What does the ideal educational path look like? Pushing yourself through high school, attending a prestigious university, finishing top of your class, getting a high-paying job? Is that the guaranteed path to success?

Ok, let’s ask a different question: what does success look like?

I can give you my answer, but I guarantee that that’s different from yours. Hell, it’s a lot different from my answer 6 months, 1 year, 5 years ago. I’ve been digging into it as I’ve gone about my journey.

I wasn’t terribly ambitious in my youth. I went to a state university after getting decent grades in high school. I knew I wanted to be a programmer and I needed a Computer Science degree. That piece of paper was the proof I needed, so I went after it.

I ran into a lot of trouble along the way. Undiagnosed ADHD played a huge roll in that. 7 years later though, I got that degree and then went on to start my career.

10 years into my career, having taken the safe path the whole time, a global pandemic hit and I started re-evaluating my life. I discovered the ADHD and a side of Autism. A few months later, I quit my job and decided I needed something different. I had an idea and I realized that if I wanted to get where I wanted to be, things needed to change.

In true ADHD fashion, I made the change happen right that minute. Left my job with no notice and decided to figure it out along the way. I saw a world full of opportunities that I had missed and I tried to grab them all at once.

It didn’t go well. But I had lived the life that everyone told me I needed to live and for the first time in a long time, I was figuring out the life I wanted to live. Had no clue what the hell that looked like, but I was determined to figure it out.

I was going to be an entrepreneur.

So I read everything I could find. I researched and experimented and tried. I did all sorts of shit.

And I realized that most of it didn’t matter. The more I tried, the more I failed. The more I thought I understood, the more I realized how little I knew. The harder I pushed, the slower I moved.

I’ve talked a lot about my first startup, so I’m not going to go into details here. But I’ll say this: my mental health was rocked. I didn’t have the support system I needed, I didn’t have the help I needed, and the resources I found didn’t fit my situation or my needs.

So I knew I wanted to help others avoid that. I ended up in a dark place before I shut things down to re-evaluate. I had to. I attached my entire self-worth to that startup, so shutting it down was painful.

One thing that I learned about myself: I was interested in teaching. I wanted to help others by sharing what I’ve learned along the way. I had a revelation: the longer removed from success given entrepreneurs were, the less useful their advice was. So instead of learning from the people who had done it before, I wanted to learn from those who were doing it. I fell into the Build In Public movement headfirst, because I was able to see things from the perspectives of the trenches.

I’ve been working on courses for the past year. I launched my first course almost a year ago, after finishing up the On Deck Course Creator fellowship. I called it Supercharge Your Time and focused on teaching automation principles. As a software engineer, I wanted to help people see how systems worked and how they could build systems that would let them focus their time on what only they could do. It was a good experience, but then I ended up taking on a full-time job with a startup and didn’t run another cohort. But I also wasn’t completely satisfied with the course. There was more to it than that. Automation is one great way to save time, but there were other courses on automation that were more actionable. I dug into details and theories that students didn’t quite need. But the time I felt the best: when I was helping the students work through their specific problems.

It’s really tough to take a decade of experience in system design and distill it down for people in an actionable manner. But on a 1-1 basis, I can help people design systems that they can understand, because I can use the language that they use. It’s harder to create a general framework for people.

So I’ve been taking all of that experience, and working on general systems that people can use. I’ve created a ton of content, had multiple attempts and ideas at courses that fizzled out when I tried to get them going, and continued to distill things down as much as possible.

Then I hit on a few things, all around the same time. I realized that content is currently converging - it’s all turning into a homogeneous blob that the algorithm likes. People see what the algorithms like and their content converges on that point. Platforms see this happening and tweak the algorithm. And the cycle continues.

That’s what happens when we all try to figure things out on our own. We all hit similar answers on what’s successful in the moment. And when you are trying to focus on short-term outcomes, that’s inevitable. And early on as an entrepreneur, it’s necessary to figure things out as quickly as possible, in order to get to a place of minimal stability.

One way to hit that stability: raise money. That’s what I thought the answer was at first. If I wanted to launch a startup, I needed to raise money, right? But I wanted to raise money in order to hire people who knew their parts. I wanted to pay for expertise. Barring that, I just needed to learn it myself and do it if I couldn’t afford to pay people for it.

It quickly occurred to me that this can be a big advantage. By having basic knowledge and skills in all areas of entrepreneurship, I was able to see where I could combine efforts. I just had to break things down into first principles and think about why I was doing each part. And after learning a bunch about each part, I hit on another revelation.

There are three components to an internet-native business that scales efficiently:

1. The Product - this is something that you can produce at scale where the cost of production stays constant or rises at a fraction of the rate as sales can rise. This is what most people focus on when trying to create online businesses. SaaS products, info products, online courses, etc. The goal here is something that scales effectively.

2. Education - Because there are so many different things online right now, you need to educate people about your product. Most people just put out a ton of content that brings people into their product. As they go on, they tend to build systems around their product that brings in qualified leads, educates them about the product, and keeps them around until they are ready to buy. Typically, this takes the form of an email list. Granted, it takes a lot of time to build up a large enough list to be effective, so this takes place over a long period of time.

3. Media - Educational content needs amplified somehow. Most creators and startups rely on either traditional media outlets or social media outlets to amplify their content that then feeds into the mailing lists or their other educational content, that then leads into their products.

Most people start by focusing on the product aspect. That’s the easiest part, especially for technical founders. It’s the thing they know best. Usually, the product is the main idea. As an entrepreneur, you see an opportunity, and you start with the product. Then you tend to add in the education and the media.

There’s a saying that first-time founders focus on the product and second-time founders focus on distribution. That’s exactly why. It’s a lot harder.

But what if it didn’t have to be?

As I started building out distribution systems, I started thinking about what could happen when we start sharing distribution networks. Normally, we pay for distribution, via advertising, placements, or we engage in activities like SEO. But when we start combining our distribution, our networks start growing exponentially and bad leads are recycled into good leads for others.

The internet has shown us the impacts of distribution at scale. We just tend to believe we need astronomical numbers to be successful. But the reality is that more targeted distribution can achieve outsized results with much smaller numbers. There are several companies that have distribution advantages due to being large and early. They have more data that they can use to hone their edge.

But that’s not an invincible moat: it can be defeated by better, more complete data.

And higher trust.

With Build In Public University, I want to provide support mechanisms for the Education and Media components. We’ll offer a number of options for recording and distributing content and other material along collectively owned distribution channels. And there will be no need to maintain exclusivity. As entrepreneurs and creators build out their channels, they’ll be able to continue to publish on ours and theirs as well.

It takes time to build up skills and trust. By providing a high-trust environment that helps creators and founders build up the skills they need, we’ll be able to offer the scaffolding that they need in order to get started.

And by offering access to experts that can help them level up their skills, they will be able to reach success levels much much faster. I’m in the process of coordinating with several other creators and experts in a number of different areas to bring them in as the professors for the initial class of Build In Public University.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about, though. How can I balance accessibility and sustainability? I want to open the university to anyone who needs it, but I also have to make sure that the experts who become professors and everyone who puts time and effort in are fairly compensated. So I’m planning on experimenting with various mechanisms to separate the payment mechanisms from the students.

One such mechanism is writing on Mirror. I’m planning on writing various essays that will be available for sale as NFTs. Each sale will allow a student to attend the university for free. It will include lifetime community access, 5 hours of 1-1 time with university professors in the 1st month, and 1 hour each month after that.

If you have a student that you would like to help attend, you can purchase one of these NFTs and send me a DM on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/leo_guinan

Or, if you just want to help someone, I will be setting up a waiting list for people interested in attending and each time one sells, I’ll simply invite the next person on the list.

Stay tuned: I’ll be announcing the first group of professors in the coming weeks. The goal is to have a trial cohort run through the base curriculum in August and then have monthly cohorts after that. In addition to the cohort with the main content, each month will feature lessons taught be the various professors that I will be bringing onboard, covering a number of different topics related to building businesses.

I’m excited to embark on this journey. By building a solid base of entrepreneurs building on their unique traits, we can begin to take back the convergent internet and turn it back into the divergent, unique, exciting experience that it used to be, while still maintaining the power of it.

Won’t you join us?

What does the ideal educational path look like? Pushing yourself through high school, attending a prestigious university, finishing top of your class, getting a high-paying job? Is that the guaranteed path to success?

Ok, let’s ask a different question: what does success look like?

I can give you my answer, but I guarantee that that’s different from yours. Hell, it’s a lot different from my answer 6 months, 1 year, 5 years ago. I’ve been digging into it as I’ve gone about my journey.

I wasn’t terribly ambitious in my youth. I went to a state university after getting decent grades in high school. I knew I wanted to be a programmer and I needed a Computer Science degree. That piece of paper was the proof I needed, so I went after it.

I ran into a lot of trouble along the way. Undiagnosed ADHD played a huge roll in that. 7 years later though, I got that degree and then went on to start my career.

10 years into my career, having taken the safe path the whole time, a global pandemic hit and I started re-evaluating my life. I discovered the ADHD and a side of Autism. A few months later, I quit my job and decided I needed something different. I had an idea and I realized that if I wanted to get where I wanted to be, things needed to change.

In true ADHD fashion, I made the change happen right that minute. Left my job with no notice and decided to figure it out along the way. I saw a world full of opportunities that I had missed and I tried to grab them all at once.

It didn’t go well. But I had lived the life that everyone told me I needed to live and for the first time in a long time, I was figuring out the life I wanted to live. Had no clue what the hell that looked like, but I was determined to figure it out.

I was going to be an entrepreneur.

So I read everything I could find. I researched and experimented and tried. I did all sorts of shit.

And I realized that most of it didn’t matter. The more I tried, the more I failed. The more I thought I understood, the more I realized how little I knew. The harder I pushed, the slower I moved.

I’ve talked a lot about my first startup, so I’m not going to go into details here. But I’ll say this: my mental health was rocked. I didn’t have the support system I needed, I didn’t have the help I needed, and the resources I found didn’t fit my situation or my needs.

So I knew I wanted to help others avoid that. I ended up in a dark place before I shut things down to re-evaluate. I had to. I attached my entire self-worth to that startup, so shutting it down was painful.

One thing that I learned about myself: I was interested in teaching. I wanted to help others by sharing what I’ve learned along the way. I had a revelation: the longer removed from success given entrepreneurs were, the less useful their advice was. So instead of learning from the people who had done it before, I wanted to learn from those who were doing it. I fell into the Build In Public movement headfirst, because I was able to see things from the perspectives of the trenches.

I’ve been working on courses for the past year. I launched my first course almost a year ago, after finishing up the On Deck Course Creator fellowship. I called it Supercharge Your Time and focused on teaching automation principles. As a software engineer, I wanted to help people see how systems worked and how they could build systems that would let them focus their time on what only they could do. It was a good experience, but then I ended up taking on a full-time job with a startup and didn’t run another cohort. But I also wasn’t completely satisfied with the course. There was more to it than that. Automation is one great way to save time, but there were other courses on automation that were more actionable. I dug into details and theories that students didn’t quite need. But the time I felt the best: when I was helping the students work through their specific problems.

It’s really tough to take a decade of experience in system design and distill it down for people in an actionable manner. But on a 1-1 basis, I can help people design systems that they can understand, because I can use the language that they use. It’s harder to create a general framework for people.

So I’ve been taking all of that experience, and working on general systems that people can use. I’ve created a ton of content, had multiple attempts and ideas at courses that fizzled out when I tried to get them going, and continued to distill things down as much as possible.

Then I hit on a few things, all around the same time. I realized that content is currently converging - it’s all turning into a homogeneous blob that the algorithm likes. People see what the algorithms like and their content converges on that point. Platforms see this happening and tweak the algorithm. And the cycle continues.

That’s what happens when we all try to figure things out on our own. We all hit similar answers on what’s successful in the moment. And when you are trying to focus on short-term outcomes, that’s inevitable. And early on as an entrepreneur, it’s necessary to figure things out as quickly as possible, in order to get to a place of minimal stability.

One way to hit that stability: raise money. That’s what I thought the answer was at first. If I wanted to launch a startup, I needed to raise money, right? But I wanted to raise money in order to hire people who knew their parts. I wanted to pay for expertise. Barring that, I just needed to learn it myself and do it if I couldn’t afford to pay people for it.

It quickly occurred to me that this can be a big advantage. By having basic knowledge and skills in all areas of entrepreneurship, I was able to see where I could combine efforts. I just had to break things down into first principles and think about why I was doing each part. And after learning a bunch about each part, I hit on another revelation.

There are three components to an internet-native business that scales efficiently:

1. The Product - this is something that you can produce at scale where the cost of production stays constant or rises at a fraction of the rate as sales can rise. This is what most people focus on when trying to create online businesses. SaaS products, info products, online courses, etc. The goal here is something that scales effectively.

2. Education - Because there are so many different things online right now, you need to educate people about your product. Most people just put out a ton of content that brings people into their product. As they go on, they tend to build systems around their product that brings in qualified leads, educates them about the product, and keeps them around until they are ready to buy. Typically, this takes the form of an email list. Granted, it takes a lot of time to build up a large enough list to be effective, so this takes place over a long period of time.

3. Media - Educational content needs amplified somehow. Most creators and startups rely on either traditional media outlets or social media outlets to amplify their content that then feeds into the mailing lists or their other educational content, that then leads into their products.

Most people start by focusing on the product aspect. That’s the easiest part, especially for technical founders. It’s the thing they know best. Usually, the product is the main idea. As an entrepreneur, you see an opportunity, and you start with the product. Then you tend to add in the education and the media.

There’s a saying that first-time founders focus on the product and second-time founders focus on distribution. That’s exactly why. It’s a lot harder.

But what if it didn’t have to be?

As I started building out distribution systems, I started thinking about what could happen when we start sharing distribution networks. Normally, we pay for distribution, via advertising, placements, or we engage in activities like SEO. But when we start combining our distribution, our networks start growing exponentially and bad leads are recycled into good leads for others.

The internet has shown us the impacts of distribution at scale. We just tend to believe we need astronomical numbers to be successful. But the reality is that more targeted distribution can achieve outsized results with much smaller numbers. There are several companies that have distribution advantages due to being large and early. They have more data that they can use to hone their edge.

But that’s not an invincible moat: it can be defeated by better, more complete data.

And higher trust.

With Build In Public University, I want to provide support mechanisms for the Education and Media components. We’ll offer a number of options for recording and distributing content and other material along collectively owned distribution channels. And there will be no need to maintain exclusivity. As entrepreneurs and creators build out their channels, they’ll be able to continue to publish on ours and theirs as well.

It takes time to build up skills and trust. By providing a high-trust environment that helps creators and founders build up the skills they need, we’ll be able to offer the scaffolding that they need in order to get started.

And by offering access to experts that can help them level up their skills, they will be able to reach success levels much much faster. I’m in the process of coordinating with several other creators and experts in a number of different areas to bring them in as the professors for the initial class of Build In Public University.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about, though. How can I balance accessibility and sustainability? I want to open the university to anyone who needs it, but I also have to make sure that the experts who become professors and everyone who puts time and effort in are fairly compensated. So I’m planning on experimenting with various mechanisms to separate the payment mechanisms from the students.

One such mechanism is writing on Mirror. I’m planning on writing various essays that will be available for sale as NFTs. Each sale will allow a student to attend the university for free. It will include lifetime community access, 5 hours of 1-1 time with university professors in the 1st month, and 1 hour each month after that.

If you have a student that you would like to help attend, you can purchase one of these NFTs and send me a DM on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/leo_guinan

Or, if you just want to help someone, I will be setting up a waiting list for people interested in attending and each time one sells, I’ll simply invite the next person on the list.

Stay tuned: I’ll be announcing the first group of professors in the coming weeks. The goal is to have a trial cohort run through the base curriculum in August and then have monthly cohorts after that. In addition to the cohort with the main content, each month will feature lessons taught be the various professors that I will be bringing onboard, covering a number of different topics related to building businesses.

I’m excited to embark on this journey. By building a solid base of entrepreneurs building on their unique traits, we can begin to take back the convergent internet and turn it back into the divergent, unique, exciting experience that it used to be, while still maintaining the power of it.

Won’t you join us?