I made a joke the other day and a got way more engagement than I expected for an off the cuff comment. Always pay attention when this happens. You’re striking a nerve, and it’s important to step back and figure out why if it isn’t immediately obvious.

The problem is simple. People want less, not more.

Fewer apps that serve more than one purpose.

Elon Musk preached about X being the next Everything App, only for Nikita to release yet another app and kill off communities in the same week!

This is just crazy.

What’s incredible though about the current state of product development is we’re all empowered to push back on what doesn’t work for us.

I’ve never enjoyed having three separate apps for mail, calendar, and knowledge. But that’s me. Most people might think it’s crazy to stuff all of that into one product.

I’m just tinkering right now, but I’m enjoying the user experience far more than jumping between Superhuman, Notion, Notion Calendar, Obsidian, Apple Notes, etc.

What are you building that’s deeply personal?

Share it in the comments below.

Chances are high that other people in the world feel your pain.

— Daniel

P.S.

I’m barely on Twitter but still discover the most interesting ideas and discourse from the newsletter I built for myself. Let me know if you’d find it useful.

I spent the past couple months going deep into the personal agent space. Most of my time went into the OpenClaw ecosystem, but I also played around with Hermes.

The hype was warranted.

But interest is waning.

I brought Motif into the world, the first OpenClaw agent I built. I integrated him with Telegram first. Yes, I’m referring to the agent as a person. That’s half the fun.

I set him up in Slack and introduced him to a few friends, Cadence and Forte.

The interplay, the promise of watching agents work together autonomously, didn’t quite hold up. I had cron jobs running that were helpful and interesting. But I got lost in upgrades, configuration, memory management, plugins, and second brain orchestration.

I don’t regret the time spent on any of this. What I do regret is not being more disciplined with my time. In the agentic age, play without constraints means you drown in product releases.

The relentless pace of innovation is only exhausting if you don’t know what you want out of life.

Goals are the perfect filter for the pace of innovation we’re experiencing.

If you know where you’re going, great. If you have conviction you’re headed in the right direction, even better. Without those two things, you’re in trouble.

You’ll end up bouncing from one thing to the next.

Here’s everything that was released last week alone:

Anthropic / Claude

• Claude Opus 4.7 shipped — flagship model with stronger autonomous task handling and built-in output verification

• Claude Design launched in research preview — prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Opus 4.7

• Claude Code routines — schedule prompts and trigger cloud workflows without your laptop open

• Claude Code desktop redesign — multiple sessions side-by-side with a new sidebar

• Claude for Word went live on Pro and Max

• $100K Claude Code hackathon with Opus 4.7 announced

• Automated alignment researcher — Opus 4.6 supervising training of stronger models

OpenAI

• Codex computer use — controls Mac apps in parallel, persistent memory, image gen, learns workflows

• GPT-Rosalind — frontier reasoning model for biology, drug discovery, translational medicine

Google

• Gemini desktop app for Mac (native Swift, Option+Space launcher, built with Antigravity)

• Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 — SOTA visual/spatial reasoning via Gemini API

• Gemma 4 running locally offline on iPhone

Other models / infra

• Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B 2-bit quant running on 13GB RAM; Opus 4.7 hit 87.6% SWE-Bench vs Qwen 3.6 at 73.4%

• OpenClaw 2026.4.15 — Opus 4.7 support, Gemini TTS, better context management

• Cursor added Opus 4.7 (50% off) and interactive canvases for visual dashboards

• Vercel Open Agents — reference platform for enterprise cloud coding agents

Products / consumer

• X Cashtags — real-time stock and crypto data on iPhone (US/CA)

• Skye — agentic iPhone home screen with ambient intelligence

• Sera — a new foundational shadcn/ui style inspired by print/editorial design

There’s also the offloading of creative and critical thinking. It’s dangerous and frictionless once you integrate AI into the messaging tools that sit in your pocket all day.

Yes, the convenience is incredible. But there’s a darker side. Unbridled access to a tool that lets you not think for yourself, that lets you offload the hard parts.

Writing is thinking. The act of sitting down at your computer and typing on a blank screen is the actual exercise necessary to achieve clarity.

The main reason I shut down my agents is because I realized I was becoming dangerously dependent on them. I wasn’t thinking for myself enough.

There were moments of bliss, sure. But I spent so much time trying to optimize my experience. I got lost focusing on how to improve my collective of agents.

Fight against shiny object syndrome. But, if you must try the latest thing.

Timebox your playtime.

— Daniel

I want my own personal agent that I can collab with for years. Not just a chatbot that helps me write or code, and not some SaaS product that feels incredible right up until the company behind it changes the rules of engagement.

I want a system that actually feels like an extension of me. A second brain in the real sense. A place where my notes, morning pages, memos, goals, projects, links, drafts, screenshots, half-finished thoughts, and recurring questions can live and compound over time. And if that’s what I’m building, I want full control over it.

That part feels obvious to me now in a way it didn’t before. For a while, I was willing to trade control for magic. If the model was good enough, useful enough, human enough, I could ignore the rest. I could tolerate the outages, the weird product choices, the clunky interfaces, the feeling that none of this was actually mine.

But eventually that starts to wear on you.

Especially when you’re trying to build something deeper than a workflow hack.

The more personal software gets, the less acceptable it feels to have that relationship mediated by a company that can shut you out, rate-limit you, or decide your use case no longer fits their strategy.

I don’t want the thing that knows my writing, my taste, my obsessions, and my private thoughts controlled by any company. I don’t want to build a real memory layer on top of servers I don’t control using a model I can lose access to six months from now because demand spiked or incentives changed. If this thing is going to become part of how I think, it can’t be fragile. And it definitely can’t belong to them.

Closed models still feel more alive than anything else. That’s real. Claude Opus 4.6 feels closer to a legit collaborator than anything I’ve ever used. The conversations are warm. Fluid. Weirdly human. However, relying solely on OpenAI and Anthropic feels like a massive long-term risk.

I want hardware I can control, and ideally, models I can control and run on my own servers. I want a memory store I can inspect and back up. I want the vault to be mine. I want the agent to be mine. If one company disappears or changes direction, I still want the system. To achieve this, the primary tools one uses must be open.

Never bet against open source.

I still reserve the right to get seduced by some god model from Anthropic later. But if I’m serious about building a personal agent that truly feels like an extension of myself, then I need to treat it like infrastructure.

And infrastructure should be owned, not rented.

— Daniel

Publish into the void.

Pour your soul into the digital page. Hit send…

Crickets.

No reply. No signal that anyone on the other end felt something. The quiet hum of algorithms deciding whether your words deserve to exist.

Every writer I know has felt this. That strange paradox of being more connected than any generation in history and yet more isolated in the act of creation than ever before.

The feeds are louder than they’ve ever been. Ads, engagement bait, brainrot, power grabs. The public internet, the one we grew up believing in, is long gone. Real voices are getting harder to find. Not because they stopped speaking. Because the noise swallowed them whole.

has a soluiton.

It’s called DFOS. The Dark Forest Operating System.

If you don’t know Yancey, you should. He co-founded Kickstarter. Started . And he’s been writing about the state of the internet with the kind of clarity that forces you stop stop scrolling. His thesis is simple: the internet isn’t dying. It’s migrating. Moving from the loud, extractive surface layer into smaller, quieter, more intentional spaces underneath.

Yancey is building the foundation to support that migration. DFOS is a new operating system for cooperation. A place where group chats, members, shared money, and private feeds work together under one roof. Lightweight and intentional. Built for people who want to make things together, not perform for strangers.

and I have created a space for Indie Thinkers inside DFOS.

You can think of it like a stripped-down Discord, but with a philosophical backbone. The interface is clean. The signal-to-noise ratio is high. And the most exciting part hasn’t even shipped yet: a shared Treasury.

Here’s what I’ve always believed about Indie Thinkers. The newsletter, the essays, the reading recommendations. Those are the surface. The real purpose of this community has always been something deeper: pooling our resources and attention toward building something greater than the sum of its parts.

A Treasury makes that tangible. It means we can collectively fund projects, support writers, back ideas we believe in. Together. Not as passive readers. As co-creators. The audience becomes the author.

That’s the shift Yancey is betting on. And I think he’s right.

I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is and you’ll see this treasury grow organically every single week.

We’ve all spent the last few years watching the creator economy tell us to build personal brands, grow followings, and monetize our audiences. And some of that works. But it misses the deeper hunger most of us have. The hunger to belong to something. To contribute to a shared vision instead of performing a solo act.

Indie Thinkers was always supposed to be that kind of place.

DFOS gives us the tools to make it real.

We’ll be opening the space up soon.

Consider this a heads-up.

If you’ve been wanting to write more and build more alongside people who get it, this is the space we’ve been building for you.

More details to come.

— Daniel

I built Woodshed because I had more ideas than hours.

I think a lot about the intersection of code and prose, and how building software has changed forever in this moment we’re in.

I felt I was leaving too many ideas on the table.

Not because they were bad. Because I’m one person.

So I built a creative studio out of AI agents. Three of them: @MotifAgent, Cadence, and Forte are all running in one Slack workspace. A woodshed.

One strategizes. One writes. One builds.

They remember what I care about, read what I’ve written, and show up every morning with their own ideas before they ask for mine.

In jazz, woodshedding means locking yourself away to practice, obsessively, until the music lives in your hands. No audience. No shortcuts. Just the work. I took that idea and applied it to agents. Build in private, iterate relentlessly, ship when it's ready.

The platform they run on is called @openclaw. It lets you give an AI agent a personality, a memory, and jobs to be done.

What happens when you give your half-formed ideas to a team that never sleeps? If revenue comes from that, great. But that’s not why I check in on the Woodshed crew before I check my email.

@steipete, who created OpenClaw, put it perfectly: it’s hard to compete with someone who’s just having fun.

This is now my creative playground. The woodshed is where musicians, and now agents, go to practice when nobody’s watching.

— Daniel

Here’s the thing.

You have more than enough time.

You have more than enough skills.

You have more than enough tools.

You have more than enough goals.

You have more than enough agents.

You have more than enough insight.

You have more than enough agency.

You have more than enough intuition.

You have more than enough expertise.

You have more than enough confidence.

You don’t have enough focus to succeed.

I’m making a conscious decision to focus on as few tools as possible.

My current bag.

Current setup in Notion.

I’m leveraging Tiago Forte’s PARA framework with the addition of a daily Journal plus a Tasks database.

Tasks may or may not be tied to a specific project.

I expect to do the majority of my “knowledge work” in Notion moving forward. I don’t use Notion Agent at the moment, but a massive upgrade is coming next week.

Most people I know haven’t leveraged the Agent feature in a serious way.

Myself included.

It’s felt more like a toy than a serious collaborator.

This was hilarious.

I gave it a simple task.

I want to go viral. Make no mistakes.

Millions of views are inevitable.

Jokes aside,

Something more useful is coming soon.

I value minimalism. Simplicity.

Obsidian is all the rage right now because of how everyone is leveraging Claude Code to organize and automate everything. I was tempted to give it another shot. So tempted, in fact, that I spent 2 hours yesterday getting the setup “just right” with the goal of avoiding the permanent underclass.

Then I scrapped all of it. Realized I fell into the shiny object trap, again.

Obsidian is incredible.

I’m stoked that Kepano and the crew are having this moment.

The CLI is dope.

There’s only one problem.

I can’t get rid of Notion, and that’s ok.

Once you start collaborating with other people, you have two options.

I’m still searching for my life’s work, but no matter what it is, I am certain it will be collaborative. There’s an obsession with the solopreneur ideal and the first single-person billion-dollar company.

I’m not interested.

The future belongs to small teams, not superheroes.

Fin

I’m curious,

What’s your stack?

How many tools are you living with day to day?

Let me know in the comments below.

— Daniel

I feel a deep need and responsibility to learn these tools, the value they provide, how they impact the company I work for, and how they impact the people I have chosen to support outside of my 9-5. It legit feels irresponsible and negligent not to be living in Claude Code every single day.

If I’m going to live and breathe these tools, why not write about how you’re using them and what’s interesting to you? What you think doesn’t work well yet? What has drastically improved since the last time you tried it? What tools are you paying for? What haven’t you tried yet?

I’m not interested in writing how-to articles. Nope, not one bit. I do enjoy learning about companies, founders, their unique angles on a problem. Packy McCormick is one of my favorite writers and I love his deep dives.

Not Boring by Packy McCormick

a16z: The Power Brokers

Welcome to the 310 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since Tuesday! Join 256,606 smart, curious folks by subscribing here…

Read more

4 months ago · 326 likes · Packy McCormick

I’m struggling with my identity as a writer, that’s the cold truth. Which is why I can’t figure out what to write about. I’ve been admittedly distracted by so many incredible advances in the knowledge work space, seemingly on a daily basis, that I’ve completely lost focus on who I want to be as a writer and the daily actions necessary to get to my desired destination.

But, what is that destination?

I think it looks a lot like Packy McCormick and Reggie James, who just landed an incredible gig at General Catalyst as a creative director.

Telling stories about the people and companies I admire.

The destination is being able to do this every day.

What’s funny is, I’ve already arrived, and yet, I’m not writing. The “destination” I’ve set out to drive towards is a place that I should technically always exist in. There’s no reason why I can’t tell stories about the people and companies I admire, right now.

Why am I not doing this? What’s stopping me?

If I’m being honest, the biggest blocker in my brain is distribution.

I’ve been writing on the internet for a long time now, and I’ve never, ever, really had a viral hit. That’s ok, it doesn’t really bother me that much, but it does color my decision-making. I think I’m stuck on the fact that I could spend so much time on a Packy McCormick deep dive, only for a few hundred people to read it and for 5 people to comment on it.

The problem, for all of us, isn’t that we can’t get distribution; it’s that we can’t guarantee it, and that uncertainty is paralyzing.

This is why SEO and Domain Ratings are so fascinating to me, because this is the closest way to guarantee distribution. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it feels like the closest thing out there.

If you write something that matches search intent and build enough authority, traffic arrives whether you’re sleeping or not. It’s the antithesis of the viral lottery. But here’s the issue... SEO-driven content and Packy McCormick-style deep dives are different games. One optimizes for what people are already searching for. The other creates demand for something people didn’t know they wanted.

What’s the point if nobody is listening?

Of course, writing is thinking, I know that.

I should write because I love to do it and I’ve somehow forgotten this important fact.

You shouldn’t write because you want thousands of people reading it.

But that’s how I feel at times.

So maybe the writing, itself, is not fulfilling enough.

That’s sad, and terrible, but it’s the truth.

I don’t need millions, thousands will do just fine.

I don’t just want to be heard, I also want to make someone pause and think.

I don’t need 130 million views like Dan Koe’s latest piece.

I just want modest adoration, not household name recognition.

I’ve got this all wrong though, and I know better.

Here’s a reframe. What if the goal isn’t thousands of readers, but being the person who deeply understands the companies and founders I’m curious about? The writing becomes the vehicle for my own education, and the audience is a byproduct. Write to learn. The readers will come because the learning is genuine.

I love to write. I know this to be true because I’ve been writing for the past 16 years and it’s one of the great joys of my life.

I love how it clears my head.

I love the cadence and rhythm of words dancing across the page.

I love how prose can reach anyone, anywhere in the world.

Even if it’s just one person.

I need to focus on inputs, not outputs.

Write every day.

Write about the people and companies you admire.

Here’s what I’m thinking about:

As I close out the year, this line still blows my mind almost every single day.

Then Karpathy decided to break the internet yet again this past Friday.

I think Karpathy and most of us feel behind because the definition of programming is changing almost every week.

I started learning how to code back in 2014, and it completely changed my life.

But how I learned is no longer relevant, and what I learned is 90% irrelevant.

Indie Thinkers

Mornings, Nights and Weekends

Change is hard…

Read more

3 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Daniel Hunter

Many have asked: In 2026, would you still learn how to code?

Yes, but not in the traditional sense.

Learn how to build and leverage software.

Learning systems engineering, automation, marketing, user research, understanding leverage, social psychology, etc., yes, these are still a few of my favorite things, and companies are desperate for people with these skills.

Understanding how software is built and maintained at scale is still incredibly valuable. It always will be. The best way to learn is to build, ask questions, build some more, and ask more nuanced questions.

Repeat.

— Daniel

Here are some of the best things we read in 2025:

Tumse Na Ho Paayega

How to live an intellectually rich life

Go to the main page of Wikipedia…

Read more

a year ago · 8726 likes · 281 comments · Utsav Mamoria

Patchwork

Notes on Internet Addiction

I grew up on the internet, and I love it, but something broke in me during the COVID era and its aftermath. I worked remotely in the crypto industry for 5 years, spent all my spare time on Twitter, and got stuck in a doom loop of e-addiction that I couldn’t unplug from. It fried my brain. So, I took a break this year to reset and reckon with my relation…

Read more

4 months ago · 159 likes · 22 comments · Ben Roy

Kyla’s Newsletter

Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy

Good morning from Washington DC! This is a long one, so it might be cut off in your inbox. Also, if you’re looking for an economic holiday gift for your loved ones (or for anyone at all), and want to support local bookstores In This Economy? is a great gift…

Read more

4 months ago · 1046 likes · 111 comments · kyla scanlon

The Etymology Nerd

slop capitalism and dead internet theory

Early this January, while we were all looking the other way, the slop revolution unfolded right under our noses…

Read more

a year ago · 934 likes · 28 comments · Adam Aleksic

signull vs. noise

the new power stack

not wealth. not title. not access…

Read more

a year ago · 81 likes · 5 comments · signull

The Sublime

What matters in the age of AI is taste

The more I use AI, the more I realize ignoring its creative potential is like dismissing the ‘90s internet as a porn delivery system…

Read more

a year ago · 286 likes · 38 comments · Sari Azout

Chris Best

Make something people want to do together

About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. [emphasis added…

Read more

10 months ago · 146 likes · 18 comments · Chris Best

Yancey Strickler

Defining groupcore

In a recent post I wrote that Metalabel’s focus is groupcore: software, tools, economics, spaces, and ideas that help creative people cooperate. But what does groupcore mean? Can one groupcore as a verb? Is groupcore distinct from other forms of coordination we already know…

Read more

5 months ago · 46 likes · 5 comments · Yancey Strickler

crystal clear

literally just do things

A few days ago, I was on FaceTime with my best friend (who coincidentally just texted me as I wrote this, hello synchronicity), telling her about a new endeavor I’m excited about. I was telling her I realized there’s one thing I’d really like to do more of in my work, and that’s creative direction—so I went down a TikTok rabbit hole of creative director…

Read more

a year ago · 51084 likes · 706 comments · Erifili Gounari

Escaping Flatland

Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom

Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961…

Read more

8 months ago · 1489 likes · 51 comments · Henrik Karlsson

P.S. Being basic as a virtue

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, Giorgio de Chirico, c. 1914

It’s the week of December 14th, 2025.

Here’s what I’m thinking about:

I started to respond to and realized it was getting long.

A lot of us, myself included, are still in denial that the old playbooks work. The first step is probably just accepting that they don’t. At least not like they used to.

Attention used to be much cheaper. Algorithms were more friendly. Followers mattered more. The advice was simple. Post consistently, play the long game, and people will find you. And for a while, it worked. But that era is over, and we’re all struggling even if we haven’t publicly admitted it yet.

Paul’s note reminded me of why shut down Write of Passage.

AI is part of a bigger story which is that the internet is in a new era. Write of Passage was based on a simple idea: write consistently, get a following on social media, build an email newsletter, and your life will change. It worked. Our students had amazing outcomes. But then the internet changed, starting with TikTok. We went from a follower-driven graph to a content-driven algorithm. Instead of distributing content based on who follows you, platforms now look at the content itself and spread it to anyone who might be interested. This has caused the value of a follower to go way down. On Twitter, I have people with a fraction of my followers who get more impressions than me. On YouTube, what matters is your click-through rate and average view duration, not subscriber count. This meant that what we were teaching at Write of Passage was no longer an honest approach to success. Now, the way I approach writing is to think of a piece as an event.

— David Perell

Once you accept this reality, opportunities start to emerge.

I keep coming back to the concept of digital real estate.

I’m officially obsessed with micro-apps. Small and focused products that actually do something for people. There’s more leverage in building owned experiences that solve a specific problem and far less leverage in content alone.

My first experiment is going well: TechTwitter.com

The idea is simple. Turn the social media firehose into a library. Curation and multimodal discovery of the best tech-focused content on Twitter. It’s not just about saving people from doomscrolling; it’s a searchable archive optimized for learning rather than engagement. A utility people return to because it solves an acute problem.

New subscribers are a natural byproduct of delivering value before asking for anything. I’m investing in SEO and building domain authority as if it were an appreciating asset. Better search rankings, more clicks, more subscribers.

LLMs are checking domain authority when deciding what to reference, and humans are reviewing citations because they don’t trust outputs blindly. I always look at sources when I get answers from AI. I want to know where certain types of information are coming from, especially when I’m conducting research.

Domain authority isn’t as hard to build as you might think.

I grew the DA for Tech Twitter from 0 to 32 in a month by launching on directories and launchpads. It’s quite effective if you’re intentional about it.

The vision is to build a portfolio of these micro-apps. Small, useful products that compound in value through organic search and AI recommendations.

Digital real estate that appreciates.

Each micro-app will link back to indiethinkers.com, improving the domain authority of the main publication. This will draw more eyeballs to the original essays we publish here. I’m still figuring it out, but that’s the current play.

— Daniel

Here’s what to read this week:

Sunday

Patchwork

Notes on Internet Addiction

I grew up on the internet, and I love it, but something broke in me during the COVID era and its aftermath. I worked remotely in the crypto industry for 5 years, spent all my spare time on Twitter, and got stuck in a doom loop of e-addiction that I couldn’t unplug from. It fried my brain. So, I took a break this year to reset and reckon with my relation…

Read more

5 months ago · 107 likes · 16 comments · Ben Roy

Monday

Escaping Flatland

When is it better to think without words?

Portrait of a Man with Glasses I, Francis Bacon, 1963…

Read more

6 months ago · 650 likes · 34 comments · Henrik Karlsson

Tuesday

postcards by hasif

Things to Leave Behind in 2025

The end of 2025 marks not just the close of a year but the closing of a chapter. In these final moments, there is a subtle whisper that calls us to reflect not just on what we’ve gained, but on what we need to shed, to leave behind. The process of letting go is not a simple one. It requires a willingness to step into a new year free of the emotional clu…

Read more

5 months ago · 966 likes · 14 comments · hasif 💌

Wednesday

maxOS

Building My Backlog

Today, my writing process has evolved. I’ve started to do a better job at writing during moments that motivate me. If I have a thought that inspires me, I’ll start writing and capture the feeling while it’s there. Then eventually I’ll get distracted by something else and move on, only to be inspired by a new idea which I then proceed to write about. As …

Read more

5 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Max Nimaroff

Thursday

Build like a scientist

I have almost no proof I existed before age 14

Read more

5 months ago · 10 likes · 6 comments · Dominik Gmeiner

Friday

Write • Build • Scale

1,000 Lessons From Building a $1M Online Business

🎯 The 1,000 Lessons Launch Special…

Read more

6 months ago · 125 likes · 62 comments · Sinem Günel, Philip Hofmacher, and Jari Roomer

Saturday

The Pavement

The era of jobs is ending

Morning again…

Read more

5 months ago · 1027 likes · 88 comments · Antonio Melonio

P.S. Which ecosystem would you choose?.

Here’s what we’re thinking about:

I’m hiring an Executive Software Engineer. Think of this like a Chief of Staff, but your job is to create technology that allows me to scale and move faster.

— Isaiah Taylor

How do you position yourself for a gig like this without building in public?

Thinking out loud on the internet is no longer an activity reserved for creators and influencers. It’s how anyone can get the most interesting opportunities.

There’s no world in which you apply for a job like this on LinkedIn.

You need to build interesting products or write thought-provoking prose.

You need to create a body of work that will speak for you when you’re not in the room.

Isaiah continues:

I’m looking for a general athlete, not a specialist. The more and weirder systems you’ve built with your own hands, the better; but you need to be well-versed in all the latest and greatest ways of creating things wicked fast (Vercel, Replit, AI coders, etc). You’ll be responsible for everything, from front-end design to backend implementation, auth, hosting, maintenance, testing, planning, product ownership, etc.

The lines between roles at startups will continue to blur.

This begs the question.

Should you be a Generalist or a Specialist in the AI Era?

— Daniel

Here’s what to read this week:

Sunday

Beck At It

Set your goals on fire

I failed my 2025 resolutions…

Read more

5 months ago · 17 likes · 9 comments · Becky Isjwara

Monday

Creative Thought Partner 👨‍🎨

The engineer who became a silliness consultant

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal growth…

Read more

5 months ago · 5 likes · Harrison Moore

Tuesday

Martian Madness

To Be Honest...

For some reason in my head, I can see the success in front of me like a prophecy just waiting to be fulfilled. Somehow, someway, it will be me that holds the reins, known for my worth, value, and contributions to society…

Read more

5 months ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Christy

Wednesday

Max’s Newsletter

Staying top of mind (without being weird about it)

There’s this idea that staying top of mind requires some big personal brand strategy, a perfect posting cadence, or a whole content calendar color-coded within an inch of its life…

Read more

5 months ago · 14 likes · 9 comments · Max Pete

Thursday

Sideroad 38

the quiet path to getting noticed

For the past few years, I’ve been helping creators and founders craft their online presence to achieve business goals. I know which psychological buttons to press, which engagement tactics perform, and how to position someone as the expert they want to be seen as. I get them results and opportunities, which I hope means I’m decent at it…

Read more

8 months ago · 277 likes · 41 comments · Ines Lee, PhD

Friday

Not Boring by Packy McCormick

The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff

Welcome to the 499 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 254,224 smart, curious folks by subscribing here…

Read more

6 months ago · 191 likes · 28 comments · Packy McCormick

Saturday

Yancey Strickler

Defining groupcore

In a recent post I wrote that Metalabel’s focus is groupcore: software, tools, economics, spaces, and ideas that help creative people cooperate. But what does groupcore mean? Can one groupcore as a verb? Is groupcore distinct from other forms of coordination we already know…

Read more

5 months ago · 44 likes · 4 comments · Yancey Strickler

P.S. The hat, haircuit, and tattoo framework

This doesn’t really happen anywhere else.

Handles on Twitter are so valuable now that there’s even a new marketplace for them.

You might hate the toxicity. You might despise the owner. You might be exhausted by misinformation, as am I. But if you work in tech or media, you’re probably still there, even if you’re not an active contributor.

Twitter is, and will always be, the internet town square.

When Google ships a new model, they announce it on Twitter. When a founder wants feedback, they post on Twitter. When journalists need to know what people are talking about, they check Twitter. The platform has become infrastructure.

But the town square is loud. Everyone can see what’s happening. Information moves fast. You bump into people you weren’t expecting. Sometimes you witness something important. Sometimes you just get yelled at.

You can’t think deeply in the town square. Everything you say is a performance. The format pushes you toward quick takes. And there’s this anxiety about who’s watching.

Substack is different, and it should focus on staying that way.

Substack is the coffee shop.

People are more vulnerable. They share personal struggles. Half-finished ideas. They’re less afraid and more honest. The long-form format filters for readers who’ll invest time. However, Substack has drifted away from this core value prop.

Twitter and Substack solve opposite problems. Twitter: “I need to know what’s happening right now.” Substack: “I need to think through something that matters.” Threading out a long essay on Twitter feels awkward. You’re still performing. Using Substack for breaking news feels weird with this half-baked trending feature.

I wish Substack would stop doing this.

A city needs both town squares and coffee shops. So does the internet.

The space shapes the thinking. Town squares produce quick reactions optimized for spreading. Coffee shops produce reflection, complexity, vulnerability.

Zuckerberg created Threads and tried to be Twitter with better moderation. LinkedIn tried to be professional Twitter with longer posts. Both struggled because they wanted town square reach with coffee shop depth. You can’t have both. The town square works because it’s open and chaotic.

The coffee shop works because it’s intimate and curated.

Online discourse will never consolidate into one platform.

Substack should take note.

— Daniel

You know what I mean. The well-curated LinkedIn post, the vacation photo with the perfect sunset, the career update that sounds like everything is falling into place. We scroll and scroll and see people announcing promotions, side hustles, new houses, and somehow always looking fresh while doing it.

And even when we know it’s just the highlight reel, it still gets to us. Because if everyone else seems to be thriving, then what does that say about me, sitting here in sweatpants eating Trader Joe’s frozen gnocchi for the third night in a row?

The truth is, nobody has it all together. Not really.

Behind every “exciting update” is usually a mess of stress, doubts, and late-night Google searches about whether or not you’re ruining your life. That friend who looks like they’re crushing it at work? They’re secretly debating if they should quit and move somewhere quieter. That couple who always posts cute photos? They fought in the car right before taking it. The person who seems effortlessly productive? They probably have three unanswered texts from their mom sitting on read.

I’m not saying this to be cynical. I’m saying it because it’s comforting to remember. The myth of having it all together is just that: a myth. Nobody is doing it as perfectly as they look online.

We’re all playing catch up

I used to think I was the only one dropping the ball. I’d see friends running marathons or announcing a new certification, and meanwhile, my big accomplishment for the week was finally sending an email that had been sitting in my drafts for three days.

But when you actually talk to people, you start to realize almost everyone feels behind. Almost everyone is quietly comparing themselves. Almost everyone has that one part of their life that feels like it’s barely holding on.

It’s just that nobody posts about this.

The whole idea of having it all together is flawed

Sometimes I think about what “having it all together” even means. Is it about money? Career? A spotless home? A thriving social life? Because honestly, I’ve never met anyone who has all of those things at once. If you’re crushing it in your career, maybe your personal life is stretched thin. If you’ve got a full social calendar, maybe your bank account feels a little tight.

Maybe the whole idea is flawed from the start. Life isn’t about checking every box at the same time. It’s more like juggling, and you’re always dropping one ball while catching another.

And maybe that’s okay.

Being real >

The older I get, the more I realize the real win is just showing up for your life as it is. Eating the leftovers. Letting the texts wait a day. Admitting you don’t have all the answers.

Because honestly? The people who matter don’t need you to have it all together. They just need you to be real with them. To say, “hey, today was a lot” or “no, I didn’t get that thing done.” That’s the kind of honesty that makes other people exhale and say, “me too.”

And I think we could all use more of that.

So if you’ve been feeling like you’re the only one fumbling while everyone else is thriving, here’s your reminder: you’re not. We’re all just doing our best, in our own messy, imperfect ways.

Some days, that looks like a promotion or a big win. Other days, it looks like surviving on coffee and leftover pasta.

Nobody has it all together. And maybe that’s the point.

Thank you for reading,
Max

Sunday

The value of writing has officially taken center stage in Silicon Valley.

Anthropic announced this past week a couple of job openings for writers, with starting salaries north of $200,000.

• Editorial, AI for Science

• Editorial, Economics & Policy Lead

Several things jump out at me.

First and foremost, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model is an incredible writer, and the Opus model is a legit researcher. Yet, Anthropic wants to hire humans for the job.

This got a ton of people excited, and rightfully so.

Writers are back!

Writing is THE most important skill of 2026 and beyond, and it’s exciting to see the tech industry placing this much value on something I love to do.

And then a16z announced this… 🤯

Introducing the a16z New Media Fellowship

Watch this space.

Monday

Both Are True

lets talk about substack

I would very much like to open the floor (don’t fall in!) and see how the people of substack are feeling about substack…

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6 months ago · 105 likes · 132 comments · Alex Dobrenko`

Tuesday

Fiona Monga

The New Founders and the Systems They Need

From Overload to Orientation…

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6 months ago · 98 likes · 7 comments · Fiona Monga

Wednesday

The 2hour Creator Stack

The Substack Shift I Saw Coming (and why you need to build differently now)

Substack is not the same platform it was six months ago and if you’ve been here that long, you’ve felt it…

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6 months ago · 236 likes · 67 comments · Benjamin Antoine

Thursday

Creative Thought Partner 👨‍🎨

I'm about to get evangelical about the nomad life

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · Harrison Moore

Friday

SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB

ADD A VIDEO. GO BACKWARDS. MAKE A ZINE.

My name is Seth Werkheiser and I help creative people quit social media, promote their work in sustainable ways, and rethink how a website and newsletter can work together…

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6 months ago · 24 likes · 7 comments · Seth Werkheiser

Saturday

Anna Mack's Stack

Income diversification 101: land then expand

Bonjour mes amis, I’m writing this week’s newsletter from my second favourite city in the world, Paris! Two quick announcements before diving into today’s post…

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6 months ago · 39 likes · 2 comments · Anna Mackenzie

As I’ve previously written, I don’t believe in giving advice. None of what follows is advice. It is simply a slice-of-life of how I personally use LLMs. Many people out there likely have different opinions and other ways they use LLMs. Great! Please let me know in the comments. 🙂

What works

This year I’ve successfully used LLMs:

1. To build and follow a diet - exactly what to buy and eat, and when?

2. To auto-title my Bluesky posts for my personal website (à la POSSE)

3. Any task I’m looking to do which is in-distribution. ie. any task that has a single correct answer and a common way of completion (eg. coding) is a prime candidate for LLMs. How to implement drag-and-drop? How to write REST endpoints that write and read payloads to and from a markdown files on disk? etc.

4. Additionally, LLMs have helped tremendously in helping me learn new technologies. eg. The old way I used to code: hunt around on Stack Overflow or Google until I found a good quick start example. I’d then adopt and appropriate the relevant parts of the example toward my own ends until I could Frankenstein something together that achieved my goals. The end result wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. This is how I’d learned Flash ActionScript, MySQL, and PHP back in the day. Countless hours sunk using this learning pattern.
   
   Now instead of spending hours scouring the internet for a kind soul’s random “how to guide” I simply turn to Copilot and ask it to generate a quick start for me. I then learn whatever I’m trying to learn in a throw-away sandbox apart from my main project. Then once I have a bare minimum understanding, I’ll cherry pick the salient parts I want over back to my main project.
   
   (As a side note: this way of learning does have issues because though my learning velocity is much faster now, I’m often working at the very edge —and sometimes, even beyond— my actual understanding of what I’m doing. So the moment I hit a bug that the LLM can’t solve, I’m screwed, because I don’t actually know what I’m doing. Eg. This past summer I was using Gemini to write some Chrome Dev Protocol scripts and everything was working great… until I got this memory leak error:

1. I’d tried to get multiple LLMs to fix it but they were all clueless so eventually I just wrote logic that restarted the instance every time this memory leak happened. Luckily, I was just working on a quick and dirty script so the stakes were low. But it does make me shudder when I wonder if people are releasing LLM-generated code they don’t understand that’s held together with duct tape into PROD? 🤔 That’d be insane if people are doing that; hopefully no one’s doing that.)

What sucks

One big challenge is LLMs are epistemologically unsound. Meaning, the kind of answers they give you are both non-deterministic and will also differ based on all of the previous conversations you’ve already had with it. (At least, that’s been my experience with ChatGPT.)

So for example: back in September after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, given the sudden spate of nationwide violence, I was wondering if people who’d recently perpetrated political violence in the US were young compared to historical norms. Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20, Luigi Mangione was 27, and Tyler Robinson was 22. These ages felt young to me and in my head, I had begun to hypothesize that thanks to the internet —which lionizes “literally just do things” and valorizes being “high-agency”— that young people were increasingly internalizing these messages in a destructive way. This is another common way I use LLMs: to sanity-check certain nascent worldviews or theories I am developing in my head about the world we live in.

As good epistemic hygiene, I will also often text my queries to my best friend who’ll then also run the same query through his ChatGPT instance. We both subscribe to ChatGPT Plus but he’s much more liberal than I am so he has a significantly different conversation history. Well, it’s a good thing I checked!

His ChatGPT response gave him a “maybe” while I got a straight-up “yes” response. We dug into the answers and found that in my response, my ChatGPT had included a specific study from Maryland that his had not and that’s why we’d received different answers:

This sucks because it means the answers that ChatGPT currently gives for something you’d think is singularly objective like trend analysis —even though may possess the veneer of accuracy and well-researched legitimacy— are basically just potentially made-up. 😠 I’d thought a simple analysis question like this was unequivocally objective with a single correct answer. But it turns out ChatGPT just cherry pick facts and gives different answers to different people, thus further fracturing reality and destroying any common semblance of shared truth that we as a populace have left.

What I wish existed

So I luckily have a best friend but it’d be nice to not have to bother him whenever I wanted to verify whether the great super-intelligence in the sky trained on all of humanity’s collective knowledge is lying to me. Thus, it’d be nice if someone put a layer on top of all the LLMs so they verified their answers with each other before I get the final output. Specifically, I’ve noticed that American and Chinese LLMs like to give different answers too, which makes sense, since LLMs essentially encode a nation’s culture and values into it. eg:

LLMs are amazing but there are still a few rough edges we need to solve to prevent them from unnecessarily fragmenting reality for all of humanity. I have no doubt we’ll figure it out though! 🥳

Sunday

Substack finally acknowledges they essentially built a social network. I’m a fan of notes and the Substack app and I believe is sincere here.

Disjointed

Why we built a social network

On Wednesday night, we hosted a small event at Substack’s New York office to demonstrate the value of Notes…

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6 months ago · 168 likes · 36 comments · Hamish McKenzie

I have no idea how this is going to play out. However, but I think this goes one of two ways. It either destroys the platform within the next 5 years or it becomes THE human-powered respite for writers and creators that are fatigued from AI-slop and bot-replies elsewhere.

Substack either fades into irrelevance, or it becomes even more valuable than Twitter.

I don’t see a middle ground here.

What’s your take?

Monday

Since November 2022, the stock market is up more than 70 percent and job openings are down more than 30 percent. Nothing like this has happened in decades.

—

It’s paywalled but I can share some gift subscriptions, just shoot me a DM.

Derek Thompson

Is This the New ‘Scariest Chart in the World’?

In the last few days, I’ve seen the following chart bounce around my corner of the Internet, often with some commentary declaring it the scariest chart in the world. The graph seems to show that the release of ChatGPT and the ensuing AI boom cracked the US economy in two, crushing the workforce while lifting the stock market…

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6 months ago · 334 likes · 20 comments · Derek Thompson

Here’s a comment I left.

I’ve been mulling over this topic for months now and haven’t been able to articulate what I’m seeing and hearing. I live in Los Angeles, which now feels like ground zero for the bifurcated economy we seem to live in.

Tech is thriving here. Apple is building a new 536,000 square foot office in my backyard, while all of my friends who are gig workers or entertainment veterans are struggling. If you work in the tech industry, as I do, it does feel like a bubble that’s completely separated from reality.

But it feels so weird. And this feeling concerns me.

It feels like a new normal and not a flash that’s doomed to crash.

Tuesday

offline crush

how to use the internet again: a curriculum

The most common (and easiest) thing to do on the internet is complain. The range of topics varies from person to person, but one consistent grumble circles around The Algorithm and it’s incorrect assumptions about what a person might want to consume…

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6 months ago · 539 likes · 38 comments · ✧ brooklyn 𓆏

Wednesday

Kyla’s Newsletter

Who's Getting Rich Off Your Attention?

Good morning!This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber…

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7 months ago · 899 likes · 88 comments · kyla scanlon

Thursday

Shae’s Substack

AI’s Hidden Crisis: The Industry Is Running Out of Data

Fifty thousand people followed me on Instagram because I made a simple, yet bold claim: the AI industry is running out of high-quality data, and humanists hold the key to solving this problem…

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6 months ago · 96 likes · Shae O.

Friday

Creative Thought Partner 👨‍🎨

12 ideas about education that get me out of bed in the morning 🌅

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Harrison Moore

Saturday

Max’s Newsletter

The art of writing it down

I’m a big journaler. I can’t remember exactly when I started this practice, but it feels like it has been at least 10–11 years now of journaling. Yes, that includes some breaks in between, but this might be one of my longest hobbies I have ever stuck with…

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Max Pete

Transforming an idea into a reality unlocked something powerful for me the first time it happened; I realized I could do it again and again and again. And the only difference after the first attempt would be money and experience, not my ability to believe in myself or whatever is trending on social media. If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious about when the journey of building gets sweeter. When the challenges start to feel like champagne problems instead of huge obstacles. So this article is for you.

The creator getting it out of the mud. The one who didn’t inherit a LinkedIn network or a trust fund. The one who sees and hears the seemingly endless symphony of: “There has to be a better way.” There is. And it starts with throwing out the hustle bro playbook entirely. You can’t trade just one aspect of your life for one aspect of someone else’s, you must commit to completely redefining what success looks like for you and your journey. Your concept of success will likely change over time, so let’s focus on what the rest of the year looks like.

I’m not under any illusions about what I’m asking you to do. The “Great Lock In” sounds cool in a social media post, but may require us to practice a version of productivity that is much less pretty and polished (Slow Productivity) in the process of dealing with the very real emotional toll many of us may be feeling in this very moment (myself included). It won’t be sexy, it won’t be flashy, but the progress will be real.

Career confusion is a luxury problem. People from less privileged backgrounds don’t always have the option to be confused; they need a job immediately. The ability to seek meaning in work is itself a privilege. It’s worth using wisely.

— Alex McCann

Creativity, duct tape, and dreams

What if—and hear me out—you created less but better? What if you stopped trying to be everywhere and focused on being somewhere that matters? The hustle culture industrial complex (I just made that name up, and I’m standing by it) wants you chronically online, perpetually productive, and permanently exhausted. The algorithm rewards quantity, but life rewards quality.

In order to achieve one of my big goals by the end of the year, I had to be honest with myself about what my capacity was. I’ve been deeply inspired by Simon O’s book, Energize, where he talks about understanding your natural energy cycles. I’m taking my own advice here. I’m pulling back on my podcast production to focus on writing, growing, and monetizing my newsletters. Any videos and films created in pursuit of that goal are secondary. It hurts; but I know that streamlining my focus doesn’t equate to accomplishing less.

When it comes to productivity, energy really is everything. You will notice that those who have high energy can get more done in days or weeks than many will get accomplished in months or even years.

— Simon Alexander Ong

Notice when your energy peaks and protect those hours like they’re made of gold—because creatively, they are. For some, it’s the quiet pre-dawn. For others like me, it’s the midnight witching hour when the world sleeps and ideas come to life. Track your natural creative cycles for two weeks. When do ideas flow? When does editing feel effortless? When do you solve problems that stumped you for days? Build your creation schedule around these patterns, not someone else’s “morning routine” gospel. Normalize rest periods. Fields need to rest to produce crops. So do brains. Nature doesn’t bloom year-round, and neither should you. The pressure to produce constantly isn’t just unrealistic—it’s unnatural.

In the economy of attention, mediocrity is bankruptcy. Social media algorithms change weekly. Quality endures for decades. While everyone else is focused on hacking algorithms, build craftsmanship instead. Quality isn’t just about the final product—it’s about quality thinking, quality research, quality relationships, and quality execution. It’s a practice, not just an outcome.

Make one thing so good people can’t stop thinking about it. Then make another. Repeat until you’ve built a body of work that speaks for itself.

— Shaan Puri

The world doesn’t need more content for content’s sake. It needs more creators who care deeply about what they make (that rhymed, you’re welcome). It needs you, operating at your highest level, not spread thin across platforms and purposes. So the secret sauce you’ve been looking for that makes everything easier? Doing less better, working at your natural rhythm, and obsessing over quality. Your creativity is the duct tape that holds your dreams together.

Writing is an art.

To me, thereʼs no denying that.

But in the past few years, with the explosion of short-form writing on Twitter, LinkedIn, and even newsletters, writing has become something else entirely: a growth lever to be hacked.

So let me plead with you: stop writing everything like a growth marketer.

Write like an artist.

Iʼm Pete, a 28-year-old “artistˮ living in New York. I put artist in quotes because for a long time I wasnʼt sure if I fit the label.

Three years ago I quit my cushy consulting job to explore the idea of turning personal data into artwork. Think: a piece of art on your wall that changes with the weather or every time you go for a run.

Along the way, Iʼve called myself a founder, a consumer app developer, an engineer. None of those quite fit. Over the past year, Iʼve finally settled into the identity of an artist.

A little over a year ago, I started publishing a short piece of writing every Monday. Iʼve written and published to Substack for 63 weeks straight. I thought it would grow my audience and help me make the jump into short-form content.

Spoilers: it didnʼt. Well, not in the way I hoped, anyway.

But what it did do was show me something important: I hated writing for growth, and I loved writing to write.

Choose Curiosity Over Consumption

So what does writing like an artist actually mean?

For me, it means treating writing the same way I treat my art: not as content to be consumed, but as an idea to be explored. It means following my curiosities, even when they donʼt fit into a neat growth framework or some trending topic.

Every time I chased a trend, the writing was flat. I tried writing about the influence of AI during peak “did A.I. write this?ˮ discourse, and no one cared at all. It was just another take on the take wheel. Hereʼs that garbage piece.

But when I dug into something I was genuinely obsessed with, people connected with it. My dad would send me an email, a friend would shoot me a text, a stranger would reach out and say a piece inspired them. My most engaged piece? How I canʼt talk to my girlfriendʼs grandma.

Itʼs worth remembering that art, whether on a canvas or on the page, is ultimately about conversation.

From Content to Conversation

Too often, creators treat their work as something to be consumed. Write a post, hit publish, watch the clicks roll in. But the most powerful moments donʼt come from passive consumption. They come when you create space for people to gather around the work, connect with it, and start a dialogue. Thatʼs what feeds both you and your audience.

I learned that lesson most viscerally last month, when I held my first gallery after years of tinkering and sharing only on the internet. For the first time, people could actually see my work. They touched it. They asked questions. They lingered in front of it and heard me give my spiel.

And what struck me most wasnʼt just that I was energized by them. It was that they were energized by each other. The room filled with curiosity. People brought their own ideas and perspectives Iʼd never considered. The work became bigger than me.

Thatʼs the part writers often forget. Live events, gatherings, workshops, they donʼt just grow your audience. They turn your work into a shared conversation. And in that space, everybody walks away with more energy than they came in with.

My Invitation to You

Of course, all writing has its place. Growth tactics, promotional posts, SEO-friendly pieces — they serve their purpose. But theyʼre not strictly necessary. And if thatʼs all you do, you risk missing the point and, most importantly, the magic of writing.

Because the most enduring writing doesnʼt just fill some arbitrary content calendar. It sparks conversation and curiosity.

So if you want to grow as a writer, hereʼs my advice: stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like an artist.

Choose curiosity over growth. Treat writing as conversation, not content. Donʼt just publish into the void, put yourself in the room. Start the dialogue. Let people bump into your work.

Stop asking how to grow faster, and start asking whatʼs genuinely worth exploring.

Thatʼs the work people want to gather around. Make the space for them to gather, and the conversation will take care of itself.

— Daniel

Here’s your reading list for the week of October 12th, 2025.

Sunday: The Future of Media-Driven Startups

Earlier this year I spoke with the managing partner of a venture capital firm about the “Every” Thing blueprint and the creator fund from Jack Raines. We talked about how the venture studio model seems poised for a renaissance in the agentic age and he challenge me to try and develop a thesis as a fun though exercise.

My core thesis is a stack:

Collectives → Ecosystems → Communities → Products → Capital

• Collectives blend creative and technical talent to rapidly test and build ideas.

• Ecosystems (like Substack) are leveraged by collectives to build communities.

• Communities become the moat—offering organic growth, trust, and feedback.

• Products emerge from within, often launched through essays and content first.

• Capital follows influence; it becomes most powerful when paired with trust.

Startups have always been laboratories—spaces where people test ideas, fail fast, and pursue concepts that seem crazy until they work. The best founders do things that don’t scale, engage directly with the market, and iterate rapidly.

That won’t change.

But how startups are formed, funded, and grown is undergoing a fundamental shift.

I have a lot of conviction around venture studios in the agentic age because you can take more shots on goal instead of going all in on one idea. Venture studios often raise capital from LPs similar to traditional venture capital firms but it’s now feasible to form a viable studio with far less capital.

When the cost of software development approaches zero, you have to rethink everything — business models, metrics, burn rates, revenue per employee, etc. Investors have to consider the purpose of pre-seed and seed rounds when tiny teams can go from zero to profitability on their own. Bootstrapping isn’t new, but it’s now far easier to get to venture scale without venture capital.

Startups are hiring agents instead of leaning on growth capital.

I read an essay from signüll a while back about the new power stack.

platform > creator > audience > company > capital

This helped me form the basis of a thesis for where I think startups are headed.

I’m calling this the collective stack.

collective > ecosystem > community > products > capital

The Collective leverages an Ecosystem to build Community and Products.

The Community reduces customer acquisition costs and serves as the marketing fuel for new product launches. Successful products generate Capital which is returned to the collective. The dream of the one-person billion-dollar startup is still alive but more and more creators are realizing it’s far easier to win if you collaborate with others.

What happens when you toss a brilliant entrepreneur, engineer, designer, and writer into a room? You get things like Spiral and Cora.

The members of the collective are the founding members of the community.

Members of the collective serve as both creators and curators, building in public while attracting others who share the vision. The collective model allows for rapid ideation, shared resources, and distributed risk. Each member brings their unique audience and expertise, creating a flywheel effect that accelerates growth.

When successful, these collectives can spin out multiple ventures, each benefiting from the combined network effects and creative capital of the group. The key is finding the right balance of autonomy and collaboration.

The most powerful ecosystems are YouTube, Twitter, and Substack.

The smartest people on earth are in at least one. Two of my favorite writers, Packy McCormick and Anu, use two quite well.

Ecosystems > Platforms.

Bluesky is trying to be a viable ecosystem but it unfortunately is running into headwinds from competing protocols I don’t believe you have to choose only one ecosystem and it’s becoming increasingly easy to manage several. It could be an advantage to have different members of a collective leverage the ecosystem that they’re most active in and understand intimately.

Followers and newsletter subscribers alone won’t be good enough.

Community is the metric that truly matters.

Show me your subscriber count and I’ll ask for your engagement rate.

Community will be one of the last moats standing in the creator economy.

A strong community provides organic distribution, rapid feedback loops, and built-in product-market fit validation. They act as both early adopters and evangelists, spreading the word through genuine enthusiasm instead of paid advertising.

The key is fostering authentic connections between members.

This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where value flows naturally between creators, community members, and the broader market.

The future belongs to creators who understand this dynamic.

An essay should be the first product.

Every spent years building trust by creating brilliant content.

I do believe that software is now a form of content but the focus should be on writing and community building first and foremost.

Engineering as Marketing is a viable tactic to grow an audience but it shouldn’t come at the expense of great writing and storytelling.

A mix of code & prose, one informing the other, is probably the answer here.

Having a ton of money is no longer an advantage. Products are cheap to build and capital is becoming more of a commodity if there’s no influence behind it.

But capital paired with influence and community?

That’s a moat.

Influence amplifies capital’s impact and creates opportunities that money alone can’t buy. When collectives combine capital with the trust and attention of a thriving community, they unlock unprecedented leverage.

— Daniel

Monday: Leap Capital: How Much Do You Need To Quit?

Tuesday: “Be Different” doesn’t work for building products anymore

Wednesday: What’s it like to live in 2025?

Thursday: Why post things online?

Friday: Weird prompts, better answers

Saturday: In the Costco Era of Software, Design Is the Differentiator

I appreciate your feedback. If you enjoyed this piece, drop a like or comment below. You can also send a note to daniel@indiethinkers.com. Would love to hear from you.

• Write online daily - Robert has been posting almost every day for nearly two years now, starting back in January 2024. He sees this practice as building a second brain. It’s a natural way to track what he’s doing with his life and organize his thinking.

• Own your content - He’s reluctant to invest time on platforms where his content could be “incinerated in a heartbeat.” Instead, he prefers to own his data, linking his BlueSky posts (via AT Protocol) back to his personal website.

• Build a personal site - Robert believes everyone should have one. His website is designed “exactly for me” and serves as a time capsule chronicling his interests—random thoughts, readings, cool videos, and things he’s built.

• Seek connection - His website emerged from a desire to “help interesting people find me.” He believes that by recording his interests and focusing on being genuinely interesting himself, the right people will reach out (like I did!).

• Prioritize intrinsic motivation - Robert operates on the belief that if you “just do what really moves you,” everything else—like TED Talk invitations—will work itself out. He’s unapologetically focused on what interests him, and he sees this self-centeredness as a virtue.

• Use platforms for distribution, not dependence - He’s cautious about relying exclusively on platforms like Substack Notes for discovery, since they’re closed systems that may still be “picking winners and losers” through algorithms.

• If you feel lost, create - Robert started chronicling his life when he realized the years were slipping by and he had “no idea what I was doing with my life.” He feels his personal work is worth it because, ultimately, this collected content “will be all I leave behind.”

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At 6AM, I’d put on my school uniform while CNN anchors broke news about global markets and political scandals.

It was a strange contrast: the world felt like it was always on fire on the TV, while I was buttoning my shirt and packing my books. My mom would glance at the screen and say, “Imagine you being like that one day. This is Becky Isjwara, reporting live from Jakarta.” In that moment, it seemed like the future was secure: CNN would always be there, and maybe one day I would too. The irony, of course, is that by the time I entered journalism, that industry was already collapsing.

Like Robin from How I Met Your Mother, I started with the not-so-glam roles in reporting: interviewing knowledge workers in finance, typing out words behind a screen instead of having a glam team prep me for a 5AM broadcast. But somewhere between my nth scoop and pretending to care about compliance messaging software (as thrilling as it sounds), I realized a disconnect. The content I produced at work wasn’t the content I consumed after hours. Instead of CNN or The Wall Street Journal, I got my news fix from podcasts—Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot basically became my newspaper for half a decade.

(This mirrored reality. Many TV producers go home to binge Netflix instead of their own network.)

So like any confused sophomore, I dropped out. Instead of sticking it out in a newsroom, I launched a Substack. And oddly enough, I think I’m economically better off for it.

The Shift in Media

I wasn’t blazing trails. I was just following the journalists who were entrepreneurial before me. Kara Swisher, in particular, has always been my north star.

There is no denying that media consumption has shifted dramatically. Very few of us log into news sites anymore. We learn about politics on podcasts, get travel tips from TikTok, and watch explainers on YouTube. Fifty years ago, newspapers were the platform du jour. Today, content creators fill that role.

And when attention shifts, money follows. The average CNN show gets about 92,000 viewers, versus 400,000 for each Pivot episode. Advertisers have been redirecting dollars from newsrooms to creators. Meanwhile, traditional newsrooms are wilting to a slow death. I had been spared from a few layoffs while I was still a journalist, but I had always wanted to leave before I got on the chopping block.

Journalists Who Jumped Ship

In case you need more convincing, plenty of journalists have already made the leap, risking their probably pretty paychecks for a more adventurous income stream:

• Derek Thompson runs a Substack alongside his Atlantic work.

• Becca Farsace does YouTube tech reviews the way Walt Mossberg once did for The Wall Street Journal.

• Johnny Harris makes investigative YouTube videos for millions.

• Casey Newton runs Platformer, a lean, independent newsletter.

• Even non-traditional voices like Kyla Scanlon have built credibility from scratch—TikTok first, then Substack—without the need to be invited to a TV segment.

They’re proof you don’t need a masthead to make money, impact, or both.

The Newsroom Advantage

Of course, this isn’t a simple story of triumph. Traditional newsrooms still offer real advantages: editorial oversight, fact-checking teams, legal protection (very important!!), and the institutional credibility that freelancers can struggle to match. Independent creators, meanwhile, face risks of income instability, algorithmic dependence, and the temptation to trade rigour for virality. Going solo also means bearing the full weight of production, distribution, and monetization—jobs that used to be spread across entire departments.

And there’s the question of investigative journalism—the part of the profession that made traditional reporting so compelling in the first place. Think of war correspondents or the Pulitzer-winning exposés like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein. That kind of work is expensive, slow, and hard to balance with the day-to-day grind of algorithm-driven posting. For decades, newsrooms could fund these long investigations with bread-and-butter beats like sports, business, or entertainment. Without a diverse newsroom to cross-subsidise, stories that deserve to be told often struggle to find oxygen. One risk of a creator-led future is the slow death of local reporting and public-interest investigations. Unless a story has the potential to go viral, it risks being invisible.

These risks are worth naming, because they keep the playing field uneven. But the gravitational pull of money, audience trust, and autonomy has shifted too strongly to ignore. Even with the safety nets of legacy media, more and more journalists are concluding that the rewards of independence outweigh the comforts of the corporations.

Why the Creator Path Wins

The most obvious advantage for journalists to treat themselves like content creators is economic. When you own your distribution, the money follows you instead of your employer. Sponsorships, partnerships, and subscriptions are far easier to land when the audience is attached to your name rather than a masthead. Platforms like Substack now have 5 million paid subscriptions globally.

There’s also the relationship factor. People swipe away banner ads or fast-forward through TV spots, but I’ll lean in when a podcaster or YouTuber I trust recommends a protein supplement. That intimacy creates a deeper connection between journalist-creators and their audiences, one that advertisers are willing to pay a premium to access.

The gatekeepers that once controlled who could publish are largely gone too. Platforms like Substack, YouTube, and LinkedIn make publishing free and direct. The people who subscribe, watch, or read are loyal to you, not the newsroom that used to employ you.

On top of that, there’s ownership. Everything you create belongs to you, which means you can repurpose it across formats, re-use it for future projects, or monetise it in ways a traditional newsroom contract would never allow.

And perhaps the biggest shift of all is leverage. When you control both your content and your audience, you’re no longer dependent on the whims of an editor-in-chief or a shrinking newsroom budget. Instead, you hold the bargaining chips—whether that’s for advertising, sponsorships, or entirely new ventures down the line.

The old aspiration was to work for a newsroom. Today, the smarter play might be to think like a content creator. Because when you own your content and your audience, you effectively own your future.

And sorry Mom, I never did make it to CNN. But I’ve got myself a job in the creator space earning a multiple of my reporter salary. And this time, there’s no editor killing my stories.