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 10 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
Pre-orders on sketchy landing pages are the ultimate proof of demand
“If people are willing to spend 30 bucks on a product they've never heard, tasted, smelled, whatever, that doesn't exist on a landing page that looks like it was a scam, that is probably a pretty good sign that this is a thing that people really, really want.”
Solo founders using AI now have an advantage over multi-person teams
“Someone that has a big, or has like a strong opinion on a product they want to make, or a direction the world is moving, They're almost at an advantage with these AI tools relative to like a small or even medium sized team, because if you are someone that like…”
Founders should build in domains where their interest is top 0.1%
“I think that generally people should probably go to wherever they are, like, on the frontier and they are among the most interested, like, top .1% of people interested in a topic. I think that that frontier for most people is where you end up having a lot of g…”
Becoming a top 1% user of frontier AI models is high leverage
“Playing with just the frontier models, Claude, GPT, Gemini you know, it just makes a lot of sense, in my view, and becoming a, like, top one percent user, there's probably a few things that you can do that will be as high leverage as that.”
Mares: Core barriers to building CPG brands are steadily falling
“I think that there's all of these barriers to building CPG brands. It's basically like, Can you make the product? Can you design it? Can you build a good brand? Can you market it well? And I think that the barriers are just more and more coming down.”
Justin Mares grew Kettle & Fire to over $100M in annual revenue
“By the end of the episode, people will understand the day one steps, really the day zero steps that I took to start Kettle and Fire, which is now a nine figure annual business.”
Mares generated $500 in bone broth pre-orders from $250 in Bing ads
“After the entire test was over we had about a 30% conversion rate where people ended up clicking the order now button, and so over the course of the two-week test that I ran to this janky checkout flow, to this bad landing page made almost 500 dollars in reven…”
Mares offered early pre-order customers a 50% discount to wait for manufacturing
“I sent this email to every single person that had placed an order and basically just said like, Hey, I'm the founder of the bone Brasco. I wanted to reach out and say, I'm very excited. We don't have the product in stock because I'd never made it and we had no…”