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Reddit priced the Apollo app out of business, Kayla Newman was never paid for "on fleek," and Nipsey Hussle bought the strip mall he once sold CDs in front of. Why I post every essay on a site I own first, then share it on X.
Show Notes
Reddit priced the Apollo app out of business, Kayla Newman was never paid for "on fleek," and Nipsey Hussle bought the strip mall he once sold CDs in front of. Why I post every essay on a site I own first, then share it on X.
Featuring: Christian Selig, Kayla Newman, Nipsey Hussle
Brought to you by:
Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities.
HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do.
Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video.
Chapters:
(00:00) How the X feed treats a viral post
(00:36) Reddit prices out the Apollo app
(00:55) Kayla Newman and "on fleek"
(01:19) Nipsey Hussle buys the strip mall
(01:48) The hub and the spokes
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Creators and Guests
CS
Guest
KN
Guest
Kayla Newman
Featured in Dru's Notes: The Viral Trap: How Social Media Keeps What You Make.
What is Dru's Notes?
One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest."
Naval Ravikant
I've seen lots of posts go viral on X.
The feed now works like TikTok's. X ranks each post by how likely it is to keep you scrolling. So people who follow someone after a viral post often miss their next post.
Since the algorithm keeps us on X longer, it pays off for X. The person posting has to win followers back with each new post.
So for years I barely posted on social media, even though Trends.vc needed it.
Christian Selig built an app called Apollo that let people read Reddit. In 2023 Reddit started charging apps like Apollo for each request to its servers.
Selig's 50,000 paying users likely brought in $500,000 a year. Reddit's new price would have cost about $20 million a year, so Selig shut down an app he spent years building.
Kayla Newman posted a short video on Vine in 2014 and said "eyebrows on fleek."
The phrase spread everywhere and IHOP tweeted that its pancakes were on fleek too.
Newman was never paid for the phrase.
Then Twitter shut Vine down.
A few weeks later she asked strangers on GoFundMe for $100,000 to start a cosmetics line. She raised a little over $13,000.
The rapper Nipsey Hussle started out selling CDs from his car at a strip mall on Crenshaw and Slauson in South Los Angeles. His music came out on a label he owned.
In 2017 he rented a storefront there and opened a clothing store called The Marathon.
Then he and a partner paid $2.5 million for the whole strip mall.
- Reddit set Apollo's price.
- Twitter decided Vine's fate.
- Nipsey was the tenant and the landlord.
I thought I had to pick between posts on X that last a few hours and essays on my site that last for years.
That was a false trade-off. Now druriley.com is the hub and the platforms are the spokes. I post each essay to my site first. Then I share them on X and elsewhere.
What could you build that keeps working after you stop?