Million Dollar Creators, FTX to Zero, New Tools and Twitter Blue.

Good day folks,

I've been thinking a lot recently about what people who signed up for this newsletter would like to receive in their inbox and wanted to float some ideas past you straight up. If you've got any feedback on this positively or negatively then I'd love to hear from you to refine it as we go.

Personally, a huge variety of stuff excites me that fall under the umbrella of 'technology', but as someone who isn't an engineer, developer or rocket scientist, I tend to think my sweet spot sits in the 'innovative tech, everyone can apply' category. Not super technical but technical enough that I can distill it enough that most people can get a grip of the thing. From here, these are a few sub-categories:

• Automation

• No-code

• Web3

• Artificial Intelligence

• NFTs

• Marketing

Why these topics above?

Because one, it's the stuff I know about and 2 having a base level grasp on these with a deeper knowledge in one or two, can be applied not only to creating value for yourself in terms of launching businesses, products and services but you will also be extremely valuable to other people too.

In a period of recession like we're going through right now, people will have to do more with less so being someone that has multiple strings to your bow makes tech generalists very sought after.

This I think is the thread that I think runs through Shiny as a community in general so is the topics we'll focus on delivering value around from here onwards.

Newsworthy

• Creator Justin Welch posted a thread as he crossed 3m USD in revenue for his one-person business.

• Twitter rollout Twitter Blue allowing anyone to buy verification for $8 per month. Chaos ensues.

• Crypto exchange FTX implodes and files for bankruptcy.

• Webflow unleash a ton of game-changing features at Webflowcon.

• OpenAI leads a $23.5 million funding round into note taking app Mem.

There's been a new meta developing over time and that's one of independent creators building an audience online and turning that attention into huge amounts of cash. But not in the traditional way of hiring huge teams but using technology and apps to apply leverage and handle pretty much everything by themselves.

We're going to take two examples today as they're front of mind but I'll drop a list of people following these two that you should definitely take the time to check out too.

1) Justin Welsh

Justin dropped this thread on November 7th mentioning that he'd crossed the 3m USD in revenue mark. Absolutely wild. Big team helping him? Nope, just him. His stack is:

• Newsletter

• Consulting

• Digital Products

• Community

What Justin is doing is absolutely incredible and a playbook that could take him straight to double digit millions per year in revenue.

Make sure to read the thread for the breakdown and sign up for his Saturday Solopreneur Email here.

2) Sahil Bloom

Sahil was recently on the My First Million podcast (highly recommend it btw) where he broke down the process of building an audience on Twitter then turning that into multiple revenue streams.

His stack is similar in some ways to Justins but with a small difference.

• Newsletter

• Agency

• Fund

Sahils next move? LinkedIn. He nailed the Twitter thread meta now is moving over to LinkedIn to grow over there too.

Hugely recommend following Sahil as he's killing it right now.

3) Pieter Levels

We can't talk about Creators / Makers killing it online without mentioning Pieter.

On November the 7th he posted the above Tweet mentioning that he'd made $100k USD in sales with AvatarAI since launching 10 days ago. Truly wild. A fine example of when preparation meets opportunity.

Worth mentioning, this isn't his first product by any stretch and while he'd had way more failures than successes, the one that made it are making him very successful indeed.

Here's his other wins.

• RemoteOk

• NomadList

• reBase

• HoodMaps

• InteriorAI

This tweet showing his Github commits shows this the best. If you don't know what Github is then this explainer is useful.

GG Pieter.

That was fairly long form so let's do a link dump of some of the most interesting tools we've discovered this week.

• OASIS - Never Worry About How You Look On Camera Again. Create a photorealistic avatar that you can use on every video platform.

• Prompt Extend - Enter a main idea for a prompt and the model will attempt to add suitable style cues.

• Shopify launch Tap to Pay. Accept contactless payments anywhere with just your iPhone. No extra hardware needed.

• Capsule launched a new generative AI tool that magically adds b-roll to videos. A process that can take hours, now done it seconds.

• Crypto, Culture and Society launched its Un Semester - towards decentralised learning.

• Packy with his weekly dose of Optimism - best part is his new series Anton Teaches Packy AI below!

That's it for this week!

If you want to join the conversation then join the community here. It's a great place to meet other like-minded individuals, learn new things, and get help with your projects. We have members with a variety of skills and experience, so there is always someone to help you out.

If you're interested in what's going on in tech, Shiny is the place for you.

Catch you on the next one,Tom

p.s. let's follow each other on Twitter if we're not already?

p.s.s. what topics would you like to hear more about in this newsletter?