How to Productize Yourself as a Writer

Actually, like, there's very little you can learn from the best because the best person is so far ahead of you that you, it's just like, it's like someone saying, hey, I can teach you how to run a four minute mile. It's like, okay, I'm good. Thanks, you know.

Welcome to the digital writing podcast where we talk about using writing to capture, keep and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. Thanks everyone for joining. Very excited. For today's webinar, we have Sahil Avinga from Gumroad. He is the founder of Gumroad and the author of the Minimalist Entrepreneur, which we're going to dig into a ton today. Quite a few bullet points here on my list, so let's just. We can skip backgrounds, skip right into it. So, Sahil, why don't you describe the minimalist entrepreneur approach in your mind, what that means, what that kind of encapsulates. And then where I want to go with it is what writers can learn from them, how there's overlap between the most successful minimalist entrepreneurs that you've seen, successful people on Gumroad writing, and then we'll just kind of jam on all that.

Totally. Yeah. So I think the, the sort of encapsulation of the minimalist entrepreneur kind of framework or approach is, is sort of just like how to, how to, how to succeed without, you know, eventually as a kind of, as an entrepreneur instead of as a kind of, you know, per business. Because I think businesses do have like a high risk profile, like you're probably not going to succeed the first time around, but that's okay because who cares if your business works? Like, what's important is that ultimately you find yourself, you know, where you want to, where you want to be financially independent, et cetera. So yeah, that's kind of like the sort of the through line of the whole thing. And so it starts with kind of like starting with community, which is kind of, I think sort of the number one mistake people make actually is they build something without actually like a market in mind, a set of customers in mind, and then it goes through kind of like what does the MVP look like in terms of building, in terms of selling, in terms of marketing? Like, what's the high leverage? You know, like the COVID of the book is, is leverage, basically. So, like, what is the high leverage approach to all of these things that you have to do to scale kind of a business and in the way that I do it. I'm sort of extreme, probably, but, you know, Gumroad is. Is, you know, over 10 million ARR. And with zero employees, basically, like no meetings, no deadlines. We just kind of work in this async way. I hire in an async way. I fire in an async way. A ton of writing. Writing is kind of a key component of this whole thing because that's how you scale generally, either writing code or writing words. One of those two generally is how you scale. So that's some of, I think, what the book is kind of about. And the minimalist entrepreneurs is about just kind of this idea of like, starting with a group of people and. And building out from there the minimum that you would need at every step, and then you can always do more over time as you figure out, you know, what. What people want from you, basically. What are.

What are some of the ways that you've seen either since starting Gumroad or things that you notice now that allow people to test? Like, how do people find those ideas?

Yeah, I mean, I think the. The beauty of the Internet is like, you can. There are so many thriving communities that you can kind of just enter and basically go from zero to one, like, incredibly, incredibly quickly. Um, and I would actually recommend not doing it on Twitter necessarily. Like, I would go on subreddits or Craigslist or meetups and find, you know, these ongoing communities that are already, you know, already existed for a long time and just ask questions and, like, you can, you know, like, literally you go to, I don't know, like, the writing subreddit and, like, you can ask a question about writing and, like, literally 100 people will respond and tell you basically all the problems that they have. And you can do this for, like, painters, you can do this for people who are into pottery. You can do this for startup founders, you can do this for designers, engineers, writers, podcasters. Like, pick any group of people and you can. There's a list of problems that they have, and you just need to ask them. And, you know, you don't even have to ask them actually anymore. Like, you can just read about what they're already saying. And I think that's really key. Like, there's just so many people who, like, you know, say, oh, I want to, like, build a business, and so I'm going to build, like, a to do list app, right? And it's like, well, for who? You know, like, for painters. Like, you could build something very specific to them. That might be appealing, but if you're Building. I call it kind of like the fusion restaurant problem, which is like, no one wants to eat at a fusion restaurant, right? You want to, you want to eat at like, I want to go get steak from a steakhouse or I want to get a burger from a burger place. Like, the more generic, you know, And I think that's, that's tempting because as you get started, you're like, well, I need to serve everyone. You know, I don't want to say no to a customer. I don't have any customers. But inherently, when you're for everybody, you end up being basically for nobody. Like, no one is going to find that you're find themselves attracted to you because you haven't alienated. I think part of the process is alienating all the people who aren't going to be fits for you, your business. You're writing and you want to do that out of the gate. And the more you can alienate people, the better. And the more the people who aren't alienated by you will be attracted to you and be like, oh, wow, I found the right person for me. This is the person I want to learn writing from, right? And everyone has like a different personality, different voice, different way of going about it. Like, for example, I write these like long form essays. You might write tweets, you might write Twitter threads, which is kind of like this other format that's emerged the last, like, you know, little while. Like, I don't really do Twitter threads. And so like, you have to kind of find what works for you. And anyway, that's, that's kind of how I would approach it. And like, what's magical about today is you, you should have like a list of like a million problems that people are having that you could solve and then build a business around. Like, they're out there and people are sharing them all the time. You know, like, just go into your Google history or go into your bank account, credit or credit card statement. You literally will have a list of problems that you have that you are either paying someone for or you are paying for it, either with money or with your time, you know, so it's like you just have to kind of prime your brain to notice, like, oh, wow, I have this problem. I would probably pay money for it. I should build it and then sell it to people like myself, you know, just like writing, right? Like, why do you write? You're like, well, I learned something and I wish I knew this thing before I had to learn it. So I'm going to write, you know, an essay and share it with the world so that I can save everybody else some time.

Right.

Kind of a similar, very similar philosophy in Hollywood. It's kind of the same question everyone asks is like what's, what's the demo?

Right.

Basically like who are you? Is it four to eight year old girls? Is, you know, is it like young adults? That's not specific enough. Like you have to be way more specific. And so, you know, it just, I think it's just a really important skill to be like who are you really, really, really building for? And the only. I think you just won't make a lot of mistakes when you get started. Like you'll end up writing for too many people or too few people. And you just need that kind of trial and error to get out of your system to, to have like the good kind of good ideas.

You know, there's a, there's a couple of threads I'd love to tie together here because I think you're touching on a lot of really important points that we talk about all the time within ship 30 as well. So one is. I'm going to drop this in the chat if you haven't read this. Sahil, this essay you wrote in 2019 reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company. I remember reading this. I came across this three years ago when you wrote it. I found it fascinating. I was also going through a similar thing. I was trying to build a. More my first company and I was feeling depressed every day that I wasn't building a billion dollar company. So if you haven't read this essay, I highly recommend reading it. Cause it's, it's a fantastic reframe. But the thing that I think is important to hit on is even your book title is a. Is a Niche down right? Cause the book isn't called the Great Entrepreneur. The book isn't called, you know, the. The Entrepreneur. Right. That's very broad. The book is called the Minimalist Entrepreneur. And there's a very specific part in the brain where people are organizing their book saying if I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to learn how to do more with less. I read this and if I want to be a different type of entrepreneur, I read something different. And I think I just want to share that as this framing where I think it's really interesting and maybe this was a very conscious decision. It sounds like it from this essay where somewhere along the line you made the decision for yourself. I started out as an entrepreneur broadly and then I made the decision to niche down and Become a minimalist entrepreneur. And even the way you describe Gumroad, you know, we hire Async, we fire Async. These are the rules of my niche, you know. So I'd just love to hear a bit from you on how you've made that decision consciously for yourself and how you've created a category for yourself as an entrepreneur. Because now everyone knows you and Gumroad as this thing.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think ultimately it's. It's a back and forth between just observing what you're doing and then trying to frame it for yourself so you can actually do it better. And you can also find people who affiliate with. With that. You know, like, initially, when I was trying to build a billion dollar company, it was the only option. It was like, this is the process in which you build companies. Today, if you just Google how to build a company, you'll find tons of that Peter Thielian rhetoric, which is fine, nothing wrong with it. But then, yeah, basically what I realized was there are a couple things I realized. One is there's no limit to, you know, it's not like you hit a number like a billion dollars and you're like, cool, I'm done. Like, I feel great. I can retire. You know, I'm a successful person. I can hang out with Bill Gates now or whatever. Like, that looks like what I learned was actually it's. It goes on forever, right? Like, being satisfied is. Is actually a kind of a personal decision that you have to decide to be, basically. And when I realized that, I was like, well, okay, then I'm never going to be happy if I'm always looking for something greater than that. And it only gets worse because, like, the people you compare yourself to are farther and farther away as you become more successful, actually. And so, yeah, I had to kind of reframe it for myself and say, okay, like, what do I really want? Did I get it? And I did. I think I, you know, I got a sustainable business that serves customers. Customers seem to like it, it pays all of my bills. So I can kind of do whatever the heck want. I can be a creative. I can write, I can paint, I can draw, I can do anything. And that was definitionally successful, even though it wasn't sort of successful in the way that I initially thought. And that, that's a lot of what I try to. When I write. I try to look for sort of the. I. I call it the sort of surprising but inevitable where like, you read something and you're like, obviously, right. Like, you kind of you're like, I should. I knew this the whole time. You didn't teach me anything. Like, obviously, you know, failing to build a billion dollar company, it's not really a failure because it's like a stupid idea in the first place. Like, very few people would consider it a failure. It's like, I failed to go to the moon today or something. You know, it's like, not really a failure. I mean, no one did, you know, but, but, but like when you highlight it, you kind of, you, you kind of point to this observation that many people missed, which is like, oh, yeah, it's kind of weird that we all rally around the unicorn. Like this very, very specific idea that I think is sort of flawed or at least has some nuance to it that we don't always talk about. And I think that's why it resonated with people. And it also shows kind of a development.

Right.

Like, one of the things I think that works really well specifically about that article, is that it starts out with like, Sahil when he was 19 years old or 18 or whatever in2011, like quitting his job at Pinterest, which is like a very different. Like, I like, speak of him in the third person because it's like, not me, you know, Like, I would not tweet about, like, I have a billion dollar idea today, you know. And so I think that is also like something that's incredibly appealing to people is actual real character growth. Like, why do you like your. Your favorite characters on Netflix? Like, why do you like them? It's because they suffered and then they're better for it and they're smarter and wiser and you know, like, that's why we write, read stories. It's like, we like stories like that, right? The hero's journey sort of thing. And so I think that also kind of highlighted that, which is like, wow, like, Sahel 10 years ago was kind of a douchebag and now he's a little bit more well rounded or whatever.

Right.

And so I think there are a.

Few figuring things out.

Yeah. Like, everybody, you know, everyone is, is on this journey, which is why, again, it resonates, is because everyone is on this journey, you know, um, and you have to kind of work, work. And, and, and it hurts. Like, there's only. There's only one way to learn, which is like pain. You know, it's uncomfortable, it's painful. It's. It's not stuff that you would necessarily sign up for, but it is kind of necessary. And if you can write about it. You know, one of the reasons it does resonate with so many people is because, like, they're. They're glad that you went through it. You know, it's like, I'm glad you did that. I'm glad you wrote about it, because I don't want to do that, you know, and so I'll just read about it and share it, and it's cool. And so it's almost kind of like a thank you in a way that I think some of the, like, how I think about engagement on the Internet is often like, in that. In that framing.

So if I were to summarize, it kind of sounds like you started in a broad category. Entrepreneurship, Build a billion dollar company. There's like a way of thinking. Peter Thiel, unicorns, et cetera. And then you almost became a professional noticer in recognizing this wasn't for you or the way most people think about this thing is flawed or not for everyone. But then instead of just kind of accepting that you wrote about it and attracted other people who are interested in it and just added a level of specificity that I think a lot of people potentially on this call listening wouldn't be comfortable doing this idea of niching down or eliminating readers or whatever it is. It takes it. It's very uncomfortable because by definition, you're making your total adjustable market less. But that is something we talk about from the very beginning. It's only when you're uncomfortably specific that you are onto something. And specificity can go just about as far as you want to make it. So when you think about that, do you. You probably see a ton of early creators on Gumroad, ones that are very successful. And I mean, talk about niche products. If you just kind of go through the Gumroad page, you're gonna find niche products and niche solutions. So how would you advise someone who's maybe looking at this, listening to this and thinking, yeah, but not for me, because my niche is this or whatever.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Specificity. Specificity is definitely kind of probably a theme. Like, you want to be as specific as it takes to be the best, right? Like, the best way to be the best is to just like, find a smaller pond.

To be the only.

Yeah, to be the only. Exactly. To be the best. You should just be the only. Being the only is much easier than being the best at, like, you know, basketball.

Right.

Like, Steph Curry is the best at a specific skill.

Right.

He's not the best at basketball. I guess people may argue with that or whatever, but generally, like, if you, even if you think about all of the athletes or any, any professional that you follow or are a fan of, like generally it's because they're specifically good at something.

Right.

And you want to be. Yeah. You want to pick something in which you are the basically the only person writing about it in this way. Like for example, like I think one of. There are a lot of people who write about unicorn stuff as we've talked about. There's also a lot of people who frankly written about the bootstrapping side of things. Like the other.

Right.

Like the base camp sort of. That story has also been told. I think the thing that I was uniquely positioned to tell was the transition between the two. Like how many people run a company, raise venture capital and then publicly say I'm not going to do that anymore. Basically zero. I mean it was not that hard for me to be the only. Because like it wasn't my choice again.

Right.

Like you have to find the things like that are observing. You have to observe what's unique about you. It's not like you can like wake up and say, oh, I'm going to do something super unique. The good news is you don't have to do that because there's something about you that is unique. You know, like Paul Graham was a painter in college and he has a book, Hacking and Painting, I think it's called.

Right.

Like that is very, very, very, very specific to. There's very few people I know who write code and paint. There's like three people I know that do that. Like literally three. So sure there are more. The beauty is also like one way to be the only is to just be the one that actually shares everything they learn.

Right.

Like there are many people, there probably are some people who like raised venture and then did this transition. But like no one who said, I'm going to write an essay about this whole journey.

Right?

So that's a huge advantage that you have basically from the get. But yeah, basically try to find the thing that's like specific. Everyone should be like, oh wow, this is alienating. 90% of the people, right? Like the minimalist entrepreneur. Like it's alienating on two dimensions. Like many people don't empathize with minimalism and many people don't want to be entrepreneurs, you know, or think entrepreneurship is like a weird. Like entrepreneur is like a very loaded word by itself. I think it's French, you know, and so. But yeah, it's important. You know, the four hour workweek, it's like very sort of opinionated and I think you need that. Like you have to lean into both the specificity of it, but then also the spikiness of it.

Right?

Like the fact that not only is it specific but it's like you will piss people off basically.

Right.

You can't say something without pissing a lot of people off. And you know, and also be saying something interesting. Like you have to be. You kind of get both at the same time or you get neither.

Right.

And I'm always looking for that. Like even no meetings, no deadlines, no full time employees. Like the first bit is controversial. No meetings. But like, you know, I think people can sort of see a path to that. Then it's like no deadlines, which is like, okay, that's like even more controversial and more specific. Like you don't have deadlines at your company. Like how do you get anything done? And then it's like no full time employees and it's like what, like what's left? You know? And so even in within a headline you can get like more and more specific. And like I think if I ordered it a different way, like no full time employees, people like, ah, nevermind, I'm not interested. Like that's crazy. That's stupid. But there are many people who like were like no meetings. That's interesting. I would love less meetings, no deadlines, no full time employees. Like that's stupid. But I actually like these other two ideas already. So now I kind of have to maybe give him a little bit more credit and see what he's up to.

Right.

So even within that headline is a three act structured literally.

Right.

Like, and so I'm always finding, trying to find those moments and, and this is how I write my essays too is like. And you know, stand up comedians do this like if they want to say something really controversial, they'll say it at the end of like a seven minute joke, you know, because they like build up to it and you're like bought into it. Like you can't almost help but agree. It's almost like a sunk cost fallacy. So yeah, you, you, you kind of want to want, you know, if you feel uncomfortable being too specific, you can like, you can kind of treat it like a funnel, right? People will drop off as they read your thing. So it literally is a kind of a funnel and you can become like more, more specific and more spiky and ultimately hopefully more truthful. Like you can speak the truth, which I think is ultimately what people are really looking for. I remember like having a conversation with Naval One time, and he said something that was like, incredibly simple, which was like, I only have one rule for what I tweet. It has to be true. That's it. That's the only rule I have. I have to say the truth, which is tempting and you know, to go viral. You can, like, you know, you know, say things that are untrue. But I thought that was like, pretty. Yeah, pretty profound. Like, okay, cool. Yeah, I need to think more about, like, what do I believe that's true? That most people are not. They, they know it's true, but they won't say it, right? And like that, that is, that is when you win. Because actually it's kind of. It alienates everybody, but actually, like, everyone also agrees with it in a way, right? Which is like this. If you can find that, like most people who read, you know, this reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company agree with it. Like, they agree with almost the whole thing. But it feels very alienating to people, right? And that's like, when you really win, like, if you can do both of those. I think Apple is my favorite example of this ever. Where they basically pitch their laptops is only for creative weirdos. But everybody believes that they're a creative weirdo, right? So everyone has an iPhone, everyone has a MacBook, whatever. But their whole marketing was so specific. And I learned this actually writing science fiction and fantasy. I took a class with this guy, Brandon Sanderson, and he said something that I thought was just phenomenal, which was he called it the pyramid of abstraction. And basically there's sort of like levels of abstraction. Like, if I say a house, that's specific, it's more specific than a building, but it's very abstract. And the way you can measure this is everyone has a different image in their head. When I say house, right? If I say building, it's even more different. If I say house, it's getting more specific. But if I say like a blue townhouse, you know, two story townhouse, boom, like, you have a much more specific. And you can get more and more and more specific over time. And the more specific you get, the more appealing the image is to everybody. Like, a building is not appealing, a house not appealing. A dog is not appealing. But if I say a German shepherd, a puppy, everyone's like, oh, I love that thing. And so you have. Obviously that was in the case of helping people visualize the scene in front of them and blah, blah, But I thought that was pretty profound. Which is like, if you want to write a story that Everyone loves it has to be about a human being solving a specific problem. It's not like, like for example, if I took reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company and I said, here are like 50 things entrepreneurs could learn from people who fail to build businesses or whatever. Like it would not resonate. You know, it resonated because it was incredibly specific and the specificity made it broadly applicable and this kind of paradox. So I often also kind of think about that, which is like I'm. My goal is to write the most true specific thing possible only about myself. Like all I do is I tell my story. I'm not trying to convince anybody. Like I just need to tell my journey on a specific idea, you know, and thought process that I went down. So anyway, that was a long run. But people like seem to like Brian Sanderson in the chat.

Yeah, I saw that there, there are a few things there we talk about. I loved your example of a dog versus German shepherd, building versus townhouse. Cause we call this knock knock riding. Which is if I said tell me a joke, your mind would kind of go everywhere and think, I don't know what a joke is. But if I said tell me a knock knock joke, you think of one right away. When even by definition there are far fewer knock knock jokes. So just that level of kind of constraint.

Totally. Yeah. That's a great example. There's a great book about this. Thinking fast and slow about this idea too. Like they like name, you know, name. Name someone you know that is an engineer. You might struggle. But if you say like a civil engineer or something like the more specific the fact, the. And I think it goes back to the visualization. You're able to visualize people who fit that much faster and then on the.

Other side or go ahead, Cole.

Yeah, just, I mean. Cause you said so many things that are worth double clicking on. So one is, you know, you talk about being more spiky, like how do you alienate people? I feel like a good, a good framework for this just for everyone else who's. Who's listening here is starting with the opposite. So whether you do this, you know, you start here or you end up here, right. The word entrepreneur at this point has become defined by unicorns, right? When Someone says entrepreneur 20 years ago you think, oh, you don't have a job today you hear entrepreneur and you're like, oh, you're trying to be this high flying startup founder, right. So conventional wisdom says entrepreneurship and startups are aiming in this direction where success is defined by a Billion dollar outcome and you go, I'm going to walk in the opposite direction. The opposite of a billion dollar outcome is a not billion dollar outcome, but with all these other benefits. And so I think a really helpful way, just as an actionable place to start for people, is start with conventional wisdom and ask yourself what would have to be true for there to be a road going the opposite direction. And that opposite is usually what people don't take the time to consider. You know, I don't know if that was something that was really conscious for you or not, or if that was just you landed there, you know, and then you said, okay, I'm going to keep running in this direction.

Yeah, no, I think that's a super good actionable point. Like ultimately it's kind of like investing. Like you can't just be right if you're just right. Like you can't succeed because there's many things that everyone, you know, you have to be right. And also everyone has to think that you made the wrong decision because you have to be the first, the only. You know, you have to be early. And definitionally, if you're early, everyone's going to think you're kind of an idiot, right? And so it's kind of the same thing. You have to find the thing that it's kind of like, I think of it like water. Like the water is going a certain direction, but you know that it's going to reverse at some point, right? The tide is going to go out eventually. But you're the first person to say, hey, look everybody, the tide's going out the other way, right? So when I publish, reflecting on my credibility, not a company, like I published it and you know, there's definitely luck involved, right, In a lot of this stuff. Just like water, like you can't control, you can just pay attention to it. But I published it basically right after the Uber sort of fiasco, the Theranos thing, and most importantly the wework thing. The WeWork thing dominated the headlines and really, again, specificity, right? It really gave an image, like a very visual image to the dangers of this Ponzi schemification of venture capital and SoftBank's approach, which was wrong. Unhinged, just unhinged. And Tiger is an example of actually a similar model, but well executed. And I actually think today, reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company would not resonate nearly as deeply today, two to three years later, for a bunch of different reasons. It would still do well, I think, but I think it was just perfect. Timing, because it nailed this sort of transition from sort of this gratitude of tech to like, wait a second, this is getting a little. It's getting excess, right? And what is the answer to excess in fashion? It's minimalism, actually. It's sort of the end of everything is excess. And then you go back to the beginning and you build up from there. Architecture, fashion. Like, there's a lot of things that are. I mean, you see this even with like art, right? You kind of saw like naturalism come in and then boom, like reset to like, you know, kind of like whatever Picasso does, Cubism and like starting from the basics. And now you have crypto, which is like even more rudimentary. Like, literally we're going Back to like 24 by 24 pixel images and building up from there. Like, there's sort of a natural cycle of kind of art and fashion and taste. And it's like the seasons in a way, right? And so yeah, you, you want to, you want to find the thing that most people, you know, Peter Thiel, what does it, what does he say? Like, what's the thing that you believe that no one else does or no one around you does, right? Like, what is that thing? And there's a tendency to like deride contrarianism. Like, oh, you're just trying to find like the, you're just like the annoying person who's like, just argues with everybody.

About everything versus contrarians.

Right, exactly. But actually, like, I do think if I had to choose, I'd much rather disagree with the system about everything because that requires just more intellectual horsepower to do. Because you can't just agree. Agreeing is just like, yes. But if you're, if you're disagreeing, then you have to say something. You have to come up with like, well, what's better?

Right?

Well, you don't have to. I guess you could just be annoying. But I think those folks have a tendency to say, well, I can't just say, you know, reflecting on my failed ability. Million dollar company. There's two parts of that, right? One is build it. Building a billion dollar company is a failure. Like that. But then what it like, well then what is. That's only half of the question, right?

Then what Success then?

Yeah, exactly. Like what, what, what, what is success? Why do you feel comfortable writing about it? No meetings, no deadlines, no full time employees like you are. You'll actually. I load it into the headlines, every headline I've written. So it's like a. No, it's like a negative. It's like failure or no meetings. And so I'm taking the default and I'm reversing it, you know, and so, yeah, I think that's super, super prescient. And spiky is the word that I often use. Like, you know, you want to. You want to find something that people are a little like. Like, that's a little weird. Like, that's, you know, some people will get rubbed the wrong. The wrong way. So you just. But you have to do it, especially on a headline.

Right.

You can obviously have more nuance in your essay itself, but you do want your headline to be, like, more spiky.

Yeah. We say the headline should force a choice in some way. And I think a lot of people in either your situation or really in writing headlines in general go. They don't want to be so specific that someone could say no. But that's the whole point of a headline, is to elicit some kind of agreement or disagreement. So they hedge and they make a headline like, My Reflections on my Entrepreneurial Journey. Right. That no one can look at and say, oh, that, I bet that's this, or, I bet that's that. But that's what gets people to read. And then they're hooked and then they're, you know, flown down the page.

Yeah, it's kind of like. I mean, again, just speaking to what you're talking about, it's not just the specificity of what you call it, it's also the point of view that comes behind it. You know, how is the. How is the way that you see the world different through this lens compared to this lens? Like, no. No one argues for climate change control by saying, it's okay if we have some things that are bad for the environment. Right. They don't hedge their bet. They go, either I believe the future is this way, or I believe the future is this way. And that, I think, is a very hard thing for people to internalize. I don't know if you've noticed, even on Gumroad, some of the most specific and most successful products or creators or if you've noticed, like, are. Are they things that are more polarizing in some way?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You have. You really. You really have to be. I think ultimately, like, I.

The.

The framework that I talk about in the book is like this. Basically, you start out educating, then inspiring, then entertaining.

Right.

Those are kind of like the three tiers of content. If you think about the content that people get attracted to and that resonates. It cannot just be educational, though I do think that is kind of table stakes. Because ultimately people are on the Internet to like learn, solve a problem that they have, make money, save time, etc. But then you have to be inspiring and you have to be entertaining. All of those, all of those three things have to be true, I think for content to really, truly resonate. And I think that the way you are entertaining is you have this like built in drama of alienating a bunch of people, right? If you say like I'm the, I'm the one who's going to teach you like how to, how to make a living, like selling metal fans, like buying and reselling metal fans. Like there's, there's just more, there's just more there, I think, for people to latch onto, right? Or there was a guy, he makes a living selling videos on how to play ultimate Frisbee. Like literally makes like a couple hundred grand a year or something. And even that is like, kind of like, it's not controversial necessarily, but it's weird and spiky. It's like, why is this a good use of anyone's time? Like, is that a real sport? You know, like, and you, you can like make it dramatic. And so yeah, I definitely see that. Or even web design, like, web design is a, a thing that many people want to learn. So there's a lot of products on offer to do that. But you can like, you know, there's a guy, for example, who teaches web designer web design, but only to people in the Caribbean, like in a very specific kind of aesthetic. And you might even argue like, well, how can you say that's Caribbean and not or whatever, right? But he picked a specific demographic and he leane into it. And people also, people want to feel seen. So if someone highly strongly identifies as like Caribbean or whatever, an ultimate Frisbee lover, like they're going to see this and be like, oh, awesome, this is, you know, one of, one of me, right? Like one of us kind of thing. Another thing I learned is you can, the language you use is also quite important, right? So it's not just what you say, but kind of how you say it. Like I might have a more, I don't know, like aggressive way of speaking where I speak in this, like very, I don't know, confident or like self assured way. And other people might hedge their thoughts a little bit more than I do or something like that. And like I might be great for certain people and some other people are like, no, I don't really like the way that he talks. Like, I'd much rather listen to Somebody else, right? Or like Gary Vaynerchuk is like even farther along one edge or whatever, right? Like everyone has that edge that they're on and you have to lean into it. Like, you have to lean into it into your, into your photography, into your cover design. You know, even something as simple as like, are you using a serif or a sans serif font, right? Like, I would never use a serif font. Like, I use only sans serif. That's like part of my brand, part of my personality. Like, I just like those more. And the beauty of it is you don't actually have to do anything differently than you're already doing because you already have these preferences. Like, you already have all these preferences. You look at a certain two images, there's one that you prefer more than the other. You look at two fonts, you look at two restaurants, two menus. Like you order different things like this, you know, happen. Everyone has these kind of fingerprints of what they like and care about. I don't know where it comes from. Genetics, chemistry in your body, where, you know, your childhood trauma. Who knows, right, where these, these things come from. Probably a combination of all the above. So you just, again, like going back to what Dickie said, right? It's just like paying attention, noticing like the things that make you unique and interesting and your kind of digital fingerprint and then leaning into that and saying, oh, if I have a tendency to like, talk about, like veterans, there are certain people who are like very excited about being veterans and they feel like part of the veteran community, like web design for veterans. That is very spiky. But I guarantee you that will resonate with many, many, many people, right?

Boom.

Like that's, you know, that's a six figure gumroad creator waiting to happen if that person doesn't want to exist, you know, so it's like, it's just finding those, those things that are already true about you and leaning into them.

I saw this great exercise because I think the hardest part of finding a niche or creating a niche or whatever it is, is by definition you're going to talk about things that are ingrained to how you operate. And so uncovering those is hard. And someone said you can find, you know, 20 niches that you belong to if you just keep track of like your first 45 minutes to an hour of your day. And so I did that one time and it's like, okay, I had black coffee, which means I'm intermittent fasting. There's one like, I got up at 5:45, which means I'm an early riser. And then you just start to list these things out and you don't recognize that that's a specific group. And then when you combine them, that's how you really kind of tap into something very specific.

Yeah, totally. I mean, that's great. Like, do you have a pet that you have to feed? Like, boom. Like, you've already alienated 80% of people who don't have that pet. Like, whatever pet it is, you've alienated most people, you know. So it's like, where do you live? Yeah. Do you get coffee? Do you drink coffee or not? Like, what do you eat in the morning? Like, are you vegetarian or vegan or whatever? Like, there's so many. But like, I think when you, when you're looking out from your. Your perspective, you just assume everyone has similar preferences to you, so you're like, o. Everyone, you know, cares about roughly the same things that I care about. It's kind of like I always have a tendency to think that I'm late. I'm like, oh, wow, I'm super late. Like to Crypto or to Web3 or Creator Economy or to whatever startups turns out I'm not. I'm actually super, super darn early. It's just I'm surrounded by other people who are also very early. So it feels like I'm late, but it's not true, you know, And I think certain people may be listening and be like, well, no, like, there's nothing unique that I have to say. Like, there's a lot of people who are like, into web design and veterans. Like, no, it's just not true. Think about how many people there are on the Internet. There's like 3 to 4 billion people on the Internet. Something like that. How many followers does Naval have? A million. So even Naval, who I would consider, like, close to the frontier of how earlier, how big or whatever in that niche you can get and how generic or generalized this stuff is now 1 million out of 3 billion. I mean, that's a third of a thousandth. I mean, that's 0.03%.

You bring up a great point. Because there's. Yeah, there's also, I think this maybe not a fear, but just a misunderstanding where, like, Dickie, to your point, if you, if you pay attention to all these niches that you're already active in, the person then says to themselves, well, I'm not a. I'm not an expert in any of these. So what do I have to say? And I just, I mean, we've told this story in a bunch of different ways. But like the author, Ryan Holiday, I didn't know this. I just learned this two days ago before he wrote his best selling book, the Obstacle is the Way. And he kind of became known for stoicism. You know, you say the word stoicism and everyone goes, Ryan Holiday, right. All of that came from a guest blog post that he wrote for Tim Ferriss called Stoicism 101. And he literally was just breaking down the basics and he was a beginner and he just said, hey, I'm a beginner and I'm just getting interested in this and here's what I know so far. And a 101 blog post leads to a book publishing deal, leads to his best selling book ever, leads to multiple books. Now in stoicism leads to. He's the category king of stoicism in the modern age. So I'm. I think that's something that's worth keeping in mind too is you're often not an expert in the beginning. You're the same example, right? I mean your journey of minimalist entrepreneurship was. I'm just telling you what I'm learning as I go along.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. I think that's a really important thing, is like, you don't have to be like, you know, the best. Actually, like, there's very little you can learn from the best because the best person is so far ahead of you that you. It's just like, it's like someone saying, hey, I can teach you how to run a four minute mile. It's like, okay, I'm good, thanks. You know, that's not appealing to me whatsoever. And so, yeah, you just have to lean into that. You know, I think it's really important to say, look, I'm not trying to convince anybody. I'm not trying to convince anyone that I'm the best or that they should even do what I'm doing or that what I'm doing is good. All I'm doing is sharing my story and my learnings and you know, take it or leave it. You know, take it or leave it. Like, I don't end any of my essays with take it or leave it. But you could add it to the end of everything that I say, every tweet, every essay, and it would be true. You know, like, here's what happened, take it or leave it. You know, and, and to really important.

Just to double click on that too. Like, what's so interesting is the longer that you do it, the more valuable you become. Because you're the one who's taking the time to keep exploring this topic.

Yeah.

So if you had just written this in 2019 and gone. I wrote it and I stopped.

Right.

You. You stopped being Sahil on the Internet. Right. And now a couple years later, you wrote this book. Right. So I'm curious if you thought about that.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, if you work at Facebook, you know, they tell you like, three months in. You're like the. In the. In the eighth percentile, meaning, like 8% of people who work at Facebook are newer than you.

Right.

Like, almost immediately, like, Stripe, I think, doubles every year. So if you've been working at Stripe for a year, you're. You've been around. You're a veteran, you've been around more than half the company. You know, that's crazy. It's insane. I mean, it's absolutely crazy. Um, but that, like, imagine crypto. Crypto is like that, except it's like three months. There's a guy who I was talking to who's like, very, you know, very early in crypto, like, took a million, turned into 100 million, like, what most people would consider him, like, very successful, blah, blah, blah. And he said something really clever to me, which was like, if I, if. If, you know, he. I'm speaking from his perspective. If I disappear for six months and you get really deep into crypto for six months, you're going to be the veteran, and I'm going to have to learn from you, because that's how fast this industry moves. And that's true in everything. Like, for example, if you are teaching web design, every two to three years, you have to redo everything that you. The basic fundamentals, you're getting better and better at. But it's now flat design, there's now dark mode, there's now iPhone, screens that have changed. There's now iPad, there's now this new user experience. There's now 3D VR. Arkansas is constantly. The. The world is. Is moving.

Right.

And so if you can just be. If you can start and just be that person who's constantly learning and sharing what they're learning, you actually will be way more interesting a person to learn from, because you just started recently, because that's where everybody else is. And if you. There's a. There's an amazing guy that I follow. Like, I draw a lot. Here's my sketchbook of drawings. And one of the things that makes me unique. And there's a guy I follow on YouTube. His name is Modern day James and he basically started drawing like two to three years ago and he's freaking great at it. But the reason he's great at it is because he started a YouTube channel and he basically drew every day for like five to 10 hours and like live streamed it all. So he was literally, he started like terrible like my level, like just not good. And now he would be hirable in the entertainment industry and could go work at like whatever, you know, game studio or something like that in like two to three years. Which makes sense because like how long does it take to get a college degree? Four years. How much of that time is spent on useless bullshit?

Half.

So two years.

Yeah, you're right.

And what is the job? You know, what is the point of college getting you a job, right? So like there's. Every job should be learnable and it, you know, to a professional enough level in two years. So in two years you can go from basically zero to a full time oil painter.

Right.

Like I could make a living as an oil painter today because I did it for two and a half years, right. If I wanted to. Or drawing or writing or podcasting or any skill really. Like you can become incredibly good at it to a point where people want to follow you and learn from you within a couple years. I really, I really believe that. And that's not easy. I mean, you know, let's say 20 hours a week for two years, you know, to get to 2,000 hours, which is 20 of the way to being a master or whatever according to, you know, Malcolm Gladwell. Like that's a lot. But it's also feels very manageable to me, you know, like how many hours is Game of Thrones? Like 85 hours or something like that. I don't know.

An investment?

Yeah, like just think of it like you know, 10 of those. So like. Or like how much hour, I mean how many hours do you spend watching sports or whatever, right? Like it's, you have to make the time. It's not going to come easy. You kind of have to do it every day in a sense, right. Ship 30, et cetera. But you have to, you have to just invest the time and it. And have faith that like if you do invest the time, you will be one of the top 1%. Like if you draw for a hundred hours, you'll be in the top 1% of people who know how to draw. And it's a fully learnable skill. Like you can draw dragons out of your head in two years, three years.

But.

I have a framework for Thinking about the learning from a master versus learning from someone just ahead of you. And I think I go back to elementary school. When you were in second grade, you didn't want to learn from the eighth graders because they knew things that you couldn't even comprehend. The coolest people on earth were the third graders because they had just unlocked something new. They were learning something, and all you wanted to do was figure out what's the difference between second and third grade. And I think on the Internet, we're all third graders in some way. There's a bunch of second graders behind us. And a way to find that is just kind of look backwards at what I've solved, what I've done in the last year, what have I. Seriously, if you just write about things you've learned and changed and done in the last year, you're going to the scale of the Internet guarantees are millions of people with the exact problem you have. And I mean, it was the origin of ship 30. I think it's a timeless framework for looking backwards two years for what you've done and write about that and then look forward two years. What do you want to learn more about? And then just start writing about that as well. And you just kind of continuously move your way up and up and up, and soon enough you're building an audience behind who really want to just follow. Like, you're a tremendous example of this. How many people want to follow the path that you've taken now, Owning a small niche, or not small, but a niche, profitable business that they doesn't take all their time and they get to paint and sketch and do all that. Right. And so you're. You've been sharing about that since 2019, and now you just wrote a book on it. And it's crazy how that kind of emerges.

Yeah. And the book was literally like, I wrote that essay and Penguin was like, do you want to write a book?

You know, okay, again, see amazing case study, like how people.

That's, by the way, how every book gets written.

We talk about this a ton. It's. It's the James Clear, Morgan Housel Mark Manson. It's a bottoms up books approach that every single successful author right now is validating the ideas so to the point where the market is almost begging for it by the time that it gets put in a book. Like, there's no excuse anymore to write an unsuccessful book because of. You could write a book. Right. Well, that's a great one too. But yeah, you know, start with tweets, atomic essays, blog posts, the market should be begging for the book. Other than we talk about the. The writer who would retreat into the woods for 18 months and write his book and come out with a masterpiece.

Right.

I mean, I think the same thing, honestly, with like, even, you know, I know this is not about investing in venture capital and all that kind of stuff, but, like, the same is true for raising money. Like, like the market should be begging to give you money before you say, I need to go out and raise money for this idea.

Yep.

Right.

Well, that's, that's the irony, right, is the startups that need to raise money often don't get funded, and then the startups that don't need to raise money are the ones that get funded.

Yeah, exactly. It's like the, you know, the quote, like, I don't want to be part of any club that wants me to be a part of it. You know, the same, it's the same thing. But yeah, I mean, not, you know, if you want to write a book, like, go crazy. But the truth is, like, yeah, you will. You will get the opportunity to write a book when you don't need it anymore. Like, I didn't need to write this book. I wrote the blog post. I have an audience. I don't need, you know, the advance or whatever. Like, I would only raise a round of funding once I was oversubscribed for that round of funding, which is how I did the crowdfunding round. And it's maybe sucks to hear because you're like, no, I want it. I want that tomorrow. Or, you know, I don't want to wait for Penguin to reach to email me and like, give me a book deal. But the truth is that that will happen to you if you deserve it. And the way you deserve it is by, like, being really, really darn good. Writing, sharing, building an audience, getting that demand now. And then, what does Penguin do? They're like, hey, 100,000 people want this from you. And so here's some, you know, money and support to make it happen for you. But, like, if you don't have that, like, it's basically. It's virtually impossible. That's all they're looking for, right? They're basically looking for people who want to have shown evidence that they can write to they that have an audience that will read. Not much left, you know, and maybe three, someone, you know, someone who isn't like, gonna do something stupid that hurts the reputation or like some tail risk or whatever.

Right?

But that's just about, that's about it, you know, if you write one great blog post that goes viral, you have a book deal if you want it, like, literally, you know, like cat person or like, I don't know, there's a bunch of examples of these sorts of things. Yes, Morgan Household psychology of money, etc. Like, it's definitely. And like, why would you want to write a book without the demand for it, right? Like, you should only write things that I think generally people really like, want to read and they're better formats. You know, it's not like you, you don't have to write. It's not like I'm saying don't write. I'm just saying don't write a book. Don't write a thing that, you know, requires a ton of effort and goes, has to go through these gatekeepers or vc. I'm not saying don't start a business. I'm just saying you might want to focus on starting a business, making it profitable, selling your customers, building the product instead of raising venture capital for it.

Right.

And if you do those things, by the way, like raising venture capital or whatever, like all this stuff becomes incredibly like, literally, like people will like try to knock down your door trying to give you money. As insane as that sounds like that will happen. I know because I do that every once in a while.

So many different ways. We could wrap up the last five minutes. Why don't we drop a few questions in the chat if anyone has anything specific. But one of my favorite questions is just what is currently has you most excited about kind of the next 12 to 18 months, whether it's something you're working on, new projects, same projects, the book, anything on that front, Just to hear.

Yeah, totally. There's a few things that are very exciting to me. One thing I'm really excited about is figuring out how to get liquidity into private markets. I think that is going to happen in the next six to six months to six years. I don't know how long it will take, but I do think what you're seeing with crypto, what you're seeing with GameStop, Robinhood, Gumroad, crowdfunding, all points to this direction of basically we just want price discovery for assets. I want to be able to buy anything and sell anything and everything is tradable and liquid and transparent, whether that be fine art or startups or whatever. Obviously the person with the IP has to choose, you know, opt into it. But. But clearly the demand is there. It's just illegal, right? Right now with securities laws and things like that. So I'm Spending a lot of my time thinking about in the context of Gumroad, but also more broadly. Again, like specific to general, right? Like how do I, how do I make crowdfunding a thing? I use my specific company and do it with Gumroad. I don't write about how this can change, right. I embody the essay. Like I don't write the essay. And so I think that's really something I'm very deeply excited about. I also think crypto generally is interesting. I would think that we're super early in web two, in web one, in web three. I think most people are wrong about the future. And so if you think you're too late or it's already getting built, like you're not, like you just have to have a unique take and bottoms up it, right? Just like those blog posts. Solve your own problem and don't worry about trying to build a billion dollar company or changing the world or whatever. Like solve your own problem, go forward from there. And then you might be on onto Stripe or Tesla or Uber, but like very rarely do you know that ahead of time. Like no one does. So, so that, those are, those are a couple of, some of the things I'm really excited about. I'm also, I wrote that essay. No meetings, no deadlines, no full time employees. That resonated pretty well. You know, nothing like the failure essay, but, but like 250,000 people read it. So I'm thinking about like, what is. If that first thing led to a book, like what does this next thing lead to? Probably not a book because I don't like doing the same thing over and over again, but trying to think about, is that a product? Can I productize this thing? Like, what does that look like? A lot of people have questions about it. So I'm kind of thinking about potentially spitting out a new product at Gumroad. We're also rebranding the entire website and product and everything that goes live next week. Hopefully it's going to be a pretty crazy change definitely by the end of the year. But the goal is really like by Friday of next week. And hopefully that will set the tone for like all this crazy other stuff. Crypto liquidity and you know, the boring stuff like shipping new features, you know, making the product better, supporting courses, like doing more and more stuff just as we, as we, you know, kind of incrementally as well. Excited about that too.

I love that your head goes and we talked about this a little bit. Cole is like literally every successful tweet or blog post or whatever you have should be okay. There's a solution. Because people only read things that solve some kind of problem or resonate with them. There's a product in every tweet, every blog post, every something. And so when people are like, oh, I don't know what to build, you just can kind of look and not. You're the best example of it. Right? The book, that first book came from a blog post came from probably conversations, right?

Very, very. Bottoms up. Yeah, yeah. Find out like, what conversations you're already having all the time. Like, I'm constantly having conversations about how liquidity needs to exist in the private markets. And I'm like, okay, what can I do about it? You know what? This is clearly a problem that people seem to have. And so, yeah, you always want to start out with the problem. And the way you start out with the problem is you find out what group of people you want to build for and then you just pay attention. And like, you see in the book, I call them toe stubs. But basically people want to do something and they stub their toe, they can't do it. Most people, when they have that moment, just move on with their life. They say, oh, nevermind. Or like, oh, there's probably some reason that it's annoying or hard or difficult. Like before stripe. Like, there was probably a reason that it was so annoying to accept a credit card payment on the Internet. Then a couple folks came along and said, well, I don't care what the reason is. It doesn't make sense in 2021 or whatever or 2011, you know, and so that, that's kind of pretty key. Like, you're constantly hitting your head against low ceilings. Like, you're constantly like living life at a less than ideal in a less than ideal way. You just have to pay attention to what the. What that actually is, you know, like, for example, like every time I like walk into my house with groceries, it's like a miserable experience. I'm like, this is how doors function that I like, have to like, do this thing that hits me in the back and like, it like, it's so stupid. And like billions of people have this problem and no one has solved. You know, I'm, you know, a better door or, you know, like some basic, like, literally something as simple as that. And so yeah, there's so much. Or lights. Like I walk into a room and there's like the lights don't automatically turn on or turn off when I leave. Like, and you can set all this stuff up manually for yourself. But like, there should be a much, you know, that's not the way that a billion people end up with that lifestyle, you know, which will happen like 30 years from now. Everyone will have doors that just slide open and lights that go on and off. Like that's kind of the sci fi future we will live in. And you can choose to build things that exist, you know, as part of that feature, or you could choose to complain, or you can choose to do nothing. Right. Which is again, not trying to convince anyone of anything, right? Like just pointing out what will. What generally happens.

And I'm a example of just to put a pin on what you said about kind of solving iterative problems.

Right.

I read your book. I was super interested in, okay, now how do you tactically, like there's this point of when you niche down, you unlock a type of person who then has a very similar specific problem. So I DM'd you and I was like, hey, I'm very curious how you actually operate the road, like with your notion, right? So you have this entire people that kind of go down your rabbit hole of the minimalist entrepreneur and then have super specific problems for putting it into practice. Like, how do I actually have a team meeting that's asynchronous or how do I check in? Like, there's so much there. That's the power of getting more specific is you don't know what lays on the other side of it, right. Once you have people go down that path, that's when all the new opportunities come out because they're asking new questions. They, they're going to present you with new problems. And then whether you're a writer, a builder, entrepreneur, you just start solving.

Yeah, I mean, I literally have like an inbox full of things like that that's like, hey, how did you. Yeah, like you've asked me, right? Like, how do, how do you run, how do you use notion to run your business? It's like, hmm, that, that is a course, that is a product, that is a SaaS thing that I could build something. You know, like there's. So right now I just, you know, share my notion and people can figure it out or whatever, or like record a YouTube video or something. But yeah, there's so, I mean, and it gets more, there's more layers to it, right. Once you solve that, then it's like, well, how do I manage people who are in different time zones? Or like, you know, how do I take notes on the meetings, the Async meetings, or how do I turn them into you know, this asset that I share and like, I do it manually. Can you automate it? Or how do I do international payments or like tax equity? I'm constantly, you know, having my own problems. I think one of the best ways to have business ideas for what it's worth is to start a business. Because once you start a business, and they can be like the most boring business, it doesn't really matter. It can be an ice cream shop. The minute you start a business, you will literally realize like, holy crap, we are so early. Like, everything sucks. Like, accepting payments, paying people, getting office, real estate, house inspections. You know, literally, you know, everything about building a business is so rudimentary, it's so basic. There's a lot of pen and paper involved. You know, every PDF, every pen and paper, everything you sign, that's a business. Literally, like, yeah, it will be software ties. Like just how, you know, go into your inbox, see how many files were sent to you, the email. Each one is a business opportunity. I'm not saying it's a massive one. Again, the great thing about the middle entrepreneur is like, there are many ideas that fit this mold. Like if you can build a business, automate it, and make a hundred thousand dollars a year, or let's say $30,000 a year, that's plenty of time to do basically quit everything. Maybe you have to move somewhere slightly more affordable. But then you literally have like, I have 10 hours a day to do whatever the hell I want. And with 10 hours a day, I can, you know, and basically 100% energy, because I don't spend any of my energy doing some bullshit job that I don't like with people I don't like, or a boss that I don't like or whatever. No commute, et cetera. Like, I can learn any skill in the world and become the best at it. And then it compounds because then I can just build, I can acquire more and more skills, you know, like, I'm doing all this art stuff for no reason now. NFTs are a thing. Like, maybe I can combine those two things together. You know, I can learn 3D modeling. Like, I can just do stuff because I have time and energy, you know, and that's the point of the minimalist entrepreneur is like, basically, how do you get enough time and energy to do all the things that you want to do? And so, yeah, it's, there are ideas. And I will at some point make a long list of ideas and publish it of business ideas that people have. Either I have or other people have because People seem to get stuck with it.

I think that's a good place to wrap it up. We're all looking for how to find the time and energy to do the things we want to do, so.

Awesome.

All right, so this has been tremendous. Where can we send people? Learn more about you. Gumroad, the minimalist entrepreneur, all that.

Yeah. The best place to go is my Twitter account hl that has like a link to the book if you want to check it out on Amazon or Audible if you like the sound of my voice. I recorded the audiobook if you don't, you can also find it on Spotify uploaded like the first chapter for free. And. And all my essays as well, actually just today and. And what else? And then, yeah, that links to my website, which has like all my essays, long form essays that I've referenced as well. So those are the best. I. I actually liked what you said about the rabbit hole. There's like the personal rabbit hole. Everyone has a rabbit hole that, you know, people learn about you and then go down this rabbit hole. Someone actually mentioned that today to me and I was like, oh, that's interesting. I never thought about it like that. Like, what's your rabbit hole and where does it lead people? You know, it's probably a good, good framing device. So anyway, that's the top of the rabbit hole is at shl.

Alrighty, cool. Thanks for joining us, man. And thanks everyone.

Thanks for taking the time.

We'll send replays around for anyone who's listening. If you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, thanks for tuning in. And that's all we got. Take it easy.