Fandom

I had two goals this year:

And thanks to Rally I’m on my way to achieving both.

Rally is a platform that allows investors to buy and sell equity shares in collectible assets… and we’re just a couple days away from their IPO of the world’s largest dinosaur skeleton.

Barosaurus skeletons are among the rarest in the fossil world, and there’s just 200,000 shares being offered.

Here’s how it works:

My updated portfolio: stocks, bonds, and dinosaurs.

This is not investment advice. For all disclosures, visit rallyrd.com/disclaimer.

I’m back in LA after spending the past week in New York.

It was nice to get out of the house. Being a founder of a remote company usually looks a whole lot like this…

Truth is, I probably spend more than 90% of my awake hours working alone in my room. Building this company definitely hasn’t been the most social experience of my life. That’s all to say, being back in New York was a great change of pace.

We had a great IRL work sesh on Tuesday, followed by a big team dinner with most of the New York based team in attendance.

Then on Wednesday I spoke at the AMO Summit, hosted by Jacob Donnelly. Several hundred of the most innovative media companies were in attendance discussing everything from business models to M&A. That last sentence reads like ChatGPT but was actually written by my dumb human brain.

I spoke on stage with the VP, Marketing at Recurrent about the evolving media landscape (and why newsletters are the shit). Recurrent is one of our newest enterprise users at beehiiv, and is home to brands like Futurism and Outdoor Life.

After the session, I hung around and chatted with a handful of beehiiv users who were there. Just as I was about to head out, some guy ran over to introduce himself.

He took off his backpack, set it on the floor, then pulled a piece of paper from a folder and handed it over to me. It was a beehiiv feature request to improve one of our API calls.

I caught myself dumbfounded and so incredibly fired up that I could have gone full Kool-Aid Man and busted through a brick wall (fun fact: he goes by Captain Kool-Aid in Canada).

I can’t believe that he took the time to physically print a feature request, track me down, and hand it to me in person. It was so novel and comical … not to mention a genuinely great suggestion.

By the way, we shipped that feature less than 24 hours later 😏.

After the summit, we headed to a party that we co-hosted alongside Breaker Media founder, Lachlan Cartwright. It was a bit of a full-circle moment.

Last November, we co-hosted a launch party for Oliver Darcy’s Status News. It was at that party where I met some gregarious Australian dude (Lachlan), who was interested in following in Oliver’s footsteps and going independent himself. A few weeks later Breaker Media was born.

The party, dubbed Bevvys & Burritos, had tons of beehiiv users in attendance and some of the who’s who of the media world (not mutually exclusive). The event even made its way to the New York Times and the NY Post.

Thursday and Friday were both marathon days with the team, working on some big projects that we’re announcing later this year 🤫.

I got out of New York on Saturday just in time to slice my foot open surfing Sunday morning. I debated dropping a pic of my stitches, but opted to keep my feet pics out of your inbox this morning.

Cons of living in NYC: can’t surf.
Pros of living in NYC: can’t hurt yourself surfing.

Anyway, the trip was crazy productive and I was able to witness the birth of the physical feature request. But what stood out the most to me was the legitimate fandom some people have for beehiiv. It was on full display in New York, and even fuller display a few weeks back at our event in LA.

We co-hosted an event with Google at their beautiful LA campus. I kicked off the event with a 45-minute presentation on building in public, and shared my playbook as to how I scaled this newsletter to 100K subscribers.

I had two major takeaways:

I spent the remainder of the day inundated with users (and soon to be users) who wanted to introduce themselves, chat about their newsletters, share what they were working on, etc.

These people were so passionate about beehiiv it blew my mind. They knew the product inside and out, could recite all of our recent announcements, and even knew some of the inside jokes that we would post online.

And while all of the conversations were great, there were three that really stuck with me.

One guy flew in from New Orleans just to attend the event. He has a newsletter focused on youth athletics and wanted to meet me and learn from the others in attendance.

This other lady woke up early and drove 5 hours from Las Vegas to attend. She’s a healthcare worker and YouTuber who had been meaning to launch a newsletter, and learned about the event a few days prior on LinkedIn.

A college student flew all the way from Edmonton (home of Captain Kool-Aid) to chat about his newsletter.

I’m no Steve Jobs or Sam Altman (yet), but the fact that these people would travel such distances just to meet and connect really shook me (in a good way). That’s why I always stick around and chat after I do any of these types of events.

Building a business is fun and all, but connecting with the people who are impacted by our work is by far the most fulfilling part of the journey. It’s also a secret weapon.

The closer I am to our users, the more I can understand and resonate with them. There’s a direct correlation to that and our product velocity (see above: API feature).

Anyway, that event was electric. Let’s see if we can recreate that magic again…

If you’re around for LA Tech Week, I’ll be doing a fireside chat with Molly O’Shea tomorrow in Santa Monica (you can RSVP here).

Molly has been absolutely crushing it with Sourcery (minus her choice of platform), and has become a good friend over the past year. After months of failing to get an interview on the books, it looks like we’ll finally get our chance to do it live in front of an awesome crowd of founders and builders.

I’m being told there are very limited spots left, so be sure to RSVP. And if you aren’t in LA, drop me a follow on Instagram where I’ll share some updates.

p.s. If you have any feature requests, I’m only accepting them on paper.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/fandom

Shoutout Jake for the reader submission (I believe his 3rd!!). Just sync up Starlink and we can take this office on the go.

Think you can generate a better office? Reply with your submissions 📨.

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

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It’s also trained on my voice, which means you can call it and have full conversations. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

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