The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 583 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Siu: Major crypto exchanges are actively seeking performance marketing deals
“Finance depends on like, you know, I think there are a lot of crypto companies reaching out to us right now. A lot of the biggest exchanges, they all want to do pay for performance and, you know, there's money in crypto.”
AppSumo's TidyCal generates $3,000 per day in profit on lifetime pricing
“So we launched tidycal.com maybe two years ago, and that's doing 3000 dollars in profit a day at 29 dollars for life.”
Isenberg details his ACP framework to validate products through niche communities
“So I have this funnel that I talk about, which is like, it's called the ACP funnel audience community product. So, I usually start with an audience. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Build up, like, it also allows you to be clearer about What it is, like how to posi…”
Isenberg: Founders should build specialized AI applications rather than core platforms
“And I think in the past I would be like, I want to create the Shopify, but now I'm kind of like, no, no, I just want to create the, like the Klaviyo. I want to build the app on top of that.”
Torenberg: Turpentine B2B podcasts monetize well with under 1,000 listeners
“We've created. You know, just in the last few months, I think we have like a top three CFO podcast or chief people officer podcast. They don't have a ton of listeners. So, you know, under a thousand per episode, but they monetize really well because people wan…”
Torenberg: Turpentine reaches $2M run rate on 350,000 monthly downloads
“We're doing about 350,000 downloads a month across 13 shows, which is not huge. Like some shows, you know, my first million does is bigger than all of our shows put together probably, but we're at about two million run rate probably because the shows monetize …”
Torenberg targets taking home $1M from Turpentine in 2024
“I want turpentine to I want a million dollars in my bank account as a result of, you know, next year turpentine.”
Isenberg prioritizes Canadian hiring to leverage 35% currency discount
“We hired some exceptional Canadians in twenty-twenty-three and I want to do more of it. Obviously continue to still hire in the US, but only for select high impact roles because I'd love to save that 35% and put that into a premium domain or put that into mark…”
Isenberg: Trimmed Google stock position to reallocate into Microsoft
“I had a bigger stake in Google and trimmed it a little bit. Roy, Royal Bank, and I trimmed it because of And put it into Microsoft basically.”
Trends.vc split-tests emails and prioritizes unique clicks over minimizing unsubscribes
“It's even to the point where we split test each Email that goes out. Since every email goes out is split tested, maybe once or twice a month, we have to make the decision between do we go for, okay, this email generated a lot of unsubscribes relative to anothe…”
Late Checkout builds unconventional software designs to retain users against incumbent copying
“What I encourage people to do, and a lot of the software we build actually at late checkout is this like the bit out there stuff, because we think that that's the stuff that's gonna linger in people's brains and create lasting impressions. And even if a large …”
Barry: If AI could have written it, it is not worth publishing
“Especially with writing being done by AI right now, a filter that I like to use is if I'm writing something, could AI have written this? If yes, it's probably not worth me publishing.”
Pompliano: Bay Area Times reached 260,000 subscribers in five months
“It launched in February of 20, 23. By May, we had 20,000 subscribers. Today it has over 260,000 subscribers. So 12 X growth in four or five months.”
Diego Perez: Wisdom Ventures aims to fund non-addictive social media
“When we first created wisdom ventures, that was a lot of the conversation was like, we were, we're hoping to invest in that next generation of social media that can help connect people without all these addictive, like byproducts.”
Clouse: Guests without built-in YouTube pull get audio-only episodes
“If we don't think that the guest will have significant pull with a unknown, you know, to a new Viewer on YouTube. We don't make a video episode out of it. We basically make it audio only and then save our resources for video specific creators.”
Huber: No operational roles or company emails allowed in portfolio companies
“I'm an over-delegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact with any of the customers. I'm not going to have an email address from, for the company. I'm not going to have a job in the company or I'm pissed off.”
Huber: No outside ads on newsletter, all space reserved for own companies
“I don't do any outside advertising on my newsletter. I don't let anybody pay for spots on my newsletter. I take up all my own space really inside of these companies now.”
Chris Hutchins sees 50% subscriber listening rate on Apple, 12% on Spotify
“On Apple, it's like, 50% of the subscribers on Apple listen to an episode on average, and on Spotify, it's like, 12%.”
Hutchins: Sponsor renewal rate is the only podcast metric I track
“The only thing I care about now that this is a business, this is like how we pay our bills. I'm like, are my sponsors renewing? That's the only metric I care about.”
Creators should optimize for 'cash per like' over raw reach
“I want the cash per like to be as high as possible.”
Greg Isenberg reveals his startup Islands received a Facebook acquisition offer
“I just give him an update about, you know, we had this acquisition offer from Facebook and I was so excited.”
Case Kenny refuses to write books without prior podcast audience analytics.
“I don't think there'll ever be a point where I write a book from zero, from scratch. It's always built from analytics, things I've talked about, things that people react well to.”
Campbell: Direct courses to drivers make up under 5% of revenue
“We do have some products that we sell to drivers directly, but honestly, that's probably less than five percent of our revenue, like our courses and coaching. And it's just been really tough for me to sell directly to drivers who frankly, aren't making a lot o…”
Nickson: Posting gimmicks on company accounts protects personal brand equity
“Sometimes it's a little bit gimmicky, you know, like here are 10 apps that you can use to harness the power of generative AI to You know, boost your business or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to post that as a little gimmicky, but I got metaver…”
Roberto Nickson: I Use Media Brands Purely to Drive Distribution for Software Products
“I think for me, like, honestly, Greg, like I like media, I like creating content, but I don't necessarily like the media business. I really love building product, right? Like that's what I've been doing over the last 10 years. And so that, that's kind of reall…”
Isenberg: Dispatch lowers design costs using non-US talent and AI tools
“The reason we're able to do it for so cheap, even though it's like high end design is We use international IE non-US designers and AI enhanced productivity. And we just sort of also we have tons of UI kits that we've created. So it's really just leveraging a l…”
Taba: Late Checkout runs 20- to 90-day trial periods before hiring
“We've developed this system where people can come in and experience the late checkout universe and we can experience them. In this very mutually kind of understood way where we do this quote unquote fit check, and that could last. 20 days. It could last two mo…”
Isenberg: Majority of Late Checkout Product Managers Are Designers
“One of the things we do is our product managers, the majority of them are designers.”
Isenberg: Dropped $30,000 monthly podcast ad revenue to zero
“This podcast was making 30,000 dollars of revenue a month. When my co-host and I Sahil Bloom split up, I was like, I don't want to do ads. So I removed all the ads and I went from 30,000 dollars a month to zero.”
Finkelstein optimizes his daily routine to completely eliminate transition time
“I'm trying to optimize my entire life for no no transition time or low transition time. So I either want to be like full on, you know, like Hustling and building our business at Shopify, or I want to be doing things that give me great, you know, great joy, bei…”
Rogenmoser: Series A investors valued Jasper's founder-led community over metrics
“Honestly, when we raised our Series A, that was, like, a big thing investors always said. Like, maybe, like, more than our, like, numbers or whatever, it's just like, man, Dave is, like, so engaged in the community.”
Josh Dorkin bootstrapped BiggerPockets for eight years with no outside capital
“And I never took a penny from anyone. You know, I started with my four dollar a month hosting and that was the only money I ever applied into that business was the first four bucks and then the next four bucks and the next four bucks, but like beyond that, I b…”
Josh Dorkin refused personal sponsor endorsements hosting the BiggerPockets podcast
“I don't think in hundreds and hundreds of episodes that, that I hosted the BiggerPockets podcast, I don't think I ever did a single endorsement.”
Josh Dorkin worked 100-hour weeks for eight years to build BiggerPockets
“To be honest, I was working a hundred hour weeks for eight years. There was a eight year period where I never did not work. On my company.”
Spartz: Currently reading the equivalent of two books a day
“Right now, I average reading about two books a day equivalent of content.”
Spartz: I use a counter 15,000 times daily to maintain focus
“I get about, 15 to 20,000 clicks a day in to make sure that every single sentence that I'm hearing, I'm processing.”
Postma Launches Mini-Products as Marketing Channels Instead of Ads
“What I like to do is I like to create products like launch mini products as a marketing.”
Autopilot reached 53,000 downloads and $220K ARR days after launch
“Built this Iris, the autopilot app and the autopilot app now has around 53,000 downloads. We launched Yesterday, two days, we launched on Thursday, so we launched a couple days ago, but that app already has 53,000 downloads, zero dollar CAC, all just through t…”
Beshore: Permanent Equity avoids putting debt on portfolio companies
“We're very different than traditional private equity in, in the sense that we don't typically put any debt on the companies.”
Permanent Equity buys companies debt-free and holds them indefinitely
“So what we do is we buy with no intention of selling the business. We typically use no debt in the transaction. We love to keep leadership teams in place. We don't we don't replace the leadership typically, unless there's a sort of acute problem. And we hold i…”
Beshore: Permanent Equity avoids companies needing outside help to succeed
“We always say we're not going to be involved with a company that wouldn't be successful without us.”
Beshore: Permanent Equity typically pays 4x to 6x future cash flow
“So look, we paid three times for a business. We've paid 10 times for a business. Those would kind of be the, I would say, rough, you know, yardstick to use in terms of range. Most of the time we're paying four, five, six times.”
Permanent Equity prefers doing more similar-sized deals over increasingly bigger deals
“You know, I would say the model that we prefer is to grow out, which is you do more deals of similar sizes or in, you know, sort of a similar range, not bigger and bigger deals.”
Bush: Audience engagement stems from posting about one niche for 18 months
“The only reason people are paying attention to that is because I talked about a singular thing pretty much every single day for a year and a half.”
Lavingia: Refuses to invest without novel code or a technical paper
“My investments follow technology. So I cannot invest in something unless there is a paper or unless there is some code that's interesting that hasn't been written in that way before.”
Karnjanaprakorn Plans to Build Holding Company Incubating Ventures Every 12-18 Months
“The way I'm thinking about it is I want to create a similar view, like my own personal holding company within that starter incubate something every 12 to 24 months or 12 to 18 months. First business is content and audience building.”
Isenberg: Personal Holding Companies Yield Happier Lives Than Venture-Backed Startups
“I've never been happier in my life. And I like you, I've done the venture back startup thing, but the personal holding company has been so fun for me
and it's helped me live a happier, healthier and wealthier life.”