short stories, but I love Ted Chiangās. Theyāre fiction that makes you think, sci-fi that often takes place in the past instead of the future, and theyāre perfect for a break from all of the non-fiction at work and in everyday life. (Insert fiction in politics joke here š„)
Note: If sci-fiās not your thing and you just want the facts, Septivium has a running list of the best introductory books for basically every topic.
Whatās Next?
Acceptance e-mails go out to our first Not Boring members go out today and I couldnāt be more excited about the group that weāre bringing together. Weāll be letting people in slowly to make sure that we get the early balance right, so if youāve applied and donāt hear anything today 1) thank you! and 2) keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks as we continue to welcome people to the club.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
I always appreciate your feedback, and nothing makes me happier than your sharing Per My Last E-mail with people you think would enjoy reading and engaging šš»