A Massive Opportunity for You and Your Company in 2025
My podcast co-host, adtech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Eric Franchi, recently brought influencer, entrepreneur, and investor Naval Ravikant to my attention, and his pinned thread on how to get rich makes a few key points that are still very true six years later. These points apply not just to how to get rich but also how to build companies. So, I want to review them in this newsletter to spark your curiosity as an individual who might like to build your career/wealth and/or grow your company.
Here are screenshots of the four key tweets from the thread:
The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
I’m an advocate of content-led PR, meaning you seek to build your reputation and relationships as well as those of your company by posting content on first-party communications channels, specifically social media, email, and podcasts. In other words, I think you and your company should be publishing more LinkedIn and Twitter posts, newsletters, and podcasts. By “first-party communications channels,” I just mean you can control what you say and the cadence at which you say it on these platforms. I believe this is the highest-leverage opportunity most individuals and companies have not yet tapped to grow their wealth (to stick with the term Naval uses).
To this, you might say, “Ha! Use social media more? Newsletters? Podcasts? None of this is new. People have been doing these things for a decade.”
True. It’s also true that less than 1% of individuals in digital advertising and adtech and less than 10% of companies meaningfully use these channels to grow their wealth. Sure, they might scroll LinkedIn and Twitter occasionally, post ‘company updates,’ or send out a newsletter that’s an unseemly, cobbled-together series of self-centered links with no point of view. But the vast majority of individuals and organizations are not consistently using social media, email, and audio to distribute a distinct point of view about a very specific topic that establishes them as one of the foremost experts on that topic while shifting the perception of their target audience. This is a capability of “the Internet,” to return to the tweet’s language, on which 99% of individuals and at least 90% of companies are not capitalizing. And its potential to transform the influence and wealth of those individuals and companies is massive despite requiring very little overhead.
Most people haven’t figured this out yet. Or they’re aware of it but are not availing themselves of the opportunity, which is functionally the same thing.
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
Old-school salespeople sometimes contrast sharing content on social media with going to events, calling people, and playing golf. In reality, digital networking and IRL networking are complementary activities, both of value. But creating content (or “media,” as Naval put it in 2018) is infinitely scalable, and as such, it has distinct advantages over old-school, 1:1 networking.
In practice, content across social media, email, and podcasts is a funnel going from top to bottom, typically in that order, and as someone engages with you across any part of that funnel, you have the opportunity to engage with them across both media and 1:1 networking. So, content isn’t in tension with 1:1, face-to-face networking. On the contrary, the former fuels the latter, and content makes it so that when you do finally speak to someone 1:1 (say, on a call), they have a great deal of context for your thinking and talents and — usually — a great deal of trust, too. In the sales context, this means they show up 80% sold. In the hiring context, it means they’re 80% ready to hire you or work for you. And in neither of those contexts, it means they’ve simply become a fan, maybe even a champion, who will sing your praises to others, becoming a referral or influence-building machine.
In any given week, I might meet with a couple dozen people. But I’ll have reached thousands, if not more, via LinkedIn, Twitter, this newsletter, and my podcast. This is obviously valuable in itself, but it’s extra valuable because their engagement with me in a one-way, no-stakes environment gives them the opportunity to vet my ideas and potentially develop an affinity for me before we chat.
Content also introduces you to a class of people you might not meet otherwise. The CEO of a public company might have ignored my message if I sent him a cold email. But after reading my newsletter for three months, he reaches out to me, and he already trusts me when he does so. That’s the power of content. Both individuals and organizations can and should avail themselves of it. And there’s nothing but their own doubts getting in the way.
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
When adtech-focused investment banker Terry Kawaja came on my and Eric’s podcast, Open Market, he offered a timeless aphorism, “There’s reality, and there’s perception, and only one matters.” Terry’s point was that marketing, the art of shaping perception, is critical to mergers and acquisitions. Of course, marketing, which is driven by content (or “permissionless media”), is critical to the entire fate of individuals and organizations precisely because it shapes perception, and yet it remains dramatically undervalued.
I’ve recently written about the role good marketing has played in the fortunes of two advertising and adtech organizations, Publicis and Viant. For the purposes of this newsletter, though, please allow me to use myself as an example in the hopes that it will inspire some of the individuals reading this to take action and access the massively undervalued leverage of content to grow their own careers.
I started posting on Twitter in August 2023. My marketing agency for adtech companies, Sharp Pen Media, was two years old, and I had some great clients, but my adtech name ID was very low, and just about no one in the space associated me with a particular marketing philosophy (e.g. content-led PR or executive evangelism). I posted once per day, eventually multiple times per day, and my following grew from about 300 people to, today, about 1,500 (still not a lot, of course, but it’s the right people). In January, Eric reached out to me to meet up in New York because he liked my tweets. Around the same time, Ari Paparo invited me on his and Eric’s podcast, Marketecture, to talk about why adtech marketing sucks. In March, I started writing my newsletter weekly, and Ari recommended others subscribe to it. Since then, my newsletter subscriber count has more than tripled. In May, Eric and I launched our podcast. Throughout this time, I’ve forged relationships with seminal adtech entrepreneurs such as Brian O’Kelley, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, and Jason Fairchild through my content and the recommendations of people I’ve initially met through my content. In 2024, Sharp Pen’s profits will be up about 70% from their previous annual high.
This good fortune isn’t a simple, 1:1 cause-and-effect result of my content. But I am 100% certain it would not have happened if I hadn’t consistently posted content about adtech marketing on Twitter. My content was the point of departure and an indispensable link in the chain for my jump in reputation and prosperity. The perception of my own influence, skill, and credibility grew; similarly, others began to perceive that I could help them change perceptions of themselves and their companies.
Sharing insights on a specific topic publicly and consistently remains the most-underleveraged opportunity of the internet era for the average person and organization (broadly speaking but also specifically in adtech and advertising).
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
Maximizing the leverage you build via content means narrowing your focus. Despite the well-known business cliché, “Riches are in the niches,” people and organizations struggle enormously to maintain focus. The grass is always greener, and I’ve never spoken to a person with a small business servicing adtech companies who wasn’t wondering if the key to growth might be expanding to other categories. The same often applies to large public companies — who are the best at what they do for a specific slice of customers but wonder about the 10x possibilities of expanding their focus, diluting their advantages.
The problem is obvious. To build a highly engaged following that buys into your expertise and will pay dearly for it, thereby growing your individual or organizational wealth (which is our goal here — not to engage tens of thousands of people who will simply like memes or agree with political platitudes), you need to align your content with a very specific skill or area of knowledge that you are plausibly extraordinarily qualified in — if not perhaps the best in the world at. If you’re a holdco exec, that means leaning into what differentiates your organization from other holdcos. If you’re an adtech marketer like me, it means being one of the five people on the internet (if even) who regularly posts about how to approach adtech marketing — and developing a critique of the state of the industry as well as an alternative to it. More abstractly, narrowing the focus of your content means:
Picking a narrow audience of people who could learn from and currently or eventually buy things from you.
Writing about the overlap of what they care about and what you know a lot about.
Critiquing a specific dimension of the status quo, and teaching people how to improve on the status quo themselves by availing themselves of a new methodology or technology.
With the primacy of perception over reality in mind, perhaps I’d iterate on Naval’s advice. You don’t need to become the best in the world at what you do. To build your wealth and dramatically increase your leverage with content, you just need to be the best in the world among those who publicly talk about how to do what you do. That’s a lower bar. Clearing it will transform your career or organization. And yet probably fewer than 10% of companies and 1% of individuals are pursuing the opportunity.
Join the few. Go create some content.
