#26: Arvid Kahl - Growing audiences online

And any relationship that you might build on Twitter over many, many years still kind of belongs to Twitter.

All right. Welcome to another episode of Cyber Patterns. Today we have Arvid Kahlén. He is a founder, a writer, a creator, super genius mastermind of sorts. He's written 3 books, Zero to Sold, The Embedded Entrepreneur, and Find Your Following. Uh, we have a really wide-ranging discussion, Twitter, newsletters, uh, growing your audience and much more. I hope you enjoy. All right, sounds good. So yeah, uh, back to, um, kind of owned and borrowed audiences. Uh, and I saw you also export your email list. So if you could talk a little bit about that or explain why you do that and, and what is the difference between owned and borrowed audiences?

Oh yeah. So the difference between borrowed and owned audiences really is that a borrowed audience does not belong to you, right? If you are on a social media platform that is kind of connecting you with other people like Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, pretty much any platform where you can make an account, and then you log into that account and you build a following or you build relationships, the platform owns the relationships. They own not just the relationships, they own all the data really on that platform, right? Every tweet you send, you can export it, you can have a backup of it, you can kind of print it out or whatever, it's kind of yours. But the availability of the tweet, that is up to Twitter, right? Twitter decides if they show it, if your account is allowed to tweet or not. And any relationship that you might build on Twitter over many, many years still kind of belongs to Twitter. So any following, any audience you built on Twitter is essentially borrowed, like they lend you that that audience. Like if you have 100 followers, you actually have zero ways of connecting with these people outside of Twitter, if Twitter ever decides to disconnect you from their platform, right? If they ban your account because you said the wrong thing, or you did a— tried something through their API, you tried to build a tool that is too automated, and it's against their terms, they can strike you out. And you have no way of connecting with those people. Now, an owned audience is the opposite of that. An owned audience is a group of people that you have a direct way of communicating that is unmediated, right? You can talk to these people, like an actual owned audience would be you knowing people really well, right? If you are in a local community and people know you, nobody can take that away from you. You know each other and transpose that into a digital realm. If you have an email list and you can write an email to these people's email address, nobody can take away that list. You have that list, right? So owning An audience means owning the means of communicating with them directly. And what I've seen a lot of creators doing eventually is turning their borrowed audience, which is usually much bigger than an email list because it's so easy to get followers on Twitter comparatively, of course, to an email list. It's still hard to find followers, but it's, it's much easier to just have somebody click a follow button than it is easy for them to hand over their email address to you. Right? And what people do to build a sustainable business out of being a creator on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, wherever, is they try to funnel their existing audience on that platform that is borrowed into an email list. They try to get a means of getting hold of them outside of the platform that they built their audience on, just as a diversification. It's like a backup strategy for relationships. That's really what it is. And that to me is something that a creator can't do early enough because A, you never know what's gonna happen on the platform, right? You're never gonna, you can never clearly say that your account is gonna be around a couple weeks from now 'cause you just don't know. And an audience that you own is an audience that you can reach at any time, right? You can even tell them, hey, I'm off Twitter now, I'm now on LinkedIn, and you can send them an email. And now all of a sudden you have a high chance that those people might follow you there. So it's just more control. It's owning the means of communication. And that is— it's a pretty strong move towards more control over your own business.

100%. I definitely found that true. Having an email list is amazing. It's a lot more personal way of talking to people as well and individually. And I mean, I feel, I feel safer. Just the fear of, you know, if something happens to my Twitter account, you know, I still have an email list with a substantial amount of people that that read my work and whatnot. So yeah, I want to jump into from there kind of just the choose your own adventure like we were talking about for a second before. So I started out kind of curating other people's content, some bigger Twitter people, Alex Lieberman from Morning Brew and people like that that I really respected. And then as I curated, I started creating my own. But every now and then I still use a quote from somebody else to inspire me to write it. And I definitely do the connector and commentating as well, just commenting and connecting people. So I think, what was your journey? And how do you think— what do you think is the best way for people to do that?

Oh, yeah. So the 4 archetypes that I have found is creator, connector, commenter, and curator, right? So these are the 4 things that kind of have this productive facade to them, right? There's something that comes out of that. And then there's the 5th one, which is just a consumer, somebody who reads whatever these things are, right? Reads those tweets, reads those blog posts, watches those videos. And that's who most people are. And that's kind of what I used to be for the longest time, particularly on Twitter. So I have a Twitter account that is like, at this point, like 12 years old or something. It's been around for a long while. And I didn't have many, many followers until like 2019. Like for a solid 10-ish years, I built an audience of like 100-some people. I really, because I just didn't contribute. I didn't participate. I just consumed. And then, of course, there's stuff that happened between these two times between starting the Twitter account and starting to use Twitter seriously. I built a couple businesses that failed hilariously. And then I built one that actually worked out, which is nice. And from that, I had the opportunity to start talking to other people in the field more and become more of a mentor, a teacher, consultant, than just a business owner. And that kind of turned into me using Twitter more as a means of communicating with people, because all founders in the software engineering space or in the software business space, the indie hacker space, they are on Twitter, or many of them are at least. So that's very convenient to build an audience of them to be able to teach them something, because that's what I wanted to do, right? I was building my business on the shoulders of giants, then I succeeded. So I kind of wanted to be a person that would teach them like I was taught by other people. That's kind of what I wanted to do. So I started using Twitter. And when I did that, I at the same time started blogging because I felt after selling a business, I co-founded a software as a service business called Feedback Panda with my partner and we ran it for 2 years, grew it to $55,000 MRR, and then we sold it for a life-changing amount of money. And after that, I had nothing. It was the weirdest thing. It was really an extremely strange situation to be in. You have this business that is kind of your lifeblood, gives you passion, gives you purpose, you see impact, right? You help people and they have a better time. They can do their job easier. They can spend more time with their family. You wouldn't believe how much that changed my perspective on what valuable work is. We built that business. And through doing that, I had a fun time. It was awesome. And we had this amazing exit. But we sold the company, we gave it away. And I felt like I was meaningless. Like my life had very little meaning, because all the things that I've had been doing for the last 2 years at that point when we sold in 2019 was now done by somebody else. And those people didn't just get my business, they got my purpose as well. So I fell into this void of purpose and I felt I need to do something. I need to find a way of getting back to doing something meaningful. And I tried online gaming. That was a bust, I can tell you that. Like I played World of Warcraft for like 2 weeks and then what had been a passion of mine for many years before I was probably not even just borderline, but like fully addicted to that game at some point in the past. It just didn't work again. Like I tried again and it didn't work anymore because the passion that I felt for helping people through my business was something that I never thought possible before. And it just leveled up the baseline for purpose. So I tried to find something else and I thankfully found writing. To be that thing. So I started the blog, I then started the newsletter to keep myself accountable. And then I started the podcast because some people didn't like reading. So now here I'm juggling all these things. And in writing, I found a way to communicate what I always wanted to do, which is help people like where they're at with their problems. Just turned out that I'm also good at helping founders, where before I was helping online English teachers with our SaaS business, right? That was our audience for that. And this new audience for founders and software entrepreneurs, that was the place that I was now finding for myself. And so initially, I just really wrote articles and talked about them on Twitter. So I think I would consider myself a creator from the start, like to answer your question 5 minutes into my response. So like, I think I was a creator first, and then I kind of experimented with the other things as well. Like I curated other people's resources because obviously my knowledge is built on the knowledge of others. So I kind of pulled that in. I started commenting on people's work and I then try to also connect to community. I think I'm all for the strong focus on being a creator because I still put out creative work every week. And also being a connector in the community because I feel this community that I'm in the IndieHackers software entrepreneur creator economy community, that has been the most wonderful group of people I have ever met in my life. Like the most aligned, the most supportive, the most encouraging people that don't hate on each other, even though there is some envy sometimes, they still support each other. It's an incredible community. And I want that community to thrive and to grow. So I focus on, you know, building relationships, inviting people to conversations and that stuff. But most of it, I think, is still being a creator because I think I have some things to share. And every week I come up with at least one of them. So, you know, as long as that is still working, I think I'll, stay a creator.

No, that's fantastic. I think something you had going for you with Twitter, like, in the beginning was you did something cool. Like, there are so many kids who are 16, 17, 18, 19 who haven't done cool shit yet, you know. They're not even just building a business, they haven't traveled, they haven't graduated high school, they maybe they're like, you know, they haven't even had their first kiss yet, for God's sake. Like, and they're trying to teach everybody about life. And so that's, that's when I think it's great for the curator and the commenter is like, you could still build a following or audience and make friends and build a community, but like, you know, or just share your learnings, you know, curate knowledge. And this isn't everybody. I know some 18-year-olds who are geniuses, absolutely geniuses and smarter than I'll ever be. But, you know, it's interesting to see. And then something else I also thought about, yeah, just the 5, I guess the 5 C's, that's so brilliantly put. It's so interesting how some of my friends are consumers and some are creators, and I just feel so much more passionate and such a stronger relationship with my creator friends, just a genuine connection of like, oh, we're doing this together. We are playing the great online game and we are teammates. We are not against each other. Even in the crypto community, there's definitely some competition over who won what or gets the money, but at the end of the day, we're just so friendly and helping each other all learn. Man, I didn't know this kind of thing existed in the world. And having this internet community for me has been extremely life-changing.

So yeah, and it has been life-changing for most of my adult life, if that is the right phrase. Like, I think I started hanging out on the internet back in like 2003, like 2003, right? Or even earlier than that. I lived in a small town in Germany, smallish, right? Like a town where not everyone is like me, not everybody was interested in the things that I was doing and the people around me certainly weren't. But it was like the nascent era of the internet when Napster was big, you know, and then people started chatting in chat rooms online. And I found people from my city in various different locations that were like me and they were my peers and we connected through the web. Back then. And then I learned how to code well. And, you know, I built a, like a community or was part of communities around that. And that's been there ever since, like even World of Warcraft, even online gaming was a big part of my life. Because it, A, allowed me as a German kid to learn how to speak English, like in front of people and to communicate clearly what I wanted. And it also gave me a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging. So I wasn't like doing other weird things that kids do, you know, like that. It just gave me a place where I could have conversations with people that cared about the same things that I did. And I've always looked for these communities. And now that I'm in this, I would call it privileged position, right? I am in a financially stable situation. I am building a media business talking about the things that I want to talk about. That is, I feel extremely privileged. Now I get to build these communities with others and for others. That's awesome. And that's wonderful. And seeing people finding those communities and finding out that they are able to align with people much more than they ever thought. Like you just said, like with your creator-driven friends, if you feel much stronger about your relationship with them, that is a clear sign of alignment, right? You both want the same thing. You want to grow, you want to contribute, you want to make the world or whatever part of it you care about a better place. That is aligned. Consumers really aren't that aligned with that mission, right? They just take it in and then they have other things they want to do. There's no value judgment here. Everybody has their own things they care about. But if you find people that care about the same things, those relationships just, they are win-win-win, right? They win for you, win for them and for everybody else that gets to benefit from that, which is awesome. And which is why I love talking to people in that space like you just now, right? Because I can just feel you want to do stuff. And that is awesome. That's just a wonderful thing. Yeah, I'm very happy that I found this community. I can tell you that.

100%. When I first started on Twitter, I thought that my audience would just be consumers kind of thing, you know, like, uh, like, you know, think about like an influencer or whatever who do on TikTok and it's just people consuming content. And I didn't realize that my audience and more just my community would be a bunch of creators. And that's who my friends would be. And my, the people who most supported my content are people who are making it and understand that. Um, and so speaking of that, um, you know, I've seen you release several books, um, I— what's been your process for writing, I guess, and what's kind of been your process for publishing as well?

Hmm, I have— initially, I had no process whatsoever. I was just like blogging, really, I was writing blog posts. And then I figured out— some people told me, hey, this looks like it's parts of a cohesive thing. Can you look into this? Because they wanted to see it more structured, then I kind of structured it into like a guide, step-by-step kind of situation where I would link to my articles from like a a central document. And then somebody told me, hey, this looks like a book, I would buy this. And then I was like, okay, I guess I'm writing a book then. And then I wrote the rest of the thing that turned out to be the book. So the first book happened really by accident or by community feedback, really, that was more— the accident was me not understanding what people actually wanted. And then they told me, so I knew. The second one I wrote was more of an intentional effort. And it kind of grew out of the feedback that I got about the first book. People were asking me specific questions about all kinds of things in Zero to Sold, my first book, which is detailing the whole story of the business that I talked about earlier, right? From beginning to actually exiting it. And people were always asking me, or most people were asking me about one thing, which is like, I'm really struggling with finding the right audience for my business. So I wrote The Embedded Entrepreneur, which is about like figuring out how to find the right audience, how to find their problems and then solve it with and for them, right? That's the idea behind the book. And that book I wrote in public. I wrote a couple thousand words every day. And I posted them as blog posts throughout the weeks. And the moment I had my first draft done, which took me a month and back in 2020, I invited a couple hundred beta readers. So I always really focused on community involvement. Because I know that if I write for these people, well, why then would I not involve them in the process? Why would I make it all about guessing what they want to hear? When I could just ask them, right? So I had hundreds of people tell me their opinion about my book. And I can tell you that that was not easy to deal with. Because hundreds of opinions, you know, trying to figure out which ones have bigger weight and impact the product in a good way. That was a lot of work. But yeah, community involvement has always been part of what I— when it comes to the things I do. My blog posts that I write every week, the videos that I do, which is essentially me reading blog posts into this Find Camera here. And you know, like all these things are very community driven. The topics I source from the community, the feedback I work into it. That's, that's how I write my books and do my courses. And I really enjoy the process, can tell you that definitely is wonderful. Because, you know, it gives you this immediacy. It's not that I'm doing this in my ivory tower. I'm doing it like, right in between people.

Yeah, I think that's amazing. I never heard the term beta readers. I love that. I have to do that with some of my blog posts or my newsletter and send it to people. And I think that's something as well. Like when I used to think of an artist, I used to think of, you know, somebody like Van Gogh who would isolate himself or whatever. And the best artists like the, you know, the F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, like they all hung out together. Like those guys were hanging out in France during the '40s. Like artists, like a big part of art is having a community of like people who will give you feedback that isn't just from your mom, you know, it's feedback from people who give you the the straight truth, you know, about your work or about what they think of it. And cause that's like, I guess they understood it just as just what I was understanding, which is, you know, your audience a lot of time is other creators, you know, it's the consumers, like they don't want the, they want the mainstream and this is the creators want more than that. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool. Beta readers.

I love that. I wanna go back to one thing you just said that the, essentially the monomyth, right? The story of the lonesome hero. That is a story that we keep telling ourselves that is just not true, right? Everything, every successful person in some capacity, huge or small, is depending on a support network of sorts. And in our case, it's other creators. In some people's, it's their spouses that keep their backs clear so they can do the work and all, you know, like you have so many stories. Of somebody doing something great. But it's not just that person. And I think if artists start to understand that they don't have to hide away and create the perfect work, like they can share unfinished drafts, and the people who resonate with that will resonate even more with the polished thing. If it becomes clear that you don't have to be perfect to be good, which is obvious, right? It's an obvious thing that perfection is not a relevant criterion to be good or to be valued or to be perceived as somebody who's contributing to the ongoing conversation. But we have this story, this kind of hero's journey arc that we always read in books of the one person through which eyes, to whose eyes we see the story evolve. But even Frodo had a lot of people helping him, right? Like the hero's journey is quite literally not about Frodo. It's about the fellowship. And the fellowship is a group of people, different people, but all with the same goal. And I think that's kind of how I see the creator community because not— you're also right, like we don't really do this for consumers. We do this for other creators, but they are our consumers. There is an overlap here, right? We help people help other people. That's this kind of— yeah, it mixes the roles a little bit. And I would love to say that my audience are consumers who have yet to understand that they're actually creators. Because I would like to see more people like taking up the charge of creating things to make other people's lives better. I would love that. So it's a kind of balance there for me. I don't know, how is it for you? Who would you think is your like audience in terms of the type of person that they are?

Yeah, I would say somebody who is not constantly online, but very online, very digital, like a digital native, a lot of the time crypto native. Just, I write for my full-time job is a staff reporter for The Defiant, which is a Web3 media company. So a lot of my audiences come from, from that work and the crypto work. And then others, it's just, just internet people who are on the internet a little too much, and like myself, um, and, and definitely creators as well. I mean, I talk a lot about patterns that, that help On Twitter, patterns that help kind of throughout, you know, throughout the internet and growing and making friends and people who, I guess one thing like people who don't think it's weird to make friends on the internet. That's like a huge, huge thing. And you know, that's, yeah, that's definitely what I found. I also find like the ideal consumer or ideal reader for me a lot of time is somebody like just one or two of my friends. That's kind of who I think about. I don't think about everyone. I think of like, well, my close friend, you know, who I think has similar tastes and a similar life as me to some degree.

Oh, that's a great idea. And any kind of writing, I found that either picturing a person that you know really well reading this and writing for them, or just picturing yourself a couple of years ago, like in a position where you didn't know the things you know today, but would have loved to know them back then because obviously you learned them ever since, right? So there was an interest in them. So that is a great writing target. Also important, it's really important to write for a specific person. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you bring that up. Because I think most creating boils down to writing in some capacity, right? Doesn't matter if you do a YouTube video, or even if you design something, writing the concept of like creating an abstraction and then turning that abstraction into a consumable thing, right? Doesn't have to be text, could be anything else. That as a process is something that everybody should try to become better at. So knowing who you're creating for, who you're writing for, who you're designing for, that is a central thing. Interesting. Thanks for bringing that up though. I find that that definition that you said of people who don't mind making friends online or for whom it is not weird, that is really, really true.

Yeah.

That is a subset of humanity, a pretty sizable one and a growing one too, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely growing. I mean, I don't know, man. Like, I don't know if I just had an advantage because my mom and stepdad met on the internet and like when I was 11, 10 or 11. And I've just always had that in me where it's like, oh, if you could make, you know, meet a partner on the internet or, you know, friends at college are, you know, dating on Tinder. I've gone on dates on Tinder. Like, you know, like why can't you make a friend like that? That seems so, so obvious. But it also like people find it very weird that I make friends on Twitter. Um, but I just don't usually hang out with the people.

Who are those people? Who are those people that find it weird? Like, are those people that are not as digitally native as us? Is that it?

Yeah. I would say, I would say kind of, um, people whose jobs just don't need or rely on the internet or, um, very kind of old-fashioned in that way. Uh, and, and even just some college people, like they, uh, like old college friends from— I went to Rutgers for a time. And they just think that it's very strange and can't understand that. And even my girlfriend thought it was strange and then she started understanding it. And then we hung out with my internet friends and she's like, oh, you just like, you make friends on here because you're on here a lot. And it makes sense. Like, I don't know. But yeah, people who, whose careers don't rely on social media kind of thing a lot of the time. But yeah.

And that's fine too, right? It's fine for people to not immediately understand the social dynamics of a medium they don't frequent, right? That's all right. But yeah, I remember too, I talked about this earlier, right? 2001, 2002, I was already like in online communities that regularly met. Like we were doing IRC chat room meetups in our area where we would just hang out and barbecue. People coming up from all over the country, like back in Germany, just to hang out because we were talking to each other online every single day. We often didn't even know our first names, like the real names that we had. We're just like pseudonyms or nicknames all the time. But that didn't matter. Like to most people, honestly, I only know them by nickname. And that is fine. Still friends and much stronger friends too than the people that I was kind of randomly assigned in school, right? School friends are people like friends by necessity because you have I have no selection outside of that. But the people that I met online at the time, and I'm still in contact with, the connection that was forged just from having such strong interest alignment, that endured the test of time. I barely know anybody from school anymore. I don't know how it is for you, but I don't have to. I have found more goal-aligned or interest-aligned friends, and I still find them very easily, particularly now. That I have a bit of a stronger reputation too, right? It's easier to make friends if, you know, you have a presence. So it comes with a couple of drawbacks, but, you know, it's still, it is easier. So how is that for you? Like, how are your high school friendships? Are they still happening or?

No, I mean, definitely suffering and not a bad thing at all. Like, you know, those friends were assigned, they were friends by location, necessity, whatever. Like, I mean, I make most of my friends off the internet now and I don't see a problem with that. It's people who are aligned with my interests and yeah, I mean, I'm 100% cool with it. So that's good. Yeah, no, it's, it makes me happy. Yeah. But you said something real quick, drawbacks of having a larger audience. What have you found?

Well, the risk is always that there's, there are things called parasocial relationships, right? The idea that somebody might think they have a stronger relationship with you than actually exists. And every celebrity has this. And I'm, again, like, not— I'm not saying that I am a celebrity. I don't want to be. But as an example, a celebrity like a movie actor, the people— you would recognize them on the street, they wouldn't recognize you, right? So the fact that you think you may have an existing relationship because you've seen them many, many times, they don't know you. They don't know you existed before the moment you walked into their life. So any thought that you may have had about an existing relationship is parasocial. It's not a real thing. It's an imaginary friend. I guess parasocial relationships are the imaginary friends of the internet age. You have a connectivity, well, a connection with certain people and they don't have a connection back at you. The strength is just different. So the risk here is that people involve you in their lives in a way that kind of makes you feel weird, right? They talk to you as if you were a friend or even just a person that they would know or you would know them. And it kind of makes you feel you owe them something because apparently there is a relationship, but you forgot. Is it my fault? Like, there are a lot of these weird situations where people talk to me as if we had talked before, but we hadn't. They've just seen me on YouTube. Or on Twitter for years and have built this kind of expectation that I would have seen them too. And for some people, that's true. With some people, and most people that I interact with, I have a pretty good memory for social interactions. I will remember what happened, but sometimes I don't. And then if you are in a position where they think you remember and you don't, it's super weird. And it can quickly turn from weird into aggression. Because if people, people's identity is often bundled up with the relationships that they're in, right? If my friend is this other person and they completely forget who I am. Who am I again, right? You start doubting your own self-identification. So if that happens, and a person gets upset at you for not responding in a way that happened, that can quickly turn into online trolling, online harassment, or, you know, people trying to stalk you. These things, not many of these have happened to me, but I've seen them happen to a lot of people in similar positions. And there's a wonderful article by Tim Ferriss, a person that is highly highly renowned in the community and very, very exposed. And he talks about the drawbacks of fame, really. Like when he travels, he travels under a different name so that when there are people at the airport that hold up a sign saying Tim Ferriss, he knows that these people are going to abduct him, right? That is the kind of level of fame that I never want to reach. And I don't even want to get close to this, that I have to travel under a fake name to not risk abduction. Like who wants to live that life? Life, right? So it's this whole thing, you want to be rich but not famous, instead of the other way around, like very famous but have no money. So I kind of aim more towards the building wealth, but building it within the community, instead of having like this general fame appeal, and then having to be exposed to all these things. But yeah, people, besides parasocial relationships, people just start spamming you, try to scam you, try to get something out of the potential relationship. They ask you for favors. You know, there's a lot of I get hundreds of DMs on Twitter every day, which is annoying because most of them are just trash. Twitter does a pretty good job filtering them. But even with people that I follow, there's sometimes something that comes through that is just really disturbing, distracting, or causes me to lose my train of thought or whatever it is. There's just a lot of potential for abuse in this whole situation.

Got you. Yeah, that Tim Ferriss article is fascinating. And definitely, I had an NFT as my profile picture for quite a while, and it was, it was kind of based on that, which is like, I don't really want that many people to— like, I don't want to be recognized like on the street ever. Like, that doesn't sound good, but like, at the same time, I do want to build a brand around myself, and I've moderated panels. I want to keep doing that and doing the podcast. So it's, it's a, it's definitely a drawback. I've, I've definitely settled on like the— I really want respect in my industry, which I think I'm getting, and that's good by me. Like, I don't, you know, like, big in the industry, but I don't want that. That full fame is terrifying, you know?

Yes. And what good does it bring, right? You get— you might get a couple more things for free because, you know, people want to attach their brands to you even more. Although you will get that as an expert in an industry to begin with, right? I get requests for sponsored content all the time. And I usually shoot them down because the only thing that I let people sponsor is like my newsletter, podcast, or YouTube thing. Like I don't do sponsored tweets where I can highlight other people's stuff and they pay me money in secret or something. I don't want to do this. But there are opportunities for this because I'm already kind of exposed within my community. But that's where I want to keep it. I want to keep it at the point where I can say no to a couple of things and live my life. Right? I don't want to, I don't want to have to buy like sunglasses to hide my face in public. Never, right? That's just something I don't think anybody really aspires to. Kind of feels like this is like nobody wants that to happen. So, and also by the way, the fact that you contain it in a particular industry also makes it so much more manageable, you know, because your expertise in Web3 or my expertise in audience building while we could reach out to other fields and like apply it there, we don't need to. Our fields are growing, right? The Web3 community, the Twitter audience building, or just general software entrepreneur community. These are communities that keep adding new people into the mix every single day. We could just like latch on to the growth of the community and grow our own brands, grow whatever we want to sell, whatever we want to do, whatever we want to impact. Like just from that, we don't need to go bigger, the thing grows with us just hooking into it. So I think you're making a very good choice by doing this and also making a very good choice by being approachable as a human being in that community. Web3 in particular with the whole NFT situation has this, in my eyes, weird, what would you say this like, this weird distinction between the person and the, the visual representation of the person. In most communities, you have an avatar picture, which is like headshot of yours, right? That's who you are, like your face. And that's your picture. In the NFT community, there is a certain kind of credibility that comes with having a rare NFT there, particularly if you're in the Bored Apes kind of situation, right? Or any comparable, like, collection that is very renowned, very popular. But then there's also the whole, oh, this is a human being and I can trust their face situation. And those two are hard to coordinate because either you want to show how good you are at NFTs or you want to show how good you are at human. You can't really have both at the same time unless you have a Twitter header image or something. You know, I digress. The idea is that in most communities, just having a real picture of the real you, professional picture, signals just professional, professional approach, or just relatable human approach. And I would highly recommend doing this to every person that wants to build a reputation in any field, like a real face and a real name is probably a good idea if you want to build expertise or become an expert in the field.

100%. I find it really interesting. Some people choose to do NFT profile pictures of themselves. Like they mint an NFT of their own picture, which is like, it's kind of an interesting mix. Yeah.

But it loses a certain appeal, right? Because it's not the NFT that shows that you are, that you were in with Apes, or you have a cool cat or whatever the big thing is today, right? That's the idea is to signal that you are kind of one of the early adopters and having a picture of yourself that nobody else wants. Kind of defeats the whole purpose. I agree. But it's kind of cool. I mean, particularly on Twitter, where you have the hexagonal shape, that is kind of a nice novelty. And it definitely shows which community you belong to. Because nobody outside the NFT adjacent communities would even recognize an NFT as a profile picture. Because they just think, okay, that's a weird picture, but I don't care. Right? Anybody who doesn't have any contact with the the medium.

Fair enough. Hey, I have had a great time. My girlfriend just got back with lunch, but this has been excellent. I'm gonna just keep on reading your posts, man, because I find a lot of wisdom in it and just like mental models that are helpful. Well, thank you, Jason Levin. Which I'm always looking for. So thank you so much for your time.

Pleasure. Yeah. Always nice to chat. Let's do that again at some point.

All right. Sounds good.