Literally doing things

Shortly after launching, Brex sent 300 bottles of Veuve Clicquot to sales prospects and converted 169 new customers (I'm not kidding). Surprise surprise, it was their best outbound campaign ever.

Let Confetti do this for you, they automatically send personalized gifts to your top prospects that generate 10x more meetings. Give them a list of names and they'll have personalized gifts in their mailboxes FROM YOU in a week.

I guarantee you another AI-generated cold email isn’t going to get you that deal. Confetti will.

And because I’m so confident it works — get $500 off when you tell them you came from BDE.

A few Sundays ago I woke up to Trump’s meme coin having a market cap of nearly $10B and an entire Twitter feed of people who seemingly never have to work again.

That tweet would have gotten a lot more engagement if it wasn’t 8am on a Sunday.

I personally know people who made hundreds of thousands of dollars tossing money into $TRUMP Friday night when it first launched. Thanks for the heads up!

This was the same Sunday that TikTok (temporarily) shut down in the U.S. and dopamine junkies (i.e. most Americans) fled to RedNote to get their fix.

I’m not personally endorsing drug use, but an excellent tweet nonetheless.

Meanwhile…

$MELANIA coin dropped and surpassed the value of Strava, Justworks, and SeatGeek… in less than 24 hours. Instagram influencers pivoted from F1 to Washington DC for the inauguration. There was a cease fire in the middle east. And Nikita’s Explode app went viral for 3 hours before everyone forgot about it.

Maybe it’s because I spent most of January sleep deprived leading up to the launch of our new website builder (it’s dope) … but I feel as if the news and hype cycle has gone from out of control to full Kanye. And that was before DeepSeek deep fucked the entire AI industrial complex and wiped out over $1T of market cap in the U.S.

It feels like everything is happening all at once and accelerating.

Speaking of acceleration (seamless transition) Boom cleared Mach 1 and achieved supersonic flight the other week, OpenAI launched their new model, o3-mini, and even new podcasts are launching and finding some overnight success.

Jordi Hays and John Coogan launched a podcast, Technology Brothers, that has found a ton of early traction. They even dropped a viral concept for a new show called PFM or Die where, well, I’ll just let Jordi explain it:

It’s intoxicating to watch people launch and build things at the pace it’s being done of late.

Somewhere some solo founder just hit $1K MRR and tweeted “you can literally just do things.”

And while anyone who lacks the self awareness to tweet that probably hasn’t gotten laid in quite some time, it’s true — people are just doing things, seemingly what feels like now more than ever.

If you feel like this post is a little all over the place, you’re probably not alone.

Replit founder, Amjad Masad, joined My First Million the other week and shared some anecdotes of what he’s seeing on the platform. As a tl;dr – unprecedented growth and scale from companies that are being built at unprecedented rates.

It makes sense; Replit allows people to build prototypes in hours, not months. It’s the classic “lowering the barriers to entry” that you read about in some Harvard Business Review in college. Except nowadays the barriers are so low you don’t need the engineers or the money to have a seat at the Silicon Valley slot machine.

Historically, you would need to convince a couple of engineers to work with you, spend months building a prototype, and refine the customer experience all before ever onboarding your very first customer. Today, you could probably pop a 10mg addy in the morning and get your first taste of MRR before going to sleep that night.

I have a handful of friends (humble brag) who have leveraged AI to build some niche app and have scaled these side projects to tens of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue.

But it’s not just a handful of side projects that are generating some extra beer money. Some of these companies have crossed the chasm to massively scaled businesses in record time.

That is both remarkably awesome and one of the most frustrating things I’ve come across lately. I’ve spent the past 3 years of my life battling insurmountable amounts of stress, hiring a team of now 80, and building relentlessly to achieve near $20M ARR.

Bolt (allegedly) accomplished that in 2 months.

I am so dialed in on beehiiv and yet I can’t even help but look at that (and the hundreds of other high flying startups) and not wonder — the fuck is going on?

There’s opportunity everywhere. beehiiv is on pace to do over $35M in revenue this year and even I can’t help but be this meme sometimes:

Is $35M in our fourth year of business even impressive anymore? I feel like Bolt might do that in their fourth month.

Somewhere on the internet Sahil Bloom is probably tweeting an inspirational poem about not comparing yourself (or company) to others.

Whether or not that’s the takeaway — I do think there’s a premium for focus. When I look back at the success we’ve experienced at beehiiv, I actually think our ability to remain focused and (mostly) ignore the shiny new thing has worked well for us.

At the company level — we’re approached multiple times per day to explore partnerships, integrations, and campaigns. We say no to almost all of them. We’re laser focused on executing our roadmap and prioritizing what our users are asking for; no glitzy partnerships needed.

At the personal level — the only thing aside from beehiiv that consumes any meaningful amount of my time is the few hours each weekend I labor to write this very newsletter. I still haven’t even finished season 4 of Succession. I watched Logan Roy die eight months ago in what was one of the better television scenes I can remember, and I haven’t found the time to see what happens next.

The older the company, the easier it is to focus (at least in my opinion). There is too much inertia moving in a particular direction, traction, progress, workflows to hard pivot. But early-stage founders are vulnerable. You may have a winning strategy or product, but because of the hype and numbers elsewhere (see above: Bolt) you may be tempted to unnecessarily shift priorities.

Focus is a competitive advantage.

In a world of seemingly boundless opportunities and low barriers to entry, I think the founders and companies who can double down on choosing the right signal, vs every signal, will emerge on top.

Or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself because I was too busy working and didn’t transfer my life savings into $TRUMP and retire.

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Sometimes I look at (AI-generated) pictures like this and think — life could be so simple. A morning walk along the beach, a few hours of work while looking out at the waves, and a sunset surf.

Instead, I am working overtime and generating my own AI images 😭. Help a brotha out and reply back with your dream office.

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…

• Marc Rowan, co-founder of Apollo Group, shares his plan to reshape the U.S. economy and fix the federal budget (DealBook)

• Related — David Friedberg sat down with Ray Dalio to discuss the potential U.S. debt spiral, portfolio construction, and more (All-In)

• I’m happy that Luka is in LA, but still don’t understand the trade. Here’s an interesting theory that’s gaining momentum (Twitter)

• All the weird, terrifying, and incredible ways drones will change the world (Pirate Wires)

• Huge fan of creative marketing campaigns 👇️ 

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽

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