Unbundling Reddit (For Digital Writers) With Greg Isenberg

Writers used to retreat into the woods for 18 months and write their masterpiece, right? And now there's just no excuse to put something out there that the market isn't begging for, in a sense. 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. If you're here, I think you know who Greg is, you know about his background. I don't want to waste time going through the whole story. If you want that, you can dig in to all the other places he's described, what he's done in the past. Today, we want to dive into a couple things, and we're going to start with how writers can better leverage Reddit. I think it's a extremely underutilized platform for idea generation, market research, posting content, all this stuff. Greg's going to walk us through a little bit of how he thinks about unbundling Reddit opportunities there, and I'm sure that's going to lead to a bunch of cool kind of discussions. So that sounds like a plan. Let's get to it. Greg, why don't you give a quick kind of rundown of the way you see Reddit as both an opportunity source for products writers, and we'll start there.

A bit of background just, you know, in the state of social, like social media, if we think about it, is awesome because we gave billions of people microphones, but you get billions of people microphones and it gets pretty noisy. And that's kind of the state that we're in. And that's why over the last few years, these communities have become the most comfortable way to converse. So basically, people found refuge in places like Reddit, which we're going to talk about in places like Discord, in places like Slack, in places like WhatsApp group. And that's why these are some of the most interesting platforms, both from a idea generation perspective. So, like, how do you get ideas in terms of, like, how to write from a people perspective? That is, you're going to meet some really interesting people in here and you can connect with them. And number three, which to me is the most important in the line of work that I do, which is how do you come up with startup ideas that are going to work and that mitigates risk? So we're going to. I'm going to take you through how I think about Reddit, but before I begin, I think that there's four main problems with the community platforms today. And I'm only telling you this because I think that'll help you when you're creating relationships or coming up with ideas on Reddit. The first is many people feel alone online and that's why they're going to these platforms. The second is a lot of these platforms, the power is in the hands of the platform, not the community. Reddit's a bit different actually. The hands in the power of the community. But in some other platforms they're not. The other thing is there's more dead communities than alive communities. Not many people talk about this, but how many like Slack or Discord groups have you been in? Or WhatsApp groups that are just like completely dead? And then most of these platforms are everything to everyone. So these are some of the big four problems. And that's why I think unbundling, which basically means that you're taking the age old example, is Craigslist. Andrew Parker came up with this blog post in 2010 where he basically was like, Craigslist is everything to everyone. And what's going to happen is it's going to be unbundled. So you can take the apartment section and unbundle it from Craigslist and create an amazing purpose built experience called Airbnb with amazing photos, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of massive businesses were created on top of unbundling. What I see that's happening is unbundling of Reddit right now, unbundling of Discord. So you take a bigger platform. You can see on the right hand side, these are a bunch of different public Discord servers. And you can basically create spaces for those people. And those people are going to give you your gold, those people are going to give you your writing ideas, they're going to give your startup ideas. So without further ado, let me give you a framework for how to think about how to unbundle a Reddit community. And this applies actually to Discord in a lot of ways too. So six steps. First is find a subreddit. You got to start with a subreddit to actually mine it. And I have a checklist for it. As you can see, I'm like, I'm very tactic. This is how I think in kind of a checklist. So the first is it needs to be growing fast. The second is it has to have a critical mass of subscribers. It can't be like 6,000 subscribers, 3,000 subscribers. I like at least 50,000 subscribers. You have to have a competitive advantage there. Now that competitive advantage might be you're genuinely interested in, like, the keto diet subreddit, but you need to actually genuinely care. And I'm sure, Dick, you must talk about this in your course or. And you must genuinely care about, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you must generally care about what you're writing about.

The only way to kind of write sustainably is something we say is that if you try to write about something that doesn't come naturally to you the way our framework for it is, like, everything is an option there. You can dive down something if someone's asking you, hey, I really want to know about this, that, or the other thing that you kind of have some knowledge about, but you don't have to take every option. So I like that framework of there's a thousand subreddits that you probably could jump into and write about and add value, but only a handful that you could do where it didn't feel like work to have to jump in there.

Absolutely. So I don't want you to read, like, the competitive advantage, like, bit and be like, oh, my God, like, I'm just starting out. Like, I don't, you know, how am I going to compete? Like, no, like, your competitive advantage could just be you show up every day and care and you're passionate about it. So now that you found a particular subreddit, and I want you guys to think while. While I'm taking you through this, like, come up with, like, something that you care about to. In your mind, you can think of, what would it be a subreddit, what would be a group, or what would be a community that you would want to take a. Be a part of?

Yeah, drop it in the chat.

Drop it in the chat as you go. Yeah. And we're going to go through, if we have time, Vicki, Nicholas, we can even go through a lot. I was thinking, like a live demo.

Oh, that'd be sick.

Okay, so we can do that. We can do that after this. So step two would be join. You know, gotta join it. So, like, make an account. Don't be a lurker. Make an account and become one with the community. I like that when I do this, I literally immerse myself. I think of myself as like a cultural anthropologist in this particular subreddit. So I learn their language, I learn their rituals, and I actually spend. I put in my calendar, like, spend an hour a day. Like, literally spend an hour a day. So once you've done that, there's a few things I do. The first is I take notice of which Posts are resonating with the community. There's always going to be certain posts that are resonating more than others, and those always take a format, a similar type of a format. Take note of that. Write that down to ask questions you're interested in and answer questions. When you have helpful knowledge, ask questions like, you're going to have genuinely. You're going to. You're genuinely curious. Right? So you're going to have questions and don't be afraid to ask. And the second thing. And then you're also. Don't be afraid to answer. Answering on Reddit is one of the best ways to learn how to write for their particular audience. And Dickie, I don't even know if you knew this, but Sweaty Startup, I don't know if you all know Sweaty on Twitter. Did you know about his story? About.

I know he spent a lot of time on Reddit because in his big kind of banger of a thread last year, people were like, how'd you learn to write like this? And he's like, spend enough time on Reddit where people give you no more than like, two seconds of your time and they're gonna. You're gonna learn to write concisely and effectively.

Yeah, you know, the first, the first best way to. The first best way to learn how to write is. Is to join your course. The second best way is to spend a lot of time on Reddit. And that's what Sweaty Startup did. He basically spent a year and a half, two years on the Entrepreneur subreddit and was just like, asking questions, writing answers, refining his approach. And then he went on Twitter one day after spending a year and a half of, like, honing his craft, and wrote the most epic thread of all time. Someone maybe can find it and, yeah, we'll link to it somewhere. But basically he. I think he went from, like, I know a few hundred followers to like 70,000 or something like that overnight. I attribute it to a subreddit. Um, so share useful links. And last but not least, and I know this might sound obvious, but you'd be surprised, people don't do this, engage like a human being. So, like, don't, don't do like, it's like that meme, hello, fellow kids or whatever. Like, don't do that, right? Like, you know, like, sound normal, be normal, smell normal, act normal. You know, don't spam and don't push marketing links because that's going to hurt your karma. Your only job is to make genuine connections. Your only job is to learn how to write Your only job is to. Is to learn about what matters to them.

Yeah, there's a few things here. One, I think we could get more tactical another time on like, what it means karma with Reddit, like actually adding value in that. But I think this is almost the right framework for writing on any social platform is you want to first find out what's working and what's resonating with people. Right? So that's very easily searching for either if it's on Twitter, the threads that are doing well, medium, the posts that are doing well, like, understand, okay, what works around here. How can I add my own secret sauce to it? I think asking questions is just a way to get up to speed on how the rules of the game work. Because to me, it's like every subreddit is its own video game in a sense. It's all going to have different rules, players, people, status, all that. It's like its own little virtual world. And so that's just a way to kind of get in and learn the jargon, all that. And then the last two are just provide value. Right. So share useful links. And that goes a long way on any kind of social platform as well.

That's good. Let's keep it moving. Step three, look for themes that emerge. I call it see what they want. Pay special attention to problems that your startup can make a real dent in. So I think about using Reddit primarily as a startup insight tool and then secondarily as a way to like, refine my craft, learning about a particular community. But the way I think about it is through this framework of like, you know, problem motivations and actions. And I ask myself, or here are some questions to ask yourself, like, are people asking for recommendations? What are they? Are they complaining about something? Specifically, if you were trying to achieve their goals, what would make it easier? So I asked myself these questions to try to understand the motivations and the problems so that I can create a product that I think has a high likelihood of success.

I like that this is like, it's. This is a simple market research kind of thing. But you. What's so cool about the subreddit is you have people just giving it to you. You don't have to search anywhere else. They're just, here's, here's, here's what I like. Here are what my problems are, here's what I find valuable and what I also, on the flip side, what I don't find valuable, when you find posts that do nothing. This is, this is cool.

And sometimes, you know, sometimes when you ask someone, like, let's just say you're on the street and you ask a friend or just a random person, like, hey, like, what do you think of, you know, I want to create a product for the keto community. Like, what do you think of this? Would you use it? And they're like, yeah, like, totally. On Reddit, like, you're getting the raw, raw human beings, you know, and there's no lipstick, there's no fluff. You're getting, you're getting real people. So the signal is actually. People think the signal is poor. The signal is actually quite high.

Ironically. Ironically, because Reddit is pseudonymous, you get actual people versus having a real, your real name on it. You get someone that.

That's, that's cool.

That's interesting.

Well, Greg, actually this raises an interesting question for me, which is, and maybe you can use it as both, but do you look at this as someone actually posing the question on Reddit and you're getting very direct answers or almost more covert and you're lurking the subreddit and you're noticing, hey, everyone keeps asking the same questions. So that is actually a stronger signal than if I were to ask the question directly and people told me, yes, I would want this. Yes, I wouldn't want this.

Yeah, the first thing I do is notice and observe. And I try to basically look at what are people saying and why are they saying it. But then I think it's really important to actually put on a bathing suit and jump in the pool or jump in the lake or whatever and just start putting out writing questions that you think might have a high likelihood of getting responses. I think that's the goal initially is like you want to just do something that is going to make people react because that shows. It shows a few things, shows, number one, that you're able to write in their language, which I think is really important, and you're able to get response. I mean, it might be very helpful. It might be helpful for a future post, it might be helpful for a tweet, it might be helpful for a thread, it might be helpful for a startup.

Yeah. And it almost, from a copywriting perspective, writes it for you because they're going to use their exact words, the exact things they want, their exact problems, all that interesting.

And I think people don't take enough or there's a huge opportunity for people just to like, take notes, you know, take notes. So like set whatever note taking tool you use. It doesn't matter. Just let your notion Google Google Docs, a piece of Paper just be like, okay, what did I learn on the subreddit this week? And just what are the three or four things that I learned? Oh, that people in the keto community use this one random product that I never would have thought and they constantly use the word XYZ and interesting, interesting, interesting. And then, you know, next week, new piece of paper, I'll keep going. Step four, create a closer space for communication. So once you've gotten comfortable with the community, take your, I think of it as like take your connection from dial up to fiber by creating your own gathering place. So one of the things you should, you could do is basically if you're on Reddit or a Discord, you know, is there, you know, there might be an opportunity to basically bring 5, 10, 15, 20 people into a more close space so that you can have direct communication with these people. So I say here that number two, the goal is to have more personal and direct interactions. The trick number four, make it feel like their own special corner in the world of the Internet. That's like the goal here. You want to make people feel like it's their home. And once you've created your new space, use the subreddit to spread the word.

So I've kind of a question on this one and it's something we think a lot about with kind of the Ship 30 community. There's so many tools and platforms and opportunities and different things you can use to kind of build a community around it. But everyone has an interesting trade off like discord. For a lot of people and the older demographic, it's like good luck. There's just no way slack you're competing with people's work. Oftentimes how do you go about turning like dissociating the tool from actually getting people talking inside a community like this? Are there anything tactical you can do on a. I'm thinking like a ritual basis. I've seen you talk about this a little bit, but setting up times, meeting times, that kind of thing.

So the first is on the platform question which is like okay, like where, which platform? There's so many where do I go? And there's even like custom software that you can create, you know, that you can use to or like white label type products. The first thing is I always try to optimize for least path lease past path of resistance. So I try to like if, if it's like for example, if I'm talking about like the Fortnite subreddit, like discord makes a lot of sense. If I'm talking About, like, the keto community, it might not make a lot of sense. If I'm talking about, like, a financial subreddit, like a Facebook group might make a lot of sense. So I think, like, the first. The first thing is once you've picked your subreddit, once you picked your niche, like, pick the platform with the path of least resistance, that's step one and then step two. Depending on that, there's a bunch of rituals that you should be creating within the platform so that you can create a daily use case or a weekly use case. So, for example, like, if you're using something like a Discord or a Slack, you can utilize, like. The big problem that I think a lot of people make is they end up creating, like, 20 channels. And then what ends up happening is they have 20 people, 20 channels, and it's just, like, overwhelming. You don't know where to look, et cetera. The people that do it the best have three to five channels, but they're very focused on the ritual. So, for example, you might have a good morning channel. If it's a crypto in the crypto vertical. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the GM meme that people use. That's something that that culture uses. Good morning. So every morning they go into this channel, they go into your space, they write gm, and then they might see something else, right? So this is what I call there's community design, which is how do you design the community such that people come back every day, which is setting up channels, setting up posts, coming up with rituals. And then there's community management, which is making sure that the conversation is healthy, et cetera. That's like, the main goal. And to me, those are very two separate sort of responsibilities.

I like that daily. We could do something like that with a daily writing prompt within a certain channel that people comment on. My mind's going to spin on that one. I like that a lot. Words. The GM one makes perfect sense for crypto. But, yeah, I like that.

Yeah, I think it's like, my advice would be like, find your own gm, you know, whatever it is for your vertical, make that. And then the other thing I would say is a lot of people tend to. In the chat platforms, they'll be like, okay, let me go spend 8,000, 12,000, 20,000, 50,000 on a bot to go and make this happen. So that every day there's this, like, computer that basically says, like, okay, it's 8:00am, like, say, good morning. Or. Right. And it's like, no, like, prove it out manually first and then if it works manually, then you can support it with bots.

Got it, got it.

Cool. You know, this is just, I call this build something for them. So like, you know, at this point you basically have a good idea of like what product you can build for them. But this can also be like, write something for them. Step five, write something, right? Like it's like you've dipped your toe in, but you haven't. Like, you know, put your whole body in the water. Go write like a long form piece. Go write something that you think you know could go viral in this community and try it out.

Yeah, this is to me here. Is that the last step or there.

Is there one more? Okay, yeah, I'd love to hear what you think of this.

No, this one I want to see the next step because I'm encapsulating like my view of how this whole thing works. So let me see the last one.

So the last one is basically once you've built, once you've written something or you've built a product or you've done something for them, it's not like set it and forget it. So for example, if you wrote a post in the keto community about, you know, your vision of the future of keto, and you post it and then you go back, you posted on Reddit, don't just like post it. And if it didn't go well, kind of just like, that was fun. Like, what's a V2 of that? Like, what did you like? Like, I think it's important to do like a post mortem. So like once you've done it, after seven days, it's like, what have I learned? And now that you have this piece of content or, um, the content could be a startup, um, you can actually take that piece of content and go back to your intimate group and be like, hey, I wrote this piece about, you know, the future of the keto community. Um, I thought it was really good, but it turns out it didn't resonate. What would you have liked to have seen in this that I didn't cover? And that's when you have the opportunity to actually go and be like, okay, you're no longer just building a startup, you're co building. You're no longer just writing a piece, you're co writing pieces. So you have a community now to co write with.

Okay, this is so this is cool. Go ahead, Cole.

Yeah, the two things, I mean, a, we, I mean we talk about this all day long in chip 30, which is, it's astounding to me how many people with writing, for example, will write something, it catches fire and then they just sit there and go, that was cool. That's the beginning of. That's not the end. That's the beginning. Right. You should do it again and do it again and do it again. But I'm equally as fascinated by, I feel like Twitter, there's this whole build in public movement. And then I mean, Greg, you're from this world and I have a foot in this world via ghostwriting too. But in Silicon Valley, it's almost like the antithesis of build in public. It's like build in private, build in secret, build in stealth, and then do this big grand reveal. And it's really interesting seeing these two side by side and someone who's lived in San Francisco, you've done a bunch of angel investing, sold a couple companies. What's your perspective on those two models and are we seeing a shift or is it like both are just going to keep existing? And it is what it is.

Yeah. It's hard to give a blanketed statement, but here's what I'll say. I'll say I understand why Silicon Valley's mentality for the most part is like do a grand reveal because if you're building a mobile app and you've got venture, you've been venture funded to build a consumer social mobile app, let's say, or a consumer app, like there's no middle in mobile. You're either like the top 10 of the app Store or you fail. Yeah. So because of it, you know, it's very hits driven business. It makes sense that you would, I mean, I understand why you would want to basically spend a lot of time in private, not share your ideas basically with a lot of people, keep it somewhat under wraps and then do a grand reveal where you have a lot more moat and against competition. Now the, that's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is like every day you're gonna like, you know, build it public to the max. You're like live streaming every day you're like tweeting 20 times a day. You're like, you know, doing like buffer for example. Like I think they do like how much each employee gets paid and their monthly revenue and their basically investor updates. And I think like you, you have to decide where you fit in the spectrum and what feels right to you. All I can say is this, what I've noticed is when you work with a community, great things happen. And when you work in a silo.

It'S a black box. You don't know what you're gonna get.

You know, like, can you build something amazing and an incredible business in 2021 in a silo? Like, yeah, I'm sure you can. But like, do I think it mitigates your risk if you're co building with a community? I think so, yeah.

I mean this is really the basis of Ship 30's writing framework is you don't. Writers used to retreat into the woods for 18 months and write their masterpiece, right. And now there's just no excuse to put something out there that the market isn't begging for in a sense, because you have all these really easy ways to validate any idea. Bottoms up. And it's same with, I mean our, I think writing and product building are extremely similar. And you can apply just about every kind of lean principle to that of getting started before launching quickly, iterating all that. So that to me there's just no downside of getting your stuff out there early and building on it versus thinking. Oh, I know. Because really it's an ego driven assumption. If you think you know what product people really want without proof or what writing people really want without proof, you're really just kind of making an ego driven assumption of I'm right, I'm right, I'm right. And then a lot of times that doesn't even come to market and so you can never even disprove yourself.

The downside is not a true downside. The downside is it is difficult as human beings for us to share our work with other people, period. And like we all get butterflies in our stomach when we do that. And to co build and to, and to publish every day. And this is, you know, it's, it's. You're basically signing yourself up for butterflies every day. And that's like what this course I think is about. Right. It's just like getting past that. And my belief is that after a certain amount of time those butterflies just don't show up, you know, like. But there is a downside of like you might have butterflies for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, a year and a half. And that's a difficult feeling to have every day you wake up.

Yeah. But I also think that means it's almost an arbitrage if you can put up with it, because for so many people that's like a gate. I think that's the reason everyone isn't writing and sharing all the knowledge that collectively they have, because they're 95% of them don't ever hit publish on the very first thing. Right. So it's like a. An activation energy that once you kind of overcome, you're just paying your dues.

I think people. Have you ever seen Mad Men? Like, the TV show?

Amazing show.

There we go. Okay, we got one fan. I don't know if people in the chat have seen it, but basically, it's a. It's a show. I think it's hbo. I could be wrong. Showcase. Showcase, whatever.

I forget who bought it. It was on Netflix. Had the rights for a bit, but.

It was on Netflix. Check it out after this. YouTube. Like, Don Draper, who is, like, the main character, and he runs his ad agency at the height of, like, the advertising age on Madison Avenue. And he's, like, coming up with, like, the biggest, you know, TV ads in the world. And it's a story about him, and he's kind of an interesting guy to watch. But the point I'm trying to make is you see these, like, epic pitches that he makes, or he's in the room and he comes. And by the way, he comes up with this amazing concept for, like, you know, I think their big client was, like, Lucky Strike, which was a cigarette.

Yeah.

And it's like, he's got this incredible vision, and then he gets in the room and they've got this, like, pitch deck where it's like an actual, like. Like, literally, like, paper, right? It's like, slide one, slide two, and it's, like, literally changing the paper. And it's the way he. Like, the way he tells the story is almost like it's a Picasso painting. Right? He's just like. It's so beautiful and eloquent, and you're, like, so charmed. And, like, you. And you wait, and then you look at, like, the Lucky Strike people, and you're like. They're like, oh, my God. It was amazing. Like, thank you so much. You've changed everything. And I think that that's what people have in their head for, like, publishing work is like, I need to get to that Don Draper moment. And it's like, no, you don't. Like, in 2021. Like, you don't get to that John Draper moment, in my opinion, by, like, spending three months XY in some place and then, like, coming up with a brilliant idea and then putting it out there. Example. Sweaty startup. Right.

Yeah, I would actually. I totally agree. I would just maybe tilt it a little bit and go. It's that same moment. It just doesn't appear that way. Like, that moment can Happen when you get one like on something or one upvote on something and all of a sudden you write something that gets 20 upvotes or 20 likes. That's a mini Don Draper moment. It's a mini. We recognize it. And I think what we're all saying is to not downplay those moments and realize that even though it's happening through a screen or on the Internet, that's a 20x difference of people going, hey, this is really interesting and you should pay attention to that.

I think this is a very perfect segue into something I'm curious to just kind of hear you talk about. Greg is as you become. So we actually in ship 30 we have a section on kind of crafting your bio, getting more specific, very clearly saying kind of what you talk about. And we had your bio on one of our slides but didn't refresh it from. I think it was maybe three months ago, three or four months ago. It's like I share how to build communities or online and then we cross checked it because the whole point is like you iterate over time kind of what you say, what you craft. And you changed one word and put I share something on how to build Web3 communities. And it was just one extra word of specificity. And we kind of turned this whole thing of like, look at this is what it's all about. You add that little bit and now it's like, okay, so here's what I'm talking about. So how as you start to share and write and do almost education in this space that is moving at light speed, how do you think about kind of striking the balance of writing about it, educating people in that space? And I'm just. Because really what you've done now is you have a bunch of experience in this, but you're still operating in something that you had to dive into. Right? Learn the jargon, learn the crypto, learn your, your subreddit is just the much larger at this point, it's kind of the crypto world. So how do you think about kind of the next maybe 6 to 12 months as you start to write about this?

Well, so this one, first of all, amazing that you guys, you dissected my bio. I, I today I actually updated my bio.

Happens again every day. It's iterative, right? It's whatever you're doing then.

Yeah. And it was just a small world, a small word where I now I think it says like I talk about Web3 and community based products versus iShare and the reason I did that was because like, change it from talk to share is because I just noticed, like everyone was putting like, I share, like everyone's bio was like, I share this, I share that. I tweeted about this, I tweeted about that. And you just have to keep, like, please don't copy my bio because I'm just gonna have to change it again.

But the goal post is always moving, like, refreshing.

And go take the word share out of my bio.

It's like, yeah, it's just, that's what it is. It's like you always kind of have to like, that's what I love about the Internet is the Internet's always moving. Just because, like you sleep for eight hours doesn't mean the Internet hasn't moved for eight hours, you know? So I think bio is a very important thing to constantly be changing and to segue into your question a little bit, it's yes, I've spent the last 15 years building community based products. My business, or the business I run is we incubate, we're an agency, we invest, and we just started noticing like 50% of our client work or whatever became Web3. And I've been involved in crypto for a while, but like, you know, had to, you know, there's a, there's a difference between being involved from like a hobby standpoint versus like being a leader. Yeah. And for me, and I think a lot of people in this room might be. For me, the way I learn is through writing. And I have a process for how I come up with content and tweets and stuff like that. And 99% of it I don't share with the public, but I still write only 1% of it. I'm actually putting it out there not because I'm trying to hide anything from other people, just because, you know, I would be. I'm one of those people where I'd be tweeting 75 times a day if I actually posted all that stuff. So to answer your question, Yeah, I basically six, nine months ago, basically started getting more into Web3. And yeah, my thinking on it is just how do I post one long form, post maybe a month on my sub stack at least, and be writing two to four tweets per week that are like very. That teach me something, right? Like we're always, like, we're always thinking about writing, especially on Twitter and social. It's always about like pushing stuff out, right? Oh, yeah. We want to get, we want to push stuff out to get likes. We want to push stuff out to get retweets we want to push stuff out to get followers. My intention with a lot of the Web three content I write is to push stuff out. And even before I've pushed it out and pressed the publish button or the tweet button, I learned a lot about a particular subject. Like, what is that worth? Right? It's like, hey, I'm really interested in this one NFT project. Like Loot, for example. There was this one NFT project a few weeks ago, I was really interested in it. So I was like, I'm going to write a post on it and that is my way of learning on it. I almost like. Anyways, that's my process. I'll, I'll, I'll stop the. Yeah, I'm curious your perspective on that. I like.

So my takeaway there is the best kind of writing and learning. Well, the best writing is almost a byproduct of learning, right? Where it's not. I'm, I'm working on all this for the end result of I'm going to write this long form post. But that long form post or that those five tweets a week are mere byproducts of your learning system, your writing system, your curiosity, whatever it is. And I think that's a very helpful framework for people who maybe sit down at a blank page and like, gotta churn something out versus turning it into. I'm gonna set up other things in my life, whether it's what I listen to, what I read, what I think about what, where it's almost effortless to kind of put something out, that because of all the other work I'm doing.

Yeah, I think that's a common thing I hear, which is like, I want to write or I want to put stuff out, but I don't have time. And my reaction to that is you, by you saying that, you're basically saying you don't have time to learn. And if you, if you want to be the best person in your industry, professionally speaking, you need to spend and allocate a certain amount of your time to learning. And I believe that the highest leverage. Use your time to do that is just by purely writing. If you decide to publish, that's on you. Um, but I think that at the very least, everyone should be writing and most people should be publishing.

Yeah, the publishing, I think, is just that little bit of credibility or not credibility, accountability, where you're going to think clearer if you know you have to put it out. Right? It's easy to hide about, oh, I'm writing, I'm writing, I'm writing, I'm thinking, I'm learning, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, oh, now I gotta go actually show people that's a little bit of skin in the game and takes it to a new level. And the by, again, the byproduct of that is you're actually going to understand it.

It's also the feedback loop, which is like, you want to be the best possible writer. And the beauty about platforms like Twitter is like, you're, you know, once you amass more than 2000 followers or 1500 followers, you will find out pretty quickly if something resonates with people or doesn't.

And you'll also figure out when you're wrong because they'll tell you really quickly, even more so than when you're right.

That's right.

All right, so my takeaway here, just putting a pin in the Reddit overall and your framework for that was it seemed like Reddit was simply a tool to do research on, a general framework for any kind of either product or thing you want to write about. So that, to me was my big takeaway was it's this. I'm going to immerse myself in the niche. I'm going to learn the way they do things, I'm going to figure out what their problems are in their specific language, I'm going to figure out what they've tried, what they're interested in, and then I'm just going to work to solve that. And potentially the tool with the tightest feedback loop for doing that is red. Is that kind of your understanding of it?

That's. That's exactly right. Do you think we have two or three minutes for me just to share my screen again and show. Oh, absolutely. We got.

I think we'll go for 15 more at least, so I'm game to take it wherever.

Cool. So I'm going to share my screen. I was thinking it could be fun to go into a subreddit and basically. Oh, sorry, we couldn't load the post. One sec. That's weird.

Maybe they got banned.

This is a great subreddit, by the way.

I heard maybe Reddit's down.

Is Reddit down?

Oh, wow. Serendipitous.

Well, not a good time to be unbundling right now.

Okay, so what would you have done if you stepped into that?

Well, yeah, exactly. We can just talk about it. On the right hand side of Reddit, there's of a subreddit. A lot of the subreddits have something which is called flare. And what flare Is is essentially a filter that grabs groups. The most interesting, the mo. The most like the post, most popular posts basically. So like it's the moderator of the, of the community that's being, being like, hey, there's a lot of posts in this category. I'm going to make it easier for people just to like filter through it. So the example I was going to use is, is Fat fire, which is stands for financial independence, retire early and fat in front of it just means that you have more than four or five million dollars. So it's this group of people who have more than four or five million dollars. It's a really fast growing subreddit. It's got a couple hundred thousand people. And if you go to the flare for that subreddit, you get a really good sense as to the motivations and the problems of that subreddit. So for example, I think one of them is the path to fat fire. So one of the things I do there, I what does that tell me? It says that of the couple hundred thousand people who are in that subreddit, maybe 150,000 of them are not actually in fire. They don't have more than $4 million. It's a lot of money, right? So there's an opportunity potentially to write for those people. Like, how do you become the path to fat fire guy or girl, right? And looking at that flare, you can really get a sense for or a bunch of those flares as to the identity of a lot of people and their motivations. Not many people look at that, so that's one thing to pay attention to. Second thing I always pay attention to is at the top of the subreddit, there's best of all time, last year, last few months, top of the day. This, you should be checking this quite frequently because it's going to give you a sense to what's trending in a particular community and that'll give you a lot of content ideas. So sometimes you'll actually get content ideas for like, let's just say in the Fat Fire community, maybe it was created seven or 10 years ago. You could actually look back like, hey, 10 years ago, what was the most, like the most popular post in, you know, 2012? And maybe someone hasn't written about that and maybe you can bring that back. So there's a lot of ways where you can actually look at Reddit, both from the, you know, the not so distant past, but also the past to come up with startup ideas, but also to write. Those are the two things I think I would you know, I would highlight. And I guess the last thing is just like I would have just taken you through, you know. Yeah, I mean, let's. Those are two really big.

So my, my thought on the flare is you're diving into a community and saying this, even this specific community is trying to be everything for everyone. I'm going to say, I'm going to get more specific and say, it's not fat fire, it's the path to fat fire. And you could even go from there. It's the path to fat fire for 20 year olds and 40 year olds.

Right.

People who. God. I mean, the number of hyper specific things that you could build something like that around using Reddit flare. My mind is just on fire right now thinking about that because you have this aggregation of people that you think are specific, but the real value is going to get even more specific than just a subreddit.

Yeah, Greg, I don't know, I don't know if you agree with this, but I mean, I feel like there's just an overwhelming underestimation of how specific you can get with a problem with a category, with whatever it is that you're writing about. Like, I feel like every time I talk about that with people, we talk about this in chip theory all the time too, is, you know, people's assumption is like, oh, that's too small. You know, I don't want to pursue that because that's too niche that there's not enough people there. And then it's not until you start going down the rabbit hole where you're like, whoa, not only is this way more for me to even eat, like I can't even eat everything here, but even if a hundred other people did it, we wouldn't all be eating it either. I mean, do you feel the same way?

Yeah, I think it actually relates back to our conversation around butterflies in your stomach. I think if you're an artist, if you're a maker, if you're a creator, you're an entrepreneur, you, you are motivated. Like everyone here, for example, is, you know, here because they're here to learn and they're here to challenge themselves and they're here to better themselves. And people like us don't like when other people think or perceive us as thinking too small. It's like, that's what I've noticed at least that it's a, like, if we're going to fail, we want to fail because we failed. We don't want to fail because someone's, oh, you were you, you chose too Small of a niche. Oh yeah. You just, you know, and I think it's way easier to choose like a smaller niche and get traction and then expand from there, then choose like a big thing like entrepreneurship and writing about entrepreneurship and trying to stand out. So from my, from my perspective, there's so many great examples. I mean, even look at sweaty startup. He's like that, that was a niche, you know, but he's got like a hundred and some odd thousand followers. A really great, you know, podcast, gets tons of downloads. Like he's raised millions of dollars off Twitter. He's got a huge business off Twitter. And the category of like sweaty businesses, which are like kind of not sexy, not boring businesses, like, was a very small category and niche a year and a half ago.

I think ironically it's, if you think something is too niche, you're probably not being specific enough. Right. Where it's, you think, you think it's small, but you could get even smaller and it's only then that you actually see it unlock the value. Like I'm obsessed with this idea of someone saying fat fire for 45 year olds who don't have this much money because that's probably such a big group. And then you can solve the problems even more specifically.

And that each group of people faces such radically different problems. You know, like if you're a 20 year old that wants to learn about financial independence, you're starting from a completely different place and you have a completely different risk profile than someone who's 48 years old and is like, hey, I never learned this. I'd like to figure this out in my lifetime. Now what do I do? So it changes the language you use, changes the problems that you answer, changes stories you tell. Yeah.

It'S just this connection of building principles with writing principles. Whether you're solving a problem with your writing, with the product, whatever it is, all of these principles are, are the same. Well, my mind is spinning. I know we want to do a few minutes of questions before we run out. So if anyone has questions as we kind of finish up, I'll start with what are you most excited about kind of writing about or sharing maybe the next six to 12 months. Greg, if you kind of fast forward and you think, I've done a great job doing this, that and the other thing. What, what comes to mind?

I would say for me, I'm just, you know, I'm obsessed with Web3 and I know it sounds like I probably, you know, I took the red pill and I took the blue pill and then I took the red pill again and I just took the whole bottle and just kind of like downed all this stuff. We all have. I, I do believe that it's going to fundamentally change the Internet and I, I do believe that community is at the core of that. So to me, what would be successful over the next six to 12 months is to continue sharing my learnings along the way and just like being generous with that and not being, like, not being afraid to press, publish and have some velocity to do that. And that would be a successful year for me. It's just putting out great content or in Web three, something that I want to, you know, know more about just because I'm curious and, and, and see what opportunities come out of that and, and, and also just teach people about Web3. And that's why I'm launching a Web3 course about what is how to design NFT projects, how to design daos and what and how to design tokenized communities. Because I'm just like, I want, I, my thesis is that the more people that know this, the better.

And I think even building your own course on it is going to be a forcing function for you to learn. Right. Do all these things. And that's just a great, that's a great way of thinking about it. It's like I'm going to create this course because it's going to force me to learn how to teach this whole thing, which means I got to learn it pretty damn well.

Exactly. And you nailed it on the head. Like I haven't like publicly said that, but like that's exact. Like the Reddit framework came from my Maven course where I'd been doing this, but I didn't write it down as well as I had done. And I taught this course on maven.com like in April or something and it was how to build a community based product. And when I actually came up with the course material, I was like, oh yeah, I gotta draw this out and I gotta put it out and through that process, like writing is one way to learn, but another way is to teach. Just like generally teach. So I think building a course is an incredible way to ramp up your learnings.

That resonates heavily because it's almost anything you want to learn either commit to. I think it's so many people are in that exact spot you were at where I've done, done this for so many years, but I've never actually wrapped it up and put a bow on it. And so whether it's creating a course, creating a product Writing about it. It's the only way to kind of. I like to say writing is the only way to figure out how little you know and how much you know where. Until you try to wrap it up and say, here's everything packaged up tightly. You don't reflect on kind of this incredible amount of specific knowledge you have. So that. That's cool to hear. I'm excited. I'm excited to take that when it drops as well. Do we have any. Do we have any questions? That's really funny. I'm reading the comments. Just shut up and take it all. I'll pay whatever it is. That's funny.

I don't want money. I want eth.

That's right. Yeah. Only an eth, which is. I actually saw something hilarious. It's like you eat. Eth is winning because it's not pricing in dollars, it's pricing in eth, which is like pretend, pretend Internet money versus if it was in dollars. You're like, hell, no, I'm not paying that. But it's like a 0.04. Sure. Whatever it is, whatever it is. So awesome. All right, I think we'll finish. This is a great question to end on for people who are Web3 kind of curious. I heard you give this explanation of Web one, Web two, Web three of information. Information plus one thing that I forgot, and then information, something in execution. Can you just give that rundown for us?

Yeah, I mean, to me, when I think about, like, the history of the web, you know, It's. It's Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 1 was, you know, desktop era. It was like Yahoo. It was like desktop software. Web two was mobile. So, sorry, Red. Web one is really about writing or, sorry, reading. Web one is about reading. Web two is about writing and reading. So not only could you read content on the Internet, but now you can write. So things like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or the hallmarks of that era. And now Web3 is about execution. Read, write and execute is what Rev3. So not only could you read and write, but now there's these smart contracts that are going to exist or starting to exist on the Internet and that will allow transactions to happen. Like, for example, I could say, hey, if 50 people buy my course, then I'll go do my course. And it's, you know, enforce via code. And if less than 50, you know, less than that amount of people buy it, then I don't have to do it. And there's a lot. It's just that unlocks A lot. So that that's how I view sort of the history of the web and where we're at today. Read, read, write, and read, write, execute. Well, if.

If I didn't need another reason to kind of have my head spinning with potential ideas, I'm really glad we got to end on that one. So I block some more time to go through this whole thing again. So I think we'll wrap it there because I want to save my own bandwidth to make sure I can actually dig through this whole talk. So, Greg, thanks for jamming with us. I got a full page of notes here I'm excited to dig through. Where can we send the folks to learn more about anything you're writing? Twitter, substack, all that.

Yeah. You know where to find me? Twitter. Maybe I'll put my Twitter link. And I got it here on Twitter and I got my substack there. Too late.

Checkout.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Find me on the Internet. There we go. Can't wait to read what you guys. You all are writing. Awesome.

All right, everyone. Well, thank you for joining. This will be recorded. If you're watching the recording right now, I hope you enjoyed this as well. And I think that's all we got for today. So I think everyone give some thanks to Greg for showing up and dropping all this knowledge. If you've got a golden nugget takeaway, drop it in the chat too. I don't have room in the text box to do that, so we'll figure it out. But, Greg, thanks again. Cole, thanks again. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Greg.