Hello and welcome,
You may not be expecting this email. But there is a reason! You signed up to receive updates from the WordPress at danieltenner.com or from swombat.io (via Ghost and possibly Twitter/Revue). Those are both my websites.
I imported the mail lists from those two sites here. If you don’t want to hear from me, simply unsubscribe (link at the bottom), and I will honour your request. Soon after you receive this email, both the WordPress list and the Ghost list will be deleted so you will never hear from me again (unless you sign up again!).
If you do decide to stay, what can you expect to receive?
Here’s my goal:
Once every week or two, I’ll write something about startups, NFTs, crypto, web3, technology, and so on. My heart is with startup founders and other creators. Chances are whatever I write will explore related topics.
I’ll add a brief update on what I’m up to, and pointers to interesting content I’ve published that week, on my Twitter, YouTube or elsewhere. So it will also act as an easy way to stay up to date with what I’m doing.
Without further ado, let’s begin with the first “written piece”. The update comes afterwards.
What speeding up really means for founders
Over the last two decades (and longer, in fact), there has already been a clear trend of tools making developers more efficient. A single full stack developer in 2021 obliterates that same developer in 2001. This has given a huge advantage to smaller startups.
Size (of a team) is not an advantage, and has never been. If they can both do the same amount of work, it’s pretty much always better to have a single person doing something than a whole team – even if that one person is more expensive than an entire team.
With AI, that one person creation engine just became a whole lot better and cheaper, since it requires less technical brilliance to be super-productive with tools like CoPilot and GPT4.
But it’s not just coding that is getting sped up. Everything is. Need to write some boilerplate text? This now takes no time. Need some marketing ideas? Just ask ChatGPT! Need help executing them? It’s right there at your fingertips.
A million marketing consultants are crying out in terror… but they’re not alone. Almost every knowledge-based “services” profession, especially the ones that don’t require physical presence, is likely to be outcompeted within the next couple of years, from marketer to copywriter, translator, editor (video, audio, etc), coach, teacher, community manager, analyst, accountant, lawyer, and so on. The list is pretty much endless.
A dire warning
If you are in one of those professions right now, you have two choices:
1. Be one of the best in the world in your profession, with a public profile (and charming personality) to match. Seth Godin will still get people asking for his marketing advice even if ChatGPT 5 or 6 gives better advice, because people will want to work with him, though his business model might change.
2. Start thinking about what else you could do and start learning what you need to get there. Most likely, your best bet is one or more “side hustles” that have a chance of turning into sustainable businesses that pay you enough to live on.
This may seem a bit dire, but the water is rising fast and I am convinced that most people are going to find themselves drowning within the next 3 months to 3 years, unless something dramatic happens to kill the momentum of AI. Sadly, the likeliest contender for that is a world war, so massive societal disruption, with hundreds of millions of people losing their jobs, is the positive scenario here.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you may have a little bit more time before people can just tell ChatGPT to “build and operate an innovative business for me”. But even that is coming eventually. At the point where that becomes possible, I suspect the definition of “entrepreneur” will either become obsolete or change. But until then, the way to ride the AI wave is, in my opinion, to ensure you use all those tools to minimise the number of people you end up having to employ.
Because remember: a larger team is always slower than a smaller team doing the same work. And in the next few years, the amount of work a single person can do is going to explode in ways we can scarcely imagine.
The Age of the Micro-Startup
So this is the age of the tiny team with a huge AI-powered impact. It’s also the age when incumbents like Google and Facebook and even Apple will face competition on a level they cannot fathom, as millions of AI-augmented out-of-work knowledge workers try their hand at creating new disruptive businesses, empowered to do so with very little funding and no teams.
Most will fail to become huge success stories, as usual, but with micro-teams, the bar for success is much lower, and so I expect larger companies will experience a “death by a thousand cuts” as masses of micro-startups eat at the long tail of their business models.
On the corporate side, there will be layoffs as margins dwindle. But these layoffs will themselves feed the swarm of micro-startups. Perhaps megacorps will find a way to adapt. Perhaps not. We’ll see.
Enough for this week. Next week, I’ll talk about the new, unpredictable, and disruptive kinds of emergent developments we can expect as secondary AI impacts over the next few years. If that’s of interest… stick around :-)
The weekly update
This week I’m actually on holiday in Northern Ireland (great time to start a Substack, I know). So there won’t be that much movement from me. That said, I have taken some time to record some interesting shots for a new educational video I’m making… coming soon on my YouTube channel, about how to generate business ideas more easily.
Investibles.xyz is also ploughing forwards. The first campaign (Oratis) is working to generate interest from its user base, and we are also looking into finding the next startup(s) to onboard, and also refining out own, evolving understanding of what it is Investibles is about. Here’s the weekly video update about that:
That’s it for this week.
If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know - I believe you can do it by simply replying to this email.
Have a lovely week,
Daniel