The Playbook Of Learning In Public & How To Thought Lead (feat. Shawn @swyx Wang)

I've actually— this is a post I have hesitated to write for a long time because I think I've unlocked how to thought lead.

I think it's gonna blow up on Hacker News. You should do that because, you know, Zach and you crowd hate stuff.

No, but people will make fun of you.

On Twitter, the DevRail DX community, he's probably the most technical guest that I've had so far.

Those 2 words are the atomic unit, the smallest possible expression of a brand, of an idea, because they are the prototype of a meme, right? That is the smallest possible meme you can fit into a person's mouth. Basically, seems to be B players writing about A players subscribe to by C players.

Oh my God! Okay,

which is just true.

I think they got to bring you on the MFM podcast. You are fascinating and serious. Like I think Sam's gonna love love your stuff.

Yeah, Shy follows me.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. I'm KP, your host of the Building Public Podcast. And today I am super excited to invite and welcome Sean to our pod. I had to take a pause there. Should I call you Swyx or Sean? Yeah, of course. Sean's super popular on Twitter, in the DevRel DX community. He's probably the most technical guest that I've had so far. And I've had 29 folks so far. But Sean, give us a quick intro of, you know, who you are. And he is the current head of DX at Airbyte. Give us a quick intro about what Airbyte does as well.

Okay. Hi. So yeah, thanks for having me on. So the TL;DR of what I do is I used to be a financial analyst or hedge fund analyst, and I switched to tech as a developer when I realized that all the money was being made in tech. I specialized in developer relations at Netlify, AWS, Temporal, and now I'm head of DX at At Airbyte. And essentially, Airbyte is a data integration company. It is the ETL pipeline for all your data sources into a data warehouse. The main thrust of the thesis is that every single company nowadays uses between 50 to 100 SaaS applications. All of them are sitting on some partial part of your data in order to monetize it, in order to provide value to you. They want to be data silos. They want to be the single source of truth for customers, for transactions, for help desk tickets, whatever that is. But in order to do an analysis across all of them to model your company, you have to pull them into a data warehouse to perform whatever, like SQL queries or Python queries or anything like that. And so the data engineering field needs these ELT solutions, and Airbyte is the largest community of open source connectors. We are doing to this industry what Wikipedia did to encyclopedias. And so it's really about community building and open source.

I love it. It's— I think you've done a great job of explaining what the thesis is because it's— I try to wrap my head around what you just said. by visiting the website of Airbyte and I stood like, stared at it for 20 minutes. I'm like, what is going on here?

But— It depends on the audience because you're not the target audience. So, right.

I think for developers.

Yeah. Yeah. It's designed at a different audience than you.

Right. And then there's— that leads me to my second question, which I think is something you've been doing for a better part of your career, which is DX, right? I think a lot of folks, especially maybe, you know, who are founders in our audience who are maybe bootstrap founders, maybe the odd one or two developers, probably know this, but like a lot of folks may not know the term DX, or developer experience, if, if that's the right acronym. What is it? And I'm also curious about another term that's very similar, seems like, like an overlap, which is dev rail. How would you define what these 2 are? And yeah, that's the question. Sorry.

Yeah, so I'm just going to assume that not everybody is a developer or familiar with developer startups. The thing about developers is that we are builders at heart, and we like talking about technical terms. The problem with marketing to developers is we really don't like marketing. We have the highest install rates of ad blockers, right? Okay. And we really hate buzzwords. We really hate— tell me benefits, not features, that kind of stuff. Tell us the features and we'll decide on the benefits. Don't— and so there's a lot of things in developer marketing that is the exact inverse of normal marketing. And so I think basically what DevRel is, developer relations is, is a reaction to the realization that developers don't like to be marketed to by traditional developers. They want another fellow developer to explain what the thing is in terms that they understand in a relatable fashion, preferably someone who's used the tool and sat in their seat before to increase empathy. This is a very different type of go-to-market than traditional company, which would hire a professional marketer who's done nothing but marketing their entire life. Right. So which is a, which is a very, very big shift for the way that these companies sell. But if you think about really big companies, $60-$100 billion companies like Twilio, Stripe, MongoDB, Confluent, And even the companies I work at, AWS, Temporal, Netlify, we've all come up through a huge amount of developer outreach from the bottoms up. Because the interesting thing about developers, and this is something your audience might appreciate, is that developers are sold to like B2C, but they buy like B2B, which is fantastic. Because you want to make sure your customer acquisition cost is as low as possible and bottom up as possible. But then once they've locked you in, their spend can go up to millions a year without even blinking. Wow. And so that's, that's just a very interesting go-to-market. And that's what's driving the current phase of developer relations and why people are so excited about it. There's another phase that is just emerging in the last 1 to 2 years, which is essentially developer experience, which is kind of like the next step of developer relations. And so what that is, is essentially developer relations trying to expand its territory. And but I'll tell you the premise of it, which is essentially developer relations are out there doing talks, doing blog posts, talking to users all the time, but they have the least power to do anything about it. They're supposed to bring feedback from the users back to the products, back to the company, but they don't have power. I know that, you know, if I see something that's missing in the docs, I cannot go to edit the docs directly. I have to go through the docs team, which has its own priorities. Instead, I have to write a blog post, which maybe 1/10 of the user base will actually read. So developer experience is more about reaching back into the product and making sure to fix things at the source, to make sure that we have to be taking care of the entire developer journey from never heard of you to using you to paying you to telling about you to other people. To their friends. That entire journey needs to be modeled and taken care of. So right now, it's an extension of developer relations from professional content creation to community building to documentation writing, and then to a little bit of product feedback and product management.

Fascinating. So would you say these two— like, could there be two separate teams that are focused on one DevRel and then the other one DX? Or is it usually one is the umbrella and it has a subset of the other?

I think it's possible to have 2 separate teams. But typically what you will see is director of DX or head of DX like myself managing a DevRel team, a docs team, and community team, for example. That's what the industry is shaking out to be for now. But I don't think there's a hard and fast rule that says you have to organize your company this way. It's really up to you.

Right. Fascinating. Wow. Thanks for that quick masterclass on how these things work. Another thing that I loved when I was sort of researching you is this framework that you talk about all the time. And I think one of my biggest reasons why I've been meaning to get you on the pod was this framework that I think the first time I think I saw it on Hacker News. It's been everywhere. It's called the Learning in Public framework, which of course, you know, spoiler alert, I'm excited about it because, you know, it's very clearly aligned with what I believe in, which is building in public. But now your Twitter bio for folks who are, you know, I'll drop your Twitter bio in the show notes too, because, you know, I think they should check it out. But you say learning in public and healing in private. First, let's talk about that. What does that comment mean? And then we'll talk about the actual framework.

I think that's the thing that most people know me for. So essentially, I switched to— I did a career change at the age of 30 from finance to tech, and I went through a boot camp. And when I was invited back to my boot camp to give a talk, that was the essence of what I gave to people, which is the essay that I wrote that became my book, which we can talk about later for side hustles and stuff like that. But that was my first viral essay. I actually— it was a screenshot essay. Like, I put it in a— Wow. I wrote like 4 paragraphs. I put it in a— I did a screenshot, posted it up, and then I went away and it came back. It was like thousands of likes, and it was my first like Like, real, like, whoa, like something I wrote really resonated with people. And that's why I haven't really touched it since then, because I'm not really sure why it resonated with people.

Like all viral things, like you just, you know, you can't really predict.

Yeah, it's not broken, don't fix it. But I'll tell you, you know, the main realization, which is the wake-up moment for me, is realizing the difference in why I was so much more successful in my tech career compared to my finance career. I've had 2 careers now, you know, and And it is such a painful lesson to learn, but really it's because tech is fundamentally more open than finance. Finance is very zero-sum, finance is very private, and my progress was only limited to my immediate surroundings, my boss, the stocks that I was trading in, my relationships within the industry. Whereas in tech, I could basically broadcast everything I was doing because essentially nothing is proprietary because most tech is like 90% open source. Right. And we even are encouraged to tell people about our failures. Tech is positive sum.

Positive sum.

There's so much blue ocean. People are willing to help you, help join you because they are hoping to improve themselves by helping you out. And I think that is just such a fundamentally more positive way to grow and to build your network, to build your skills, and, you know, to show your work. So I really like that. And I summed it up into this philosophy of learning in public, which I also have to say I did not coin. I think I'm the number one Google search result now. But it was kind of by accident. Like I picked it up from Kelsey Hightower, who's another extremely well-known developer advocate from Google. And the first instance I can find of learning in public actually dates back to NASA in the 2000s, when they were using learning in public internally as a— they had a memo of this is how rocket scientists share their knowledge internally. So public, there's different forms of public. It doesn't— you don't always have to blast it out in a public square like Twitter. That's right. You can also just do it internally within a company. And that really shares your learnings and keeps you accountable and also accelerates the learning of the entire organization. So I really, you know, the more I dove into it, the more I found benefits for myself. And obviously telling others about it is kind of a way to pay it backwards, but also a way to commit myself to doing more of it. Like, I know it's good for me. I know it's a pain. I know it's— I feel vulnerable every time I do it because I could fuck up. Like, you know, I look at something I did yesterday and I'm like, oh man, the spelling mistake here, like grammar mistake there. I missed an example here. I should have shouted out this other person and I forgot, you know, that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, I shipped something in public and people had something to respond to me for. Like, I could connect with You know, people doing podcasts because of something that I wrote. And I think there's just so— it really increases your luck surface area so much because it just makes you more visible out there. And that's something that I really want to tell— pass on to others.

There was another similar phrase that you talked about in one of your YouTube videos, which is the open source knowledge. I don't know if you wrote about this on— as a post as well, but I think it's another interesting framework that I thought was, was fun because you defined it as like Open means this, source means this, and knowledge means this. So I would love for you to re-narrate that for our audience here. And then why is it important?

Yeah, I don't exactly know the word-by-word breakdown anymore. I did that talk a couple of years ago. Essentially, whenever someone has like a conference or something and I'm invited to do a talk, I'll have to come up with something on the spot. And I try to make it fresh so I don't repeat myself because everything is permanent online. So you should always be trying to push yourself to produce new content. But I really believe in open source knowledge for one thing, which is essentially cumulative learning in public, right? A lot of people, when they first start learning in public, it's basically blog posts, it's basically Twitter, it's basically one-off sprints that you sprint for a while, you're like, you spend like 6 hours writing a blog post, and then you're done, and you put it down. The inspiration of open source knowledge is essentially that you should build things up cumulatively over time into something that is way more man-hours than anyone else has ever put into a project, and therefore it becomes worthwhile. So you're— the benefits of your work start compounding rather than being a continuous series of one-offs that don't really matter. So So that's what open source means, and that's what open source knowledge means. So the assertion, the fundamental assertion to that talk was essentially that open source has eaten software engineering because multiple people, there's multiple benefits. People can reuse it, people can contribute back to it, and you can sort of learn as a group. And networks learning is always better than individual private learning. Not always, but mostly. Right. And so the open source movement coming for software is now very developed, but the open source movement for knowledge is not very well developed. We tend towards authority figures. We tend towards one version of history, one Wikipedia article that defines like whatever you care about, right? You know, let's say you care about no-code, you know, history of no-code, what no-code is. We tend towards like 3 or 4 primary sources. But why should all of us not have our own ideas of what no-code is and our timelines, our collection of facts, our market maps, and let people contribute if they, if they see that this is something that they like but they want to add some piece of information? And it really, really helps. So for me, I did this with my learning of React and TypeScript, which are 2 of the leading technologies in frontend, right? And I started out solving, creating it as a cheat sheet for myself to solve my own problems. But other people saw the effort that I was putting into it. And they contributed, they asked questions, they corrected my mistakes. And as part of all of this, I was learning every single time. I've been taught React and TypeScript by people at Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, you know, like just all these top places that would never normally pay me the time of day, just because they could see my mission. in the open. I was doing something in public as a public service. Yes, motivated by myself, but also I could let others play along. So, I really like that mission. I think— I forget who it is. I think it's Geoffrey Litt who has this idea of— no, it's not Geoffrey. I'm not sure. I forget who he is. But working with the garage door open is another phrase of the working in public philosophy. Do you know who that is? I'm really killing myself for blanking on the name. Anyway, it's fine. He's famous enough.

I want to say David Perell, but I don't know. Is that him or not?

No, it's not David Pratt.

No, but, um, no, anyway,

so

I've heard of it for sure.

So the point is that because you opened up your notes to other people and you made it inviting for people to fork or contribute back to it, you start to build a community around you that accelerates your growth in learning much more than you would yourself, and that it is cumulative over time. It is not a bunch of one-offs. It is just something that you're working at over the course of years, and by the end of it, you will Absolutely end up with a large body of knowledge with all your notes that is a useful resource for someone else. And they'll start pointing their friends to you because, you know, you've spent so much work and you made it so easily accessible and you've organized it, you've curated it. And also, like, people start hiring you based on that just because they know that everything you put there is the stuff that you've bothered to write down. But there's always stuff that you haven't written down yet that's actually the juicy stuff,

right? So in the sense of community and how like learning in public applies or naturally, naturally builds community, it seems like. What is your take on content? Like, do you see creating content as a separate exercise to learning in public, or you think it's just part of learning in public is to write notes and share them, and that's really content?

Yeah, I think it's part of the process. I would actually like to make it so easy, so low effort that you don't view it as a separate activity. You view like when I code, I will take notes to— I will write design drafts or whatever in order to structure my code better. It's a way of thinking. And if you find— if you create yourself a venue or an expectation from your audience that it is okay to publish your work in progress notes, it's just very liberating to just say, here's where I'm at today, here's what I got, here's what I'm working on. And you can see some of these, like the game designers are really good at it. Like, here's a micro interaction that I worked on today, and it gets thousands of likes because that is a little bit of building in public, right? You're kind of building your knowledge base in public. I call it learning in public, but I really Don't really super care about the semantics. And ultimately, it's just a really good way to get people involved in your journey. And I think that's great for hiring, that's great for marketing, whatever it is you're trying to do. I think there is a spectrum of signal-to-noise management that people at the high level should really— should get really good at, because ultimately you want to create one high signal-to-noise channel that your most distant people can subscribe to. Like when people first hear about you, they should get extremely high signal. Only when people are very familiar with you, you can give more noise in order to give them more of the behind the scenes. Brilliant insight. relationship with it.

That's a brilliant insight. I've never heard that from anyone before. But yeah, this makes me want to ask, so then how do you architect this? Like, would you say the newsletter would be the first point of entry so that in that case then maybe it should be a high signal thing? Or like, how do you put this in application? Like, apply this framework.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, to be clear, I don't think I'm the perfect practitioner of it because I'm still evolving my thoughts. And secondly, I also don't take it super seriously myself because the third part of this, which is it's better to be anonymous than to be famous, right? Like if your entire business runs on your personal celebrity, that is unsustainable. You are a bus— one-person bus factor. But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about making yourself famous. So, the point about making yourself famous is that you should have a mental picture of how people come across you. So, probably they're not gonna come across you in your newsletter, right? That is a very, very high commitment thing. I get to hand over my email address to you and then I have to read emails, which I do for work. I don't even do for work, so why would I do it for fun? So—

That's a gate. That's just like a step friction.

Some friction is good. Some friction is good, yes. But you should do it for the real fans, right? But for those who are not real fans, so people who haven't— have never heard of you, you should make it easily accessible what you're about. You should be able to deliver value in some very compact fashion right off the top of the dome and then give them a few breadcrumbs to say, oh, there's these other aspects to this guy that you can follow through if you're interested. And if not, you know, happy days, be on your way. But if so, then it can be a very, very fast process from someone never hearing about you to suddenly just binge reading your entire blog post archives. And I think that's kind of where you want to make things happen. Kevin Kwok has this very famous phrase, you know, being on Twitter is basically tapping a tuning fork on the universe and seeing who resonates. Wow. And it's not about the maximum number of growth. Like, if I wanted to, I could write all those Twitter threads and hustle porn threads, and I could repost Reddit stories to Twitter stories. There's all this, all this stuff that people do, right? But it's not really authentic because you should just look for the people that think the way that you like, are interested in your journey and think the same as you. So I really appreciate that kind of authentic growth. And I think more people should do it. I'll expand a bit more on the signal-to-noise thing. Yeah, of course. So high signal-to-noise, yeah, high signal-to-noise should be in people's feeds wherever they are. And usually it is one of these aggregate feeds, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Hacker News is a bit of a lottery ticket because the algorithm is extremely finicky. The same post, the same exact post can not do well on one day and do well another day. So it's a bit more tricky. Maybe Discord, some of the large communities there, and then YouTube. And then concentric circles in terms of the number of people and then the increasing involvement in your journey and interest in your work-in-progress stuff. And so what I'm trying to get at is that's fine, having a philosophy of like your funnel, but really as a creator, it's important to set up your creation channel so that no matter what you do, if you feel like posting it, you should have a channel for yourself. And if you don't, if you feel like you're being restricted from productivity, Just because you're like, oh man, this is not ready for my blog. Like, you know, look at the— look at my other blog posts. Those are extremely high quality. Yeah, these are extremely high quality. So, and then this one is like not done yet, so I'm not gonna post it. When that kind of thing happens, or it can be your Twitter, your YouTube, whatever, when that kind of thing happens, you basically are limiting your output because of the channels. And it should be the other way around. Like, you should not be limited, you should create the channels to fit your output. And so for me, for example, I'll create like a Discord where I can share work in progress stuff that It's just a smaller community that's more engaged. It will still give you feedback as part of your process, but— and you still feel like you ship something. And so, I'm very keen on basically picking the social— creating enough channels that matches your output and matching that to the signal-to-noise ratio that you want to achieve for that particular channel. Is that— No, I love it.

I love it. And I'm curious how— I love it, first of all, the fact that you do the opposite. Like, it's a little contrarian to think about that because, you know, You're trying to make sure that you don't lose your output or your inclination towards creating that kind of output because you don't have a channel for it. And so I love that. What I think is interesting here is then take me through a journey of, let's say, a work-in-progress thought that you had. Maybe you shared with like 20 people on Discord. How does it make it to your, let's say, high signal channel? Is it the blog or something? What kind of mindset do you have when you post it on the blog? Do you do it only when it's fully finished?

No, because nothing's ever finished. I think it's mostly when there's an arbitrary feeling of the timing is right, whether I have done enough work on it. And sometimes a lot of things never make it out because they didn't get enough interest, whatever. So, I think it's mostly timing, it's mostly whether or not I feel like I have an interesting angle. If I just have a boring angle, I just won't publish it. You know, I'm the editor of my own media empire, and editorial is always like top of mind. Like, is this a good angle? Do I have a differentiating opinion? If not, then maybe I can just sit on it for another few months. And that's essentially— I've done this for like— I've sat on things for years because it just wasn't ready, you know. And I think that's fine. You have to be comfortable with that. But then you also need the idea velocity to have multiple things going on and trying to have something come out on a somewhat regular basis so that you remain relevant and top of mind. So there is a bit of a juggling effect. going on there. But I think anyone who has any interest in their space, engagement with the news of the day, with the builders in their space, should be able to come up with multiple ongoing threads simultaneously of like questions they want to answer. And when you have accumulated enough— so for example, one of my recent greatest hits was the end of localhost. There was a culmination of maybe 2 to 3 years of thinking about cloud development environments and why I didn't like them and why everyone seems to love them. And for me, suddenly changing my mind based on one throwaway comment that someone said in a podcast, that was the catalyst. I had to wait for that to get there, and then I could spin up this whole story. That post got 100,000 views. Like that, I just did some more podcasts about it. Like, it becomes— like, I have to produce consistently one blog post a week, every week for the year to have one hit. And that one hit drives like the rest of, you know, I'm still talking about a blog post I did 3 years ago. I'm still being flown around to different conferences based on that blog post. And it's just crazy that that's how nonlinear blog posts are. Right. But you just need to work on the process and then trust that the outcomes will come along. If you have a good process.

I love that. How much do you care about SEO and backlinks and stuff like that? Because I think a lot of people get— yeah, I mean, I know you're technical, so you probably do care, but I think a lot of people get bogged down by, am I writing the questions and the answers in the way that somebody would find them easily on Google and stuff? And I feel like it can be a distraction sometimes, but it can be a healthy thing. So how do you— what's your balance on that?

Yeah, okay. I have a distinction between machine SEO and human SEO. So let me elaborate a little bit on this. Machine SEO is what is best dishwasher? What is— what, you know, I don't know, Blue Yeti versus Yamaha MH75. I'm just making this shit up. For that kind of machine SEO, it's like, yes, people are typing that into the Google search terms. You just need to perform the best service on those top search terms. You need to rank for those terms that are already established. Human SEO is completely opposite. You are trying to rank for terms that don't exist yet. Because if you coin a new term, the search volume would be zero. But because you were right, you will have created that search volume and made the whole journey around you fit that thing. So when Seth Godin talks about the purple cow, nobody was searching for purple cow, but now he owns the purple cow, right? When HubSpot invents inbound marketing, nobody was searching for inbound marketing, but they made inbound marketing a thing by by being right. And I think that is the hard thing to do. But if you're a thought leader, essentially, and if you're an influencer, whatever you whatever label you choose to call yourself, and you're optimizing for humans and not machines. That's essentially what you have to

do. Wow, brilliant insight, man. Another thing that I think, again, a lot of people struggle with, but it seems it's like, it's a great way to look at it, you know?

Yeah. And there's a very, very, very, very, very, very simple trick that I think everyone should be aware of because this is like absolutely a conscious strategy.

You mean this one you just shared?

It is called— so that is the basic insight that you should have, which is there's a difference between machine SEO and human SEO. And actually the way the SEO courses courses teach you to optimize for machine SEO is kind of the bottom feeder type SEO where you're just competing for, I hope the Google algorithm likes me today. And in the next update, it might suddenly not like me. I have seen entire sites destroyed based on Google algorithm changes, right? Whereas human SEO is very much word of mouth, very much like it spreads because you've coined a term and it spreads. Yes, exactly.

So the trick to— Yeah, I was gonna say something, but yeah.

Yeah, I'll finish. The trick to human SEO is this phrase I've called 2 words. Essentially, the 2-word, like, Identify the 2 words that succinctly position yourself against the rest of the orthodoxy in your discipline. So I have a blog post on it. You can look up on my blog the 2-word philosophy.

Now I'm curious. But essentially when you think about— You gotta unpack it for us.

Yeah. So you think about deep work, right? Essentially a lot of philosophies can be reduced to 2 words. If it's 3 words, it probably won't do as well as 2 words. If it's 1 word, it probably won't do as well as 2 words. This is a general rule, not a fixed thing. But you can just look at the amount of, I don't know, radical candor. How many of these TED Talks can you sum Summarize into words, right? Like, and those 2 words are the atomic unit, the smallest possible expression of a brand, of an idea, because they are the prototype of a meme, right? That is the smallest possible meme you can fit into a person's mouth, and it should be as few syllables as possible because then it will spread.

Atomic cow, right? Radical candor.

Yes, yes. I have a full list.

I want to hear more. Give me some more.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.

You might be, you might be the most interesting guest I've interviewed, man. Like, you're so freaking— you're just— you were so unassuming when I spoke to you earlier.

I, I love the— I love the content game. I love the content game. Okay, so let me just— let me hit you with the list. Okay, Black Swan, right? That—

oh my God, that was it, right?

Effective Executive was— this is old school. This is like before either of us were, were really— but like, this was a meme in the business circles for many years. Amazon is the everything store. Right? Even Robert Kiyosaki, his thing is Rich Dad Poor Dad, but really the atomic thing is Rich Dad, right? His website is richdad.com. He has a dad and he's rich, right? It's always the noun and the modifier. It's 2 words that succinctly express everything you stand for, and that's all people remember you for. Those are the 2 words. So your thing is Build in Public. By the way, conjugation words, conjunction words don't count, so the in doesn't count, but you have build and you have public.

I was gonna— That's the 2 words that you want everybody to To memorize things. I am like terrible at SEO, but I get so many invites to speak at conferences and all these things because if you search for building in public, my site shows up and my podcast shows up. And I named it just because I was curious about the topic. I'm not, by no means I'm the first person to talk about building in public. Ryan Hoover's done it, Peter Levitt's done it. And so many times I have to correct people saying they think that I'm the coiner. I'm like, I'm not the coiner, but I just create more content on that theme. Because I love it. That's it. That's really what it is. And I have zero SEO knowledge, literally zero SEO knowledge. And it's fascinating because

you're human

SEO. So back to your point,

the deep

account.

Surveillance capitalism. Apple, think different. 2

words. Yeah. I mean, I'm a baller. Yes. Like network state, right? That's interesting.

Network state. Yeah. This is the Thought Leader Playbook. Basically, I've actually— this is a post I have hesitated to write for a long time because I think I've unlocked How to thought lead?

I think it's gonna blow up on Hacker News. You should do that because you know that can be a crowd hate stuff.

No, but people will make fun of you.

People hate thought leaders. Like the ultimate thought leader killer is this trick or is this framework? But

there's there's more to this. What you should you should be able to pitch your yourself, your startup, your company, your your life purpose in two words, in one sentence, in one elevator pitch, in one twenty-five minute talk. And in a 200-page book. So there's range that you should develop. But the atomic thing that everybody has to strive for is 2 words, because that is the amount of memory that people have for you.

That's wild, man. I'm blown away by just thinking about all these examples come to mind now. What would you say Naval is?

The points guy.

Naval, angel philosopher, I think. Maybe, right?

Angel philosopher. Yeah. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Try to go wide. Go wide. Neil deGrasse Tyson calls himself every one of his podcasts, he calls himself your personal astrophysicist. Right. It's a noun, it's an angle that sets him apart. But he makes himself relevant because he says there's something differentiating about him. Naval tells you to productize yourself more than the angel philosophy thing. He tells you to productize yourself. And he wrote essentially a whole book on what productize means and what yourself means.

Now I can't. Right. Oh my God, there's so many now, right? Like Visualize Value, Jack Butcher, right? Like there's literally so many.

Yeah, exactly. Growth hacking. We used to have marketers and now it's a growth hacker. Yeah, exactly. But there's even the social political movement. Movement. Lean in, be better, time's up, me too. Yeah, it's all 2 words. And it's just the atomic unit of like what a meme becomes. And that's really like what you have to nail as an SEO. And so I think it's worth spending a lot of time on

it. How much of this can be done intentionally? And how much of this is just like being in the game long enough to capitalize on something that comes your way?

Yeah, I think being in the game sometimes is— it's just like, it should come out of your mouth. To me, the most effective 2-word campaign is not 2 words. I don't know, it's weird. Just do it. It's from Nike, right? Like, because so much advice, so much self-help motivational advice of like, or like experience distilled down into as few words as possible is some shitty variation of just do it. And Nike owned it. So even though it's not 2 words, it's like, let's say 2.5 words.

I mean, in that case, it kind of breaks the framework, but I guess—

So the explanation is like, do it is one verb and then just is the first word. So you can sort of backfit. Obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule. So there's no point. There's no point oversimplifying it. But it really demonstrates the power— it's a power law of signal to noise because your 2-word summation of yourself or your principle or your mission is the highest signal to noise that you can possibly achieve. And it's the most viral, spreadable term.

Okay, well, I got to double-click into this content thing because I have a couple more. What are some other content-related frameworks that you have? 2 versus 1. What else is something that you think about that nobody else is thinking or nobody else is paying attention to?

I mean, I can just kind of mouth blog my post on How to Thought Lead. Do it. I'm pulling it up right now. So by the way, all my blog posts are public, and it's part of how I work in public as well.

That's why I was curious earlier.

You can find it on my GitHub.

It's published already. My curiosity is, I'm like you in the sense that I like to work in public and think public, but when it comes to long form, I'm a little nervous about that. I don't know why, because I feel like people expect long form to be clean, nicely thought out. And my Twitter is fine. My expectation towards Twitter is like, yeah, I don't care. But long form, I'm like, oh my God, I need to align all my thoughts into like a nice essay. And that stops me from sharing often. How do you get over that hump?

Yeah, yeah. So I publish my drafts, all my drafts.

Publish your draft and—

They're publicly accessible at all times, just not on my blog, right? They're in a different venue. So when I find my production process—

Yeah, okay, gotcha.

It's on GitHub. So anyone following me, anyone who is technical enough to know how to subscribe to things on GitHub will get notifications anytime I update. And those are the true fans, right? Those have— they opted in for the noise, fine. But yeah, I mean, you wanna just publish it. You know, less than a percent of my audience and your audience will listen to this podcast. So, I'm just like, I'm drafting in public with you but I don't have any qualms about sharing it because I like— it's understood that this is not the final form and people will just be more and more excited about this. There'll be word of mouth spreading about this post even before I published it because they've been hearing about it for years. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I can go into a little bit of this.

You have so much of an artist DNA in you. Like an artist, not a painter. I'm like a musician artist. like, like a pop culture rapper artist. You got a lot of that. Oh yeah, like you like to tease people, you like to— you know the game as a creator.

I studied the game. I don't think I know the game yet. I think that the, the people who actually are masters are like the Seth Godins, you know, they actually— Cal Newports, like they've just decided to, to go all in. This is me being academic about it. This is me being like, okay, if I were to do this, what would I do? But I actually, I actually don't do this full time.

I'm gonna call this out. I'm gonna— this is just my side hustle. I think, I think they gotta bring you on the MFM You're fascinating. I'm serious. Like, I think Sam's gonna love your stuff.

Yeah, Sean follows me. He likes my— I had a blog post about the Meta Creator Seal.

Yeah, let's go.

You want to talk about that?

Wait, wait, wait. That's another 2-word thing. Wait, wait, wait. Let's finish this and then maybe we jump to the other one. What did you just pull up?

Okay, okay, okay, okay,

okay.

House of Aline.

That's what I'm saying. I think Sean's gonna love this.

This is my draft so far, which is—

But anyway, go on.

There are a bunch of— I haven't organized it yet, and that's why—

That's fine. Dude, this is like so

perfect

for your brand and my brand.

This is much rougher.

Especially literally mouth— like, you're literally verbalizing your draft on a podcast. So, go on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One, understand what people want. What makes people click? So, Sean, because you brought up Sean Puri, he has a philosophy of what makes people click, right? It's emotions. What emotions do you want people to have at the end of reading? Which is awe or like, wow, or like, I can't believe this, someone finally said this, you know? That is one thing that I think, understand what people want is the primary driver of marketing. And you have to accept and recognize that people want very simple things. You don't have to guess. People want money, people want sex, people want cute things and animals. You know, people want outrage. Oh, people love outrage, right? People want status, people want to feel smart. They want to be able to say like, I was first, I knew this before you knew this. And that's another thing. And if you can supply them what they want, they'll follow you. It's not that hard. And so, I think the baseline is knowing what people want. The next thing I think definitely is to name things. Let me drill down into the what people want thing. So remind— like, there's always a way to elevate people's conversation into something aspirational. So there's the day-to-day humdrum thing, and you can stand out by reminding people of what is more important. What is the real story? What is the long-term game that they're trying to play? And so Naval definitely did that for a lot of people, right, with his tweetstorm. Because most of us think in terms of like, okay, what is my current salary? What is the next level on my career ladder? And, you know, he could just kind of blasted that wide open and just said like, okay, what is the real And I think if you can do that a lot in terms of thought leading, because you understand what people really want, you can really break through a lot of the noise because most people target at the surface layer and you're targeting one layer up.

I feel like I at least attempt to do some of that. I mean, I haven't gotten to that level, but at least for my little niche, I try to think about what kind of aspirational stuff that I can write that can inspire me and can inspire others. So yeah, I love it. Yes. Keep going.

Yeah. A lot of times it's calling bullshit on something that is just accepted. And yeah, I think that's a really, really masterful tool. Another thing to— and then the other exercise that you want to go through is to basically drop dichotomies of your field. So for HubSpot, it was inbound versus outbound, right? Outbound. And conveniently, they were the only ones doing inbound. So I have a lot of offense to defense, right? Most people playing defense most of the time turn into offense.

There are so many episodes in which I focus on building in private or building in stealth to not promote, but subconsciously to say the building public is better. But to say building public is better, I had to say What was not good or what was not better? And I had to like shit on stealth a lot of the times. And now I'm thinking about that, I'm like, yeah, actually that's true.

Yeah, you're creating a dichotomy to make yourself stand apart. Yeah, it's a very common tactic to thought lead and that's what you're doing. So, but what's important for you as a professional thought leader or prospective thought leader is to understand the pros and cons of the various dimensions that you're choosing and to choose the battles wisely. Because you're going to be locked into this for a very long time. So defense versus offense, proactive versus reactive, positive versus negative. There's just all sorts. In the programming field, I have a few more, but it's essentially try to categorize everything into dichotomies, draw the 2 by 2, and just try and figure out which axes matter the most and where you're most opinionated against. And it's pretty easy to stand out there and to drive people towards your field. And then you can start to name things because you've now done the work of you know what people want, you know the basic dichotomies of the world, and then you can start to identify what is your 2-word summation of everything. Once you've named things, you can start drawing the picture in your mind of how things should be. You can map the world. Yeah. Ness Labs and Laura Lecomte has a really good blog post on thinking in maps that I've taken notes on to share. And then finally, I think there's another way to really thought lead, which is create equations. So Derek Sivers, for him, success is idea times execution. And he's even mapped out like 10 points on idea, 1 point on execution, or 10 points on idea, 0 on execution equals 0. that kind of thing. And if you create the formula for growth, formula for success, even though everyone is kind of knows it's kind of like fake pseudo math, that, that kind of quotability factor is what makes you trend as a thought leader. So here I have, I'm going to drop in a quick little clip, you know, and part of my blogging process is I'll just clip examples that are really relevant to this. Oh, great. I'm gonna drop it into the chat over here of Romain Chef. Yes. So he has 3 ingredients for angel investors: access plus judgment plus value equals investment. Judgment plus value with no Access equals didn't see the deal. Access plus value equals didn't pick the deal because you have no judgment, that kind of thing. So it's just, these are frameworks but visualized in very, very memeable formats that makes me more of a thought leader than people who like write 1,000-word blog posts with no conclusion.

Love it. Yeah, I've seen that one for sure. And I think a lot of what you said has been like, it's what's fascinating and refreshing is that you're putting, you're basically saying, putting words to a lot of subconscious behavior that happens, you know, across all feels. And so that's been my biggest takeaway here, is that you verbalize some of the stuff that we've been all thinking. All right. I mean, sorry, there was another segment that you wanted to jump off to. I want it.

MetaCreator. This will be quick.

This will be quick. Just give it to me.

Okay. Yeah, this will be the most— because you and I both are involved. Hunter Walk, do you know? He's like a VC at Homebrew. He had this tweet which really caught me thinking, which is essentially the emerging newsletter playbook seems to B players writing about A players subscribed to by C players.

Oh my God, okay.

Which is just true. It's true.

Hunter, all right.

The A players don't write newsletters. They don't give a fuck about Twitter growth.

They're just building.

They just make. They're just A players. And the C players, they're just building. And, and, and for, and, you know, for B players like us, we think we're hot. We think we're hot shit, right? We think we're like, wow, like, you know, I have so many subscribers, so many followers. I'm writing like the best Twitter thread on Twitter today. day, who gives a crap, right? Like, that is B-player stuff. You will never become an A-player by doing B-player stuff. So, this is called the MetaCreator ceiling because there's a career ceiling in being a MetaCreator. A lot of get started being a creator advice is become a MetaCreator. Summarize other people's books. Here's the like top 7 things you need to know about— Right. I don't know, whatever bullshit in your industry. You're not actually making, you're making things about other people making. And at the end of the day, there's a career ceiling and there's a glass ceiling in that which you will never go beyond that because all you've done is MetaCreate. You've never actually actually gone down to actually do stuff. You have— like, yeah. And part of this is, is me thinking about the very famous Quora answer from Justine Musk. I don't know if you've heard about this. There's an interesting question on Quora: what do smart, successful people like Elon Musk do to be who they are, to be how successful and how intelligent they are? Never read Quora. And Justine Musk was Elon's first wife. Yeah, they don't ask questions on Quora.

Right.

Yeah, right. So again, this is one of those things in terms of reminding people like what is really at stake, like what is the norm and how mediocre the norm is, and how you can actually make more of your life by aspiring to better. And just reminding what people— people what really matters, which is doing the thing, which is building stuff that makes people happy, creating jobs,

right?

Building—

It comes back to the earlier notion that you shared, which is just doing Do it, right? Like, do hard things, do ambitious shit. They're all like variations of the same thing, which is just do it, you know? Like, do something that's meaningful in your life, you know, than just talk about stuff. Like, there. Yes. Dude, I love how candid you are. I love how off the cuff you are. I appreciate it. Well, I don't have any other questions. I think we're at the 48-minute mark of this. It's been such a fun 40, 50 minutes chatting with you. Hope to see you back on the pod at some point. I've learned a I appreciate you taking, uh, taking this time and keep that fun personality that you got. All right, always alive.

Yeah, thanks for jamming with me. I know that because you're also a creator, like, you appreciate this stuff because this is the stuff that—

of course, I mean, I wish more people thought— Definitely would share it.

Exactly.

There we go. I'm marketing my post before I wrote it. I think—

Would you add anything?

What idea can I get an idea from you?

What's missing?

I think the biggest The biggest myth to me seems to be that you can engineer this. You can engineer your journey, but you can't engineer the exact 2 words. And that has to be a bit organic. And so a lot of people always think about, oh yeah, I'm in the DTC space. I'm trying to build the biggest candle empire. So my 2 words would be X on day 1. I'm like, no, you can't think of it like that. that because it has to come from what people are resonating with, and which means you have to first invest in your journey and go through the motions and like just put out some content and then let it organically come to you. It's like the wand picks— it's— I feel the 2 words are, if you think about the niche, like the wand picks the wizard, the wizard can't pick the wand. The Harry Potter reference. So that's like probably my take because I didn't intend to be the building public guy.

Yeah.

I'm sure, you know, like some— like it just became the topic that I was most interested in. No-code. I used to be community, all these other things, and now I'm all building in public. So that's probably my take. But yeah, it was fun, man. Thanks for being here and, uh, wish you all the best.

All right, makes sense.

See ya.

Bye-bye. Thank you.