What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these Andy Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities,
and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
I've got David Perrell here.
David, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
I'm a longtime Andy Hackers fan.
Yeah, you are also, I think, one of the most requested guests to come on the show.
People are always sending me emails, so you got to get David on here, and now you're here.
And you're also somewhat of a tough person to describe because you do so many different
things.
You are prolific on Twitter.
You've got, I think, like 160,000 followers.
You've got a blog where you've written hundreds of essays.
You've got multiple newsletters, I think multiple podcasts, and then maybe the most
Andy Hacker thing about you is that you've got an online school where you teach people
to write.
And I think the thing that sort of ties all this stuff together is the fact that it's
all about writing.
Everything you write is about writing.
Everything you talk about is about writing.
Your Twitter bio says, literally, the writing guy.
How did you decide to choose that as a description for yourself?
Yeah, really creative.
My friend Nick Sharma had the DTC guy, and I said, hey, that's pretty good.
I'm going to call myself the writing guy.
That's it.
It's as simple as that.
But yeah, I really believe that writing on the internet, particularly sharing ideas on
the internet, is one of the most underutilized, under-explored opportunities in the world
right now.
I believe very strongly that people should write online, especially people who maybe
want to start a business, who feel intellectually isolated, who work for a corporation, and
they don't feel like they're being fairly compensated for their ideas.
What we're seeing right now is a couple of shifts where it's becoming much easier to
distribute your writing.
You have a bunch of places where you can share your writing, and you don't have to go through
a lot of the work that you used to have to do when you would build like a WordPress site
in like 2010 or something.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is more and more people are just actually on the internet, and then you
just now have a whole movement around online writing and the tools to learn how to do it
like my business, which is Write a Passage, where I teach people how to write online.
It's five weeks, and in that five-week cohort, we just get a bunch of people who are absolutely
obsessed with this idea.
We bring them all together, and I have a full curriculum that I've spent years developing,
and we all come together around this shared mission, this shared project of writing on
the internet.
Let's talk about this cohort-based learning, this idea of an online school, because I've
been talking to obviously any hacker for years now, and it seems like every quarter, every
year, more and more people are learning through these sort of structured mechanisms online.
Two or three years ago, everybody learned just by doing.
They're like, oh, I learned to write because I spent eight years painstakingly crafting
my blog, and people kept telling me it sucked.
Now I ask people how they learned to write, and they're like, yeah, I went through Write
a Passage.
How did you learn SEO?
Oh, I took this course from Ahrefs, et cetera, et cetera.
We're kind of already living in this golden age of people who are ambitious and a little
bit far-sighted, taking advantage of all these really high-quality courses online and sort
of eschewing the traditional educational structure.
With your course, I mentioned this is kind of the most endy hacker thing that you do.
It's an online business.
You actually charge people.
Have you ever shared revenue numbers and how you're supporting yourself through the course?
The course is a couple million dollars in revenue per year, and then I have a business
partner whose name is Tiago Forte, who runs Building a Second Brain, which does quite
well.
We share a staff, which is, I think, one of the things that actually makes this all possible.
Take something like Coachella, right?
It's a music festival happens every April, and think of the staff that you need to hire.
It's very spiky in terms of your revenue, in terms of the staff.
The thing is, I've never looked into this, but I bet that they hire a bunch of part-time
contractors.
I bet the run-up in order to get all those people is a mess.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bunch of festival consortium that basically hires
a bunch of staff together so that those staff can work all year, and they can just pop between
different festivals.
Maybe they can work for four or five, rather than just joining Coachella and then leaving,
because it's just like talented people generally want to be employed all year.
We have the same, basically, this Coachella problem in Read a Passage and with cohort-based
courses where what I want to do is I want to basically live a life where I have eight
months a year to be as creative as possible and four months a year where I teach and I
sell the course.
What we do is I have the same staff as my partner Tiago, and then we basically break
through the Coachella problem where everyone who works for us can work for both courses
at the same time, and then for us, we save a lot on salary.
Our rate of learning is also way faster because our whole team gets double the cohorts.
Let's talk about how you actually started this because I know a lot of people who are
launching online courses, not very many of them are making millions of dollars a year.
Not many have accrued the following that you've accrued.
Where do you start if you want to build something that people trust and respect and are willing
to pay a lot of money to take?
You start writing and you start sharing your ideas.
You start accruing an audience of people who are on your intellectual wavelength.
I think that there's a couple of things about this.
The first is that what you do is you basically build expertise and connections within a specific
genre or industry that you're interested in.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is you end up building an audience so that once you go to sell something,
you already have pre-validated demand that people are interested in that thing.
The thing that got me pretty funny story, so the guy who, my co-founder who runs Will
Mann, an unbelievable talent who runs all of our courses.
He's the director of student experience.
He reached out to me through my newsletter in 2018.
We met at Venice Beach at this place called the Venice Whaler.
I wanted to have an intellectual conversation and he found this beachy restaurant with super
loud music and it was just the worst pick of all time for a first meeting restaurant
for what I wanted.
I always make fun of him for this.
It's like trying to go to a first date at the club or something.
It's like, I can't really hear you.
Exactly.
You look good.
Yeah, exactly.
I told him that I wanted in 2019 to help 12 people start writing online.
I don't know what happened.
This is his story that he tells.
I came back two weeks later and I posted on Twitter and I said, I want to help a thousand
people start writing.
I received a flood of responses.
I was like, oh my goodness, there are so many people who want to do this.
You strike me as someone who sets a lot of goals.
You want to teach 12 people to write.
That's a very specific goal.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Basecamp guys, DHH and Jason Fried.
They've got this mantra that they preach.
I don't know how serious they are about it, but they're like, don't set goals.
You shouldn't set goals from their purview because it's kind of this binary.
You either hit it and you're happy or you don't hit it and you're sad and it doesn't
matter either way because you're just going to set a new goal.
The way they see things is you should just do the best work you can do every day and
you shouldn't need a goal to do that.
What do you think about that advice?
I do think it's nice to set goals.
They just help you orient your life in terms of what you actually want, but I think goals
are much more beneficial from the sense of how do you make sense of your priorities.
I really try not to measure things too much.
Goals in retrospect are much less useful than goals in advance of looking into the future.
What are your goals right now?
One goal is I really want to figure out how to write two long form essays a year that
are just absolutely exceptional.
They all take hundreds of hours and I need to create the intellectual space in my life
where I can explore these ideas that aren't immediately relevant and that don't have like
a very fast ROI, but to me, the long form essay is just a beautiful art form.
It's one that I want to get really good at and they're the most rewarding things that
I do, but running a business and sending multiple newsletters every week and just the daily
demands of life make it hard to write these things.
I want to figure out how to do two of them this year.
It's a challenge of being a creator.
I mean, I rattled off some of the things you're doing.
If you've got multiple podcasts and newsletters and tweets to send, how can you really sit
down and focus on two major things?
I guess you've got to outsource some stuff or quit some stuff or very cleverly realign
a lot of the work you're doing such that it like somehow adds up at the end of the year
to some major long form writing.
I don't know how you figure it out, but I have the same challenge with indie hackers
I'm doing, also a podcast and a couple of newsletters and posting on the forum regularly
and tweeting and meeting lots and lots of people and then doing my own sort of personal
writing that I don't publish anywhere just to help me formulate ideas.
It's really hard when you're doing that to sit down and just write one big thing.
This is the challenge of being a creator and being an entrepreneur is how do we build systems
that serve us rather than systems that we have to serve?
It's just a daily challenge because when you serve a system, you end up getting these compounding
returns into the work that you do, but then you lose some lateral mobility.
I want to figure out how to live a life where I can really work on these things, but in
a way that doesn't sacrifice the business because I feel a duty to my students and quite
frankly a duty to the world to figure out how to get these ideas out there because I
think they're really important.
There's a really good blog post by Sahel, the founder of Gumroad.
He wrote it last month.
It's called No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees.
Did you read this?
I did not read it.
I read the end where he talked about no full-time employees.
I did not read the whole blog post.
I skimmed through, so I also haven't read the entire thing, but it was super inspiring
like what I did read because they've got like 25 people.
They're doing $11 million in revenue a year and no one on their team is full-time.
Not even Sahel, the founder, he's like off doing a bunch of other things.
Everybody's got other projects.
Like some of the employees are like indie hackers, not even on the side, just like in
parallel with what they're doing at Gumroad.
The reason that they decided to switch to this model was it clicked for him that Gumroad
helps creators sell products online.
If you have an ebook, you can sell it on Gumroad.
When they looked at their users and their customers, they realized like these creators
are not working to make stuff just so they can make money.
More often, they're like making money so that they have the free time to make whatever they
want, which is kind of like what you're doing.
I think it's so funny that like they decided to apply that to their own business.
Like, well, why not our employees?
Like, why don't we only hire creators to be our employees and they can basically come
here.
They can work however number of hours they want.
We have a giant to-do list.
They just take whatever's at the top.
Go do that.
They can pay them and then they can spend their free time doing whatever they want.
And that's kind of like what you're working to do as an indie hacker.
Build these businesses and get them to the point where they can actually serve the world
but also serve you.
So let's talk about how you started your cohort-based course.
Because I kind of read like your origin story and you talked about not being a good student.
Like you had a 2.9 GPA, you know, your SAT scores weren't great.
Like you didn't look at yourself as, you know, this masterful writer, but today you've got
like famous successful people who are coming to you asking for writing tips.
So how did you go from point A to point B?
I, you know, like I was a horrible writer and I was a horrible student.
And I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever.
I thought that my life was going to be a big failure for the first 23 years.
It was bad and it was really unenjoyable and I got good at writing out of desperation.
What happened was I was in college and I got C in my writing class.
I just wasn't going to other classes.
I was working and when I was working a full-time job, like the feedback was you're not a great
writer.
I had friends who told me that I wasn't a good writer.
And I think that I just looked at that and I just said, I refuse to be bad at this.
Like it's very important and I'm going to get good because I knew and I still know this
is something that I just really believed to be true, that good writers are now rewarded
like they've never been rewarded before because the barriers to publishing, the constraints
to getting your ideas out there have never been less.
And we've actually had like a serious order of magnitude shift in terms of the ability
for just normal people like you and me to just get ideas out there.
And that means that writing is an activity with really high returns right now.
And so I said, I'm going to get good at this.
I'm not a good writer naturally, but what I do have that comes very easily to me is
I'm good at taking individual pursuits with clear metrics or clear ways of looking at
success and failure and things that are diverse enough and unique enough where every single
time I work on that thing, it's going to be different.
But it's also as enough sameness that I can apply frameworks and principles and I can
just develop systems to do things.
And I got recruited to play college golf, I played baseball at like a decently high
level.
I wasn't that good, but like I was good for my size, that's for sure.
And then I've learned to become a pilot, I've learned to write this thing of these individual
pursuit in this very particular way, I am really good at.
And so, you know, there's a line that people say, oh, if you have a hammer, everything
looks like a nail.
And people are like, oh, that's so bad, you know, you don't want to have a hammer, you're
just going to be trapped in specialization.
I say BS, I say totally wrong, build a Thor's hammer, and then just go around looking for
nails.
So in life, what I do is I know exactly what I'm good at.
And I just go find that thing.
And if it wasn't writing, it'd be music, it'd be drama, it'd be theater, it'd be something
else entirely be painting, I don't care.
But like, that is what I'm good at, I've just now applied it to writing, because that is
basically where, what would it be like in finance, you have return on invested capital,
this is where I would have the highest return on invested attention.
So it's almost like, you know, you're describing the Thor's hammer.
It's either like you've got a framework that's amazing, or it's like a framework or process
for creating frameworks, so that no matter what you go into, you figure out the right
approach to hit it from.
What are some of those frameworks?
Like, what do you use to approach writing, what do you use to approach Twitter growth?
What's something that like, you know, other people probably haven't thought of, that you're
using to get ahead?
Yeah, so all audience building works the same way.
It's with a public to private bridge.
So what you do is you grow your audience on public platforms, and then you build relationships
with people on private ones.
And so take something like it, like indie hackers, or your own site, people find you
on social media, say something like Twitter, then what happens is you have to get as many
of them to basically cross some bridge onto a private platform, like the podcast that
people can subscribe to directly, or the forum that you were talking about, where now once
they're on that forum, they're spending life there, they're going to the meetups that you
guys host around the world.
Now they're like really a part of the community, but they all found you on these public platforms.
And so all audience building is, is you attract people on public platforms, and they're great
because they give you free reach and distribution.
That's what's awesome.
But then you end up with, remember there was an app called Meerkat, and Meerkat was like
going to be the next big thing.
Remember that?
And it was all about live video and stuff.
And what happened?
Twitter built Periscope and shut off API access to Meerkat.
And that was because they were too dependent on the public platform.
Whereas a company that did a really good job of crossing the public to private bridge is
Instagram.
What Instagram did early on, you could post a photo through Twitter, I think, and it would
populate there.
But then what Instagram did was they said over and over again, come back to our app,
come back to our app.
The experience is going to be better.
And then once they got people from the public side of Twitter into the private side of Instagram,
then they controlled the experience with their customers, their users.
And that's how they've built such an unbelievably successful consumer social app.
I love the way that you're looking at it.
And I think about this a lot that there are these basically these public feeds on the
internet that people check for various reasons.
And I kind of think of it as almost three different buckets of feeds that people check.
There's the feeds that you check, because they're just so damn addictive.
Like you can't like you're compulsively addicted to checking them.
So that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, like I'll just type TW into my browser bar and
like blackout.
I'm on Twitter.
I don't even know how I got there.
You know, read it's like that Hacker News, then you've got feeds that you're kind of
required to check because if you don't, you're going to miss something.
So this is like your phone notifications, your email, like your work slack and communication
tools like snapchats from friends.
And then like maybe the third category is you have a really specific problem and you're
looking out for a solution.
And so then you go to these public channels like Google search or YouTube search or like,
you know, some repository of browsable searchable information, you go there.
And so what you're saying is that basically, if you're a creator, that's where you want
to start.
You want to start on one of these public feeds and basically build up a lot of attention
there, social capital there, following there, and eventually convert them to your own private
fee, which might be an email newsletter or a blog.
For you, I guess your ultimate like end of the funnel is your online school, right?
A passage.
Ideally, if you're, you know, putting out good information for people, they're gonna
like say, you know what, this David guy, you know, I'm picking up what he's putting down.
He knows how to write.
I don't know how to write and I'm convinced that it's super valuable.
What are your, what are your like top of funnel channels, which public channels do you use
to get people to come to write a passage?
I use Twitter quite a bit.
I guess this going on other podcasts, making YouTube videos, like it really is, what do
I get excited about?
What sort of idea do I want to pursue?
Because I just make stuff all the time.
It's so fun for me, like there's no other way that I would ever want to live besides
just creating, creating, creating all the time.
The bottom of the funnel stuff requires a lot more work.
So I sort of go from there, get people on an email list, then I, I have a blast.
I send two email newsletters every week, Monday Musings and Friday Finds.
I think of them as like the burnt ends of my intellectual life.
So in a, here's what I mean by that.
So you know, for barbecue, like I live in Texas now.
So of course we've got to talk about barbecue and are you in Austin?
I am in Austin.
But when I was in Kansas city, I was with my friend Eric and he took me to this place
and it's like this famous barbecue joint.
What happened with burnt ends is they used to throw away the burnt ends cause they were
just burnt ends.
Like who the heck wants burnt food, right?
And so one day, this was in the 1970s, the owner of this barbecue joint, he went out
and started giving the burnt ends to all the people waiting in line.
And it was like Disney, right?
One of Disney's great innovations is like waiting in line at most places, the worst
waiting in line at Disney, not that bad, like kind of entertaining.
Likewise waiting in line at most barbecue joints, ah, it takes forever.
You got to stand there, it's kind of cold maybe.
But then you get your free burnt ends, great.
And people just loved these burnt ends.
And so now what's really interesting is burnt ends have gone from being the worst things
that they're already doing, they're already making, and now they're like the first thing
to sell out at a lot of barbecue places.
And my point is that there's a lot of things in life that is basically the residue, the
intellectual residue of the things that you do.
And I think of an email newsletter as like, how do you then take advantage of that?
So my Monday newsletter is the coolest things I learned last week, I'm already doing that
sort of stuff.
I sort of summarize it, it's almost like journaling for me in terms of now I'm synthesizing and
making explicit what I learned.
And then my Friday newsletter, Friday Finds, is just the coolest things that I came across
in the previous week.
And once again, I'm already doing that.
And so I basically write newsletters that are the burnt ends of my intellectual life.
And then bottom of the funnel is like, hosting workshops and sending out really targeted
emails for people who say that they want to join Write a Passage.
And that's much less fun.
That requires work.
You're sort of like, in real time demonstrating what I think is one of the biggest benefits
of being a prolific writer, like you've got, I don't know how many essays long and short
form on your blog, and then how many tweets and newsletters you've written, but like you've
written a ton.
And you have to write a ton to be able to teach a writing class.
But when you write, what you're really doing is you're thinking, because you can't like
you just have to edit and read it and really think about the idea and play with it and
express it in the best way.
And even if you don't think that what you're doing is thinking about idea and refining your
thinking, like you're ultimately going to do that.
And it has so many like redounding benefits, like in my opinion, the best speakers are
almost always really good writers, because you come on and you don't say, Oh, I'm very
big into content reuse, and say, this is very dry spiel, you're like, you have a whole story
about like the burnt ends, like I haven't read it, but I'm pretty sure like you've actually
written about this online somewhere before.
And that's why I can blow out of you, like, it's almost like a parlor trick, where a lot
of people see and they hear really great speakers, you know, they hear a comedian on stage, like
this guy's so funny, you know, they hear a podcast host, you can really just deliver.
And what they don't see is that behind the scenes, this person has spent so much time
writing about this topic and refining in their mind.
And at this point, it's almost like a professional delivering something that they've just practiced
over and over and over again.
That is the best description I've ever heard.
So I had this moment I had this experience, it was crazy.
So I was 22 years old, I just graduated from college.
And after my third podcast, I interviewed a guy named Masmo Palucci.
He's a philosopher of stoicism at the graduate school in New York City.
That's what it's called, the graduate school.
So I interview him, and we're in this, like, academic building, you know, with low ceilings
on the fifth floor, these fluorescent lights that give you a headache after four minutes
in there.
And it was like, really hot in this room, like, I just remember it, you know, so well.
And after, I was also really nervous, which is probably why I felt this way, because I
was just said nothing to my name at the time.
And so after the after the interview, I used to do this for every single guest, I'd say,
hey, can you help me out?
I'm 22 years old, I don't know anyone, can you just introduce me to another podcast guest?
And he goes, yeah, you know, I could introduce you to this woman, this woman, this guy, I
was like, cool, you know, never heard of him.
And then he goes, he looks me dead in the eye, and he goes, oh, wait, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
he's one of my best friends.
And I'm like, well, that would be great, you know, just like try to play it cool.
So because of this, I got an intro to him, I interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson in his office,
the day his book, astrophysics for people in a hurry came out.
That day, he was on five different programs.
He was on The Today Show in the morning, he was on CBS podcast before me, then North Star
podcast episode number seven, that was my show, then New York Times after me, and I
think the Colbert report that night, I had no business doing this, no business, right?
It's like, how did this guy end up here?
The thing that Neil said to me, and I didn't believe him at the time, and now I know it's
100% true, he's such an eloquent speaker.
So I asked him, how do you do this, man?
And he said, 90% of what I say in public, I've written down before.
And whenever I say something that sounds eloquent, it's just because I've written it.
I've structured the ideas, I've done the hard work.
And I'm sitting there, I'm like, no way, that's true, who writes that much?
Four years later, 100% true.
So true.
It's true.
It's actually a trick I use with podcast guests too, which is like, if you're interviewing
somebody for a podcast, like you want to get good material out of them.
You don't want someone to come on and feel awkward and not have anything to say.
And it turns out the easiest people to interview are people who've written a lot.
And the best questions to ask are about things that they've already written, because they're
guaranteed to be like Neil deGrasse Tyson and basically be able to riff on these things
with such skill and I guess, comfortability that it almost seems natural to a listener.
And I think this is everywhere.
Like you look on Twitter, you might just see a tweet that's like 120 words, you know, it
looks super 120 characters, looks super simple, but you don't know how much work and effort
really went into that tweet and how many months of writing or weeks of thinking went into
that tweet.
And like a lot of the best tweeters I know, like you, our mutual friend Julian, who were
just growing their Twitter accounts the fastest and like growing their blogs the fastest are
all people who were just writing about these ideas and then presenting them in this deceptively
simple way.
But I'm curious about this Neil deGrasse Tyson interview.
How nervous were you going into this?
Like, how do you even prep for something like that?
I was so nervous.
It was bad.
I just remember probably like sweating through my shirt and all this sort of stuff.
But you know what, there's moments in life and these moments where you know, before you
go into them, that you're going to have an experience that is going to change you.
That day, I knew that that was going to happen.
I knew that it was going to be one of those before and after moments.
And the thing that I'm really happy about from that day is that I knew it was going
to be a special day and that whole day I just felt it and I just embrace that because we
don't get that a lot in life.
Really the big things that happened to us are surprises.
They're unexpected.
They're tragedies or celebrations that we just never saw coming.
They're totally random.
And what was really cool about that day was it was life changing, but I knew it was going
to be life changing before I stepped into it.
So let's talk about some of these top of funnel channels.
We've talked a little bit about, you know, your bottom of funnel, the kind of standard
burnt the burnt ends of your newsletter, etc, and content reuse that you've got, but you're
still on Twitter, you've got your podcast, you've got YouTube, and you do a lot of blogging.
If you could only do one of these things, what would you do?
I'd write.
Writing is just, it cuts to your core.
It changes you, man.
When you try to write and to rewrite and to figure out what it is that you're trying to
say, it's the ultimate process of self-discovery and it requires a level of rigor that no other
medium does long form essays are what I'd pick.
I think that they, you know, I don't really care that much about having a big audience.
There's certain benefits to that cool and I won't deny those benefits, but what is absolutely
amazing is to have somebody email you or come up to you or reach out to you because you
wrote something that changed them, that was long, and where they had to spend like 30
to 90 minutes with that idea.
Good writing is the closest that you can get to inhabiting another person's mind.
You know, I see this a lot with David Foster Wallace, who is of course a tortured human
being.
He ended up taking his own life and you can actually feel the chaos and the pain and just
the actual burden of being that observant in his writing with the way that he writes
45-word sentences, that in those sentences, it's like an atomic bomb.
When David Foster Wallace writes a poignant sentence, you feel like he contains the world
in that sentence and you can churn on that idea for months or years and still continue
to get things out of it.
Like he has this line from his This Is Water speech where he says, everybody worships.
It's two words and that idea has rocked me.
And to get back to your question about writing, like that is what a good piece of writing
can do.
You can just cut through all of your mental walls and pierce through your soul.
And David White, the poet said, poetry is language for which we have no defense.
And that's what I aspire to.
The thing that clearly motivates you the most is this long form writing where you can really
put yourself on display and also dive into your writing and become your writing and immerse
yourself in it because these pieces don't take a few hours to bang out.
Like this is something that you're saying consumes you.
What have you learned about long form writing that you think most other people, even people
who are trying to do this haven't learned or haven't realized?
Like I'll tell you what I grapple with, what I really struggle with is how much should
I focus on my own style versus what is the best thing to do.
And I think of long form writing actually a lot like comedy.
So if you look at a comedy skit, like a Netflix stand up, you know, maybe it's an hour.
But what you have is you have the overarching narrative of that special.
And so whatever it is that they're trying to say, that ends up being a frame for the
entire special.
But what good comedy still does is it makes you laugh every couple of minutes, hopefully
every minute.
And so within that long special, what you have is all these mini moments that are entertaining
and stuff like that.
And, you know, you could also think of it like the hero's journey, right?
The Lord of the Rings starts in the Shire, ends in the Shire.
There's still all of these things that happen.
All the individual scenes end up being their own things with their own stories and their
own takeaways.
And that's the way that I like to write a long form essay.
So what I do is I say, what is an idea that I'm going to be really focused on?
Now how do I just have all of these mini moments within the piece that relate to that?
Then I just, what I really struggle with is then trying to structure it all so that it
fits together.
But I think that what people don't realize about long form writing, which is what makes
it so cool, is just the relationships that you build with people when they've spent
that much time with your ideas.
And it just leads to some really wonderful friendships and even business opportunities.
Yeah, if you think about what writing is, you have an idea in your head and you've had
millions of ideas that go through your head, but you pick one that's so resonant that it
must be better than all the other ones.
And then you basically try as hard as you can to transfer the idea into someone else's
head in the exact same shape that it exists in your head.
And that's an incredibly difficult thing to do because it's got to go through all these
transformations into like a set of squiggles on a page.
And then you also got to have the other reader has to take those squiggles and put in an
idea and like they have all sorts of other ideas in their head that might mess with the
idea.
And so you have to kind of anticipate that and make sure you structure the squiggle such
that the idea looks the same in their head as it does in yours.
It's this incredible process.
And I think if you as a reader experience someone who's able to do that really well,
like you're right.
Like you're just going to connect with that person.
Some of the people that I respect the most are fiction authors where I've read their
thing and I'm like, this person is just brilliant.
And my day-to-day life, the people I look up to the most are usually people running
businesses twisting the right knobs and tweaking the right channels, et cetera.
But like the people who touched me on a more personal level, I think are always writers.
You also write short form essays.
You're very prolific.
Same question there.
What do you know about writing short form essays and cranking them out and actually getting
them to be read and reusing them, et cetera, that other people who've started blogs and
maybe can't continue with their blogs or quit or who don't get traction, what are they doing
wrong?
Well, I don't know.
It's hard to give a general point, but you said something really, really insightful.
You said reusing.
And this is the key, that writing can actually save you time.
It does take a long time, but it can save you time because every single thing that you
write is a new intellectual Lego block for your life.
And what I do is I only start projects that are 80% done.
And I only write about things that I've done 80% of the work with because what I just do
is I get a bunch of notes on the paper.
I collect a bunch of stories.
Everything is there.
And then I say, okay, I now have enough ideas of my own and enough statistics and quotes
that I can then come together in writing and produce something that's good, but I actually
do the same thing in my work where rather than saying, okay, what is the super top down
plan that I'm going to have?
Like, I have no idea.
I don't know what read a passage is going to become.
I mean, I would love for it to become some kind of business school of the future where
we then create a bunch of companies that come out of this.
Because once you have an audience, then you can start a company in a way that has a lot
less risk.
Cool.
I love that.
But really what I do is I write things down and I work on projects where then I have all
these intellectual building blocks.
So then what I do is like when it comes to building out a curriculum, when it comes to
hiring principles, rather than starting everything from scratch, I say, what are the things that
I've already produced?
How do I repackage and recombine the ideas that I've already made?
And words on a page, they have infinite patience, and you write something once you benefit from
it forever.
It's a hell of a trade.
I mean, you've, you've given like a lot of writing advice, I've read a lot of writing
advice, both from you and from others, like if I had to share like, okay, here, like,
you know, some of the things that have stuck with me the most, number one, be that people
pay attention to novelty.
In fact, you hit on this earlier where you could, you could share an aphorism or an old
quote that people have heard a million times and like they won't, they won't really stick
with them.
They'll be like, oh, I've already heard this, but you restate it in a way that changes it
and makes it seem fresh and new, like a vivid analogy or a different example.
And suddenly it's like they've heard it for the first time and they take it seriously.
And so this is like an idea that I came across in a few books a while ago, and it's never
left my mind, like novelty, novelty, novelty.
And another comes from like a copywriting book, I think advertising secrets of the written
word was recommended to me by a previous podcast guest and he had like these two very simple
points.
He said your title, the entire purpose of your title is to get people to read the first
sentence and the entire purpose of your first sentence is to get people to read the second
sentence.
And it's very reductive and simple, but that's also never left my mind and it's kind of been
part of my writing process.
What would be like your, your most like tactical three tips to someone who's, you know, listening
to this podcast, they're not going to take a writing class, but they would like to be
better at writing online.
Use stories, analogies, and examples.
Simple as that.
Use stories to illuminate your point and talk about your personal stories, talk about the
stories of other people, metaphors and analogies.
What you're doing is this is how we learn.
We take ideas from one domain, we compare them to another domain and try to use analogies
that haven't been used before.
Try to think, can I use an analogy that maybe has never been done before?
Like I don't think that anyone has ever compared email newsletters to burnt ends from barbecue
joints.
And then the third thing is give examples.
You say something that's abstract.
People are really good with things that are concrete and focus on things that are concrete
in the world that people can see and have people say, ah, now I understand that.
You make an abstract point.
You clarify it with a concrete idea.
And you have your bucket of, once again, stories, metaphors, analogies, and examples.
And you just pull from all three of those places.
Your writing will get so much better.
Simple.
Love it.
I want to try something.
I think it'll be fun.
We'll see.
You've written a ton of short form essays and I've just gone through and picked out
a few of them that I think are particularly insightful or kind of fun or interesting that
I just want to talk about.
And maybe you can kind of walk us through like, what was your point?
And what does you mean by this?
We actually already talked about one.
You called it one big idea.
And this is this idea that you really should just work on ideally one thing.
So how are you doing that?
What's the point of just working on one thing?
Yeah.
So it's actually a little bit of both.
It's that you should work on one thing, but even the manifestation of how that thing works
and plays out is a little bit different.
I mean, for me, I'm just trying to do everything I can to get people to learn and explore ideas
on the internet.
And writing online is one of those things.
Trying to save the liberal arts.
There's a whole other thing there.
Trying to build a writing school is another thing there.
Me doing it is another thing there.
I'm on YouTube, all these sorts of things.
That is just my one big idea.
Writing online is an absolutely massive opportunity and you should use the internet to learn rather
than paying so much money for traditional school or thinking that you can't do it.
Like, it's super simple.
And I'm just hammering home on that idea over and over and over again.
But the thing is, I'm actually exploring that idea in so many different ways.
And I think that article sort of starts off with a critique of how people read books and
try to collect how many books they've read, like they're collecting mushrooms in Super
Mario Kart.
I think it's kind of ridiculous and you don't need to like chase so many ideas.
You can just find the ideas that are really good and you can just double down on them
and you can study them over and over and over again.
And you can sit with ideas, you can have them churn through your brain and so it's kind
of both.
Like, that article is very deliberately not telling you to be a polymath but it's also
very deliberately not telling you to be a specialist.
I try to just take that spectrum and invert it and flip it so that it's a new perspective
where you kind of get the best of both while you also remove elements of both being a polymath
and a specialist.
Yeah.
In a way, like any idea you pick to focus on is going to have so many different facets
to it that you're actually going to get to do quite a lot of stuff.
But since it's all kind of falls under the umbrella of one idea for you writing, well,
even if you do a hundred different things, like there's this cohesive layer that ties
it all together because it falls under one idea, you're not doing like 15 different things
that are unrelated, you're doing 15 different things that are all related.
Right?
Like when you started Indie Hackers, there's no way that you realized that what you would
build would be as complex and as multivariate and all the little nooks that you would go
down in this journey and with these ideas.
Like it's a surprise, like you start focusing on something and you realize, oh my goodness,
there's so much here and everything that you look at in the world has this near infinite
complexity.
I was on a website today called TV Tropes and it's just focused on like tropes from
TV and movies and this is the most insane wiki.
I didn't even realize that all this stuff existed.
Yeah.
And you know what struck me reading this blog post was really the first part of it, this
idea of performative reading, people trying to collect, you know, who's read the most
books who can brag about how many books they finished, which is such a vanity metric because
who cares, right?
You don't get a prize for reading the most books.
Nobody cares.
If your knowledge is super scattershot and you're not actually using it to accomplish
anything, then who cares?
My boss's brother, John, has this really interesting approach to reading books and it's actually
kind of similar to my brother who has a similar approach to do lists where they're both like
very obsessed with like the most important thing and then they don't care about anything
else.
So the way that John reads books is he picks the book that he's the most interested in
reading at any point in time and he starts reading it.
And the second another book becomes more interesting to him, he just drops the book he's
reading and starts reading that one.
It's weird because it's not what you would expect, like why not finish the book?
Can you then even tell people you read a book if you didn't finish it?
No, you can't.
So now you can't contribute to this vanity metric, but like if you think about it, any
other algorithm besides always reading the most interesting thing leads to a life where
you just read less interesting stuff or my brother is kind of the same as to-do list
where he doesn't like to make like a giant plan of like 15 items, I'm gonna do A then
B then C then D, he likes to figure out like what's the most impactful thing I can do right
now?
And then after he's done with that, sort of reevaluate, okay, what's the most impactful
thing I can do now?
And maybe like in a week ago that was item number B, but maybe today like it's a completely
different thing and if he didn't go back and sort of reevaluate, he would kind of be stuck
with where he is.
I don't know why your post reminded me of that, but it's, it's kind of a similar focus,
you know, focus on what's your one goal and don't get distracted by some other vanity
metric or some other like plan you came up with earlier on.
Another post you've got is called why you should write pseudonymously.
And this one you talk about, you talk about how some of the most interesting Twitter accounts
have pseudonymous authors.
So there's one that's like the stoic emperor, it's got 340,000 followers and it's just tweeting
like the stoic philosophy, no real drama, there's no real headache, like no one's trying
to cancel the stoic emperor, stoic philosopher account because it's not a person.
So my question to you is, you know, why, why consider writing pseudonymously?
I mean, you don't, you're not a pseudonymous author unless you're behind the stoic emperor
and I don't know about it.
Why should anyone consider doing this?
Well, we're moving to an age where there's going to be, there's going to be pseudonymous
indie hackers and there's going to be people that already are, we've got AJ from card.
No one knows what he looks like.
No one knows his real name.
There's a website that's making 30, $40,000 a month used by millions of people could be
anyone.
I know multiple people who are running businesses and no one knows who they are.
Cool.
I think that that's where the world is going.
The internet is going to change identity in big ways.
And for a certain kind of person, there are major benefits to writing pseudonymously.
Now they might depend on your personal background.
They might depend on the ideas that you're exploring.
And I think writing pseudonymously should be way more common.
That doesn't mean that there aren't benefits to writing under your real name, but many
of my best friends do write pseudonymously.
Like I know the stoic emperor decently well, and he gets a lot of, he basically has 90%
of the benefits, but without a lot of the drawbacks, I just think it should be much
more common.
It's like an extra little oomph to not knowing who the person is.
And if you look at some of the phenomenon that have spread the most recently, like there's
a QAnon theory or there's this person Qs and posting predictions on the internet, probably
not good for the world, but for some reason, because this person is named Q, there's this
extra layer of credibility that people give.
There's Satoshi with Bitcoin.
Who knows who Satoshi is?
Nobody knows.
It's synonymous.
But the amount of impact this synonymous person has been able to make, despite not writing
under the real name, I think would quash any suggestion that writing pseudonymously means
that you're giving something up.
So maybe the real question is why isn't everybody synonymous?
Why would anyone do anything under their real name unless it's video or audio?
What's the advantage of you being David Perrell?
Look, there are certain advantages.
There's no doubt.
If you're just going to focus on writing, then being under your real name works really
well.
It's something that's very culturally accepted, but William Gibson does have that great line
where he says the future is already here.
It's just not evenly distributed yet.
Just an unbelievable insight.
And what he's trying to get at is that the future can basically, depending on what you're
doing, can best be predicted by looking not at the world of tomorrow and trying to say
what will come, but looking at the world of today and saying, what is already here that
is going to be a bigger part of the world of tomorrow?
And I think that the way that I would think about writing pseudonymously is two things.
The first is that people are going to diversify their identities like they diversify their
investments.
I just think that that is a smart thing to do if the intellectual climate stays the same.
That's the first thing.
And so then you have a bunch of different identities and people will figure out ways
to do this.
And also you're going to be able to take your karma on one platform.
So say like how many points you have on Hacker News and you're able to transport it to other
platforms and there's going to be some kind of interoperability of identity so that once
you go on under new name, you're not starting from zero.
Maybe they're sort of like some kind of embedded trust in the system that that allows you to
change.
That's the first thing.
So this will become much more common.
And then the second thing is create a burnout is such a thing, right?
Like when I look at my own career, I mean, I just like I just work very hard and it works
really well in my 20s.
It'll work well in my early 30s.
When I have a bunch of kids, I'm not going to work this hard.
And the thing that I want to do is I want to build equity in whatever it is that I'm
building.
Like even a guy like Joe Rogan, like if Joe Rogan, who is one of the biggest podcasters
on planet earth, if he doesn't show up to record a podcast, well, the podcast doesn't
happen.
So the system is fundamentally dependent on him.
Whereas what would be really cool about building these virtual identities is what then you
have is you have something like the writing guy, and then I would come up with a bunch
of the ideas and then we'd have like a whole team of writers would have a virtual avatar.
And then if I just want to take off for a year, like the whole system could run.
And that's actually what it means to build a business.
You build something that sort of transcends you and writing pseudonymously creates the
conditions in order to do that.
So I don't think people are thinking nearly big enough about the possibilities of writing
under a pseudonym.
Yeah.
I mean, I love this point about the future really being here and really what you need
to do is not look at, you know, the future, but that you need to look at who was already
on the bleeding edge.
You know, who was living in tomorrow yesterday, David Perrell, thanks so much for coming on
the show.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about your school and your
podcast and your newsletters and your essays and hopefully your long form essays when you
get to the point where you're cranking out two of them a year?
Yeah.
P-E-R-E-L-L is my website and then Twitter at David underscore Perrell.
One thing that I would just suggest if you're interested in learning to write is I have
a free email series that is called 50 days of writing and sign up for that.
It's really focused on how to curate ideas, how to write well, how to distribute your
ideas and I'll send you 50 articles in 50 days.
And I think by the end of it, you'll be a hell of a lot better writer and you'll really
enjoy it.
All right.
Thanks again, David.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.