This is a quick message to let you know that after nearly 4 wonderful years, we’re leaving the Medium platform. It’s been an honor and a pleasure writing for you all, but it’s time for the next phase of our evolution as we grow beyond what Medium is designed for.

You can read about why (and how) we’re making the transition in my (last!) article, Why I’m Leaving Medium (13m).

If you subscribe on the new site by April 29, you’ll get a 30-day free trial, AND be grandfathered in forever at the legacy rate of $5 per month (or $50 per year). The new rate after that date will be $10 per month (or $100 per year).

Subscribe here

For members, we’ll be cancelling your membership to this publication within the next hour. All new subscriptions come with a 30-day free trial so you won’t be double billed for the current month.

If you have any questions about this transition, please email praxis@fortelabs.co or let us know in the #praxis channel on the new Forte Labs Slack.

Thank you so much for reading and sharing and commenting on these articles these past few years. And best of luck on your productivity journey.

Tiago

Announcing Praxis 2.0 was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In that time, I’ve written somewhere north of 100,000 words, in more than 50 long-form essays, read by many tens of thousands of people. I’m a “Top Writer” in two of the most popular categories on the site — Productivity and Reading — and have more than 8,000 followers between my personal profile and my publication. Praxis is a paywalled publication generating almost $2,000 in recurring monthly revenue from 400+ subscribers.

I don’t think there’s anyone more invested in the success of Medium than I am. And over the next week I’ll be taking my writing and my audience to a new Wordpress blog.

In this article I’ll explain why, despite all this investment, functionality, and exposure offered to me for free, it still makes no sense for me to stay. I’m hoping it will shed some light on blogging-as-a-business, provide the Medium team some useful feedback, and explain to my audience why I’m putting them through this migration.

Check out the new blog below! You’ll get a one-month free trial and be grandfathered in permanently at the old rate of $5 per month ($50 per year) if you subscribe by April 29. After that it will be $10 per month or $100 annually:

The death of freemium

In December of 2016, I received an email from Medium about an experiment they were running to allow publications to charge for their content. This seemed unthinkable at first. It seemed contrary to everything I’d ever learned about blogging.

The conventional marketing wisdom is that you should open the doors of your blog as wide as possible, because it is your best customer acquisition channel. It is the easiest and most frictionless way for someone to “try out” what you have to offer. Once hooked, a reader can be turned into a customer by selling them other products or services.

But around that same time I started reading Stratechery, Ben Thompson’s email newsletter offering “analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media.” He writes one free weekly article, and paid daily articles dissecting and explaining the news and trends of the day.

First, I noticed his impressive business model: $10 per month (or $100 per year) for in-depth articles that could reach any number of people at almost no marginal cost. Internet rumor has it that he has more than 10,000 paying subscribers, which would suggest monthly revenue of $100,000.

Again, this contradicted everything I thought I knew about media. I don’t think there is a topic more oversaturated than tech news and analysis, and here was one man single-handedly producing the best content in the whole industry. Reading the short Stratechery updates each weekday has allowed me to drop dozens of other news sources and still come away with a better understanding of what’s happening in technology and why.

Second, I read Thompson’s rationale that paid subscriptions are the future of local news media, fully explained in The Local News Business Model (free article). I won’t try to replicate the full argument here, but here’s the gist:

By owning printing presses and delivery trucks (and thanks to the low marginal cost of printing extra pages), newspapers were the primary outlet for advertising that didn’t work (or couldn’t afford) TV or radio — and there was a lot of it. Maximizing advertising, though, meant maximizing the potential audience, which meant offering all kinds of different types of content in volume: thus the mashup of wildly disparate content listed above, all focused on quantity over quality.

Traditional newspapers had to maximize their potential audience by including “something for everyone” in each issue. Thus their pages include a wild diversity of content — crossword puzzles, editorials, comics, recipes, news stories — but most of it of mediocre or standard quality. This makes no sense in a digital world where the very best content in each category is just a click away.

Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality. Look at any popular media website, and you’ll see a constant stream of mediocre, click-bait updates. This is because, until recently, the only viable way to monetize online was advertising, and making any meaningful revenue from advertising required millions of readers. Only the biggest operations could afford to play this game, so we mistakenly concluded that online media only worked for large corporations.

But times have changed. Maximizing audience size and number of views no longer makes any sense in an online world of hyper-niches. Thompson’s theory about local news applies equally well to the rest of online media — now it’s just digital neighborhoods, which can be targeted ever more precisely via email, social media, and ads.

For the first time in the internet age, it now makes economic sense to focus on a specific niche, write only high-quality content that appeals to that niche, and monetize the audience yourself using subscriptions and information products, rather than relying on advertising.

A number of trends have made this model both sustainable, and even preferable:

• Online software-as-a-service that makes billing, analytics, subscription management, content hosting, email marketing, and many other capabilities easy and affordable
• The scarcity of attention, driving people to seek authoritative sources that carefully curate what they publish
• The rise of ebook self-publishing and premium-priced online courses, providing a way to monetize readers in a scalable way
• The dominance of social media for discovery, making personal word-of-mouth around specific pieces of content even more important than it already was

Thompson goes on to define what is needed to make a subscription model work:

It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.

Each of those words is meaningful:

Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye.

Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app.

Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.

All of the points above applied to my own niche and business, and I saw an opportunity to move Praxis behind a paywall. I’d been publishing monthly for a couple years already, and knew I would have no problem keeping up that pace.

In fact, the paywall idea came as a welcome relief. I’d been feeling the pressure to make my articles shorter, simpler, and more digestible for a mainstream audience, to ride the waves of social media algorithms. This made me depressed: I didn’t want to write bite-sized listicles with clean-cut takeaways. What I really wanted to do was go in the opposite direction: write deeper, more subtle and complex, and even longer-form series exploring the frontiers of productivity. Charging members directly allowed me to test my hypothesis that there was a market for such writing, without getting distracted by the demands of endless promotion.

In many ways, there was no tradeoff for me. The more accessible posts I could continue to publish for free, bringing in new readers. The deeper, longer posts wouldn’t be attractive to new readers anyway, so I wasn’t losing anything. And dedicated readers would find these longer posts even more interesting for being exclusive. They would also be more likely to stick around and actually try out the methods I was recommending, since they were paying for them after all.

The experience of blogging changed dramatically after I flipped the switch. My articles went from thousands of views to hundreds, but the quality of my readers spiked. I found my tribe. The noise of random passersby leaving inane comments dwindled to nothing, and we started having real conversations about what it would take to manifest a new vision of work. I started learning as much from them as they were learning from me. I went from having a blog that a large group of uncommitted readers perused, to a much smaller but more intimate group of people pre-committed to trying new things.

This change also enabled other business models. It suddenly made more sense to compile my essays into ebooks, which people valued more highly because the contents weren’t freely available. Paying members were far more likely to purchase my online courses, since they were already customers. Even personalized services like coaching made more sense, because readers were more likely to want to put my methods to use. Paradoxically, putting up a paywall at the front door made the Full-Stack Freelancer lifestyle possible, by setting a higher bar for every interaction I had with my customers.

But this goes deeper than the needs of my business model. I’ve come to believe that we’re seeing the death of the freemium model that has governed online media since its inception. Freemium is the practice of publishing free content to give readers a taste of what you offer, and then up-selling them to other products and services over time.

Freemium relies on one basic assumption: that attention is cheaper than money. It essentially allows you to pay for content with a cheaper currency — your attention — than cold, hard cash. But this assumption has now been overturned. For an increasingly larger percentage of the online population, attention has become the scarcest good of all. So “free” content has become terribly expensive, if it consumes your attention without delivering tangible value.

This is the fundamental driver of the subscription wave. What people are paying for is not a bunch of text. They are paying for the perspective the writer brings to the subject, distilling a vast amount of raw information on a topic into a highly curated, manageable stream. Every minute reading Stratechery saves me many minutes of lower-quality reading. My hope is that reading Praxis likewise saves my members many hours of first-hand research and experimentation.

Why I’m leaving Medium

In the past year, Medium has pivoted to an “open paywall.” Any writer can join with the click of a button, allowing them to make money on their articles. I’ve thought many times about joining the program, but I just can’t justify it.

First, because I won’t make anywhere close to the revenue I’m making now. Why would I give up $5 per member per month in exchange for random readers that I’ll probably never see again? Not to mention that Medium’s membership program directly competes with my own, and they understandably give theirs favorable placement everywhere on the site.

Second, because Medium users are in a walled garden. I have 8,000 followers, but the only ones I can contact directly are the 400+ who pay for my publication. Every month about 100 new people follow me, but these emails make me cringe, reminding me of all the people who like what I have to say but remain just out of reach.

Third, because I don’t think their open paywall is going to work. I might be willing to give up the previous points if I thought they were on a path to explosive growth. As every platform always promises its merchants, they could “make it up in volume.”

But I think the theory that people will pay for an “all-you-can-eat” subscription for written text on a webpage just like they do with music and video is deeply flawed. Music and video is entertainment — you want more volume, more diversity, and more access in more places. We’ve discovered so many little pockets in our day we can fill with this content (along with free media like podcasts and social media).

But written text is different. It’s not a leisure activity for most people most of the time. Especially dense topics displayed on a screen — the last thing most knowledge workers want at the end of a long day sitting at a computer is to stare at yet another screen. Because digital reading is seen in terms of utility, not entertainment, people don’t want more volume, diversity, or access. They don’t want “unlimited reading.” Reading is hard work. People don’t like hard work, so they won’t pay you to assign more of it to them. They want to read as little as they can get away with!

But there is an even more fundamental reason I don’t think it will work: there is no substantial group of writers whose incentives line up with an open paywall.

I think there are two basic groups of “people who write online.” The first is non-professional, casual writers sharing their thoughts, commentary, or ideas. What they care most about is an easy writing experience, and readership. It is exhilarating as a casual blogger to see hundreds or thousands of people reading what you’ve written. I think a lot of this writing is migrating to Facebook, where it’s even easier and more discoverable. Medium will continue to capture the high end of this group, but not behind its paywall. If all you care about is people reading what you’ve written, why restrict access? They don’t have a large enough audience to make the income worthwhile anyway.

The second group is professionals. Either professional bloggers, or others for whom writing is a strategic investment in marketing, thought leadership, or idea prototyping. But these people are even less likely to join an open paywall. By definition, they have much more effective ways to monetize even very small audiences, from online courses to ebooks to consulting to donations. I was offered a hefty sum just to write an article for Medium members, but even that generous offer I had to turn down. Just one conversion to my online course would generate the same amount of money — limiting readership of even one article would be stupid, especially considering that paying members can still see my free posts. They can’t even promise exposure to a targeted group of people: “Medium members” are a monolithic, diffuse demographic.

So who exactly do they expect to be writing for this open paywall?

Even smaller groups don’t make sense: journalists want to build their home publication’s membership base, OR promote their own reputation among a larger audience; politicians and business leaders want articles that can be linked to from anywhere; startup and tech leaders have avid followings and know better than anyone the value of an email address. It seems the only ones left are part-time self-improvement gurus.

What I think we’re seeing is a deep inversion: the basic connection between scale and revenue (more scale equaling more revenue) has now been reversed. You no longer need to scale massively to build a profitable business. The option of focusing intently on a core audience is enabling the rise of “online small businesses” that never need to wade into the storm of mass media.

With this inversion, I believe that charging for access to writing provides value in and of itself. Instead of allowing a reader to meander through article upon article chasing the promise of a reward, you ask them to make a decision upfront: is this work valuable enough to pay for? If not, you’ve saved them a lot of time and attention. If so, their financial commitment is aligned with their psychic commitment from the first minute. Especially when it comes to self-improvement and productivity advice, the reward only comes with action anyway. Asking people to put skin in the game by taking out their credit card sets them up for greater success at every subsequent stage of their journey.

The vision for Praxis

There are a lot of opportunities opening up as Praxis has found its audience. Being able to rely on the attention and engagement of a loyal following allows us to run experiments:

• The Anti-Book Club: having everyone learn the same method for highlighting and summarizing books, we’ve created a repository of book summaries using a standard template. Everyone who contributes is given access to the repository, which will grow and improve over time.
• Webinars and workshops: knowing more precisely what readers care about, we’ve started facilitating monthly workshops and webinars on topics related to productivity: speed-reading, scaleable freelancing, Wardley mapping, other personal development programs, and more to come.
• Case studies: having more dedicated readers means they’re more likely to put what I’m teaching to use. I’ve published a number of case studies from members, providing examples I couldn’t come up with myself.

My ultimate vision for Praxis is to become much more than a blog. I want it to become a living and breathing experimentation platform for the future of work. I want to be able to invite writers, makers, entrepreneurs, and practitioners into an environment primed for learning and discovery, with an audience ready and waiting to try radical new approaches. It will be an idea accelerator, launching new ways of working into escape velocity much faster than they’d be able to otherwise.

The move to Wordpress (along with Memberful and Discourse) as a blogging platform will propel us in this direction. Among the many capabilities we’ll gain are:

• Improving the reader experience: we’ll be able to improve all aspects of the visual layout, how images and videos are displayed, and add other widgets and embeds to provide a more interactive experience
• Creating an online forum for organic discussions: instead of a little comment box at the end that no one reads, all post comments will now be routed to a dedicated online forum on Discourse. We’ve been testing this for the past year with our online courses, and I believe it will allow for much richer, evergreen conversations around articles
• Hiring a Praxis Community Manager: having admin permissions on Wordpress and increasing the monthly price from $5 to $10 (with all existing members grandfathered in at the lower price) will allow us to hire a Praxis Community Manager. They’ll be available to answer questions, point out useful resources, manage customer service, and work with me to consistently improve the blog
• Publish more guest posts: I’ve long wanted to have more contributors writing about their own niches and experiments. Being able to grant contributor privileges and have an easier review process will make this more frequent
• Templates and process improvements: the backend functionality of Wordpress and Memberful will help us optimize many parts of managing the blog, from post templates that I can update automatically, to making invoices instantly accessible, to providing annual billing options. That means more time for creating new stuff!
• Bundling and membership management: I’ve long wanted to bundle Praxis membership with other courses or programs we offer. Reading Praxis articles is obviously the perfect complement to anything else we’re doing, and now we’ll be able to make it into one integrated package that’s easy to access using Memberful

To be clear, I believe Medium is still the absolute best place to start writing for the vast majority of people. If I was starting today, I’d start there. The ability to create an account, open up a new document, and start writing in a beautiful, user-friendly interface within minutes is a miracle of modern technology. Most people spend so much of their initial motivation “designing the furniture” — picking themes, customizing templates, fiddling with settings, worrying about layout — that they never actually make a habit of writing.

But it’s time for Praxis to grow up, and us along with it. I sincerely hope you’ll join the community we’re building for a new chapter of Praxis’ growth.

Subscribe now for a free 30-day trial of the new Praxis blog

Or follow us for occasional free content via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

P.S. Here’s an article that gives a good overview of the emerging market for paid newsletters. And this one provides guidance on a great way to get started, with free, personal email newsletters.

Why I’m Leaving Medium was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There have been 3 Eras of Productivity in modern times, each defined by a seminal book:

The Values-First Era at the dawn of corporate America told us that character was the most important thing. If you were a virtuous person, living according to principles and high ideals, you’d be successful. But then the cutthroat corporate culture of the 1980’s set in, and everyone realized they had to look out for their own interests.

The Goals-First Era came next, proclaiming that we should have clear goals to help focus our efforts. No one was going to give us a handout, so we had to ruthlessly drive toward the outcomes we wanted to happen. But goals too lost their luster. As the new millennium began and the uncertainty in the world spun seemingly out of control, we started looking for a process to follow.

We are now deep in the throes of the Process-First Era. A little over halfway through, if the average 25-year cycle holds. People march under the banner of their favorite process: Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, Agile/Scrum, Getting Things Done, Lean Startup, Habit Loop. Every aspect of modern work is being systematically distilled down to 5 steps that promise results if you’ll only follow the process.

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

P.A.R.A. VII: Creating a Project Network was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In P.A.R.A Part I, I argued that the Project List was the lynchpin of modern productivity, serving as a dashboard of your current commitments and the bridge between actionable and reference systems.

But formulating a Project List is also one of the most difficult exercises for most people to complete. And I’m not the only one to notice. David Allen has written:

“One of the most bizarre phenomena I have encountered in 30 years of working closely with some of the brightest and busiest people in the world is how difficult it is for most to grasp the idea of what a “project” is and to consistently manage their total inventory of same.

People complain about “too much to do,” and yet most couldn’t give you, in the moment, a complete and accurately defined inventory of what they’ve committed “to do” if their life depended on it.”

The reason it’s so hard to make a Project List is that it’s not just a matter of writing down what you’re currently working on. Hidden inside this simple exercise is a whole new paradigm for what a project even is.

What a Project List calls for are “small-batch projects.”

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

P.A.R.A. VI: Small-Batch Projects for Focus, Creativity, and Perspective was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What if we treated the Star Trek universe as if it was real, and used it to draw economic lessons about post-scarcity?

The model rests upon one glaring, unavoidable fact of the Star Trek economy: there is no money. There are a few mentions of “exchanging credits” in the TV series, but they all prove to be metaphors, throwback rituals, or jokes. No money means no salaries, no revenue, and no profit. The great majority of the machinery by which capitalism runs is simply gone.

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Trekonomics: The Economics of Post-Scarcity was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Storm of Tweets: Micro-essays on work, life, the universe, and everything

Foreword from the book

I first started using Twitter in the spring of 2012, fresh off the plane from Ukraine, where I served for two years in the Peace Corps. My first job in San Francisco was for a coworking space that also hosted events and classes. My first forays onto the network were to tweet links to our events or announcements, desperately trying to get some traction.

Within a few months, I started getting regular notifications. I was meeting people in the coworking space and at our events, and quickly learned that Twitter was the watercooler for online influencers. I started spending more time there, slowly moving from lurking to reading articles to responding to interacting. The accessibility of high-profile, successful people managing their own accounts blew my impressionable little mind away.

It took me a couple years to begin thinking of Twitter as a place for learning and ideation, not just consumption. I started reading the Ribbonfarm blog, which exposed me to intense intellectual discussions taking place in the social networks connected to it. Gaining followers who were interested in the same things as me, I started to blog more, testing out my ability to create insights for other smart people.

It was around this time that I started using the tweetstorm format specifically. A tweetstorm is simply a series of tweets (short snippets of text that can also contain links or images) with an overarching topic or point that are “threaded” together in a chain. You add tweets to the chain by successively replying to each previous tweet. What a tweetstorm adds versus, say, a blog post, is that each tweet stands as its own statement, with individual controls for others to like, reply to, or share, with or without their own commentary. Instead of a comments section at the very end of a webpage that no one reads, you get a distributed, modular, atomized, non-linear, open-ended conversation among any number of people.

The immediate need I was trying to fulfill was to get ideas out of my head, where they tended to cycle aimlessly until I captured them somewhere. The default place for these ideas was Evernote, but I thought, “Why not make these notes public?” These tweetstorms evolved from random musings shouted into the digital wind, to critical pieces in my process of developing ideas to fruition.

It’s difficult to overstate how important tweetstorms have been for my work and my business. They are the most-cited referral source for customers and collaborators alike. I’ve found thought partners, clients, mentors, and advisors through them. They’ve saved me hours of work, allowing me to simply link to a thread instead of explaining things again and again. By inserting these threads one tweet at a time into the slipstream of online discussions, I’ve found an audience that is hungry for meaningful insights delivered in bite-sized packages.

It’s also difficult to overstate what a remarkable format it is. First, it is a “soft” technology, created in an instant and driven by a practical need. It requires no special technology, no maintenance or updates, beyond the basic functionality of tweeting and replying. Second, it puts the comments and arguments, which are the best part of any piece of online content, on nearly equal footing with the original thread itself. By allowing multiple entry points to start a discussion–at a sentence by sentence level, instead of only at the end–it encourages discussion instead of just allowing it. Third, it enforces succinctness and brevity, both by the strict 140 (now 280) character limit, and also by the short attention spans that people usually bring to social media. Since virtually all writing can be improved by getting more quickly to the point, this has the effect of increasing quality across the board. Fourth, you are always one click away from self-written biographies for every person in a thread, allowing you to put in context what they’re saying. Anonymity is allowed but not required. The more transparent you are about who you are and where you’re coming from, the more credibility your words carry. Fifth, it is a format optimized for learning. As the writer, you can get feedback point by point along multiple dimensions: likes, retweets, and replies. I’ve found that often one seemingly minor point receives most of the attention. Or one tweet in the thread becomes its own parallel discussion, like a self-selecting chat room, telling you what people find interesting. The modularity of tweetstorms–that any given tweet can find its way into any number of feeds, discussions, hashtags, and retweets–allows the thread to appeal to multiple audiences, each tweet part of a great river but carried along its own particular currents. Sixth, it bypasses writer’s block, by keeping expectations low and spelling and grammer even lower. There is no barrier to just getting your ideas out there, because nothing is permanent unless you want it to be. Your inner critic stays asleep because “it’s just social media after all.”

I decided to review these old tweetstorms in preparation for a book I’m writing, based on my course Building a Second Brain. Tweetstorms are often proto-ideas that I found interesting enough to write about, but that aren’t yet complete enough to turn into full articles. They are like free-floating, raw genetic material, waiting to evolve into full organisms.

I discovered that I could export my entire tweet archive in one click, and then do a search for the prefix 1/, which I use to kick off each tweetstorm. By the time I had done that, I realized I was just a few steps away from an ebook. If I was getting so much value from rereading my own tweetstorms, why not bring others into the conversation? The self-publishing service offered by Kindle Direct Publishing has become so dead simple, all you need to do is submit a Word document and they take care of the rest. With some help from Ben Mosior, Marko Kosović, and Jay Dugger, we selected the best storms and put together the manuscript you’re reading now.

I’m a big believer in sharing your work publicly, as early and as often as possible. This book is an experiment to see just how far we can push that practice. My goal is to compress two years of thought experiments into an artifact that can be examined and unpacked in just a few hours. My hope is that readers will see the holes, assumptions, and hidden insights that I can’t see myself.

I’ll end with a few guidelines on how to create your own tweetstorms. I imagine some of you will be inspired to try it out for yourself. But like anything that has the potential to capture people’s attention, there is a sensible and respectful way to go about it.

The first and most important guideline is to add value. Social networks are full of content that is inane, mindless, or actively harmful, and we don’t need another voice to join that chorus. Shed light on something you understand that others don’t. Tell a good story that motivates or inspires people. Create a packet of insight that others can take and use in their own work.

Second, don’t @mention people in the thread itself. This will result in them getting notifications for every reply, potentially far into the future. You don’t want to burn people like that. They know who you are. If you want to bring them into the conversation, quote-retweet the tweet that is most relevant to them, add a question or request and their handle, and allow them to decide whether to jump in.

Third, don’t make the thread more than 15–20 tweets long, since your followers will be flooded with them all. Make sure that every tweet in the thread is necessary and adding value to your point, otherwise you’ll lose followers instead of gaining them.

Fourth, start every tweet with the same number format, to make them easy to identify and search for in the future. Common options include 1/, 1., and 1).

Enjoy your romp through my imagination. Following the hyperlinks in the date for each tweetstorm will take you to the original thread on Twitter, which you can then share or discuss live. And tweet me @fortelabs if you discover anything interesting ;)

Sign up here for a free 30-day trial of the new Praxis blog, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Storm of Tweets: Micro-Essays on Work, Life, the Universe, and Everything was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for the Anti-Book Club for easy reference. And so you can run your own Anti-Book Club if you want. I’ll update this article with future improvements as I discover them.

The Premise

Start by reading my original article introducing the concept and why it’s important. Here’s a short version:

• Books contain valuable ideas, but are too long, boring, and diluted with extraneous information
• We need a way for different people to read different books, and then share the key points with each other
• Progressive summarization provides a way to do so in a format that provides enough context for it to make sense and be useful
• It doesn’t replace reading the full text, but allows your future self to remember what you’ve learned, and helps others to make better decisions about what to read

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Praxis Anti-Book Club Instructions was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After I quit my job in June of 2013, some of my very first projects were small consulting gigs. From designing a website for a friend for $50, to helping a local business figure out their social media accounts. These projects gave me some runway to get on my feet and start thinking seriously about what it would take to run a business of my own.

Starting out by offering a service gave me the flexibility, experience, and income I needed to later build products. My early clients paid for the learning that eventually made its way into blog posts, courses, and ebooks. Those products now give me the credibility to charge $15–20k on average for a two-day corporate training. That’s what it actually looks like to become a Full-Stack Freelancer.

Click here to register for the free webinar from 9:00–10:00 AM PST on Wednesday, March 28.

I know that many of you are interested in starting your own business. You want somewhere to put your new productivity skills to use! The best way to start a company, in my opinion, is to start by offering a service, for many reasons:

• It allows you to gain experience with a wide variety of clients, to understand what you’re best at and who your ideal customer is
• It can be started very cheaply and in parallel with a normal job if you’re not quite ready to take the plunge
• It allows you to optimize for learning and skill-building without the hassles of infrastructure, equipment, warehouses, or storefronts
• It can be performed flexibly, on your own time and from different locations
• It builds your personal brand, growing a network that you can take with you from client to client
• You can easily build on your services with new products and content

Now here’s the downside: the very same things that make service-based businesses awesome also create pitfalls:

• It’s easy to call yourself a consultant, but finding clients is another matter altogether
• There are few costs, but that also means there are constant new entrants, making it hard to cut through the noise
• It’s easy to change what you’re offering quickly, but you often have to start from scratch with new projects
• You can work from anywhere, but that also means work-life balance and structure around your workday can be elusive
• You get to focus on you and your brand, but that also means your reputation is on the line from day one

I’ve been looking for ways to support freelancers, solopreneurs, and wantrepreneurs because I know how difficult it can be to overcome these challenges on your own. There’s no reason we should each have to reinvent the wheel. I want to help make the leap from employment to entrepreneurship a little easier and less risky.

Speaking at Reactive Conference in Slovakia last October, I met Jan, an information science professor and top-level government advisor with many similar interests. We hit it off, and he enrolled in my course Building a Second Brain. Shortly thereafter, I received an urgent message from him: “I’ve found someone you have to meet.”

That person ended up being Jeff Sauer, an entrepreneur and online marketing expert. We connected and quickly found that our approaches complemented each other perfectly: I teach people how to capture and utilize their knowledge using software, while Jeff teaches how to turn that knowledge and experience into profitable service businesses.

Jeff is an all-star in the online marketing world. As a partner he grew his marketing agency by 500% to $6 million in annual revenue, reaching the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for five years in a row. He’s provided everything from SEO and web analytics services, to social media and online reputation management, to email marketing and e-commerce consulting, serving small businesses and Fortune 500 brands alike.

He’s also successfully made the transition to online products, launching in-depth courses on Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and data-driven marketing. Most recently, he’s summarized what he learned over 13 years into an online course called Agency Jumpstart. It is a treasure trove of models, frameworks, case studies, hard learnings, and live coaching on the art and science of scaling a service. It’s a rare insider view of the nuts and bolts of running an agency, from one-person freelancing all the way up to a big team. If I was starting a business today, I’d start with this course.

Because Jeff’s offerings are such a great complement to mine, I’m partnering with him to offer a one-time live webinar, integrating Building a Second Brain with Agency Jumpstart.

In this webinar, Build A Six-Figure Service-Based Business Without Trial and Error, Jeff and I will present some of our top recommendations for turning your knowledge into a service business.

You’ll learn:

• The ONE revenue model for service-based businesses that virtually guarantees cash-flow month-after-month
• The importance of avoiding the Law of Desperation in your service-based business and how the Pipeline Rule can help you do this
• What the “Sauer Reframe Technique” is and how to use it to ethically price your freelancing or consulting services
• How to avoid the #1 mistake service-based businesses make when selling services

I hope you’ll join us!

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Live Webinar: Build A Six-Figure Service-Based Business Without Trial and Error was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First developed by Simon Wardley to navigate the emerging cloud computing industry, it's now exploded into dozens of different industries and applications. Here is Simon’s Medium publication where he’s publishing a book on the subject chapter by chapter, and here’s an interview he did with Venkatesh Rao on “mapping the internal and external realities of organizations.” I’m interested in how visual thinking can be used to externalize complex, strategic thinking, but this tool can be used for many other purposes as well.

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Wardley Mapping Workshop was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s taken me a long time to be able to make the process explicit. The Building a Second Brain course is basically my long-form writing workflow expanded and abstracted to encompass any type of content and any type of project.

I just added a third in-depth case study to BASB on how I plan, track, and write long-form blog posts like the ones you find here. I’ve decided to share it here as well, because I know many of you have blogs or are interested in starting one. Please note that the “Workflow Strategies” I utilize in the video are exclusive to the course, and you’ll need to enroll to find the full explanations.

This article has moved to the new Praxis blog. Sign up here for a free 30-day trial, or subscribe to the newsletter to receive notifications of free articles. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

How I Write Long-Form Blog Posts was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.