I write this newsletter to share things that I’m working on and thinking about. A little about me:
I own and manage an agency in Toronto called August. We design and build digital products. We spend about 80% of our time on client work, and the balance on the internal projects. I also invest in real estate with my two brothers.
some thoughts
Today is the first day of the rest of your life. It’s also the first day of 2022. And I’m going to be honest. I stayed up late last night, was woken up at 5:30AM by my two kids, and haven’t been very productive.
So this newsletter will be a bit shorter than usual.
Two quick points that I’ll share here as an update to last month’s musings on bitcoin-backed loans.
First, Ledger has launched a card that can pull from a bitcoin-backed line of credit. This is the future: bitcoin as your savings account, and a bitcoin-backed line of credit as your chequing account.
Second, Ledn has launched a bitcoin-backed mortgage. Here’s how it works.
Let’s imagine a house priced at $1,000,000. With this product, you can stake $1,000,000 worth of bitcoin to access a bitcoin-backed mortgage of $1,000,000 to cover the full cost of the house.
The house then also becomes security for the mortgage so that we’re really dealing with a bitcoin-and-house-backed mortgage.
This might not sound too interesting in our cheap credit environment, but it could become a very big deal if and when rates start to rise. That’s when bitcoiners will start buying all the real estate.
business stuff
I think that I’m pretty good at coming up with product ideas. I’m much less good at launching and scaling them successfully. In fact, I’ve never done the latter. As far as I can remember, I’ve only really made money for myself—outside of having a job—through services, like those that August provides, and a real estate assembly. (I’m not counting passive investments here, so my early bet on bitcoin doesn’t count, nor am I counting anything under five figures, so events I’ve hosted and other smaller hustles don’t count either.)
I enjoy coming up with these product ideas, branding them, working through their user experience, and building them. I’ve done a lot of that over the past fifteen years. But, too often, I don’t ship. And when I do ship, I generally start overestimating competitive threats and lose focus and momentum. It doesn’t take much for me to convince myself that I’m climbing the wrong mountain and that I should step back to pick another one rather than trudge forward.
I’ve collected a long list of company names, logos, marketing sites, and products that look great, work well, and make no money.
I’ve gotten from 0 to 0.5 a few times, but never quite all the way 1. Ideating is well within my comfort zone; shipping and selling isn’t.
I say all of that to say this: I’ve recently gotten much more interested in the idea of getting from 0 to having a product shipped and $1+ in real (non-friend) revenue as cheaply and quickly as possible.
Skip the brand id, fancy landing page, and React web app. For many (most?) of my ideas, a name and a no-code product is probably enough to get that far.
If this sounds like I’m rediscovering the idea of a minimum viable product, it should, and three people have helped get me there.
The first is Sahil Lavingia, who’s book The Minimalist Entrepreneur is all about this idea. Chapters 3 and 4 are titled “Build as Little as Possible” and “Sell to Your First Hundred Customers”. That’s what I’m talking about.
The second is Pieter Levels, who first built and launched his most successful product, Nomad List, as an editable Google Sheet. His book Make is also all about this idea.
Based on what he’s published online, he appears to be building and maintaining about ten small projects and generating annual revenue of ~$4.5 million for an operation run by himself and a few part-time contractors. Not bad.
The third is Jakob Greenfeld, who’s launched seventeen small products—at, I believe, a pace of one per month—in order to learn about and get better at ideation, marketing, and product development. It’s been fascinating following his experiments in real time.
Today is the first day of 2022. I wonder how cheaply and quickly I can get to having a product shipped and $1+ in real (non-friend) revenue.
investment stuff
As we continue to wait for our zoning certificate for FH1, which is late, we’ve started looking at some new potential projects.
In the last month, we’ve had a conditional offer accepted for a midrise site in Etobicoke that could be interesting. We’re now working our way through a due diligence process to determine its viability before our offer firms up, at which point our deposit would become non-refundable.
As part of this process, we need to determine 1) what we could build (density), 2) what it would cost (expenses), and 3) what new units would sell or rent for (revenue).
If that exercise gets us to a good place, we’ll then need to get some studies completed for our lender as a condition of financing. These include a Phase 1 and 2 Environmental Site Assessment, as well as geotechnical and hydrological investigations to get a sense of the soil and groundwater conditions.
Also, an appraisal validating the current value of the site and projecting its future value once its been rezoned.
This is all pretty straightforward but does require that we move quickly to get everything done before our conditional period expires. The last thing you want to do is have to pass on a good deal because you weren’t able to get your ducks lined up in time.
Separately, the public property I mentioned in last month’s newsletter was Delta Secondary School in Hamilton. The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board put it up for a sale through a Request for Offers (RFO) process in early September. It’s a cool site and heritage building, and could have made for a cool adaptive reuse / condo conversion project, but I couldn’t drum up enough investor interest in time to pull the trigger. Most of the people I know with money are real estate people, and I avoided them for this one as, again, it was an open RFO process. That might have been the wrong move.
It’ll be interesting to see who ends up buying it and at what price, and what they end up doing with it.
stuff I’ve enjoyed
This is some of the content I’ve come across over the past month that I’ve really enjoyed.
Article: I’ve been thinking a lot more about the need for competent, powerful, disagreeable individuals in government to get things done. I’m very concerned about our diminishing state capacity at all levels of government and think that it does not get addressed and reversed without the introduction of strong operators. This is my great man theory of government. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has written a short piece on this topic that introduces a new framework—the bulldozer vs. vetocracy divide—and, well, you’re just going to have to read it to learn what that means.
Book: I just finished re-reading my favourite book of the year, “Where’s my flying car?”. I first read this book in the spring as an ebook, loved it, despite not loving ebooks in general, and emailed the author to explore the idea of getting a printed version published. He told me that Stripe Press was already on the job, and they delivered! Beyond its physical form, which I really appreciate, the print version is improved with a cool cover, better content structure and organization, and some new material. This book explores the future that could have been, if it weren’t for our collective failure of nerve and imagination. I liked it so much that I think I’ll write a proper book review that I can link to next month.
Podcast: I’m going to plug a podcast episode that I recently recorded. It was for the Commercial Real Estate podcast on the introduction of inclusionary zoning in Toronto. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out and let me know how I did.
Video: Remember that cool Chobani commercial I linked to last month? I’ve since discovered that it’s an excerpt of a slightly longer video. Take a look and imagine how much better off we would all be if we spent a bit more time imagining and working toward a radically better future. For too many people, a better future looks kind of like the present but with some preferred policy changes implemented. Let’s takes this further. What does the best possible sci-fi version of 2100 look like, and how can we achieve it?
***
And that’s it for now. I hope you have a great January and an even better year.
Feel free to reply to this email with any comments or questions. I love chatting about everything mentioned above.