Let’s start with the big news - a new name.
There are a number of factors that went into this decision, but more and more, I’ve been thinking about consolidation and re-alignment. Turns out, I wasn’t alone.
One of my favorite creators, Jay Clouse, announced last week that he was rebranding his podcast to align with his newsletter and more accurately reflect what he’s been doing.
I’m not putting everything under a single brand though. I’ve been building out several brands because I want to scale them independently. But they all work together and allow me to categorize things.
I’ve been building with the assumption that there are three components to an internet business:
Product - you have to have something to sell
Media - you have to capture attention
Education - you have to teach people how to use your product to maximum effect
For product, I’ve been primarily focusing on SaaS products (which was the point of this newsletter, I wanted to distill the ideas of building SaaS down to a repeatable process). Given the number of products I’ve created, even though they didn’t have much success, I would say that this newsletter served its purpose. I can launch a new product in a week or so now, but now I don’t want to launch that quickly.
For media, I’ve been:
appearing on podcasts
I’ve got my own podcast in How To Scale Yourself
I’ve been writing:
this newsletter
the AI Augmented Creator that didn’t quite get the reception I hoped
Build In Public University (the educational entity that makes up the business)
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Future
I still need to build up the educational platform a bit, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on for Q2 of this year. I’m in the process of outlining a series of courses that I’ll be launching called: Build Your Own Internet.
(See where I’m going with the whole “Internet Factory” thing now?)
Here’s the hypothesis I’m working from:
If people understand more about the business models of large tech companies and what’s valuable tech-wise, they will stop wasting time on doing things that only benefit the large tech players and focus their efforts on doing things that will help them directly.
I think that we are doing a lot of free work that we don’t see and if we can instead do the things that actually matter the most to us, we’ll be better able to build up a strong creator middle class and allow people the freedom to expand deliberately instead of doing what they can to make all their numbers go up and try to make that as profitable as possible for themselves.
The first part of building your own internet? The Search Engine.
I’ll post a more in-depth look at search engines next week (I’m going to try to turn this into a weekly newsletter, possibly with a more structured format, but I’m still not 100% on that. Stay tuned.)
The Search Engine is the doorway to the internet. Think about how often you type something in your address bar, and that automatically goes to Google.
I don’t want to replace Google, though. I want to augment Google, by enabling people to give the same data to others, a playbook on how to use it, and how to use it faster and more accurately than Google does.
And by Google, I mean Bing. Because Bing offers a better API for using search than Google does, but ideally, I’d allow users to set their fallback according to preference. Google, ball is in your court.
I think building your own search engine offers a few key advantages, and I’ll be looking to prove those out over Q2. Specifically, I’ll be building a podcast network with a shared search engine that will allow participating podcast hosts to have access to the data and guidance on what it means and how they can use it. In addition, I’ll be using this initial dataset to reach out to potential sponsors for the network. I’d love to give sponsors a chance to be closer to a user’s intent so I can get them out of my podcasts.
I’ll be sharing more in-depth analysis, experiment structure and results, and some of the hypotheses I’m building from over the next quarter.
Q2 is all about the search engine, so let’s see what happens!
Guess we’ll find out.
(Yes that was totally a search pun, and no, I’m not sorry)
Shutting it down
Now on to other news, let’s talk shutdowns.
The big news last week (some of the big news? There seems to be big news constantly, doesn’t there?) was Twitter announcing their new API prices.
Now, I don’t know about you, but as a “hobbyist or student”, I didn’t have $100/month to throw around. For the number of products I launched that revolved around Twitter, I could probably afford about 2.5 months of API access, except the data I pulled wouldn’t fit into the basic tier, so instead, I would need to pay *checks notes* $42,000 per month.
Seeing that, I decided to just shut down all of my Twitter-related projects. I think this is the beginning of the end for Twitter. All of that development time that went into projects on Twitter can now be applied to other social media platforms (or, let’s be honest, AI tools).
And after I get the whole search engine piece released, I’ll work on social media algorithms as well. That will give people a starting point to build extensions to social networks that they can eventually use to move en masse as needed.
How Can You Get Involved?
I’m working on a number of ways to get the community involved. This will be an open-source project and I’ll be providing course materials for people to use so they can experiment with their own versions.
If you are a creator who wants to try out the search platform to give your audience an easy way to support you, reach out to me! Just reply to this email or DM me on Twitter.
Also, if you want to help on the open-source side of things, I’ll be setting up a Discord channel for that soon. Again, let me know and I’ll bring you in once I get things set up.
Finally, I’d love to get some people to test out the course materials and let me know what they think. I’m planning on it being a “pay what you want” sort of thing, likely via Gumroad, and I’ll be updating the materials as things evolve, but I’d love to get an early version out soon so I can start iterating. A test audience would be fantastic because that will help me get V1 out quicker.