🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 043

Welcome back to Blueprint, a weekly series where I share an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look into my journey as a creator & entrepreneur.

It’s been 43 weeks (10.75 months) since I went full-time.

A reminder that the internet game is not zero-sum. Everyone reading this can win at an unlimited scale. I’m writing this for the internet astronauts building their own worlds. If that’s you…let’s ride 👩🏻‍🚀

WEEK 43 METRICS & PULSE CHECK

Week 43 Pulse Check:

I’m adding a quick weekly “pulse check” into the top section of Blueprint.

Here’s where we’re at at the end of week 43:

• After several months of stalling, growth has been reinvigorated. The biggest change was finally getting clarity on the “who” [who am I making stuff for] and not incessantly worrying about the “how” [how will I build a massive business for them]. The how will likely come in a way I’m not expecting

• My who is “creators/content makers” that are aiming to become entrepreneurs and build enduring businesses (not necessarily to get famous). This is exactly who I am and the niche I can relate to most. Picking this as my niche will best leverage my 1/1 skills and ideas. It also completely removes any remaining imposter syndrome and the barrier between what I know is valuable for me and what might be valuable for others

• My only goal for the foreseeable future is to build a cult of these people by providing as much value as possible

• Before I make any piece of content, I now ask myself, “How will this directly add value to my core audience?” If the answer isn’t clear, I won’t make it

• I feel great about where everything is. As expected, clarity was what I need to start swinging the bat freely. Without clarity, I was a puddle of indecision. With clarity, I believe winning is inevitable

Blueprint Video:

I released my first proper attempt at a video version of Blueprint…I’m super proud of how it turned out (s/o to Charlie, my video editor)

I think a visual companion to these newsletters would be amazing if we can find a way to produce them consistently.

If you’re a big fan of Blueprint and haven’t had a chance to check out this video pilot, give it a watch and let me know what you think: Blueprint Episode 40 (video)

Btw, YouTube is becoming a huge priority for me over the next 12 months. Would mean the world if you could check out my latest videos and share any feedback on how I can improve.

CREATOR DROP KITS

Creator drop kits

Here’s an idea for brands that would supercharge their free earned media from creators.

I think this will be a common trend in 3-5 years.

Last Monday, OpenAI had a huge product release.

1M+ people watched live, including all of my tech creator friends that planned on covering the new products.

The event was livestreamed on YouTube.

As soon as the stream was over, hundreds of creators sprinted to make content about the announcement (GPT-4o).

And this process (live demo → creator content storm) is typically how product releases go for any cult brand.

As I was sitting at my desk trying to make a vertical summary video out of the horizontal long-form base footage, I realized something…

What a terrible experience for the creator!

My only source of b-roll was from the YouTube livestream itself.

I had to rip the video from YouTube, find compelling clips, resize them, change the audio timing, etc.

I made it work, of course, but not without sizable friction.

For most of my paid brand deals, I’ll be given a robust google drive or dropbox folder with vertical video shots, product demos, high fidelity wireframes, etc.

And then I realized…

Why doesn’t every company do this intentionally for all creators?

As a company, the dream scenario is to have hundreds of creators with millions of followers chomping at the bit to make free content about your products.

If you want to help increase the quality of their videos and better seed the creator echo, why not take the first step and give them a “drop folder” full of great assets to work with?

Influencer marketing is typically called seeding, where brands send product to influencers hoping they’ll make free content for them.

The creator drop kit is influencer seeding on steroids because it’s available instantly, digitally, to any creator that wants it.

Here’s an example of why this could be powerful…

The OpenAI demo only featured a couple interesting examples of the model in action (e.g., helping with math, coding, live translating English <> Italian, etc.)

This became the limited set that creators could use for their content.

It meant that “the wave of content” was fairly undifferentiated and minimized the effect of the long-tail.

Smaller creators repurposing the same demo snippets as larger creators would likely be suppressed.

Instead, if OpenAI had made a drop kit, they could have included dozens of different demo examples.

This would have varied the creator content that would have been made, increasing the relevance of the long-tail.

The “curated folder of assets” should be a strategy deployed by any company that has journalists and creators eagerly trying to cover their releases.

It’s the evolution of the press kit.

I first had this idea planted when I saw Ronnie Fieg, Founder of Kith, do something similar for a few of his drops last year.

When they were prepping their Wilson release, he tweeted out a full Dropbox of product images the day before the collection came out.

This let fans look through all the pieces and decide what they wanted to buy ahead of time.

Ronnie was onto something, but his implementation was just as a lookbook, not as marketing fuel.

Brand should be allocating resources to develop creator drop kits…this would supercharge organic content at launch.

GPT-4o

GPT-4o

As I mentioned above, last week OpenAI released their latest AI model, GPT-4o.

I’m not going to dive too deep into it here because it’s still in the early phases of rolling out.

That being said, this was the first moment I realized AI is going to completely change how education works.

If you didn’t see my video about it, you can quickly watch it here to better understand what I mean.

The big innovation of GPT-4o was combining vision, text, and voice with unified reasoning.

This means you can point your camera at something and have a no lag conversation with ChatGPT about what it is, how to understand it, how to build it, how to solve it, etc.

And the voice has gotten scary impressive.

For example, if a student was struggling with a math problem, he/she could share their screen with ChatGPT and get instant tutoring on how to understand the problem.

This tutor is free, always calm, knows everything about everything, and has unlimited patience.

Imagine every student having access to this?!

With respect to what this means for teachers, universities, tutors, or educational curriculum in general, I think it’s all up in the air.

We’ll obviously still need some version of school to help students build interpersonal skills, problem solve in teams, and learn how to interact with others…but when it comes to the actual learning, this feels like we are opening Pandora’s box.

I’ve experimented with ChatGPT asking it to “build me a module based lesson plan to teach me how to code starting with the base fundamentals and expanding from there” and it did it easily.

For me, as someone that’s looking to make content, build efficient workflows, and launch businesses, I’m super excited to experiment with the vision + voice in a development capacity.

In theory, I could share my screen with ChatGPT and say something like, “Hey, watch me do this process and then let’s build a tool that can automate as much as possible” and it will just….do it.

I could also say, “Hey, look at this existing website and all functionality. I want you to write the code to build the exact same site, but also add these 3 features which I’ve hand sketched over here” and it will just…do it.

We are going to be entering crazy town very soon.

I referenced in an IG story this week that I think we will see a whole new category of content emerge from this…developer buildalongs.

It will be product builders livestreaming themselves conversing with the voice AI to build products in real-time.

They’ll have their screen shared and a camera on them as they talk to their AI assistant, JARVIS style.

I predict this will be a huge category.

There’s a ton more to cover on this, but we’ll leave it here for now.

One quick question for you on the AI stuff…

Blueprint is not designed to be an AI newsletter, because frankly, my interests are too broad to want to specialize only in AI.

However, I tend to like being the first to play with this stuff and figure out how to actually use it in my daily workflow.

A quick poll…

ZUCK’S NEW CONTENT STRATEGY

Zuck’s new content strategy is what every founder should be doing

If you’ve been following tech social media, you’ll have noticed an interesting trend with Mark Zuckerberg’s content…

Like where he reviews the Apple Vision Pro vs Quest 3 on his couch, makes an album cover with a sloth, or does a green screen video about Meta’s new VR operating system.

His approach, his format, his shot selections, his vocal tone…they’re all intentionally crafted to come off extremely approachable and appeal to the mass market.

And he’s crushing it.

In addition to his own content, he has made it a priority to appear as a guest on podcasts as well.

He’s sat for conversations with Morning Brew’s team, Roberto Nickson, Dwarkesh Patel, and more.

The question is…why is he doing this?

Meta is a $1.2T market cap company and Zuck is worth $160B…why is he spending time doing interviews on YouTube channels that have 140K subscribers?

Because he understands culture…and realizes that creators control the new media.

If you want your products to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist, you need to share your long-form perspective via podcasts and other internet-native programming.

The mainstream media is dead. White-haired content is dead. Stodgy, lame, bought-and-paid for media is dead.

The new stewards of attention are creators and Zuck is laying the groundwork to build social capital in new media.

This is a similar playbook that we saw from Elon. He was real when all others were media trained.

In 3-5 years, you’re going to see all major companies try to break into these new age content channels because this is where all the attention (and buyers) spend their time.

The takeaways…don’t fade Zuck & creators are underpriced.

WEEK 43 CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. 🤖 | OpenAI just released GPT-4o: Watch

2. 🎰 | The GameStop saga is happening again: Watch

3. ✉️ | Google Workspace dropped new AI features: Watch

4. 🥤 | How Stanley designed their cups to go viral (+6B views): Watch

5. 🗺️ | Journey to $1M/year as a solo creator (week 40): Watch

6. 🤦🏻‍♂️ | I made a big mistake as a creator: Read

7. 🧐 | Biggest content observations after 300 videos: Read

8. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint 042 - Content trends, creators are the new celebrities, platform slants, Ryan Reynolds, 4 quick creator mindset checks: Read