A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

The biggest story in tech no one’s talking about is Uber discovering they’d been defrauded out of $100M - or 2/3 of their ad spend.

And all bc Sleeping Giants kept bugging them to block their ads on Breitbart.

I was so surprised when Kevin Frisch, Uber’s ex-Head of Acquisition reached out to me one day on LinkedIn to tell me he found this epic fraud bc they actually DID block their Breitbart ads but somehow the ads were still slipping thru. 🧐

Uber was in deep shit in 2017 because Sleeping Giants was on their case for their Breitbart ads, followed by #DeleteUber.

Kevin said in an interview last year that we were a pain in their ass and he wished we’d get hit by a bus

Uber DID actually quietly block their Breitbart ads early on, but our followers kept seeing them and so we kept tweeting @ CEO Travis.

Travis was seeing our tweets and would ping Kevin saying “WTF. Have you not handled this yet?”

So Kevin - who is embarrassed bc he had instructed all vendors to block Breitbart (!!) - figures out which ones are letting the ads slip thru & pauses them. It’s ~10% of their total budget, $150M.

A significant % when they’ve already lost so many riders due to #DeleteUber.

I just keep being surprised by how many people expect all business to run as usual despite the fact that we're into year two of a worldwide pandemic.

Like.... anyone notice how many people's jobs got a ton harder? Or how many people lost their jobs, or the prospect of even being in the running for employment?

Anyone notice how many people now have massively heavier care responsibilities -- for children, parents, elderly relatives and friends, you name it?

Anyone notice the massive, unceasing level of stress that comes from mixed messages coming from govts, bungled safety policies and vaccination plans, endless lockdowns?

Every now and then I see someone miffed that some inessential thing hasn't gone as quickly or as efficiently as they'd have like, and I have to wonder -- are we living on the same planet?

My path as a founder:

a. didn't do any marketing - no growth
b. hired an agency - no growth
c. became a marketer - 4x growth in 1 year

Skip a and b.

Step c. helped me make sales, and I had enough money to hire a content writer, then a marketing project manager.

She became head of content, then CMO, and now has her own team.

Now, when we know more about what works, we successfully hire agencies.

But as a founder, you never stop being a marketer.

You always think about the distribution of your product, ideas. And not just to your customers, to your investors, team, press, public.

Copywriting is a skill that never goes out of need.

Over the last week, I've been blocked by various people, including an MSP, for allegedly being a conspiracy theorist, trying to sow division within @theSNP and #indy ranks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I want independence for Scotland, plain and simple.

But I still have the right to challenge people if I think something is wrong, legally or morally, as recent events within the SNP seem to be.

But anyway, I'm not talking about that. Today I'm looking at the @NowScotlandNow logo.

I'm not a fan. Just to be clear, I want Scottish Independence. But the logo for the new organisation, unfortunately, doesn't work as well as the previous YES ones. It's a mix of the colour and the font used, which presumably is referencing Charlies Rennie Mackintosh.

The italics and thin font means it doesn't stand out. Plus, I associate Mackintosh more with Glasgow than Scotland as a whole. So I took some of the elements of the last two and looked at alternative fonts (that are all free BTW)

This font is called ChuckFive. It's big, bold and brash and you can read it a mile off.