(og thread) I’m sleep deprived from caring for a bb so these are delirious thoughts with no sensibilities but let me freestyle talking through what a job is. or even more fundamentally, how do you make money? You have to persuade people to give it to you. Why should people give u money?

typically you have to solve some sort of problem for them, help them achieve some sort of desired goal, end-state, or sometimes (this gets into grifty territory) even the illusion or impression of it the clearer you are about what this is, the more easily you can find matches

most jobs are typically a pattern of behaviour that’s stable and predictable enough that it can be turned into a script for other people to repeat. IMO the most interesting jobs are comparatively undefined. if you start your own business you do anything/everything as you please

drifting a little. so you want to make money tweeting. there are a few ways you can approach it. you can subscriber-maxx. you can do a patreon. these are generally not great ideas for optimizing for $ because “tweeting” isn’t very differentiated. Millions of people tweet for free

you *can* get paid to tweet, but you have to figure out “the conversion”. For example, if you wanna get paid to sail in a boat all day, you have to define some parameters that make it interesting to people. Define an expedition. Or compete for speed. People pay for outcomes

there’s a more elegant way to say all of this but I am tired so this sloppy mess is what u get lol yolo

you can sell a product. if you make your own product you get great margins on it, but you also have to do your own marketing and demand-gen. alternatively, you can join some existing product team and help to sell more product. Consider how/why authors write for magazines etc

a thing I might try if I were in pradyu’s shoes is to maybe do bounties for book reviews. but trying to get paid for individual tweets is a losing game, you’re much much likelier to make the $ doing substck or podcasts or youtube where the customer behavior’s already established

pradyu already has an economics podcast with 50+ episodes which puts him wayyy ahead of the curve of anybody “trying to make money tweeting” from scratch. It would be much smarter for him to conceptualize the podcast as the core engine and twitter as demand-gen for the podcast

so- (this is what I charge my clients $600/session to figure out) – define the econs podcast and blog as an expedition. articulate a vision for where it’s going over the next 20 years. List out open questions you want to answer. Books you want to review, guests you want to talk to. And give people the opportunity to support this expedition via paid substack/patreon. Shouldn’t be too hard to get to ~$2k/mo pretty quick imo. $10k/mo not an unreasonable stretch target. But that’s another thing to figure out; how much work do you wanna be doing

also pretty much anybody on Twitter with some audience that likes them can write a pdf ebook in google docs and sell it on gumroad, and followers who like you and want to give you money will do that. You can do this in a weekend even

people often use “job” as a sort of cover to avoid facing the chaos of the open market. I reveal my bias in the tone I use when talking about this lol I hate jobs and I would rather be insulted in the open market than endure the indignity of employment