Building/investing in private. Former cofounder Leadpages & Nomics. Author: The Interactive Offer. Join my newsletter via link in bio. Classical liberal.
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Joined April 2008
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No self-respecting marketer is without an email list.
Somehow I went about a decade without a personal one.
That's fixed. I'm writing again, and the announcements list is where things land first.
Join me if you're so inclined: claycollins.io
Clay Collins retweeted
If there's ever a #hex movie, dear god please cast Zach Galifianakis as Richard Heart.
We assume anything that gets smart enough will eventually become conscious.
Maybe not.
A chicken is nowhere near as intelligent as Claude Fable. A chicken is conscious.
Maybe consciousness has nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe it requires a body, a birth, and the possibility of death.
We’ve been correlating two things that might not be related at all.
In an enormous number of categories, paying 15 to 20% more gets you a product that’s 2 to 3x better. The price curve and the quality curve are not the same shape.
Steak. USDA Choice runs 15 to 25% more than Select. Choice has roughly twice the marbling. Select often has none you can see.
Olive oil. UC Davis tested the top-selling imported “extra virgin” oils in US supermarkets. 69% failed the international standard for extra virgin. Rancid, stale, or cut with refined oil. The real thing on the next shelf costs a few dollars more a bottle.
Tires. Consumer Reports found that among new tires in the same category, wet braking distance differs by almost 50 feet between the best and worst models. Three car lengths. The good tire costs about 20% more.
The cheap version isn’t 20% worse. It’s much, much worse. You save a little and give up most of the quality.
Pay the last 20% if you can afford it (and I realize not everyone can).
Clay Collins retweeted
Thinking about the time a group of men brought a woman caught in adultery to Jesus and demanded her public execution and Jesus didn't go for it.
Someone needs to teach Jesus how to be a good "conservative" Christian.
If anyone wants to try this: testflight.apple.com/join/HG…
There's a moment right before an outcome is sealed where most people lose themselves. I call it the psychology of finality.
Every skill has two versions: the one the calm version of you produces, and the one you can access when it really counts. Finality is the gap between them.
The overhead tennis smash at match point. The piano recital after a month of perfect run-throughs at home. Naming your price in a negotiation and having to sit in the silence.
Most people flail.
The smash goes into the net. The hands shake and the wrong note rings out. The silence gets filled with a discount.
Nothing changed about their ability. Only the finality changed.
Smart people get stupid. Calm people get frantic. Prepared people forget everything they prepared.
The most successful people I know are the most grounded when things are about to become final.
Everything is hitting a crescendo, and they hit the routine shot.
There's no shortcut. No book, no mindset, no breathing technique.
You get grounded in final moments by having been in a lot of final moments.
That's the whole secret.
Clay Collins retweeted
You built an agent to help with your own work.
Now someone in your community asks, "Can we use it too?"
Your side project could use a name.
Meet .c
headlessdomains.com/blog/c-d…
Clay Collins retweeted
Bought a Handshake name at @Namecheap and can’t renew or manage it?
For .c .1 .zen .yolo .ez .use .coffees .giveaways, Namebase can’t process those claims.
The route is HeadlessDomains.com/recover - submit the exact name + purchase evidence for manual review. Submission ≠ approval or activation.
headlessdomains.com/blog/nam…
The most dangerous confusion in politics: thinking the state is the people.
Millions of voters make this mistake. Power moves to the state and they celebrate like it moved to them.
They hear "the government is taking the power back" and think it means they are.
It doesn't. The state winning power and you winning power are not the same thing.
They're usually opposites.
For years I didn't distinguish between loving to build software and loving to build software for other people.
Turns out they're further apart than I thought.
I've been vibe coding a product for six months. The codebase is mature. The product is good. And at every fork in the road, I've had to choose: build it for me, or build it so it could serve thousands.
Every single time, I chose me.
I'm proud of what I built. But the distance between what I have and a shippable product, with support, docs, onboarding, and marketing, is enormous.
We've been taught to trust our own taste. Build what you love and the customers will follow.
I don't believe that anymore.
Building what you love is a hobby. Building what they love is a business.
It's naive to confuse the two.
Hear me out. The value of human labor is trending toward zero.
Some of the most talented people I've ever worked with can't find jobs right now.
And the people who don't see what's coming are responding the exact wrong way. More degrees. More certificates. More skills. The belief that if they make themselves more valuable to an employer, they'll be safe.
This is not the way.
The world is dividing into two classes: the labor class and the asset class.
The only way out is owning assets.
Scrimp. Save. Convert every dollar you can into things that can't be inflated away. Gold. Land. Bitcoin. To a lesser extent, stocks.
Investing in the value of your own labor is a great way to go broke slowly.
If you do invest in your skills, do it for exactly one reason: to convert that labor into assets as fast as humanly possible.
Labor is the on-ramp. Assets are the only way out.
I can see a path where social mobility survives, with different engines.
For a century the escalator was skilled labor, credentials, and expertise. Get the degree, join the professional class, rise. AI is dismantling that escalator, and I'll grant you that's a real loss for the people who were mid-ride.
But it doesn't follow that mobility ends. It follows that the attributes that produce mobility change.
The new engines are insatiable curiosity and high agency. People who can't stop asking questions and can't stop acting on the answers will rise, and they'll rise faster than the credentialed ever did, because the tools now amplify exactly those two traits and almost nothing else.
That's still a game biological humans can win. The winners are just different people than the last hundred years trained us to expect.
Pure incumbency assumes the incumbents know what to do with the machines. Most of them don't.
Without fail, the people most obsessed with moral judgment have been the most immoral, most judgmental, and least empathetic people I know.
The kind of people most likely to celebrate the literal death of a moral foe.
The most drunk on their own radicalization.
Clay Collins retweeted
Honestly, it's trench warfare. Worth obsessing over, worth trying anything and everything. But if I had to pick three:
1.) Find the format you can produce effortlessly. When I started blogging about marketing, I wanted to make content as easily as Gary Vaynerchuk did. He had a wine store outside his office, he'd pull three bottles off the shelf, and he'd review them on camera, off the cuff, no prep. The secret to a big audience is a format that costs you almost nothing to produce, because volume is the whole game and volume dies on effort.
2.) Give something away with every piece. I used to write long thought pieces on marketing. People didn't want them. What they wanted was me critiquing a landing page and then handing them the template. So every post came with a free landing page template. That one move produced most of my opt-ins, and it turned out to be the entire basis for Leadpages.
3.) Keep going until you find your formula. It took me forever. There's no one-size-fits-all answer and nobody can hand you yours. But once you crack it, results stop being linear and go exponential.
It's trench warfare right up until it isn't.
So many of the marketing problems I've faced building companies got solved automatically, as a byproduct of building a bigger audience.
In my experience there is no growth marketing or go-to-market challenge that doesn't get solved on the way to a larger audience.
This sounds like oversimplification. It's not.
Learn to build a large, passionate audience online and the rest of your business falls into your lap.
Because you cannot build a huge audience without learning what they want to buy and earning the trust that makes them buy it from you. The skills are the same skills.
Business sounds complicated. It's this simple.
"If you build it, they will come" is a lie for products. It's the literal truth for audiences.
Audience first. Then product.
Never the other way around.