The last month of 2020 (Ricky Weekly #53)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
—
A picture from my life:
Sharing more than one because I went to Arizona for the holidays!
Thing on my mind:
Wow it’s been five weeks since the last weekly newsletter. Every week I skip, I build up more expectations about how I must share all the exciting thoughts I have with y’all 🙄, which isn’t conducive to shipping. So I’m writing today in a Zoom Writing Flow Club that David organized and the goal is just to write without expectations. Here we go:
David and I spent 2020 trying to make something people want. We knew it was going to be hard, so we kept a very demanding shipping schedule. For our 10th and final project of the year, we shipped a social podcast discovery tool called Palcast. Yes, we re-used the name from our 9th project, which some of you might remember as an app to asynchronously “podcast with your friends.” If you use Spotify for podcasts, we can compare our podcast taste. If you don’t use Spotify for podcasts, I blogged about why Spotify is the future of podcasting if you’re curious.
We’ve grown a lot as founders in 2020. Despite shipping ten projects, we haven’t hit on anything that special yet, and that’s been really tough. David and I don’t remember having this hard of a time making something that really resonates. One obvious contributing factor is we’re building for consumers this time instead of businesses, and they’re much harder to decipher. We are definitely feeling significantly stronger though as we enter the new year, and we’re taking the lessons we’ve learned about gathering people and creating appealing spaces and applying them to our 11th and 12th project. They already feel very different.
Our 11th project is called Flow Club, and it’s about productive virtual co-working and finding “flow” together. Few days into testing we’ve already gotten enthusiastic texts and emails from users, including an offer to pay for it. Our 12th project is called Hobby Cohort where we’re building “clubs for adults” better than Meetups and Facebook Groups. The first cohort is called Startup to Standup where I’m bringing together a small group of YC founders to learn to write comedy together over Zoom, so in six weeks I should have a new comedy set to share with y’all 🙃!
Outside of work:
For Christmas, I took a roadtrip with friends from SF->LA->AZ and back. I love driving and got to put 2k miles on a rental car or roughly 30 hours of driving. Yeah that’s a lot of driving even for me.
I was pretty nervous before going on the trip. I had the usual anxiety of finding it difficult to put work down. On top of that, I was going to be making three new friends while the pandemic reached an all-time high. Despite everyone taking precautions like getting tested beforehand and traveling with minimal exposure, it was still nerve wracking. I don’t think I’m naturally this anxious, but having spent most of the year practicing social distancing with friends who are extremely safe, I’ve definitely absorbed their anxiety.
I was planning to spend some time with my old man in LA on the way back to SF, so I wanted to get another Covid test done in Arizona before heading to LA, but I couldn’t find any available tests in Arizona OR LA after Christmas. I looked all over and the only one I found was at Lincoln Park in LA, and when I got there there were so many people it looked like a f*cking concert just ended. I didn’t even bother getting out of my car and just skipped the test altogether. What a mess, man.
In Arizona I made friends with some awesome people, who all happened to be British. I realized that I have a hard time understanding their accent and humor…or maybe my new friends just aren’t funny 😝.
We lived in the desert, which was really cool for the first day or two exploring cacti and sand…and then it got boring. The company was what made the trip fun, especially because it was the most social I’ve been all year. It was great to just be able to share laughs with people in the same room, cooking together, playing together, singing together, etc. Oh, and I rode a horse for the first time!
Right before the trip, I completed two months of the Beachbody Insanity workout, something we used to do in college. I don’t think the workout is that good for you, but I’m a fan of the instructor Shaun T, who by the way should totally be dominating YouTube and TikTok right now but for some reason his success hasn’t translated on to those new platforms.
The great thing about doing Insanity these last two months was that I got to see my friends Richard and Kat every morning via Zoom despite them living in Portugal. We’d often stay behind to talk some more. I’m excited to keep up these social workouts in 2021 until we get sick of each other.
Alright I’ll stop here before you get sick of me. I hope everyone’s having a good start to 2020 Part 2 😅.
Reply to me if you want to be invited to Flow Club and join me in a virtual co-working session. It’d be good to see you.
Piece of content I recommend:
Soul movie Extras on Disney+
Soul was amazing but what I’d like to recommend is the Extras content about the making of the film that you can find on Disney+. I LOVED watching talented people talk about their craft in all the excruciating and very satisfying detail. I was super inspired to make something at that level.
🤗
—
As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “Why I use Spotify for podcasts (and you will too).”