Transcription
What's going on? My name is Dicky Bush, and five years ago today, I played my last snap of college football at Princeton.
And in the five years since then, my life has changed quite a bit. Mainly, I lost 100 pounds; I completely gave up alcohol; I worked as a hedge fund trader at BlackRock for four years; I started a Twitter account and grew that from zero to 280,000 followers; I started a side hustle and built it from zero to seven figures in about 18 months, which let me leave that full-time job at BlackRock to build something on my own. And honestly, a lot of other stuff has happened. And when I read that out loud, it's kind of absurd because if you'd have told me five years ago that was a path I would have ended up taking, I'd have thought you were crazy.
So over the next two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years, I plan on making a ton of videos and doing a lot of writing about this journey, while also documenting some things I'm working on now. So when this first asked me anything, I'm going to cover three topics: first, going from zero to two hundred eighty thousand followers on Twitter; second, building Ship 30 from side hustle to seven figures in about 18 months; and third, working a full-time job at BlackRock while doing these things on the side. So some things I learned along the way there and some reflections now that I'm nine months in.
So we'll kick it off with the first topic, which is going from zero to two hundred eighty thousand followers on Twitter in about 24 months. This goes back a little bit further, all the way to January 2020, when I started writing on the internet. Now, I followed the conventional playbook when I started my writing journey. I started a blog; I was posting weekly blog posts into the void because, quite frankly, no one knew my blog existed. And those first nine months were kind of a complete waste of time for me. I'd wake up every single Sunday; I'd hammer out a blog post by kind of slaving over a hot keyboard, worrying about every single word, thinking everything had to be perfect. Then I'd hit publish, and I very vividly remember the anticipation that the first time I'd hit published on something, there'd be this wave of attention. And that kind of happened every single week for the first nine months. I always thought, one of these days I'm gonna hit publish on something and I'm gonna get this wave of kind of applause or feedback, but more and more all I got was the internet's crickets of indifference.
So nine months in, I was pretty much ready to give up that writing journey. I gave it a shot; I said, this maybe it just wasn't for me. But I didn't want to just completely give up right when I felt like it. So I said, okay, I'm going to, instead of writing on a blog with a weekly blog post, I'm going to try writing on Twitter. And instead of writing every single week, I'm gonna put something out every single day. I'd seen people kind of build up their audiences on Twitter; I'd been following them along for a long time, but I really wasn't posting anything consistently. Fast forward a little over two years now, and I'm sitting at 280,000 followers, and I can say the best decision I've ever made was that initial: published 30 pieces of content in 30 days.
So looking back at the last 24 months, I've definitely put out at least two tweets per day and one thread or Atomic essay every single week, and I've learned quite a bit along this journey. So let's dive into a couple of these questions. So the first question Jesse asks: how did your Twitter following grow over time? It'll be helpful to see some sort of breakdown like day 0 to 30 you had x, 31 to 90. I hit a thousand followers in one month. So in my first 30 days, I went from zero to a thousand. I'll talk a little bit about how I did that. Then it took about seven months until I hit ten thousand, and it took another seven months I hit fifty thousand, another seven months I hit a hundred thousand, and then throughout this year—so I was at a hundred thousand at the start of 2022—now I'm sitting at 280,000. So pretty much tripled in over the last 12. Now what you'll see from this chart is that Twitter is usually a slow and steady grind higher, and then you have something that pops off that leads to a nice little jump, and then it's another slow and steady grind higher. So a big piece of advice I give to anyone at the beginning of their journey is you can't get caught up in the follower number because followers are a lagging indicator of value. Once you've hit 10,000 followers, that means you've created enough value for ten thousand people to have followed you. So instead of focusing on that number, you want to instead look at inputs. That's going to be the second question, and but this is a more general framework for life: is instead of thinking I have this goal of hitting a hundred thousand followers, I'm just gonna obsess over that goal; pick a goal like I want a hundred thousand followers and then reverse engineer the inputs that make achieving that goal inevitable.
So that brings us perfectly to the second question where Tai asks: what would be your strategy if you were to start again? What are the differences in strategy between managing a small account at 2000 followers and a bigger one at a hundred thousand? So I put out a tweet recently with the exact playbook I would use if I was starting over from scratch, and that would be: write and publish five tweets per day; I'd publish two Atomic essays per week. If you don't know what an atomic essay is, it's a screenshot essay where you're able to concisely distill one point where you get a little bit more than a tweet, but you don't need to write a full Twitter thread on it; you just want to kind of validate one idea. And if you want to start writing those, you can go to typeshare.com, and you'll see all about that. Then I would craft one high-quality Twitter thread per week, and then fourth, I would block time to make one new friend. The most important part of this entire system is I would stick to this for 52 weeks in a row. Now a couple of reasons why I think this playbook works: first, you can't focus on follower account at all; you have to 100% focus on inputs in your first year. I can pretty much promise you that if you do these four things every single week or every single day for 52 weeks, you are going to see success. I don't know what the follower number is going to end up at; I don't think the follower number is that important. What I think is far more important is what doing that amount of volume and getting that many ideas out there is going to do for you. So number one, I remember at the beginning of my Twitter journey, like five times a day—that's crazy in your head; you're like, oh my God, that's gonna annoy so, so, so many people. But what you have to realize in Twitter and the feed, most your followers won't see most of your tweets anyway, and you kind of have to get over the fear of putting out that much content in the beginning, and that's the perfect time to do it when you don't have as large of a following because the truth is that many people aren't reading it. So instead of kind of, I'm gonna try to have things perfect and just put one thing out per day, when you put five out, one, you're gonna get way better way faster because you're gonna have far more reps. Two, you're going to kind of get over that discomfort of like, I can't be putting that much out there. And then the other part of this playbook that I think is important is you're going to make friends every single week where you're going to learn from them as well. So the best part about Twitter for me has been the people I've gotten to meet. My business partner, Nicholas Cole, we make videos together on the Ship 30 YouTube channel and more partners in Ship 30; we met because he saw some of my tweets and I saw some of his, and we were introduced by a buddy. Probably the 10 people I talked to the most on a daily or weekly basis, I met on Twitter, and I met from doing this exact strategy. So if you follow this exact playbook—five tweets a day, two Atomic essays a week, one thread per week, and make a new friend every single week—your life will change because of Twitter doing that; I, I can certainly promise you. So the number one piece of advice is don't focus on follower account in the beginning; focus on inputs; pick some kind of consistent system and stick to it. The hard part is sticking to it every day or every week for 52 weeks, right? If, if it was easy, everyone would do that, but it's impossible to fail if you go 52 weeks doing that because your first 10 tweets, your first 50 tweets, they're gonna suck. I'm doing this right now with YouTube; my first 10, 20, 30 videos are not going to be that good, but what I committed to was I'm gonna make a video every single week for a year. I don't know what's going to happen on the subscriber count; I don't know what's gonna happen on the algorithm; I, I know I'm gonna get better though, just comparing my first video to this video, my ability to talk on camera, my understanding of thumbnails and titles, all that is getting much better. So the number one thing to focus on in the beginning is enough volume where you're going to get better no matter what, and don't focus on the outcome; focus on the inputs. All right, our last question on Twitter growth: Rodney asks, what mistakes did you make early in your Twitter journey, and what would you do differently to overcome those obstacles?
So I liked reflecting on this one a little bit. The biggest mistake I had in the beginning is kind of a combination of a few things. So I thought in the beginning that I had to hold back my good ideas until I had a bunch of followers. So when I was sitting at 100, 200, a couple hundred, I was like, oh, I had this really cool idea for a thread; I'm not going to put it out there because I don't have enough followers or not, not enough people are going to see it. And this is a big realization I've had is that on social platforms you have to get comfortable repeating yourself. If you have this good idea, you should put it out no matter what your follower account is because follower growth is a lagging indicator, meaning to get to 10,000, you have to put out enough value where 10,000 people have said, I'm going to follow you; you don't just magically get there. Then this is more of kind of a mathematical thing, but let's say you go from 100 to a thousand followers, right? Say that takes you a couple of months. When you're sitting at a thousand, 90% of people will not have seen all the things you had out when you had a hundred followers, which means you're going to have to reintroduce them to some of your core ideas. And this happens time and time again, right? When you go from a thousand to ten thousand, that means nine thousand people have not seen what you said back when you had a thousand. When I put something out that saw success in the beginning, I thought, okay, now I can't talk about that anymore, right? I've said it now; I can't say it again. But the truth is the second that something resonates with a reader early on, that is the first time, not the last time you talk about it. That was a big kind of breakthrough for me is I found a couple of core ideas that people resonated with, and then I just found new and novel ways to say them. So it's not about coming up with a thousand new ideas; it's about testing a ton of ideas, finding a few that work, and then figuring out a way to repeat them time and time again. So by far the biggest mistake there, and so what I would do differently is just get comfortable repeating myself. The thing to remember is like, you know all the tweets that you put out, but most people haven't seen them, and so it feels like you're repeating yourself, and so you're putting yourself in the followers who's thinking, oh, if they're reading this and they see it again, oh, they're, they're gonna think I repeat them, whatever, whatever story you're telling yourself, it's not true because think about how many tweets you see per day; you don't remember what other people are saying. So get used to repeating yourself; it's only going to get more important as you build a bigger and bigger following is just to figure out how to recycle ideas. So that was a big mistake. All right, so next set of questions, I'm going to talk a little bit about growing Ship 30 from side hustle to seven figures in 18 months while working a full-time job.
So if you don't know what Ship 30 is, it is a writing course that helps people start writing online by writing every single day for 30 days. I started it in November of 2020 as a way to get accountability for myself to continue writing. So in the earlier question, I talked a little bit about how I went from zero to a thousand followers on Twitter in my first 30 days, and all I did during that time was post a single Twitter thread every single day. I kind of had this routine: I'd go for a walk; I'd listen to a podcast; I'd listen and take notes as I walked; that'd be in the morning, and then in the evening I'd write a thread on everything I learned from that podcast and kind of tweet out my takeaways. So I did that for a month, and a couple of them went viral, which made me understand—well, I should say a couple of them went viral; the 29th one went viral, and I still remember the 28th one getting zero likes. So I was totally ready to give up; it's like, okay, I gave this a shot; I put something out on day 28; it got zero likes; I was like, okay, this is over. Said, okay, instead, I'm gonna finish the challenge; I'm gonna make all 30 days. And so I hit published on day 29; that one went viral, and I basically went from 200 to a thousand followers overnight. So I quickly realized the power of putting something out every single day, but I also understood that I was really close to quitting, and if I had quit, I definitely wouldn't be in the position I'm in now. And pretty much every good thing that's happened to me over the last two years, I can point back to putting out that thread. So at the time I said, I want to keep doing this, but no way I can do another 30 days without some kind of accountability. So I tweeted something out of, hey, is anyone interested in starting a writing challenge with me where you write and publish something every single day for 30 days? That turned into a quick accountability group; that accountability group then everyone else was writing every single day. Fast forward to today; spent all of 2021 working with Nicholas Cole to build Ship 30 from just an accountability Slack channel into a full-blown digital writing curriculum, community, live sessions, tons of stuff; we don't need to go into everything there, but basically all of 2021 I was still working for BlackRock but building Ship 30 on the side early in the morning. So the first question on that is: thoughts on building your business while working full-time? Now there were a bunch of other questions kind of on this topic about how do you balance working a side hustle with a full-time job, and then on top of that, how do you continue to manage your relationships, take care of your health, all that. My big thought here was there were definitely some short-term sacrifices to other areas of my life during that time that I'm probably still making today, even though I don't work that full-time job. So my focus was to build Ship 30 from 5 to 8 A.M.; then I'd work my full-time job from eight to five or six; I take care of my health; I'd work out in the evening, and then build Ship 30 before I went to bed. And this was definitely a period of obsession and not any kind of balance, but it's my general framework that you kind of have to earn the right to have full work-life balance, and I don't think I'm necessarily interested in my 20s and having any kind of balance; I'm more looking for big bursts of intensity where I can make giant leaps of progress, and I've definitely built up a framework in my head that the amount of progress you can make in three to six months of focused intensity, it can jump you ahead quite a few levels rather than trying to balance a bunch of things. So I kind of think about this as like a burner; if you have four burners or six burners, you can turn up one of them all the way and kind of keep the others on a simmer, and I think that you can do that in any area of your life. So I've chosen over the last two or three years business and my health, knowing that I can come around and do those other things as I go. So I've been less interested in hobbies; I think relationships, I've kept a tighter inner circle; there's definitely trade-offs, and I don't think that there's—this isn't a prescription by any means; I don't think you have to do anything like this, but for me, I understood that balance is something I'm going to unlock when I'm a dad in the future; right now, I'm 26, so I'd rather give more intensity to some things that I think set a foundation for balance in the future. Second question here, the Val, the validate says: how did you decide to price it? So Ship 30, the original cohort was $50, and you got your money back because I was terrified to actually charge money for something, um, tons of imposter syndrome about charging money for a product on the internet and having someone actually pay me for it. But the initial response to my tweet of, would anyone be interested in this with me, had too many people or it wouldn't have been a good community. So I had to add some kind of gate; I was like, okay, $50, but I promise if you write every day for 30 days, I'll give you your money back. And I did; that was the original price, and then, so that was the November cohort in 2020, and then the January 2021 cohort, which was the first one that didn't have a you've got your money back if you wrote every day; I charged $99, and I just, I just picked that price. Was that too low, potentially? But this is how I think about price, pricing in general, and this, I think, goes for anyone with any kind of course or product or community: the number of people after we charge $99 that said that was an absurd amount of value at a laughably low price, that was what I was looking for because that generates tons of positive word of mouth, where if you are charging a price where someone goes through and it's like, I think I got some value, they're not going to go tell all their friends, but if you charge something that is way below where you give them a ton more value than they actually paid, that's going to pay for itself time and time again because that spreads quadratically, meaning they tell someone, and that person tells someone, and that person tells someone. We've raised the price where it's now $699, so it's seven times higher than the original one, but it's at least a hundred times more valuable. So you pick a price where, okay, people are responding and saying, this is an absurd amount of value at this price, then you keep raising the price but keep adding more value. So we've gotten worth $700, but it's not like we just raised the price there and didn't add anything; instead, we got to $700 but added a hundred times more where we could have raised it even more. So now that's still continuing to work for us. So that's a general pricing framework: pick a price; for every time you interview a customer afterwards, they said, you've got to charge more for this, then charge more, but add more at the same time. So don't go wrong with charging more but not adding more; charge more, add more; charge more, add more, and then that's just going to keep compounding. Third and last question on building Ship 30: Harmony asks, when did you feel like you were ready to build and scale Ship 30? I still, to this day, do not feel ready; I didn't feel ready at the time, hence why I charged $50 and gave everyone their money back. This is a more general framework for life, and it's to kill your onces. So I keep this in mind anytime I find myself saying, once I blank, then I'll go and do something. So once I feel ready, I'll go do something, or once things slow down, I'll go do something; that time never comes. We always assume we're going to be less busy in the future; we always assume that there'll be a better time. So anytime I find myself saying, once I, just start doing that thing immediately. I probably could have gone back at the beginning of Ship 30 and said, you know, once I have a bigger following, then I'll tweet this out, or once work slows down; you can come up with a thousand different excuses for why now is not the perfect time, but you're just assuming that in the future the time will be perfect when you get there, but the same thing's going to happen, and then you're going to look up months or years later, and you never started that thing. So that's how I avoid it; anytime I find myself saying, once I do this, then I'll get started, I stop; I get started right away on whatever it is I say I would do in the future, and that served me pretty well.
All right, the third and final topic we're going to take questions on was my time at BlackRock. So a little bit of background on this: I worked for BlackRock for four years, right out of college after graduating from Princeton in 2018 with a degree in math and computer science, nothing to do with writing, which is what I talk a lot about now, mainly because I hated writing in school. My freshman writing class at Princeton made me, made me never want to write again, just because didn't like the teacher; thought the way they taught was just not going to work in the real world. And then when I got in the real world, especially when I started working at BlackRock, I realized the power of writing. So I interned there for two years going into my junior year and senior year, and then I worked for a 10-hedge fund within BlackRock for four years. So the first two years, 2018, 2019, was just kind of diving into the world of finance, learning as much as I could, really, really enjoying it, and thought I was going to work there forever. And then COVID hit in 2020, and we all work from home. So I went from living in New York City in a very small one-bedroom—or three-bedroom apartment, one of them didn't even have windows—to working from my parents' house in Florida, and I kind of realized at that point that working in finance was not going to be something I wanted to do long-term if I wasn't going to be in an office environment with a bunch of people around me. So working on doing trades and everything from home, I didn't really enjoy that much. That's when I started building Ship 30 on the side; I had all this free time, and kind of the big realization I had here was a lot of the work that people do working 60, 70, 80 hours a week in finance has kind of made up—maybe not if you're in investment banking and like making PowerPoints and doing all this stuff—but the truth was I didn't feel like if I didn't have a bunch of people around me like looking and seeing if I was working that I had that much to do because a lot of it is you make a bet on something and then you just kind of wait for time to go by. So I had all this free time, and that's when I started writing and just reading and learning more things beyond just finance because I do my regular job during the day, but there'd be a lot of periods of downtime where maybe if I was in the
Office with a bunch of people kind of around me. I would have pretended to click around in Excel, but didn't need to do that. So that was my time at BlackRock, and I did learn a ton during that time. And so, Coal asked a very good question here: what were your three biggest positive takeaways and three biggest net negative takeaways?
So I loved my time there. I got access to some of the smartest investors in the world. I got access to all the information I could possibly want—any research report, anything. I could basically get access to; I could talk to people that would come in from different banks and all these other places that had just a really good understanding of the market. So I got to learn basically the ins and outs of the world of Finance. So I'll talk a little bit about some of the positives, some of the negatives.
One positive: it taught me the fundamentals of how markets work. Working for a hedge fund, a fixed income hedge fund, I got to study the global economy. So every currency, commodity, Equity—everything. I just got to kind of soak in the Global Financial system, which was really cool. And I really took to the idea of predicting economies. So I liked thinking about economic data and how it was kind of influencing decisions. There's just so much that goes into working at a hedge fund, skill-wise, that goes beyond just Finance that I really enjoyed. But the biggest thing was the fundamentals of markets—how they worked, how psychology plays a role in all that—and I can apply that now to, if I end up wanting to do Venture investing or just regular asset allocation with my personal funds, things like that. So I really like that I now can look at a market and understand what's going on.
Another big positive was learning the benefits of working with a small team. So we worked—we were a 10-person hedge fund—tons of responsibility for each of us, nice and lean, few meetings, quick feedback loops, and I try to do that with the Ship 30 team now. It was ironic because we were a 10-person hedge fund within a big company, and so we were able to kind of operate on our own, or as I'd see a lot of the other bloat that happened in some of the other groups, and that definitely disillusioned me from the idea of working like for a giant company in some big role that wasn't within a small team, because I saw how there was just a lot of kind of bloat—I guess that's the best word—that kept things from getting done versus having a small team that can move fast. So that's one of our core values at Ship 30 is running a lean operation, because there's no need for excessive meetings or excessive communication. I think it's all about moving fast. So that was another good one.
Another just giant positive was getting to meet some of the smartest investors in the world. So we always had kind of rotating speakers come in, or some high-level investor at BlackRock would give presentations or just general commentary, and what I really liked were they were always down to have a conversation about what was going on. And I'm trying to, in my current season with Ship 30 and other entrepreneurial things, recognize the power of consistently talking out your ideas with other people and kind of straw Manning, steel Manning them, getting their feedback on it, because the best investors at BlackRock, they always were going around to different people and stress testing their views. So if they had an idea, it would be, "Hey, I'm gonna go talk to 10 people and figure out why they agree or disagree," and I think that goes beyond just working in markets. I think if you're writing about an idea, you can present that idea to a bunch of other people. I think if you're unsure of something, I always try to talk to people about it, because they're going to be able to point out the holes in my thinking. Yeah, those are, I'd say, the biggest positive takeaways I had on on working at BlackRock: learning the fundamentals, the benefits of a small team, and then understanding the power of conversation for talking out your ideas.
Now, on the negative side, I'd say the first one was kind of realizing that a lot of finance and a lot of people who think that they have a good understanding of the market or claim to are kind of just making it all up. And working for, uh, obviously some of the most talented investors in the world, they still weren't really sure on 95% of the things they were doing. I think they're more educated and had more of an edge than the average investor, but still, I thought that these guys, when I'd get in there, would have this big powerful understanding of the way things worked or the way things were going to unfold, and I, I kind of quickly realized that was not true. And that's not necessarily a bad thing or a knock on them. I think I just had a different perspective on how the game worked. And the truth is, a lot of people don't really know exactly what's going to happen. And there's two ways you can do that: you can pretend to know what you're going to happen, which is what a lot of people do, and they make these big broad claims like, "This is going up, that's going down," and then you have the Smart Ones who say, "This could happen or this could happen, and here's why I think one of the two are going to."
So another net negative was just seeing how slow things can move inside a big company, and that has totally put me off for either working for another big company ever again or for any company for that matter, or the idea of growing and building some bloat-filled giant company, just because the hoops and ladders you had to jump through to kind of get things going versus within our small team—it was like one conversation and you'd get on to the next thing. So getting to witness that with other teams having to deal with headaches and middle management things like that, I think was another one. And then, honestly, I don't think I have any other net negatives from working there. I guess obviously the negative is that I stopped working there, but that wasn't for any reason to do with that; it was just I had a way better opportunity to build something on my own than I didn't want to pass up.
So to this day, I still keep up with the markets. I'm still reading pretty much the same things I was on a weekly or monthly basis—not every single day, obviously. I still love that world and I'm still kind of immersed in it; I just don't do it as a full-time job, and it's actually made it a little bit more fun to keep up with that stuff because I don't have any real reason to. Right? I think potentially one of the big net positives was realizing that I don't like to do things that I'm instructed to do. I quickly realized that in my time there that I could be working on a project that I really wanted to, and the second it was no longer my idea but someone else's, I would just kind of get, I don't know, turned off. And that's not necessarily a good or bad thing; I think it was just a realization about myself—of I like to have ownership of the things I'm working on, and what I'm being told what to do, I lose enthusiasm. So I guess that's the third one—was getting to quickly realize that my time as a corporate worker was going to be limited. Tons of positives, tons of—I don't even want to say their net negatives. I think there are more negative realizations that led to positive things, right? I had potential beliefs broken or just expectations that weren't either met or I had to reform. I'm still using a ton of the Frameworks there, and I'm still good friends with all the guys on that team, so it worked out really well. It played its role in my first four years, and I'm fairly certain I won't be working for a company ever again, but loved my time there, loved getting to learn, and still getting to put those things in practice today. Boom.
That does it for this ask me anything session. If you have more questions on any of the topics I covered in this video, you can ask them in the comments below, and I'll make sure to get to them either in the next one or I'll probably just follow up with a comment. Other than that, leave a like on the video if you enjoyed these questions, if you enjoyed this format, if you want me to do videos like this more. Throw some topics down as a comment below, and I will ask my Twitter and LinkedIn audience for questions on those. I can do a deeper dive onto any of the things we've talked about. Going to be a long journey on YouTube here, and I plan on making a ton of videos about the things I talked about today. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next video.