Form a Coalition

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I can also be found writing about internet growth strategies on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Today's Cyber Patterns is brought to you by Makers Mark.

No, not the rum. Makers Mark is a Twitter hypergrowth course led by Aadit Sheth and Brandon Zhang. I took the course last October and grew to 11,000+ followers over the next 7 months. Aadit and Brandon give you the tricks to writing viral threads, how to repurpose content, and how to organize a content dashboard.

Every Morning Brew writer has a ☕️ next to their name on Twitter. Every Workweek employee has a yellow background. Every a16z member has @a16z in their bio. These are what I like to call social media coalitions — specifically co-worker coalitions.

These are more than just brand guidelines. The coffee cup is a badge of honor to be worn on your profile page. The @a16z in your bio is tech Twitter's Medal of Honor. Being part of a co-worker coalitions is an immediate status signal symbolizing that you are part of an exclusive, permissioned group. You are the chosen ones.

More importantly, because each co-worker coalition member's status depends on the status of the overarching brand, co-worker coalition members help each other grow online. Co-worker coalition members retweet and comment on each other's posts like they're paid for it — because they are.

Let's take Morning Brew for example. The company is up to 300+ employees. Cofounders Austin Lieberman and Austin Rief have grown their accounts to 225k+ and 125k+ followers respectively. Because of the company size and the aforementioned incentive alignment, the following 2 things happen:

• Lieberman and Rief have an army of coffee-cup-flashing blue-checked employees to retweet and amplify their content.

• Lieberman and Rief can retweet and amplify all of their coffee-cup-flashing blue-checked employees' content.

#1 seems like the only good reason to start a company nowadays. #2 seems like the only good reason to join a company with a co-worker coalition. How can joining one of these companies help you grow?

Toby Howell leveraged his Morning Brew status to grow his account to 30,000+ and then get a job at Launch House. Dan Toomey leveraged his TikTok work at Morning Brew into being a full-time creator and comedian. Neither of these things would have happened if they didn't have the big dogs Alex and Austin sharing their shit.

Joining a company that has a social media co-worker coalition is a cheat code into building an audience. So how do you join one of these coalitions?

Fuck if I know. I got rejected from Morning Brew. I haven't even bothered applying to a16z. There was sorta a coalition at The Defiant, but Bankless and The Block did it 100x better.

Fortunately, I have good news folks. You can do just fine without a co-worker coalition.  You don't need a co-worker coalition to be in a coalition. That's because there are 2+ other types of coalitions online: course coalitions and friend coalitions.

Course Coalitions

My first experience with a coalition was actually Aadit and Brandon's Makers Mark course. I spent 3 weeks learning 2x/week with classmates, often chatting in breakout rooms or online. I got more out of cohort-based courses like this than any college class.

As we were practicing writing on Twitter, we'd share our work in a special channel on the Discord. If a post was interesting and aligned with my core audience, I'd check it out and give it a comment or retweet.

What ended up happening was a few of us have built a very informal coalition of Makers Mark alumni who help each other out. Rather than paying $50,000+ for an MFA, we paid $950 to meet the biggest up-and-coming writers on Twitter.

I met people like Bernie, a web3 writer with 30,000+ followers who frequently retweets my work, and Dave Kline, a management consultant with 70,0000+ followers who was instrumental in my early Twitter growth. Plus I made friends like Brett Dashevsky, who I had coffee with 2 weeks ago and saw Morpheus from The Matrix.

There are tons of cohort-based courses and examples of students going off and building things of their own. I was part of a DAO that was founded by Zak Fleischmann and Jonathan Hillis, two former students of David Perell's Write of Passage. I know Sahil Bloom's audience building course has created an incredible alumni network as well.

But, not everyone can afford a course. That's ok. There's a free way to form a coalition.

Friend Coalitions

Go make some friends on the internet!

I've written frequently about the joy of decentralized friendships. One of the byproducts of making genuine friendships via Twitter is that these friends will end up being some of your biggest supporters — often more than Iongtime school friends.

Don't make internet friends, make friends through the internet.

When you build a network of genuine friendships on Twitter, you build your own coalition. When I tweeted that I was going full-time freelance, I received 43 comments and 16 retweets. Because my friends helped amplify this tweet, I've signed on multiple content writing clients.

I don't need a co-worker coalition. I get by with a little help from my friends.