Novels, movies, even consulting, are based on a knock knock business model.
Tom Cruise made a movie, and you need to buy a ticket to see it. Jane Collins is an engineering professional and you need to pay to get their insight about how to fix your bridge. This 300-page autobiography is worth your time to read.
The publication or offering creates tension (there’s something here, you might want it) and the way to relieve the tension is for the person you’re reaching to buy access to it.
Huge swaths of our culture are based on this simple approach to intellectual property. The idea comes in a wrapper, the wrapper costs money, the money pays the bills.
Mass media was the way creators could spread the tension and announce their work. You’re waiting for “who’s there!”
It’s worth distinguishing these knock knock offerings from cultural organizations, communities, and tools. In these cases, you can tell the whole story, give away the entire idea, and the IP is worth more, not less.
When people around you are all talking about using the tools in Atomic Habits or This is Strategy, the book becomes a foundation for what happens next. If you’re open to signing up for the blog after you read the book, that’s a hint. That’s not true for The Power Broker.
Rocky Horror Picture Show isn’t like Mission: Impossible. At Rocky Horror, the ticket buys you a chance to see a movie you know by heart–with other people. Being in the club is where the real value is.
Music succeeds when it becomes an anthem. And anthems spread, are played on the radio and become part of our culture. So it doesn’t make sense to say, “I have a new song but you can’t hear it.”
Yes, you need to start with a great piece of music, but the real work is in creating community and ubiquity, Grateful Dead style, not to put your secret recipe behind the doors of a vault.
You can see where the tension for creators comes in.
If you create a knock knock situation, you have to alert people to what’s on offer, but not actually give them what’s on offer. You need ‘who’s there’. That means that your online posts and videos are about the thing, they aren’t the thing itself.
And the opportunity for tool builders and community organizers is to give away the punchline, often. To focus on abundance (of connection and utility and trust) not scarcity.
Many of the creators I’ve worked with over the years feel this tension and then fall into a gap. They have a fine knock knock on offer, but promotion is grating, endless and feels demeaning. Hustle isn’t the solution, not any longer. The best way for this sort of work to become popular is for people who have engaged with it to tell their friends (see the Blair Witch Project for an example). But “getting the word out” has never been more frustrating or difficult than it is now. The web is not TV.
We need this sort of thoughtful, long-form scholarship, but the business model for it is shaky indeed. The breakthroughs happen via peer-to-peer promotion, not hustle.
At the same time, it’s never been more productive to build tools and communities. And it helps to do it with intent.
March 14, 2025
The phone book was a groundbreaking innovation. For the first time, you could actually look up the person you were seeking to reach.
At about the same time, the department store arrived. You could actually have a shot at finding what you were hoping to buy.
TV Guide was, at one time, the most valuable magazine in the US, worth more than any TV network. Directories transform consumption.
Incrementally, slowly then all at once, we’ve multiplied the sorting and directory building of our world. We didn’t notice it happening, but we’ve sorted the people, the ideas, the media, the culture, healthcare, even which lake to go fishing on. Serendipity used to be normal, now it’s rare.
Why stumble when you can look it up?
It’s not simply the extraordinary efficiency of this sort that makes it important. It also represents a different expectation of how the world works.
There’s no place to go look up what to do with that insight, so we’ll have to figure it out as we go.
March 13, 2025
The more common, easier to execute sort: Instructions to remind people who already know what to do, what to do.
The more essential and harder to create kind: Instructions for people who don’t know what to do.
It’s a mistake to assume that just because you know all the steps, the person you’re writing for does as well.
[Almost all instructions on car dashboards, and most on the highway, are for people who already know how to drive and where they’re going… instructions that teach are a special category.]
Here are some steps to consider:
- Decide in advance what sort of instructions you’re creating.
- Put a value on getting it right. You probably don’t need to sweat the instructions that come with a yo-yo, but maybe improving the manual for that CNC router is the best way to grow your brand’s reputation.
- If it’s for a new user, make sure that someone like that is on the team, or even better, put that person in charge.
- Start with big picture concepts and an overview before getting to step 1.
- Earn enrollment in a patient journey and treat the learner with respect.
- When in doubt, take advantage of links, videos and other methods to give frustrated users a chance to dig deeper (it’s hard to do this with street signs and other real world interactions, but if you’re connected to the net, it’s always a good idea). Every interaction should have a, “what if the person is confused in this moment?” branch.
- Get feedback from users and update the instructions regularly. Shipped is not done. Shipped is the beginning.
- Consider asking Claude to review your instructions with a beginner’s mind and to restate what is being described. If it doesn’t translate, it’s probably not clear.
This is more challenging than it looks. That’s okay. That’s why we need you to do it.
March 12, 2025
No one knows the name of the maternity nurse who helped with the delivery of Marie Curie or Esperanza Spaulding. You might grow up to be a genius, but the team that helped your mom give birth don’t have to be geniuses–they simply have to be pretty good at their craft.
The same is becoming ever more true when it comes to the way tech is changing our lives.
The folks running these companies are not marketing geniuses. In fact, most of them aren’t even good at it. The same goes for their management style or strategic insight.
What’s required is someone who is committed enough to the possibility the tech offers to show up and persist, and then get out of the way.
Kevin Kelly helped us understand that tech is best understood as a new sort of species, one that symbiotically uses us to advance its goals.
We shouldn’t mistake the midwives for the end result.
March 11, 2025
Freelancers looking to build a career have two good options:
- Be so good at doing the work by hand that you’re a better alternative for a client than using AI. This is going to get more and more difficult.
- Be so good at having AI work for you that you’re the obvious choice when there’s work to be done.
The lousy options are to insist that you don’t use AI, but to be slower, more expensive and not as good as the AI option.
Or to do tasks that an AI assigns you.
Hiring an AI to work for you and getting very good at producing value feels like the future for most programmers, creators, business development folks and marketers.
March 10, 2025
You have a strategy. Perhaps you didn’t even choose it but you have one… and it’s not working.
The dominant question is, “what do I do now?”
Which tactic do we use? How do we get the word out? How do we close this sale, solve the problem and succeed?
Perhaps we should look to others that have succeeded and use their tactics.
The problem is simple. You don’t have a tactics problem. You have a strategy problem.
Borrowing tactics from someone with a useful strategy isn’t going to help because it’s their strategy that’s better, not their tactics.
And using tactics from someone who got lucky isn’t going to help either. Someone needs to get lucky, and it was them. It’s not their tactics that made it happen. Going to the same bank as Charlize Theron isn’t going to make you a movie star.
When in doubt, focus on your strategy. The tactics will follow.
March 9, 2025
While it’s tempting to compare suffering, inconvenience, unfairness or general no-goodness, it’s not helpful.
Someone else’s trauma doesn’t diminish yours. In fact, when we can find the space to see that others have their own mess to deal with, it opens the door for forward motion. The past happened, but all that’s available to us now is the choice of what to do about it.
And doing it together is more nurturing, resilient and effective.
This is difficult.
Care requires time and effort, and we can’t care about everything, all the way, all the time.
If you’re prepared to care about every element of your work, then you also have to decide to not care about something else. Because caring equally about everything means that someone else cares more than you do about something.
If a non-customer doesn’t like your product, perhaps it pays to not let that bother you.
If there are features in your service that don’t matter to your key customers, perhaps you can let them go.
Deciding to care also requires you do the hard work of not caring.
March 8, 2025
It’s one thing to say that 7,000,000 people will die next year from smoking cigarettes.
It’s a totally different thing to list those folks by name.
When we confront risk, two things make it seem less real: We’re not sure who, and we’re not sure when.
If you want to clarify our understanding, it helps to be specific.
March 7, 2025
The first impression is vitally important. It positions us, establishes the tone of our relationship and earns trust.
But we’re human, and it’s unlikely that every first impression will be as useful as we’d like. Fortunately, people can speak up and let us know, particularly if we make it easy for them to do so.
When a customer or partner lets us know that we made a lousy first impression, it’s time to lean in. You’re not going to get a third chance to make a second impression.
If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.
What an opportunity to make things right. If your team isn’t empowered to escalate support at the first hint of a problem, you’re letting them down.
March 6, 2025
