Think Week #39
The last moat standing, Think Tank, Claude 4
Community is the metric that truly matters
Followers and newsletter subscribers alone won’t be good enough.
Show me your subscriber count and I’ll ask for your engagement rate.
Community will be one of the last moats standing in the creator economy.
A strong community provides organic distribution, rapid feedback loops, and built-in product-market fit validation. They act as both early adopters and evangelists, spreading the word through genuine enthusiasm instead of paid advertising.
The key is fostering authentic connections between members.
This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where value flows naturally between creators, community members, and the broader market.
The future belongs to creators who understand this dynamic.
Good Reads for essays meets Hacker News for writers
I built a thing this past week with some motivation from a new friend.
Just getting started, but hope you enjoy.
Let me know what’s missing.
It's ridiculously early but both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 inside Cursor make far fewer mistakes than their predecessors, and I find myself yelling at them less often.
I'm in love.
Every raises $2M and lands in the NYT
Either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
—Benjamin Franklin
Why not both?
Every was founded by Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez back in 2020.
It started as The Everything Bundle, a collection of newsletters on Substack.
Key milestones over the past five years:
Published 1,500 essays
Reached nearly 4,000 paid subscribers.
Hit $60,000 in MRR and over $3 million in total revenue.
Incubated three software products.
Launched courses on writing, programming, and psychology.
Built a full-time team of seven.
Every raised a pre-seed round from Eric Stromberg but they’ve been primarily self-funded. Until now.
Fin.
You can do 10x more now with AI!
When we save time, we create a vacuum.
The challenge is deciding what to fill it with.
Leverage only matters if you have clarity.
— Daniel