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Life:

✓ Lost 7kg (86→79)
✓ Saw JUSTICE live twice
✓...

It’s been a rollercoaster, with amazing and terrible...

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• Gaming performance is incredible. Even when it gets...

Crazy fun. Now I...

I enjoyed the first season already, but this one is even better.

It's a...

Though WWW/Iris remains my favorite, really loved the intensity and...

I love being a power user of my own tool, and "Overthinking...

Some sort of AGI is now available, and creating SaaS (or any software, really) is...

It has awakened my inner...

Great mix of humor and drama, and the story keeps surprising me with...

Just over 1 year ago, I got my first sim racing...

By observing its power users, my co-founder Francesco and I distilled our learnings into a series of insights on how to grow on Twitter.

We put all of this in Typefully's welcome email to help new users get started, and they seem to really appreciate it. This is the kind of responses it gets:

Truth be told, I've been on Twitter for many years, and for most of this time, I hovered around the 1k followers' mark — so this welcome email / tiny Twitter course is something I wish I could read years ago.

I've been asked to share it by some older users who didn't receive it, so I'm publishing it here in its entirety. Enjoy.

1. Be authentic and unique

Don’t look for growth hacks, but instead leverage your unique knowledge and share insights about your industry, passions, or any topic you want to share.

Most of the fastest-growing accounts we see are the ones that are genuinely interesting.

In fact, I often write drafts on mobile like they're personal notes: I don't think "what can go viral on Twitter" but "what is genuinely interesting to me and worth sharing"? I write first and foremost with myself in mind as an audience.

Typefully is a Progressive Web App so it can be installed on mobile to fit this use-case perfectly.

2. Be consistent

With my co-founder Francesco, we've seen time and time again that the accounts with the highest engagement tweet more regularly.

People are busy, and if you only tweet very rarely, your followers might forget about you and not engage with your tweets.

I'm not advocating tweeting a lot, mind you, but just consistently.

As an example of how Typefully can help you be more consistent, there's a Streaks chart that helps you gauge your consistency through the year.

A regular tweeting schedule will also help you be consistent. These days I try to resist the urge to always tweet instantly, and queue tweets to make sure they reach a wider audience.

3. Build in public

If you’re working on something, this is the best time ever to share it.

More and more people every day are quitting their jobs to start their ventures, or dream about doing that. Building your product, art, startup or anything else in public is a great way to grow on Twitter.

Even a simple tweet like the one below (that took seconds to write) has great engagement, and brought more than 600 people on my profile, to find out who's behind those numbers.

4. Optimize for profile visits

Viral tweets with memes can get thousands of retweets, but they don’t always translate into tons of new followers.

In my experience, instead, the following types of tweets get you many more profile visits, and therefore followers:

• A tweet about something that is unique to you, or shows your skills
• A tweet about an impressive accomplishment
• Insights and learnings from your specific experience

Make sure to review your tweets to find those gems that have a lot of profile clicks, pushing your “conversion rate” high (there's a dedicated chart in Typefully).

Bonus: having a great and effective profile bio that explains what kind of value you bring will also help a great deal in converting people to followers. Make sure to tweak your bio and see if the conversion rate changes.

5. Use threads (but not too much)

Writing a thread in Typefully is as easy as adding some extra newlines between your paragraphs — and threads are a great way to compile great content or your thoughts in a single “post”.

As I wrote in a recent note, in many ways threads are the new blog posts.

Use them with caution though since we're reaching a saturation point where lots of threads aren't that valuable, and many people are growing tired of them.

6. Engage your followers

If you look at the Tweets table below, you’ll see that some tweets have more replies than the others (first columns) and a higher engagement rate (last column).

Usually, tweets are more engaging when they have questions, thought-provoking ideas, or trigger follow-ups.

These tweets create genuine engagement, which the Twitter algorithm favors. Don’t just try to be a loud voice, create a conversation.

7. No walls of texts

Imagine someone scrolling their Twitter timeline quickly. Will they stop for a “wall of text tweet”, or will they stop for something that is formatted in a way that grabs their attention?

The best tweets have great layouts, so formatting shouldn’t be an afterthought.

David Perell is a master of this. He formats his text so that you have a clear hook on why you should read the rest, or in a very symmetrical and structured way will grab your attention when scrolling a messy timeline.

8. Find your style

You can recognize a Julian Shapiro thread or Jack Butcher tweet without looking at their avatar or user name.

Why? Because they have a unique and recognizable voice, and that is expressed both in their choice of words and in their use of media and attachments.

I probably don't need to tell you who wrote this tweet (or at least I don't if we're in the same bubble):

That's it.

In the end, be you (specifically you), find your unique voice and style, create real lasting value, engage your audience, leverage this unique weird format (tweets) where well-formatted condensed ideas flourish.

The meme below comes to mind in this particular context, of course replacing the IQ axis with the amount of knowledge one accumulates when learning:

• when you start and know nothing, you only make very simple assumptions and come up with simple solutions;
• the more you learn, the more your start adding complexity to your ideas and projects, you try everything, you iterate on your work without giving too much thought to what to discard, simplify, or remake;
• finally, if and when you become an expert, you go back at simple solutions because you can now see beyond the complexity, you can induct (more on this later) universal principles, and you can ignore counter-productive solutions masked as help.
  

That last point, the unlearning process, naturally follows the learning part because as beginners we intuitively focus on “accumulating” knowledge rather than finding patterns and discovering universal principles.

You become an expert when you start crystallizing knowledge into those simple core principles from which everything else stems.

It’s like shifting from a deduction mindset to an induction one:

• when you start, you learn a ton of stuff and memorize principles and rules to follow; when you apply them, you deduct solutions to your problems based on these rules and laws you learned;
• when you’re finally starting to master the new skills, you use your new “muscle memory” and automatic behaviors to infer principles and rules on your own and find patterns that are meaningful to you.

Masters of their crafts come up with principles and rules themselves.

For example with programming, it’s common for beginners’ code to be convoluted and hard to understand. My co-founder Francesco (an expert full stack developer) often corrects me to simplify my code and remove useless complexity. In fact producing clean, simple, and reusable components is one of the most satisfying things to be able to do for a beginner developer.

As another even more personal example, I’ve spent years studying, learning, and researching how stories are developed out of personal interest. I’ve read McKee, Truby, and the rest of them and took copious notes about storytelling. I finally started mastering some little aspects of storytelling (but I'm still as far from an expert as one can be) when I put aside most of the notions and started seeing the bigger picture, reasoning from “first story principles” myself (what drives almost all stories? Why? What universal principles do I personally find the be true?) or coming up with my own principles. And you can come up with this kind of insights only if you can put aside the theory you've learned.

One final thought: in the learning process, projects often become complex and convoluted. Trying to improve them is a burden and sometimes counterproductive.

When I tried just starting from scratch, the work usually took half the time, with results that were much cleaner and better in any way.

You shouldn’t ever be afraid to start over; it’s almost always for the better and will help clarify and solidify new knowledge and expertise.

And no, I'm not talking about threads like "I'm 17, here are 17 things I've learned", but thoughtful or thought-provoking threads like this one about acting on advice by Julian — quality content that took a lot of effort to write.

I believe threads are a compromised version of blog posts, and at the same time, an evolution.

In which ways are they worse?

• They're usually less readable — but Twitter is working on a solution, a reader mode for threads.
• They're less discoverable — for example, if you visit a user profile, you don't instantly see their latest (or best) threads.

In which ways are the better?

• As you see these days, they're often more viral since they're native to the platform where you can instantly share them.
• They're bite-sized, with each part becoming an independent atom that can be liked, commented and shared.

This last point is fundamental, and it's one of my favorite things about Twitter threads. Sharing just a specific chunk of a thread, commenting on it, and quoting it, makes Twitter a better blogging platform than many out there.

I'm very bullish on Twitter as a "blogging" and creator platform, and I can see this evolving in many directions.

(disclaimer, I'll mention a couple of tools I'm working on here)

• Tools like Typefully (used by Julian himself, for example) enable creators to craft quality threads. With tools and Twitter itself evolving, I can see the quality scope and this kind of content becoming even better.
• Tools like Mailbrew already let people follow this kind of content outside of Twitter, in this case via email, so I can see threads starting to have a life of their own.
• Twitter can empower creators and embrace this content even more, keeping the tweets as "atoms" but improving readability and consumption.

An interesting phenomenon is also how creators can use threads as a public writing playgrounds. Shapiro is already doing it. He wrote:

i think you figured it out already, but this is how i use twitter

1. i write 75% of a blog post
2. post it to twitter. people will bluntly point out how it's wrong
3. do revisions
4. post to blog / save for book

if you can stomach criticism, this is my favorite use of twitter

We're just starting to see the potential of Twitter as a creator platform, and developers have a huge opportunity to be part of this shift and evolution.

Now I should practice what I preach and turn this post into a thread, but honestly, writing quality threads is more art than science for me. I'm also more attuned to the longer-form writing variety than the bite-sized one, but I'm getting the hang of it.

It's a difficult question because, for the most part, we believe we have much more agency over our daily lives than we actually do.

Without giving it too much thought, I'd say those percentages are 50/30/20, respectively:

• 50% of my time, energy, and attention is spent on things that matter to me deeply and reflect my real priorities;
• 30% is spent on whatever feels right at the moment;
• 20% is dictated by my smartphone, its apps, its notifications, and its feeds.

But if I wanted to be brutally honest with myself, I'd have to think long and hard about my choices and actions, and I'd probably realize that those percentages don't even remotely reflect reality.

As the years go by, a handful of smartphones apps are digging deeper footholds into my day, dictating more of my actions, channeling more and more of my attention toward them.

I don't want to sound overly dramatic. I believe that most of the time, I'm still able to unplug, focus on meaningful things, being mindful about what I do and why.

But I fear the trend isn't positive.

Last year, the average American spent 58 minutes per day on Facebook. No judgment from me, I assure you. I'm of the school of thought that people should do what they please with their time. But, if I take a long, hard look at my own screen time data, I wonder: are we really making the best use of our time? Or put differently: are we actively choosing to spend 58 minutes per day on Facebook? Or is it just the easiest, most addictive, most obvious thing to do since it's been engineered to be just that?

Am I really in control?

I'm starting to believe that our sense of agency is being held hostage by feeds and algorithms, which are beautifully designed to grab our attention and hold it for as long as possible.

The very best software engineers in the world make minute but powerful optimizations every day to those apps, feeds, and algorithms to make them more efficient in getting ahold of my mind.

This advancement in technology is unstoppable. We are kept too busy and distracted that there isn't a moment where we can pause, take a breath, debate whether these things are actually good for our mental health, or find out what alternatives we have.

Humankind, whose greatest strength is an unparalleled ability to cooperate on a large scale, have yet to create the tools needed to properly address this problem: what we're actually doing to ourselves when we bombard our brains with unessential news, flashy but unmemorable content, countless notifications, an addictive and endless streams of (mostly) noise.

Finding the signal

The other side of the coin: mixed into the noise and the hacks, there's thought-provoking content that helps me grow as a person; there are courses, videos, and resources that help me enhance my skillset; there are powerful connections with people all over the globe that make me part of the biggest tribe humanity has ever known.

But I'm often overwhelmed and my attention wanders because it's under the scrutiny and control of sophisticated software that knows me better than myself and makes me become a sort of slave of those same apps and platforms that I cherish.

It's a virtually inescapable conundrum that we're only just starting to come to terms with.

The Internet, and Twitter in particular, are basically the reason why I'm an entrepreneur. They've filled my life with serendipity, they helped me make friends, grow, learn, build, explore my creative side.

But at the same time, I worry about my mental health.

I worry about the background of anxiety that social media often increases or even creates. I worry about my attention being constantly disrupted. I worry about filling my brain with noise and nonsense to find the signal and meaningful content.

No easy fix

Scrolling Twitter all day, or consuming whatever Facebook or TikTok are recommending you, is like being on a diet where 90% of the calories are empty calories, doing nothing for you, just making you slowly become unhealthy and overweight.

Shouldn't it be the other way around? Can't we design our information diet to be rich and healthy instead? If we are what we eat, I can't imagine what we become if we keep our brain on a diet mostly made of digital junk food.

I don't think the solution is just completely unplugging, giving up, or trying to use as little technology as possible.

I want to believe there's an alternative, that we can evolve to make better use of technology to serve us, instead of being subjugated by it.

We invented feeds anyway; we invented notifications; we designed the algorithms. We can surely invent better ways to find and consume meaningful content in a non-addictive way — something I'm trying to achieve while building Mailbrew.

I'm on a personal quest to reclaim my time and attention whenever I can, using technology mindfully, not as a never-ending buffet of things that leave me thirstier and hungrier for more, but as a bicycle for my mind.

These are not meant to be universal, but I think they might be good guiding principles to other founders as well.

Will update this in the future, and possibly expand each point below.

1. Build for yourself
2. Think, build, polish, ship, repeat
3. Sprint, rest, sprint, rest
4. Leverage your unique knowledge and long time passions
5. If it feels like work: delegate it, automate it, avoid it
6. Think years (and decades) ahead
7. Iterate relentlessly
8. Make users happier about themselves
9. Make users signal to others how much happier they are
10. If 90% of users don’t care about it, nuke it

That's also why I'm unemployable. Every moment I spend on trivial tasks where I feel no ownership, no real stakes, I'm swamped by anxiety and existential dread: why am I doing this? does this matter in any meaningful way? who I am doing this for?

Launching both Mailbrew and Typefully, I didn't think these are sound business ideas; these have vast addressable markets; these things have interesting growth loops. Surely these things always linger in the back of my head, but at the core I build what I build because I feel a deep need to do so. I feel like these things matter, and that there are tons of people out there that would share this feeling.

Mailbrew affects my daily routine and mental health in a meaningful way. Typefully is the only sane way I know to write and publish a Twitter thread away from distractions. Even my side-project lofi.cafe was built out of a specific frustration: having to find a good lofi station every time, without getting bored of listening to the usual 2 or 3.

I decide to build these things because they're essential to me in some way, and I love (almost) every moment I spend working on them.

Sure, these are those customer support days, those bug fixin' days, those full-of-zoom-calls days — but knowing that tomorrow I'll get to decide what's on my plate, makes them bearable and even occasionally fun.

If I know that what I'm doing has a true, lasting impact and makes some kind of true difference in people's lives, I choose to continue working on these things every day.

But as an insatiable "maker" and creative — or maybe I should say creator? not sure what's the lingo anymore — at the end of the day I'm always left wondering: what's next? what's bolder, better, more challenging? what will make my past projects blush in embarrassment?

And there's no cure for this. Nor should there be.

And today, your attention is so valuable it is quite literally on auction 24/7. Reclaiming your attention and focus is then necessary to stay sane, keep control of your inputs, and be mindful about the ideas you're exposed to.

It's impossible to stay up to date with everything, and there's a lot of ego involved in trying to do it. The amount of incredible, quality content from smart and creative people out there is unprecedented, and this growth won't slow down.

Being ruthless with how and when we digest this content is essential. It's like going every day to the best restaurant in the world, where everything is free, and constantly overfeed yourself and be nauseous afterward. It's the default effect: I'll just eat whatever they put on my plate, so I need to take back control unless I want to be shaped by other people, and, even worse, companies.

While building Mailbrew — an app to get a daily digest with your favorite content — we didn't always keep these principles in mind. But since we've built Mailbrew first and foremost for ourselves, we naturally tried to avoid making it over-stimulating, cluttered, overwhelming, addictive.

As a founder, I believe that creating software that is not unnecessarily addictive and doesn't hijack your attention is almost a moral imperative.

Software should empower people to be better, improve the quality of their lives, and get jobs done — it shouldn't make them miserable, tired, over-stimulated.

As you go on a diet if you're overweight, you should be mindful about your information diet if you're over-stimulated.

Your intuition isn't just what you feel is right, right now. It should be informed by experience, first principles, good taste.

Example: Typefully wouldn’t have made it alive even after just a meeting in the average tech company, at least in my experience.

I can imagine the loud voices in the room, screaming:

• This will take more than the 2-weeks allocated to this kind of project, pass.
• We don’t know that Twitter won’t block this kind of API usage in 3 years, pass.
• There are already 2 similar products, pass.
• You should ask 100 Twitter users first if they think this would be useful.

And also:

• If you want to make it, certainly not with that thread live preview, it's too complicated, start cutting features.
• The UI is too polished for an MVP, start ruining it (maybe they would have phrased this one differently).
• Can we add ads under the editor? Why not?
• Can we make it work with Linkedin instead?

I could go on.

Typefully was born as a little side project of mine, and I had some discussions with Francesco to promote it to a “Mailbrew team” effort. After brief discussions, we agreed that:

• This looks incredibly useful, we shouldn’t ask around.
• It will probably take more time than a “marketing project” but fuck it, it looks very cool and could make a splash.
• It feels like our core Twitter audience would love something like this.
• Let's cut a couple of features, but just to make it simpler and ship it. Let's not ruin the design or compromise its core features.

We used a lot of intuition to reach these conclusions. Intuition we fine-tuned with years of product work and seeing a lot of things fail. Intuition that we constantly challenge, but know when to trust.

By trying many things and seeing them fail, and then understanding why they failed, you hone your intuition.

Of course the more we grow as a company, the more we trust data and analytics, and I’m not downplaying their importance. I’m arguing that intuition can be a wiser guide, that your adaptive unconscious is your best friend in decision making, that you know more than you know you know.

End of meeting.

That being said, 2020 has been one hell of a year, a rollercoaster for both me and my co-founder — and I feel like it's been one of the years that changed me the most.

In fact, I've never spent as much time thinking and reading (for obvious reasons) as I did this year. This is an overused quote but it's so relevant here: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Well, this year I've spent a lot of time sitting quietly in a room, so that game me a lot of time for reflection and introspection.

Looking back at my personal notes, I've tried to collect some of my learnings and thoughts, things that this weird and unsettling year has helped me understand. This is in fact also the year I've finally taken journaling more seriously (also thanks to Roam Research), and this had a huge impact on my self-awareness and personal growth.

Here are 20 thoughts and learnings from 2020, in no particular order:

1. Improving my daily habits and routines has a much bigger impact on my personal (physical and mental) wellbeing than making broader, more complex life changes that don't always make me grow in meaningful ways.
2. "Hell yes or no" is a good mantra to apply to almost everything. Every "maybe in the future" and "I'm not sure" fills me with anxiety and regret, even if it's not always obvious.
3. Walk every day, or run, or work out. There shouldn't be a single day where there's not at least some movement and fresh air. My life and mental health changed deeply after I've started doing this.
4. If you're not finding the time for some things, it doesn't really matter and I shouldn't make long lists of things to do in the future. Embrace what you're doing now, and don't over-rely on planning. Also, change plans often, according to your current priorities.
5. 99.9% of the time, anxiety is not something that kills you or hurts your physically, so you can ignore it. Acknowledge anxiety like an unwelcome guest, then move on with your day. It's not always easy, but it works.
6. Radical honesty makes your life much easier, up to a point. You need to have the sensibility in some rare instances to keep a thought to yourself, but it's an exception, not the rule.
7. I'm having more fun by trying new things the moment I want to. Example: I thought that skating would be cool so I ordered a skateboard that very moment, and had fun for months. Broke my wrist afterward, but it was 100% worth it.
8. Embrace being a "lost teen" who doesn't take himself too seriously, and who's still figuring out what I want to be.
9. You don't need to smile in photos, you don't need to say anything in particular to anyone in any occasion. Actually, remove "should" from your vocabulary.
10. Remote and non-remote work are not two antithetical things, but they complement each other and each individual has an ideal balance between the two (mine is around 40% / 60%).
11. Uncompromising perfectionism is not something to be ashamed of. It often pays off in the medium/long term and it's the trademark in most things I do. It doesn't work for most companies or founders, but everyone has a way of doing things, and this is mine. I just have to understand when it's time to stop, especially when the sunk-cost fallacy makes me keep working on something too long.
12. Authenticity always wins. Most people have a good bullshit-detector, so instead of thinking "How can I grab people's attention?" is better to think "How can I be genuinely interesting and useful?". People that are very good at looking authentic and genuine win people's affection and interest.
13. It's easier and more useful to understand than to judge.
14. Reading is nourishment for the mind. Meditation is fasting. Feeds are junk food.
15. We'll always crave good stories to find meaning among the chaos, especially in the age of the death of truth.
16. The more you are ok with not doing anything at all, the most likely you are to be truly at peace.
17. Therapy is no substitute for embracing who you are.
18. The ability to comprehend and de-escalate situations of anxiety, panic, or conflict is a superpower.
19. Nobody is ok, nobody has figured it out. We're all just trying. Embrace chaos and uncertainty.
20. Never be afraid to write or say what you think. Haters are going to hate, the occasional flame will always begin, but if you're true to yourself you have nothing to fear.
21. Bonus: HODL.

We left our day job in late 2018, and we started traveling and enjoying the new freedom of being entrepreneurs right away. But while we enjoyed this new lifestyle, we weren't really excited about the (very slow) growth of our company.

It was 2019 and our core business then was Boxy Suite, a Gmail client for Mac. It was paying the bills (and the plane tickets) but that ramen profitability was starting to linger a bit too long. Luckily, 2019 was also the year we started working on something new: a better way to get your favorite content, unplugging from feeds. Mailbrew was born.

But a new product in private beta and dreams about adding more zeros to our MRR weren't cutting it. We wanted more, that's why we left our job in the first place.

Francesco had an idea: let's give ourselves an ultimatum.

We both agreed that the opportunity cost of earning a minimum salary and scraping by, while being top-tech talent, was starting to get too high to make sense.

So the idea was: if in 6 months we're still barely paying ourselves a minimum salary to live in Milan, we should go back to a normal day job.

Even the idea of going back to a day job for me felt like seppuku, but he was right: if we want to accelerate our growth, we shouldn't look for hacks and shortcuts. We need skin in the game, we need to keep ourselves accountable. We need to make it this year, not next year, not in 10 years.

The milestone to hit wasn't a specific number, like 10k MRR. We just felt that "making it" was about having steady revenues to pay ourselves comfortably, leaving some buffer in the company to invest, and eventually hire, and finally have some peace of mind.

We basically said to each other: if we're still scraping by in 6 months (18 months since quitting our jobs), it means it's not working.

I accepted.

Having an ultimatum already helped us make a big decision we wouldn't have made otherwise: we decided to not pay ourselves anything for a few months, and instead invest in a productivity boost and lifestyle improvement. Enough working in bars, searching for wifi, trying to stay away from bad music and loud voices, let's get a couple of desks at a WeWork.

So that's how 2020 started: with an ultimatum, no salary, a mission to make a new product work, and a couple of nice desks to be more focused and productive.

The next few months are history.

We put the finishing touches on Mailbrew with the help us our first beta testers, while we put Boxy Suite on maintenance mode (it was still making ~$5k/month). Focusing only on Mailbrew and finally working side by side every day had a huge impact on our productivity and put us on the same page on everything.

In March we were finally ready to launch Mailbrew, but we have a curse that whenever hit an important milestone or we're ready to launch something, we're not in the same room. So when it finally came to launching Mailbrew in March, a global pandemic that you're probably familiar with started, and so we launched it from our homes, in lockdown.

Still, with the launch of Mailbrew things started to change for us.

We finally felt we were not the "Boxy Team" anymore: Mailbrew received amazing responses, comments, feedback, and it was clear it was going to become our core business if we gave it a fair chance.

To maximize our chances of real success, we applied the Barbell Strategy by betting big on Mailbrew (high-risk) while de-risking with Boxy Suite and little consulting on the side, and giving some space to side-projects as well (as smaller, but riskier bets).

In hindsight, giving ourselves an ultimatum gave us the right amount of urgency, and clarity, to say no to lots of things, ship faster, focus our attention, and fine-tune our bullshit detector.

It was a drastic way of saying: this is not a joke, we either make it or we don't.

Besides the ultimatum, there are a few other things that helped us become sharper and better entrepreneurs this year, while also improving our general wellbeing.

We started giving more honest and ruthless feedback to each other, always speaking our mind and making sure that weak and bad ideas don't sneak their way in our roadmap out of sheer confirmation bias or fear to offend the other person.

We kept trusting our guts when we feel like we have a strong intuition about something. Finding the balance between pragmatism and intuition is one of the biggest struggles for entrepreneurs, but it gives the greatest results when you get it right.

We've decided to take our first investment. We still feel bootstrappers at heart, and the reason we eventually made this choice is because we chatted with Tyler Tringas, founder of Earnest Capital, and realized how perfectly aligned we were, and how their model is structured around founders that care about their freedom and ownership. I can't even imagine working as hard as we're working now without the peace of mind and confidence of being in the Earnest network, getting their mentorship, and knowing we finally have a safety net in our bank account.

We both focused more on finding the right work-life balance. We often take breaks from work, long pauses to think, long walks, respect each other time, and always try to reduce sync work in favor of async work — in fact we slowly settled on a 50/50 async/sync schedule. Focused mornings at home, afternoons at the office. Even when we were back in lockdown, we started reducing notifications and pinging each other in the morning by default.

All in all, we've decided we want to build a calm company where work is modeled around our life, not the other way around.

One year has passed since Francesco proposed the ultimatum, but it feels like a decade. We started 2020 feeling lost and without purpose, disenamoured with our core business, and we're ending it with a clearer growth path, working on a product we're excited to use every single day, and enough money in the bank to work without the insidious background noise of anxiety that things aren't working out.

It's not like the ultimatum itself saved our company. It was the realization that we needed to hold each other accountable, stop delaying important choices because of the commitment they required, and start focusing on things that matter while cutting back on noise and distractions.

The same principles we're enforcing in our work, we're enforcing in our private lives. If there's a disconnect between how you work and how you lead your life, it's impossible to feel truly at peace and content with either.

In product design, it’s extremely important to keep this effect in mind, since giving wrong defaults could completely impair the ability of users to get value from the product, giving in some cases the wrong impression that the product doesn’t work or isn’t useful.

But we should think about defaults in our daily lives as well.

Having a certain breakfast every day, starting to work at a certain time, getting your news on some website, and taking a walk in a specific place are all things that can become defaults easily, making you completely ignore far better alternatives.

It might be that changing your sleep schedule might affect your concentration a lot. Getting your news from better sources could improve your world-views. Switching the path for your daily walk could make you discover beautiful new places.

On the other side, you can try to intentionally set new defaults, like timeboxing certain high leverage activities or changing the layout of your house or desk to promote certain behaviors. How much of our daily lives are the way they are, just because they are the way they are?

So, it’s worth asking yourself: what are the defaults I’m mindlessly adhering to? What options do I really have?

We have a profound need to reduce uncertainty in our lives, so it might trigger anxiety to actively look for different options, challenging our defaults. Still, I think it’s out of this mental comfort zone that nice things can happen.

There's a great saying: Garbage in, garbage out. If you want good output, you have to watch over the inputs.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the only way to live a meaningful life, nurture my mind, and cultivate good ideas is by ruthlessly eliminating sources of "garbage": useless news, noise, hate, uninformed opinions of vocal minorities etc.

As I've written before, I believe friction controls our lives, so it's easier to let the above garbage creep into your life (and mind) than to actively protect yourself from it.

I hope a new wave of mindful tech (borrowing the expression from Ali Mese during a call we had) will help us in this regard, filtering out the garbage before it reaches us, or at least helping us to spot it.

It will surely be an area of focus while working on Mailbrew. Our mission has a lot to do with filtering out the noise, unplugging from feeds, and finding meaningful information.

If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters. (Epictetus)

But I'd like to get more into some of the specific reasons why I believe we love his videos. I'm a technologist, writer, and storyteller, so these things are often on my mind.

No unnecessary camera movements

Many people might confuse more camera movements as better storytelling, but 99% of the time it's the exact opposite. Think about how intentional David Fincher is with where he places the camera, and if it will move or won't. One emblematic example: in Gone Girl there's a single hand-held shot (can't find it on YouTube, but it's Ben Affleck running from journalist and other people).

Marques does the same, and most of the time if the camera moves, there's a reason.

Color balance

Color is great, and it's a powerful storytelling tool. Just like camera movements though, too much color, or too many colors, can be distracting and overwhelming.

Usually, colors in Marques videos are extremely consistent, and never unnecessarily flashy.

Straight to the point

After a 4 seconds intro, and sometimes a few beautiful shots of the topic of the video, Marques goes straight to the point and doesn't waste any of your time.

Authenticity

I don't know how you feel, but for me watching MKBHD feels like being with a techie friend who genuinely wants to tell me about some tech that is new and exciting.

It doesn't feel like marketing, it doesn't feel like overthinking or bullshit, it genuinely feels like someone saying hey check this out.

We've bombarded daily by content of any kind, and so much of it feels useless or fake that we crave authenticity.

Marques gets it, it doesn't matter how many millions are in his bank account.

Symmetry and composition

Finally, it's worth mentioning how precise, symmetric and pleasing to watch are Marques shots. They almost have a calming effect, and you can feel how intentional he is when placing objects for the camera.

Do you think there are other core reasons we love his videos? Let me know on Twitter.

Fewer algorithms, less recommended content, more good stuff from people you actually care about.

We're already seeing it with Substack. How cumbersome is it to subscribe to a different newsletter from each writer you want to follow? Still, people would rather do this than get lost in yet another platform where the signal gets lost in a sea of noise.

The transition is also from synchronicity to asynchronicity. Staying home locked down for months helped us realize that we could easily spend 8 full hours per day scrolling feeds, and yet no end would ever be in sight.

Why? Because that's how feeds are built: they're intrinsically synchronous, addictive, and endless.

The solution? Slower feeds. Better feeds. Purposeful and controlled digests, versus endless and mindless flows of information. A few companies are attempting to build them — mine among them — and I bet they're going to be everywhere soon.

While many tech companies will still try to get AIs to guess what's the next article you want to read, others will hopefully give back control in our hands, and try to unlearn what years of obsession for algorithms taught us. That's how we ended up here anywhere.

There must be a reason we miss Google Reader.

So I had an idea to send all my users (automatically after a couple of weeks since signing up) a little survey asking for feedback, specifically to understand our value proposition in the eyes of the user.

This is the email I've started sending them:

Hi [user], can I ask you a few questions regarding Mailbrew?

It's a quick private survey only for early users, so your feedback is invaluable.

Take the 90-seconds survey here (link).

Thanks so much in advance. Mailbrew is improving thanks to people like you, and I'm excited to make the product even more amazing.

Fabrizio Rinaldi
Co-Founder of Mailbrew

Users are then taken to a Typeform that invites them to complete some sentences. In fact, I think the key when trying to really understand your product and define positioning is to not put words in the users mouth.

The first one is completely open:

• Briefly describe Mailbrew, as you would do with a friend: ...

Then here are the sentences to complete:

• Mailbrew is valuable to me because...
• The main problem Mailbrew solves is...
• What makes Mailbrew unique and different from other apps is...
• If I couldn't use Mailbrew anymore I...
• My main issue with Mailbrew is...
• My main feature request is...

How my users explained my product better than me

The survey answers started arriving, and I was blown away by how insightful and high-level some them were. One in particular described the product much better than I possibly could.

Here it is (emphasis mine):

Mailbrew is the taming of the firehose that is today's online information landscape. For the first time, I feel like I can keep up with the things I love without getting completely overwhelmed or falling into infinite rabbit holes that the web is so good at getting us to fall into. Mailbrew is an information diet done right. It forces you to consider only that information which is essential to you and then delivers it seamlessly and beautifully. No more having to check multiple sites. No more hunting for interesting things—it’s all right there, right in my inbox. It will save me heaps of time this year.

In my mind, this answer means remembering that I'm not building a "newsletter builder" or "news aggregator", but "a way to follow your favorite topics, unplug from feeds, and get meaningful information on your schedule".

Here are some of the other answers I'm getting, or parts of them:

• For the first time, I feel like I can keep up with the things I love without getting completely overwhelmed or falling into infinite rabbit holes that the web is so good at getting us to fall into.
• Mailbrew is an information diet done right.
• It forces you to consider only that information which is essential to you and then delivers it seamlessly and beautifully. No more having to check multiple sites. No more hunting for interesting things—it’s all right there, right in my inbox. It will save me heaps of time this year.
• [Without Mailbrew] I would go back to being a hopeless information junkie. I really feel that Mailbrew fills an essential need for those of us that have found ourselves heavily addicted to the internet.
• The problem Mailbrew solves is collecting a bunch of content on a specific topic, so you can find the good bits.
• I like discovering good content, but I don't want to manually check websites to see if something new is out.
• Handpicked corners of the internet delivered by newsletter.
• Mailbrew is valuable to me because it keeps me in touch with my interests without going down the rabbit hole.
• Break your Twitter addiction [...] Mailbrew is valuable to me because...I don't have Twitter FOMO anymore.
• The main problem Mailbrew solves is losing focus due to scanning too many news sites.
• If I couldn't use Mailbrew anymore I would go back to searching several times the same keyword on all the services, every day.

Reading and discussing with my co-founder is making all the difference. It's helping us focus on the right things, not lose time building features that are not central to the core experience of the product, and have a clear picture in our mind of what the ideal user should feel like when using our product, and even after using it.

I've already updated Mailbrew's landing page with some of these results, and I'm working on a complete revamp that takes all of this into consideration. Hopefully by launch day, thanks to this effort, people will get what the product is really about instantly. Or at least that's the goal.

In the last couple of years though I’ve finally started building a few healthy habits without any external aid.

What worked this time? A simple shift in thinking.

For example, take reading.

My old rationale was: I want to read 10 pages per day. Or I want to read 5 days in a row. Or maybe I want to read 50 books this year. That didn’t work.

My new way of thinking is: I want to gain knowledge, discover different points of view, grow intellectually. I want to have fun reading crazy thoughts from diverse authors, and fill my time with a slow, healthy activity vs. scrolling feeds obsessively.

Going from focusing on how much or when I should do something, to why I should do it made all the difference.

The same goes for everything else. Eating? Try going from “I shouldn’t eat sweets during the week” to “I’m a healthy person, and I enjoy feeling light” (I'm still not quite there yet). Don’t just try to change your actions, shift your identity and let that change your actions. Please the deep part of your brain that feeds on meaningful goals, not just its rewards and pleasure centers that crave the dopamine rushes.

PS: I’m currently reading to Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it heavily influences this post. I’m just a few chapters in and it’s giving me amazing insights. Highly recommended.

Sure, there are growth hacks, there are hackish things you can do to build a huge following, there’s an infinite amount of A/B tests you can do, there are shortcuts to rank on Google, there are techniques to get more likes on your posts etc. And sure, in certain cases, for example for businesses that have a lot of cash to spare, it makes a lot of sense to try these things.

But if you’re a small, focused company or even a solo founder, no amount of hacks can substitute creating things that people want, and putting your heart in it.

Whenever you try to hack your way around thoughtful product development, or genuine participation in your community, you're likely wasting your precious, limited time.

To be completely honest, me and my co-founder Francesco have tried at times to “hack” our way into popular sites, finding obscure strategies to boost our social presence or website traffic, or thinking about new products first in terms of growth or monetization. But how much do you think these strategies payed off? Very little, compared to the effort.

What worked for us, for years? Creating things that excite us; going the extra mile to make our products delightful and truly valuable; being responsive to our users; following our gut instincts on what works and what doesn't; learning from other makers that share this mindset; iterating on meaningful parts of our apps in a way that impacts key metrics, not vanity ones.

There's also something to be said about how doing tons of cold, hackish things (and often seeing them fail) has a nasty impact on morale, while failing with product development often means learning lots of lessons, growing as makers, and obtain the experience and tools to not make the same mistakes again.

Between choosing whether to test 10 different paywalls to slighlty increase revenue or adding a new important feature to our product, I'll choose the latter every time.

Hence I have a personal resolution to do less hacking, more making, even in my personal life. There are many shortcuts and hacks your can do to improve your life, and they surely work for some people: trying quick extreme diets, using weird settings to use your phone less (yes black and white display people, I'm talking to you), downloading gamified habit apps to stick to your plans even if you don't really want to, listening to 10 minutes books digests instead of taking the time to read, and so on.

But I think that, for most people, taking the time to do the work will create real lasting value and have real tangible impact, more than any hack or shortcut.

This is a very powerful statement. Most of us would know exactly what the character should do — to feel better, to be better — yet many of us would just go on and keep doing the same things that hurt us, or prevent us to move forward, grow, improve.

It’s easier to read the book, than to write it. We’re addicted to our hardships.

It would be wrong to feel the applause was just to the movie, it almost felt like it was to the character itself, but not for his (condemnable) actions, but rather for how genuine and true it felt. And that's when I realized much of the power of this film comes from one thing: its unadulterated, unfiltered authenticity.

It's a divisive film, even to a fault — it's almost "overcommitted" to its theme — but you can't deny its pledge to showing this character in the most genuine way possible, and I think audiences loved this, even if on a subconscious level.

I believe this film could represent a deep change in how we portrait "negative" characters, and it's likely going to leave a mark on superhero movies, and movies in general. Mainstream Cinema rarely feels truly uncomfortable and challenging on a thematic level, and the discussions it sparks are often rather superficial; the drama of this character and the power of his self-revelations are so problematic, authentic and dark, that I can't help but think this is a truer villain than most we've seen so far.

I love its slow and deliberate development cycle, its almost perfect feature set, how committed it is to a simple but powerful GTD approach, and the near-perfection of its user interface — as a designer, I love just looking at the UI, and its delightful interactions.

Even after all these years spent using it, I've recently fine-tuned a few Things workflows that have made me even more productive with it.

1. Use Things with your teammates

Things has a neat feature that allows you to set up an email address to receive tasks. It's part of Things Cloud and you can set it up in the app's preferences.

Once you activate it, you'll get an email address that looks like this: add-to-things-somethingsomething@things.email — I love that things.email domain. When this address receives an email, Things will add a new task in your Inbox. The subject of the email will be the task title, while the body will fill the description.

Me and my co-founder Francesco are using this feature to send tasks to each other — and since we work on multiple products, like Boxy Suite and Unreadit, it's important to eliminate friction when assigning small tasks.

Initially, we just used email clients to send tasks, but the real productivity boost was setting up a Keyboard Maestro macro that gives us a UI to send these tasks. It looks like this:

Pressing Enter after writing in these fields will open Mail, send the email with the task to Francesco's Things address, and close Mail after a while, all of this in background.

Francesco will then find this in his Inbox:

Here's the macro in case you want to try it. Of course, you'll need to replace the teammate name and email address — Francesco, if you're reading this, don't worry I've removed your address before exporting the macro, you won't find crazy stuff in your inbox.

2. Send emails to Things, the better way

I deal with a lot of emails every day, and I was looking for a quick way to create Things tasks from them. Some email clients have a Things integrations (even mine), but I was looking for something faster.

That's why I came up with an automation that allows me to apply a label to an email and having that email magically appear in my Things inbox. Some email clients like Spark treat labels as folders, and this is even better because this makes the email disappear from your inbox, and appear in Things a few minutes later.

In Spark, I even set a gesture to move any email directly in my Things folder, so it takes a single swipe to move email to Things now.

To set this up, I've created a Zapier automation that searches for emails matching the query label:things, and then sends a new email to my Things address following a simple template:

And finally here's how an example email looks in my Things Inbox, complete with sender and link to the original message:

3. Bonus: smarter autofill tasks

Things for Mac lets you set a global Quick Entry shortcut, that will open a floating entry window, floating above any app you're using.

It looks like this:

Something that I've only recently done, is switching the Quick Entry shortcut with the Quick Entry with Autofill action instead.

Now, when I'm visiting a webpage or I'm using another compatible app, and I want to add a task in Things, I don't have to remember to use a different shortcut, the Quick Entry will populate with the right things automatically.

When Things doesn't detect any content to autofill the Quick Entry box, it will just leave it empty, making it behave like the standard Quick Entry.

That's how I'm using Things these days. Please let me know if you came up with similar workflows, I'll happily add them to the article.

Friction permeates every aspect of out life, and reducing (or adding) friction can be an effective strategy to change things. The next time you do something that doesn't make you feel good, or you don't do something that would make you feel good, try to think if adding or reducing friction could change that behaviour. There's a good chance it will.

PS: yes, this is a very brief post, not the 1.500-words SEO-friendly stuff I should probably write; but I want to write more, and starting again with little thoughts and tidbits might reduce the friction to do it. Or at least that's the idea.