I write about tech + humans + philosophy https://www.joanwestenberg.com/
Everyone’s selling picks and shovels to people already drowning in picks and shovels, in a great big barrel of picks and shovels at the International Pick and Shovel Convention.
The Indie Hacker Economy is a Pyramid SchemeAI Didn’t Kill Indie Hacking. The Closed Loop Did.medium.comStop trying to build for "the algorithm." Stop trying to scale to a million faceless users. If you want to make something people actually give a shit about, shrink your target audience to a single person you know. 5 rules for creating work that leaves a mark:
How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About5 Rules for Creating Work That Leaves a Markwww.joanwestenberg.comListening to a podcast at 2x speed while answering emails isn’t "learning." It’s just noise with a productivity badge. If you want real leverage, turn off your phone, sit in silence, and read a damn book.
Read More. Read Often. Read Every Day.Stop Looking for Productivity Hacks. Pick Up a Damn Book.www.joanwestenberg.comBudget is never your ultimate advantage. You can build the best product, hire top-tier talent, and raise millions; but strategy without belief is dead on arrival. Why the "3-to-1 Rule" decides who wins in business and in war: open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...
US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!" Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft" New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror:
The Great AI Double StandardDistillation Is a Mirror; the US Labs Just Hate What They Seewww.joanwestenberg.comJulius Caesar didn’t conquer empires by waiting for 100% certainty; he moved at 80% and adjusted on the fly. In a world of slow committees, speed is an unfair advantage. open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...
(Free download) Everything is seamless. Frictionless. Immediate. You can summon a meal, a driver, a dopamine hit, or a partner with the slide of a thumb. The world has been engineered to demand absolutely nothing of you. And it's making us soft, uncreative, and fragile. onfriction.com/
"Growth hacking" and hustle culture are a series of stolen victories. Are you building a legacy, or just chasing numbers? open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...
Sun Tzu ranked strategic outcomes, best to worst: - Thwart the enemy's plans - Break his alliances - Fight his army - Besiege his cities Notice fighting comes third. The whole point is to win without it.
Subdue your enemy without fightingJuly 20, 2026open.substack.comThe reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams: Nobody else gives a shit
Humans Don't Want Infinite Content. We Want Common Ground.In summer 1999, a kid could whisper “I see dead people,” and every person in the room knew exactly what he meant. That is what a movie actually is. It’s not ...youtu.beDevelopers have GitHub contribution graphs to track their consistency. Writers deserve the same. Kerouac automatically tracks your publishing frequency across Substack, Ghost, & Medium. Streaks, gaps, and all. Finally, proof of work for your words... www.kerouacapp.com/
Don’t ask: “What niche should I choose?” Ask: “What can I see because of where I’ve been - and who else desperately needs help seeing it too?” That question will give you a body of work. That’s a lot better than a “content” category.
Don’t pick a writing niche. Find the one only you can own.How to build a niche from first principleswww.joanwestenberg.comThe best ideas hit you in the shower, then vanish by the time you open a doc. Kerouac’s Inbox captures half-thoughts the moment they arrive. Drop them into the drafting board when you're ready. Everything from idea to published. $8/mo. 30 days free. No credit card. www.kerouacapp.com/
The AI industry has confused abundance with value. More drafts. More images. More summaries. More angles. More options. But “more” is not a product. It’s often the product refusing to do its job. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/infinite-c...
"Link in bio" for writers is usually a mess of random URLs. Kerouac syncs everything you've ever shipped on Substack, Ghost, & Medium into one clean profile. One URL. Put it in every bio. Let people find your work without a scavenger hunt.
KEROUAC // The studio for pro bloggersSync everywhere you publish, capture every idea, move it down the board, and watch the graph fill in. The one place to run a serious blog.www.kerouacapp.comIn a sea of thousands of VC firms, differentiation is the only thing that matters. Acting like a commodity makes you a commodity. You need a public identity that separates you from the thousands of other checkbooks. You need to write.
The VC who writes wins | SELFThree kinds of investor exist right now: the silent, the ones who outsource their thinking to AI, and the ones who publish their own unfiltered, messy, human brains. The third group beats the first two every time.www.thisisstudioself.comNew on Kerouac: link in bio tools that let you add up to 15 custom links to your writing profile. Shipped and ready: www.kerouacapp.com/u/joan