A Daily Curation of the Web's Best Content for Startups

Billion Dollar Creator – Nathan Barry

Billion Dollar Creator

Shaan Puri and Sam Parr interview Nathan Barry of ConvertKit on the My First Million podcast.

The best part of this interview starts at 15:40.

They discuss Nathan Barry’s famous The Billion Dollar Creator framework. 

RULE #1: Build more than a personal brand
RULE #2: Sell products, not attention
RULE #3: Driver higher customer value through recurring or repeat purchases
RULE #4: Choose a better business model

Big Idea: Don’t sell attention to your audience. Sell your own products. 

Sponsored content is not that profitable. The best thing to do is to create your own product and to drive that attention to where you build equity long-term.

Best Shopify Stores: What We Can Learn from the Top 1k

Best Shopify Stores: What We Can Learn from the Top 1k

The Hustle created a Google spreadsheet of the top 1000 Shopify stores analyzing them by industry, tools they use, and SEO stats (referring domains, backlinks, and domain authority). There is some valuable information here if you are interested in creating an online store and what SEO effort would be required to compete against the established companies. Browse through the descriptions to see what is selling well online. Maybe you’ll discover a new opportunity.

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Startup Transparency is Great Marketing

Startup Transparency is Great Marketing

The Hustle has a short post about the open startup movement. It links to Pieter Levels monster post where he documents, in great detail, the process of building his Hoodmaps business to more than 300,000 users. This follows Gary Vaynerchuck’s idea of Document, Don’t Create. Rather than generic advice and platitudes, it’s a lot more valuable and interesting to read exactly how you built something. The press likes this, too. Documenting the process and key business metrics can be a great way to promote your business. Checkout Baremetrics for a list of companies openly sharing financial details. Business Opportunity: When an idea, like open startups, is clear and simple and is gaining traction there will be more newsletters, podcasts, conferences, apps, consulting, etc. around it. You’ll see.

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The man who has created 100+ pointless inventions

The man who has created 100+ pointless inventions

“What happened when one entrepreneur decided to share all of his crazy, rejected product ideas with the world.” Matty Benedetto has invented hundreds of largely useless inventions. His notoriety has earned him 555k Instagram followers and another 55k on YouTube. His typical invention costs less than $20 in 3D printer filament and 2 or 3 days to design.

Business Lessons: 

1. Prototyping new products is probably easier and faster than you might think, particularly if you do a lot of them.
2. Do interesting things if you want people to be interested in you. Taking it to the extreme like creating hundreds of pointless inventions can generate publicity and fans. The fact that sites like The Hustle are promoting Matty Benedetto proves that it works.
3. I’ve recently written about doing 100 projects in 100 days, or 12 Startups in 12 Months. Those are stories that people want to share. What can you do that will be of interest to others?

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Can you build a business around internet pranks?

Can you build a business around internet pranks?
“A new game via the company MSCHF is hitting the internet next month — and it involves a ton of free cash. Dubbed Card v. Card, it works like so: A bunch of players get free debit cards in the mail that are all linked to the same MSCHF bank account. MSCHF drops money into the account; players rush to spend it.”

Here are some of their past ideas:

– $1.8k “Jesus Shoes” (Nikes filled with holy water)
– A weed pipe fashioned to look like a rubber chicken
– A dog collar that morphs barks into swear words

No business idea is too crazy! In fact, crazier is probably better.
 

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