Sterling Proffer

Think about the last thing you made that fell flat. When you created it, did you have a particular person in mind who would especially appreciate and benefit from that work? Or maybe a group of people?

Substack become a haven for writers who find, for one reason or another, that traditional media no longer works for them. Substack will never be able to offer the deep institutional backing and editorial muscle that comes with working at a place like The New York Times. But it’s able to provide limited assistance with editing, legal, design, photo... See more

When you have Product-Market Fit, you have healthy retention curves (they flatten out). But this isn’t the end goal. Your current retention doesn’t represent the true potential of your current product-market fit. There is a hypothetical retention curve that sits above that represents this true potential. What creates this gap? There are a set of... See more

4. Capture meaningful cultural moments: NFTs are not valuable because of “utility” or vague notions of community. The real value of NFTs comes from the “meaning” they represent as the cultural artifacts of communities.

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more