Blog
36 articles on leverage, value, and building independently.

Constraining your Curiosity
The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

How to Build Leverage from Scratch

Downstream of Consciousness

0 — $1,000,000
The title should perhaps read $58 — $1,000,000. $58. That was my business bank account balance in January of 2020.

The Formula for Freedom
Doing business on the internet is about convincing people you don't know that you have something they need or want. Think of a brand as the bridge between the two.

Building a Personal Monopoly
How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.

Don’t Depend on The People You Care About
Expecting the people that care about you to care as much about your obscure obsession as you do is not going to help you.

Personal Brands vs. Company Brands
"Should I start a personal brand or a company brand?" This is a question we receive on a weekly basis. Our opinion on the difference between personal brands and company brands is not a one-size-fits

How to Create Value
"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve." — Elon Musk There are four ways to think about how value is perceived: Psychological, monetary, functional, and social. T

NFTs Are Worth Understanding
A sharp, short read by Nick Widmer on why NFTs are worth understanding.

The Art of Saying No
The Art of Saying No This article is about the transition from hustling your way to a few clients, to dialing in a product and buying your time back. The eventual goal is to make your business your on

Make Yourself an API
“The world rewards the people who are best at communicating ideas, not the people with the best ideas.” — David Perell

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
I read Naval's infamous How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) thread in 2019. I spent the years following trying to install each one of the principles in my life and business. Here's how I did it.

How to Create Visual Leverage
Six practical examples of how you can use visuals to grow your business, convince someone of your talent, and get your point across in the highest possible fidelity.

Playing to an Empty Club

100 Days with the Daily Manifest

Brain Dumps: Build Once, Sell Twice

Build Once, Sell Twice Preview

How Exceptional People Think

The Age of Infinite Leverage
Leverage allows you to accomplish 100x what others can – it is a force multiplier for your effort, skill, and judgement.

They Don't Need a New Website

Crypto and CC0 Case Study
What do you get when you combine a permissionless financial system with permissionless intellectual property? Skin-in-the-game communities supporting businesses that experiment with new ways to get th

Build Proof, Not Products: Why Showing Your Work Beats Shipping Features
In the AI era, anyone can ship a product. What you can't fake is proof of work — the public trail of thinking, building, and learning that earns trust.

Code Is Cheap. Conviction Is Expensive. The Real Cost of Building in the AI Era
AI made code nearly free. But the willingness to commit to an idea, face rejection, and keep going? That still costs everything. The new scarce resource isn't technical skill — it's conviction.

Distribution Is the Product: Why Audience Beats App in the AI Era
AI made building easy. Distribution is still hard. If you have an audience, you can sell anything. If you have a product and no audience, you have a hobby.

If You Aren't Going to Sell, Don't Build
Building without selling is expensive journaling. The market doesn't grade on effort — it grades on exchange. Distribution is the hard part. The product is the easy part.

Nobody Cares What You Built: Why Communication Beats Code
The market doesn't see your code, your architecture, or your clever prompt engineering. It sees your ability to communicate what you built and why it matters.

One Customer Changes Everything: Stop Building for Hypothetical Users
Stop building for imaginary users. Get one real person to pay you. One customer proves the mechanism works and changes your entire psychology.

Package the Transformation, Not the Feature: How to Sell What You Build
People don't buy products. They buy transformations — from stuck to unstuck, from slow to fast, from confused to clear. Stop listing features. Start selling outcomes.

In the Age of AI, It's Easy to Make. It's Hard to Make Sense.
AI collapsed the cost of making things to zero. But meaning, taste, and point of view can't be automated. The new creative advantage isn't execution — it's judgment.

The Prompt Is Not the Hard Part: Why Knowing What to Build Matters More
Anyone can prompt AI to build an app. The hard part is knowing what's worth building, who it's for, and why they should care. Judgment beats execution.

The Vibe Coder's Trap: Why Building Without Selling Is Expensive Journaling
Vibe coding feels like progress. Ship an app, start another, ship again. But building without selling is just expensive journaling. The trap is mistaking motion for progress.

You Shipped It. Now What? Why Launching Is Just the Beginning
Shipping is not the finish line. It's the starting line. The real work begins after you deploy — and most vibe coders never do it.

Your App Is Not a Business: Why Vibe Coding Isn't Enough
You built an app with AI in a weekend. Congratulations. But an app without a customer is a hobby, not a business. Here's what actually matters.

Find Your Place
If you are reading this you are likely no stranger to the concept of leverage in its digital context: using technology to amplify your effort. Code, media, brand, capital — all forms of leverage that
Make a Name For Yourself
Language is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of leverage. If you nail the language that represents your idea, and deliver on the promise that it makes, the validity and memorability of it gr