How Hard Did Steve Jobs Work? Compounding, Dog Covers, and more

Good afternoon from the concrete jungle –

I'm 4 coffees in and buzzing with ideas.

So I'm going to press send after this one instead of scheduling, please excuse the typos!

Newsletter goal: You get one "aha" moment to make more $$$ or have abetter life.

👆 If I don't accomplish this, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom.

Today's Outline:

• Compounding Relationships 📈

• Pet Seat Covers 🐶

• Creator Brand Incubator 💡

• Steve Job Stories & Why Day Traders Suck 📚

📚 1 Business Lessons:

Since you're reading a business newsletter, you're probably well versed in Compound Interest.

Albert Einstein famously said:

Compound Interest is simple. It's numbers.

But what I want to talk about today goes beyond numbers.

If your goal is to build wealth, you should be focusing on compounding your relationships. Especially if you're early in your career.

Here's Why (and how I think about it):

Cold calls & cold emails are notoriously difficult. Usually the worst part of business.

The person on the other end has never heard of you.

And they don't trust you. Like, at all.

Which... well, sucks.

Because instead of spending 90% of the conversation on what you actually want to talk about, you need to spend 90% of the time convincing that person that you're somebody worth listening to.

The legendary investor Charlie Munger even said during a USC Grad School speech:

Here's the reality:

For most people in business, life is a massive game of "cold emails".

Every single time you meet someone new, or need to convince them of something (hire you, buy from you, work for you) you need to first convince them that you're worth their time.

This is essentially playing the game on hard mode 24/7.

In my mind, the relationships we build are the best things in life. And the more you invest in them, the more they compound into your most powerful assets.

There are millions of ways to do this well in your personal life. But being a business newsletter, here are 3 ways you do compound your relationships into a world class network in only a few years.

1. Build your proof of work – Personal branding gets a bad rap. But when done right, is one of the most powerful tools in business today. It's the reason real estate investors can raise $40M+ in 40 minutes from 1 tweet. Because they've spent the last 5 years sharing deal highlights and investor returns. They built their proof of work.

2. Focus on 1:1 conversations – Getting 1,000+ likes on a post is nice, but the magic happens in the intimacy. For me, this was building a podcast. Some of the best connections I have in my life right now came from inviting interesting people to talk with me on a recorded Zoom call for 1 hour.

3. Give More – Make the introduction. Connect people who would benefit from knowing each other. Send resources that helped you. The more you can give with 0 expectations, the stronger your relationships become.

💰 2 Business Ideas

1. Milk Snob for Pets –

OK here's a mindblowing stat –In the U.S. 84 million households have a dog or cat

Whereas 35 million have children

So we're in agreement that Americans love pets more than people?

OK – check out this company I just found

Milksnobs – fitted infant car seat covers with designs.

Their website says "over 1M+ sold"... moms love this sh*t.

I think you can do the same for car covers for pets.

On a quick Google search, the options are incredibly boring.

3 ways to improve a product: Design, Functionality, Price.

I think this could be a big win in the design category.

And it meets the DTC checklist of:

• Huge TAM

• 75%+ Landed Margins

• AOV over $50

2. Creator Product Incubator

This idea goes out to anyone who is amazing at building products & sucks at marketing.

I got the inspiration from Sean Frank. He runs Ridge (they do $100M+ in ecom sales annually so he knows a thing or 2 about the space).

The Creator → Product playbook works incredibly well.

Logan Paul & KSI Launch Prime Hydration

Mr. Beast Launches Feastables

Kylie Jenner with Kylie Cosmetics

The point is, it works.

But 99% of creators don't have the product & logistic teams that these A-List content creators have.

But if you can design products, source them well, and handle the basic e-commerce playbook, you can work with the smaller influencers who have built in distribution to launch it properly.

A Canadian company, Juniper is doing this today and when I interviewed their founder back in 2021, they were on track to do $65M+ that year in revenue.

😎 3 Cool Internet Things:

1.  How Hard Did Steve Jobs Work? – This is an epic story in the responses

2. Day Traders Suck – One of the biggest lessons I've learned from investing: Active Traders always lose. 3 cool points from this article:

• After 5 years only 7% of Day Traders remain

• Active traders underperform by 6.5% annually on average

• 98.4% of all day traders lose money

3. On Happiness – 26 second read on making decisions to be happier

✌️

-Connor

PS – How would you grow this newsletter if you were me? I have $1,000 monthly to spend. Let me know what you'd do.