Week 58

Dear Reader,

Auditless has been keeping me pretty busy in January, but I've been itching to write this update.

1/ I launched a thing - new approach to SEO

TL:DR; Auditless launched a cheat sheet for Ethereum programming languages: https://reference.auditless.com/.

Here's a couple of things I've learned the hard way:

• Blogging = SEO. if you write a blog, the only sustainable way for you to acquire customers is to answer topics people search for. There are blogs that are primarily social media driven (Paul Graham's essays) but they are exceptional.
• The "standard" way to do SEO is to pay north of $1,000 per article every week and dump 5,000 words of keyword rich content. This is a perfect example.
• Moe Amaya discovered a better way - you can do SEO by building lightweight internet destinations as products.

That's what the Auditless Reference is.

2/ Getting overwhelmed with planning? Introducing the Traveler's Notebook

TL:DR; If you want to take notes but don't, get a Traveler's Notebook.

I've recently been overwhelmed by context switching. Notion is still pulling it's weight but I'm missing a portable think-space, something where I can jot down and lay out my thoughts to resolve problems and frame solutions better. I found this nifty notebook from Japan and will be trying it out.

It's actually a notebook system, allowing you to reuse the same notebook cover and use different refills for different contexts and purposes (albeit the whole thing is much less economical than it sounds). I'm going to be using separate refills to isolate across work, life and clients.

3/ Organising Genius, a new study group from Matt Clifford

TL:DR; Matt Clifford is starting a new study group on the topic "Organising Genius". I'm joining in London.

Matt Clifford with a little help from friends has gathered an amazing syllabus to study from the best organisations that allowed smart people to achieve incredible things (think Silicon Valley, Bell Labs, Manhattan Project).

This is a continuation of the Peter Thiel group from last year which I really enjoyed and will be a wonderful way to kickstart your 2020 reading habit. It would be great to meet some of you there.

Book clubs are a cheat code.

4/ The rise of start-up studios

TL:DR; The economics for starting a start-up studio have never been better.

What does this tweet have to do with start-up studios? Massive reduction in cost to create a start-up combined with increased competition for investment. What will this push investors to do? This will necessarily push investors to build/incubate their own start-ups as deal terms will get untenable.

Start-up studios are also pretty sustainable because they provide a clear path to continuously reinvest funds. Today's VC model today is under some moral pressure because it is intrinsically transient. Even the Google Founders don't want to work at Google anymore.

That's a sign that start-ups are not the world changing vehicles they once were, but instead a piece of equity that's expected to grow. A better model would have VCs vertically integrate with public market investors and hold the company throughout its tenure (like a studio...).

There was another great thread listing the best venture studios out there.

5/ Game design applied to Product Management

TL:DR; Game design > Gamification says Rahul Vohra.

I loved the talk, I think it is a new and useful way to think about certain productivity tools.

Related tweet: Company dashboards should feel like video games.