Q&A April 2, 2023

Personal and professional

Sup nerds, you're reading Cyber Patterns. You’re joined by 5,280+ readers learning how to develop their Content Strategy.

In today’s piece, I’m switching things up a bit.

I’m gonna answer a few questions from friends and readers about me and my work. Hope you enjoy and get some valuable takeaways out of this.

I split it up into PROFESSIONAL and PERSONAL. I have a feeling the professional section will be better for those searching for actionable strategies and the personal section will be better for those looking for some good life stories and content recs. Enjoy.

PROFESSIONAL

If you started on Twitter again what would you do to get your first 1,000 followers?

I would do these 3 things and spend 2-3 hours/day on Twitter minimum.

  1. Set up profile focused on credibility (when you don’t have followers or a large portfolio of tweets, you lack credibility on Twitter). So I’d drop some school names or brand names I’ve worked with in the bio.

  2. I’d follow a bunch of people who seem cool and who have less than 1,000 followers. I’d read their work and send them DMs with a compliment about a tweet or blog post. Then I’d ask if they want to get on the phone or grab coffee. The goal here is to make friends and build out your Twitter network. I’ve slowly realized that biz/tech Twitter follows an extreme version of the Kevin Bacon rule. Everyone is only 1 or 2 mutual followers away from each other.

  3. I’d make a lot of thoughtful content multiple times per day around a somewhat wide niche and piggyback on top of bigger creators. When I had 1k followers, I wrote a lot of tweets about popular founders who’d often retweet them and get me followers. This strategy still works if you do it in an authentic, non-cringeworthy way.

At the end of the day though, if you make good content and build genuine friendships, you’ll grow online. As my buddy Jack Raines wrote, “Two underrated growth hacks are to 1) make friends online and 2) write bangers. Pretty much everything is a derivative of those, actually.”

Do you see any new patterns emerging in how to take advantage of the internet?

I just updated my 2022 article Digital Apprenticeships because I realized it wasn’t just me who was doing digital apprenticeships.

I apprenticed under Greg Isenberg, my friend Billy Oppenheimer apprentices under Ryan Holiday, Trung Phan and Steph Smith worked under Sam Parr, the list goes on. If you’re early in your career, find a master to learn from, not a boss to pay the bills. As the university system continues to decline, I think we’ll see more and more young people doing digital apprenticeships.

Speaking of Greg, he tweeted out a pattern in November that I’ve been seeing come to fruition in real-time.

I have a friend who basically followed this exact playbook. He blew up on TikTok, grew his newsletter, and just raised capital to build a product. All from TikToks! Remember monkey business can become big money business.

Speaking of monkey business, I believe another patterns is the rise of meme-brand-empires. We’ve already seen 7-figure meme empires like Litquidity, FuckJerry, and BoredElonMusk. In the attention economy, memelords are kings and queens. I’m currently writing a book called Memes Make Millions and become more bullish on meme marketing everyday.

How did you get your first content writing client?

I saw the marketing director at a DAO post they were looking for writers so I DMed her and sent her my blog. My blog barely had any readers, but the content was good enough to get an initial assignment.

From there, it’s just been that on repeat. DM, show portfolio, get hired, grow portfolio, repeat. The beautiful thing about being freelance is you can stack up brands and build your portfolio much faster than working 1 job at a time.

What should college kids do to take advantage of the internet and twitter?

I don’t think most people realize you can change your life with 1 cold message.

If there’s someone online you genuinely want to talk to, there’s no downside to sending them a message. When I was in college running a music magazine, I was exchanging messages with rappers and managers. Now working in startups, I message with founders and VCs. Everyone is 1 cold message away.

If I could go back to college, I’d tell myself 1 thing: start a podcast.

It’s the ultimate hack to talking to cool people. If you start a podcast — it doesn’t even matter if your only listeners are your friends — you can chat with super successful people. Maybe not Lebron or Bezos level, but there’s plenty of successful people who love good conversations and want more distribution: listens, views, whatever. If you can give them that, you’ll have a much higher Yes rate than asking to take their time to pick their brain.

They say “never meet your heroes” - do you agree?

This advice is so stupid. I think it’s just a cope for people too afraid to meet their heroes and find out. I live by the motto “try to work with your heroes”.

My old boss Greg Isenberg is one of my heroes. He’s legit the nicest dude and has taught me so much. If I was too scared of “meeting my heroes” then I would’ve never DMed him asking for a job.

Balaji Srinivasan is another big hero of mine. After I published a piece called I’m a Cyborg — and So Are You, he saw it on his timeline and DMed me the piece with a 🔥. He’s done this a few times now with my work. He’s always down to answer questions and is just a really friendly dude.

If your heroes are assholes, maybe you need to choose better heroes.

How are you leveraging AI?

I use ChatGPT for tweet ideas and DALL-E 2 for newsletter pics.

AI tools will replace the worst creators and make the best creators even better. Here’s what I tweeted about the subject a few days ago.

Tired: ChatGPT replaces writers

Wired: Good writers a) have an advantage on ChatGPT and b) will leverage this advantage to get rich

“Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead you’ll be able to write a request in plain English,” wrote Bill Gates.

Today’s OpenAI announcement included plug-ins for web browsing, code execution, booking trips, ordering groceries, and more. It won’t be long until you can open a Shopify shop with ChatGPT or run a YouTube channel with just your words. Whoever can write well and has a powerful imagination can succeed in the Age of AI.

Cheers to the Idea Guys.

me, 3/23/23

PERSONAL

Where is Cyber Patterns at in 1 year?

I went from 100 readers to 5,000+ in a year so I’m hoping to keep the momentum going. My goal for the next year is 25,000 readers.

In the long term, I want Cyber Patterns to be a brand you’d rep on a sweatshirt. So I’m gonna keep on creating content that I find cool, collabing with dope creators, and pray I’ll find some more internet nerds to party with.

Craziest pinch me moment in the last year? Personal and professional.

On the personal side of things, I proposed to my fiancée this year in the middle of Central Park. So it definitely felt like a movie. Another thing, I finally tried doing stand-up comedy and killed my first open mic. It was a crazy rush.

On the professional side, I hosted an event for 100+ tech people in NYC and people I’d never met were coming up to me and saying they read my work and have been following me on Twitter. That felt like a dream come true, ngl. Cheers to more Cyber Patterns events in the future.

If you had all the money in the world, what would your days look like?

Basically the same as they do now. Wake up and make cool shit with my friends. When I was still in corporate, I tweeted that my definition of wealth was “freedom to read, write, and drink coffee with friends all day.”

To some degree I’ve achieved that. I still have work to do, but I have the flexibility in my schedule that I film TikToks with friends and go on 2-hour walks in Central Park with my dog in the middle of a Tuesday. I’m really looking to the point where I can cut down on my client work and spend more time on Cyber Patterns, writing books, and collabing with friends.

Favorite essays?

  1. Why Nerds Are Unpopular. “The main reason why nerds are unpopular is because they have other things to think about”, writes Paul Graham. The founder of Y Combinator is around nerds all day everyday and is full of wisdom.

  2. How to Get Insanely Rich in the Creator Economy. Author Nat Eliason gives a no-bullshit approach to getting rich as a creator.

  3. The Sovereign Creator. I can’t wait until I’m a Sovereign Creator and can look back on this essay and be like damn ya boy did it.

  4. Be Slightly Evil. Author Venkatesh Rao writes about the art of being just a little bit evil in business. My favorite essay is about the power dynamics of opening doors for people. It’s rlly funny.

  5. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. The author Henrik Karlsson gives a wonderful explanation of how writing online can lead to making new interesting friends you’d never meet IRL.

Favorite thinkers / writers?

  • Jack Butcher: Jack’s ideas surrounding permissionless creation and internet art are always 1 step ahead of the curve.

  • Tim Ferriss: I appreciate Tim’s willingness to be human guinea pig and be so vulnerable about his struggles with depression.

  • Naval Ravikant: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant may have the highest value-per-page. He’s like a modern Marcus Aurelius.

  • Andy Warhol: “My favorite mood is money”. The dude is just full of banger quotes haha.

  • Ayn Rand: Reading Atlas Shrugged taught me more about myself than 3 years of therapy.

  • Balaji Srinivasan: Balaji may not always be right, but he usually is. Brilliant innovator with a mind like a beehive.

If you could be an expert in 3 subjects, which 3 would you choose?

  1. Programming: Before my writing took off, I worked as a data engineer at American Express to pay the bills. I would love to be able to build websites and apps, but I never got around to learning front-end engineering. Maybe with all the advances in ChatGPT, I’ll be able to do that kinda stuff without needing to code: who knows.

  2. Science: I wish I was good at science but my brain can’t memorize all the scientific terms. I’d love to understand how physics works, all the laws and stuff, but after smoking weed for 7 years, I really struggle with memory. That’s what was nice about coding — it’s expected that you need to google stuff, no memorization necessary.

  3. French: I love the French language and want to become a better speaker. Because my memorization skills suck, I think the only way I’d learn French is to immerse myself in the culture for a couple years. I’m going to Paris this summer and want to live there when I’m older, so we’ll see what happens.

If you were to be stranded on an island, what are 3 books you would take?

  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The book is all about radical acceptance. If I was stranded on an island forever, I know I’d have a hard time accepting my situation. That book would definitely be helpful.

  • Yes Man by Danny Wallace. Every time I read it, it gets funnier.

  • My notebook 😏

Alright, that’s all the questions! I’m skipping Creator’s Corner today to save you from information overload. Hope you enjoyed.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason Levin

P.S. Want to really upgrade your content strategy?

🥳 Looking for content strategy guides? Check out my shop.

📞 If you want 1:1 advice on your content strategy, book a call with me.

🤖 For monthly brand case studies and exclusive blogs, upgrade to premium.

Until next edition, see you on Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.