I’m Sophia, and I've dedicated my career to helping entrepreneurs build their dream businesses. I'm the founder of a $350M business, New York Times bestselling author, writer, and run a venture capital fund called Trust Fund. Every week, we'll send you the most interesting and useful news in business, marketing, productivity, and finance so you can know more, do more, and make more money.
Issue 20: Find out how demure your LinkedIn is and don’t let perfectionism tank your social media
by Sophia Amoruso and Melanie Ehrenkranz
Business Class is a weekly newsletter for people who work for themselves. Have a scoop? Wanna partner? Hit reply.
Notes from a Messy Desk
I just moved into my place and now I’m moving out. I know I sound psycho but I’m about to be in London (again) for two and a half months – not to try on new clothing for size because I just got rid of a bunch, but to try on a new life. Ish.
Same (ish) life, different place. At least for now. Because I can. I never thought that being 40, single, and not having kids would be fun – in my earlier 30s I would’ve considered that a failure, at least for me. But turns out it’s a fucking win.
Okay time to pack.
– Sophia
In today’s issue:
Links to make you smarter and sound interesting
How to start building your brand's community
A time management method to drown out the bullshit
➤ An excerpt from the upcoming book on how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter has a wild detail on how Musk came up with the $8 verification price tag:
Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up.
“There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.
Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?”
Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
How to start building your brand's community
I recently heard an analogy around community building that viscerally spoke to the insecure 22-year-old in me: You can’t be afraid of someone not coming to your party.
Whether that’s a fear you had yesterday or a decade ago, it acknowledges the vulnerability that it takes to start cultivating a community around your brand.
Creative director Arielle Egozi and Future of Sex podcast host Bryony Cole hosted an hour-long workshop exclusive to Business Class members last week around finding your people, and they pointed out that going from zero to one is always the hardest when it comes to building your brand’s community.
But once you’re at one, you can use that action and momentum to get to 100, and so on.
Arielle and Bryony shared an exercise to better understand your future community and how to connect and access them. Grab a pen and paper (or fire up a doc) and meditate on these four questions:
❀
Where do they spend their time? From scrolling through TikTok to working out at the local Pilates studio to preschool drop-offs.
What media are they consuming? From Love Island to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to Call Her Daddy.
What struggles are they facing? From juggling work and parenthood to suffering from a chronic illness to feeling lonely.
Who do they already trust? From a wellness influencer to a political journalist to their mom.
❀
Once you have a fuller picture of who and where your people are, pick one of your audience’s existing communities and commit to taking action to support them this week.
That can look like: Donating your money, resources, energy, or time. Hosting a special workshop or event. Featuring them in your existing channels, if you have a following on social or a newsletter. Just showing up.
Like I said, there’s a vulnerability when it comes to building your brand’s community from scratch – at least, if you want to be successful. People want to feel connected to you, that you did the work in understanding who they are and how you can bring some value to their lives.
That’s because it’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship.
If a workshop like this sounds valuable to you, our 3,500+ Business Class members have access to 80+ hours of cool entrepreneurial workshops, with live ones every month. You can join here.
How demure is your LinkedIn?
Another day, another way to get roasted online. Are we all so desperate for feedback that we’ll let a chatbot brutally take down our digital footprints? (Yes.)
This free tool checks how demure and mindful your LinkedIn profile is. You drop your LinkedIn URL in and in a few seconds it’ll generate a score out of ten along with grinchy critiques like, "With a resume that reads like a Wikipedia page, Melanie's demureness is about as real as a unicorn in a tech startup."
Phrase of the day: 'Eisenhower Matrix'
Investor and entrepreneur Jules Fedele wrote about how she drowns out the bullshit (read: things that feel urgent but really aren’t) in order to get her priorities in order.
Her solution to the cortisol rush of trying to do ten things at once is the Eisenhower Matrix, a quadrant-based time-management tool. It has you put different tasks in different quadrants based on how urgent and important they are. You can then visualize what you should do, schedule, delegate, and delete.
We found free Eisenhower Matrix templates on Notion and Miro.
Browse AI: Browse AI is a tool that extracts and monitors data from any website. We love it to snoop LinkedIn company pages for new hires and layoffs. You may love it to monitor changes in competitor’s pricing.
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Carry:Carry is the all-in-one platform for retirement accounts, investments and strategy for business owners and solopreneurs.
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Dynasty: Dynasty empowers the average American with wealth creation and protection tools that are usually reserved for the rich.
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Want more?
Check out the Business Class Flight Planner – an undated annual planner that’ll set you straight and ready for take off.
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I'm Sophia.
I built my first business to over $100M in revenue... in my 20s. It was hard. Today, I use what I learned to mentor and invest in a new generation of founders through my digital membership for entrepreneurs, Business Class, and my early-stage venture fund, Trust Fund.
I'm Melanie.
I'm the Head of Content and Community at Business Class. After ~a decade as a tech culture reporter, I started consulting for early-stage startups on all things content and community building. Now, I'm focused on making this newsletter your favorite weekly email.
I’m Sophia, and I've dedicated my career to helping entrepreneurs build their dream businesses. I'm the founder of a $350M business, New York Times bestselling author, writer, and run a venture capital fund called Trust Fund. Every week, we'll send you the most interesting and useful news in business, marketing, productivity, and finance so you can know more, do more, and make more money.
