Freedom Starts With Building On The Internet
If you want freedom, it’s time to start building online. Whatever skill you have, whatever business you’re in, writing & creating online is a cheat code (kinda like Super Mario Bros 3’s magic whistle - if you know you know) that will open you up to so many opportunities, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner.
It took me years to get this through by stubborn skull. I was seduced by the ideas of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger - ideas about investing, business moats, and mental models. In other words - OLD (but timeless) ideas.
But, then I found Naval Ravikant. And I learned about the NEW ideas of wealth creation. Ideas about how to leverage the internet’s greatest power - zero marginal cost of replication - to forge a path outside the corporate drudgery.
And if you want freedom, that’s where you should start. Here’s why:
The Internet Has A Low Barrier To Entry.
It’s like a nightclub where everyone gets in (even if you have no girls with you).
If you want to invest in asset classes like real estate, stocks / bonds, start ups, or physical businesses, you need real money. You can’t even touch start ups without being an “accredited investor.” That’s a net worth over $1 million - not including your house - or income over $200,000 individually / $300,000 household.
This isn’t true for building online. This website, my newsletter list, my Twitter following - it all started with a very small initial investment. This is how much I spend per year on everything Wealest related:
Google Mail Service: $6.00 / month = $72 / year
Squarespace Website: $253 / year
Newsletter Marketing: $288 / year
Total Expenses: $613 / year
That’s roughly $50/month to reach hundreds of thousands of people. It’s possible to spend so little and reach so many because of another special attribute of the internet…
The Internet Lets you Copy Your Work For Free To Everyone Online.
Back when newspapers were a thing, for every new “subscriber” you got, you had to print and deliver another newspaper. Your costs went up as your business grew (even if you hired the cheapest possible labor: a 10-year-old kid with a bad haircut riding a beat-up bicycle with a baseball card stuffed in the spoke).
This isn’t true online. The power of code and media is that it’s scalable - it’s free to duplicate over and over at no additional cost. You write / create / publish it once, and can ship it to anyone with an internet connection. You’re no longer limited by physical copies or physical location.
Hell, you’re not even limited by language barriers with powerful A.I. models coming online that will translate text automatically, like this: तुम तो भाषा की बाधाओं से भी सीमित नहीं हो, जो शक्तिशाली ए.आई. मॉडल ऑनलाइन आ रहे हैं जो स्वत: पाठ का अनुवाद करेंगे।. (If you speak Hindi - hit me up and let me know how close this is. I used ChatGPT + Google translate…)
This scalability is why software / digital products / digital subscriptions are such attractive business models. You code it / write it once, and ship it to anyone who wants it. And as your business scales, your costs stay almost the same.
The Internet Lets You Compound Your Efforts.
Your first 100 readers / subscribers / customers are the hardest to get. You’re going from nothing to something. And you have to generate a lot of content to get people interested. It takes energy and consistency.
But once you start getting traction, social proof kicks in. People start following you because other people are following you. People start seeing your work because other people are sharing it. People start landing on your website because other people are linking to it. Your growth rate accelerates. The bigger your following, the faster it grows (similar to how the richer you are, the easier it is to make money).
The key here is to stay in the game long enough to let compounding work for you. Consistency and patience are the two great differentiators. If you are consistent and let compounding make small things big, you can’t lose.
The Internet Lets you Test Ideas Quickly.
Every time I send out a newsletter, I get feedback. Stats like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribes, and notes from people telling me how I have an uncanny resemblance to Jude Law (those never get old… though he is starting to lose his hair… is that what you’re trying to tell me?!) show me how my content is doing.
Here are the stats from my last newsletter, Become a Rational Flâneur:
The 37% open rate is in my average range. But that click-through rate is low at 6%. I usually do about 9%. That tells me that I had a decent subject line, but the content itself wasn’t exactly right for my audience. I can use that information to get better.
I get feedback in other places too. Twitter gives you almost-instant feedback on how your content is doing. Recently, I tried something new after reading a post about changes to the Twitter algorithm. Twitter is now rewarding “long-form tweets that share an authentic and real/raw story with a video showing something relevant to that story.”
So I tried it with a post about a trip I just made for my Grandma’s 90th birthday. And guess what? It worked.
It did 3500+ impressions. That’s about 20x what my average post does. So it worked. And I plan to do it again.
You can do this for simple landing pages too. The first time I tried to create my “Become A Content Curator” product, I built a landing page and then collected emails. I collected 30 emails in the first week. That’s proof there’s something to the product idea (and one of the reasons I turned it into an e-book… launching soon!).
This kind of feedback is really powerful. It lets you iterate, test ideas, and double down on the methods that work at very little personal cost. And as Naval Ravikant says about success: “It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations.”
The Internet Lets you Prove To Yourself How Powerful You Are.
Just start. You’re far more powerful than you think you are. You don’t have to quit your job. You don’t have to make huge changes in your life. Just create one thing online today and publish so you can say you started. Then do it again tomorrow.
Confidence is everything. Most people never discover it. They think someone needs to tell them what to do. Someone needs to give them direction. Someone needs to control their time.
That’s not true. You have the power, instincts, and creativity to make these decisions. And what you don’t know, you’ll quickly learn. So start now. Because it’s not too late to start creating online.