Hmm... something interesting I learned from my buddy @RomeenSheth about McKinsey.

I thought they are just a stale boring consulting co

But he told me they've acquired a ton of software co's & now have a $100M ARR tech portfolio now (!)

I'll let him explain - guest thread!

So I thought the whole "paid newsletter" thing was dumb.

So naturally, I tried it out as an experiment.. The results were kinda nutty. The newsletter started bringing home $49k per month (!) -- Here's the backstory

"what was the newsletter about?"

Well - for the past year, I've been doing a podcast called My First Million. Gimmicky name, but whatever.

It's a pod where me and @theSamParr (and friends like @awilkinson @_jacksmith etc.) brainstorm business ideas based on trends we see

Anyways - the podcast has gotten pretty big. We do over 350k downloads/month.

People like listening to us shoot the shit, brainstorming ideas.

But as the nearest schmuck will tell you - ideas aren't shit without execution!

The problem is - execution is less sexy.

Usually when people talk about execution, it's in the past tense. We did X, and voila, we won.

They edit & cut out all the dead ends they hit, the stuff they tried that failed.

This gives people a f*cked up idea of what execution really is.

Still - there's demand for learning how to execute better.

The number one question I get in my DMs everyday is: "I love that idea from the pod, how would you approach it?"

There's no simple answer. So for months I just ignored them.

10 years ago, Netflix spent $0 on original content.

This year:

Netflix: $11B
Apple: $6B
Disney: $1B
+ amazon, hulu HBO etc.
=
$20B+

Here's a crazy startup idea to take a swing at this $20B+ content piñata. 👇 Here's a quick business plan 🤔

The idea ---> @ycombinator for Content

Let's give it a made up name : Zeta Studios

It is a new accelerator model for getting shows & movies made.

= give engineer duos money ($120k), coaching, & give them 3 months to get ready for a Demo Day in front of a room of investors.

Zeta = give storytelling duos money ($120k), coaching, & 3 mo to get a sizzle reel ready for Demo Day w/ buyers from netflix, amazon etc.

Why now? ---> This wouldn't work 10 years ago.

Demand for content has skyrocketed, but supply has not kept up.

You have infinite niches (action, comedy, reality, etc)

I mean there's a f*cking hit show about cleaning your house!

People are CHUGGING content of every flavor.

Plus areas like india, indonesia, africa etc. now have 2B+ new internet users streaming video

There's no such thing as "too much content"

The same way YC is replacing university for the most ambitious engineers. Let's replace film school for the best creatives.

The ancient struggle was not having enough.

The modern struggle is having too much.

Too much news, too much sugar, too much of everything at your fingertips..There's only 1 way out.

Let's lay it out:

On one side, you have "Team Dopamine":
* 24/7 news cycle, full of clickbait headlines
* Social Media, friend's pics that disappear in 24 hours
* Endless varieties of sugar & porn

going up against your tiny, 3 pound brain running 20,000 yr old software

Even if you are a smart person who tries their best to stay healthy & happy... you are going up against Fox News, TikTok, PornHub, Robinhood, Instagram

These are weapons of mental destruction.

Thousands of our smartest engineers & data scientists work at these companies.

They run constant experiments. Fighting against each other for every moment of your attention. So you open THEIR app.

It's skinner's box, rats pushing buttons for rewards. But you're the lab rat.

So what do we do?

We have everything. More than any species, at any time period in history. It's wonderful...but also deadly.

Food injected with syrup sugar
Painkillers you can't live without
Video games where you can fly and kill
Porn better than any date you'll ever have

If you're a college student who wants to pay off all your loans... here's an idea for you:

It takes ~$5k to start and will make ~$30k a year of profit

It won't get you rich, it'll pay for college.

(..and will teach them more about business than they’ll learn in school)

The idea isn’t sexy. But it works:

**Plastic Moving Bin Rentals**

Everyone knows moving sucks. The worst part is being stuck with 400 cardboard boxes at the end of your move.

Instead - @benmlevy told me about Gorilla Bins. They dropoff plastic moving bins, & pickem up later.

Let’s break it down. Our goal is to pay for college (~$30k profit per year).

To do that, I think we’ll need $50k in revenue.

The avg move (a 2 bedroom apartment) is $180

To hit our goal, we need do ~5.5 moves per week

COSTS?

How many bins do we need to buy up front?

5.5 moves a week x 50 bins = you need 275 bins. Let’s round up to 300 to be safe.

Ok let’s hop over to @uline to see how much these bins cost

Bingo. Bins cost about $15 a piece.

$15 x 300 bins = $4,500 initial startup costs.

Time to beg your parents or a rich aunt to lend you money to get the biz rolling (...or just take $5k of student loan money and invest it here…)

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.

Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.

Positioning in CSS allows you to display your element wherever you want on the screen

But when I was learning it, I found it little bit confusing😅

So in this thread I'll try to explain it in easiest manner with practical implementation. Let's start

THREAD🧵👇

There are 5 values that you can pass in position property

- static
- relative
- absolute
- fixed
- sticky

In this thread we will be focusing on relative and absolute positioning as both are widely used

Let's start with understanding what document flow is?

📌 Elements are displayed on the screen as they written in the HTML document

Consider the following piece of code:

H1, P, H3 and div are displayed on the screen in exact order as they written in the HTML file.

As now you know about document flow, let's start with Relative positioning

📌 Relative Position

- Relative positioning do not take an element out of document flow
- Relative positioning is relative to element's original position which can be changed using offset

🔹 Relative position is relative to itself.

For example: Consider the code and output in the attached image below

As you can see red box is shifted 100px from left because I applied left offset after giving it relative positioning

Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ

For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.

Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.