SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 626: Senior Editor at The Atlantic Releases Book To Predict Popularity In New Distraction Age with writer Derek Thompson
11 Apr 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What inspired Derek Thompson to write his book?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Derek face in the publishing process?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you who I've met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built. You know, I'm an analytics-like crazy person. I love the data. And I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices, their phones, and TVs throughout the office.
Chapter 4: How does Derek define creativity in writing?
Now, the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at nathanlacka.com forward slash analytics.
Chapter 5: How does Derek describe the science of popularity?
It's using a company called Clipfolio. And I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them. It's nathanlacka.com forward slash analytics.
top tribe you know i don't have a lot of time to waste that's why i use fresh books to send out invoices and make sure i'm collecting my money to get your free month go to nathanlatka.com forward slash fresh books and enter the top in the how did you hear about us section Nathan Latke here. This is episode 626.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of different audiences for a book?
And coming up tomorrow morning, you hear from 46-year-old CEO and father of two, Mark Mader. He's the CEO of Smartsheet.
Chapter 7: What are the risks and benefits of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing?
They've raised $70 million, have passed $80 million in annual recurring revenue, and they're helping 65,000 customers with project management. So what's their ARPU CAC in LTV? Tune in to find out tomorrow morning, 6 a.m.
Chapter 8: What lessons can authors learn from the rejection of famous books?
Eastern. Good morning, everybody. Nathan Latke here. Our guest this morning is Derek Thompson. He's a senior editor at The Atlantic, a big, big, big media company. Many of you maybe have heard of them. His first book, Hitmakers, is about the science of hits in pop culture and technology and why people like what they like. That's what we're going to focus on. He lives in New York.
Derek, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's go to the top. Let's do it. Awesome. I appreciate you being here, but I have to tell you, people say, you know, don't write a book. All you do is it takes a lot of time and you lose a lot of money. Why are you writing a book?
You know, the great thing about a book is that the reason to go into journalism is because you have a lot of questions that you want answered. And the best reason to write a book is to answer questions. And so I wrote a book about why people like what they like and why cultural products succeed. It's a huge answer, but I loved writing it.
And the funny thing is people say, you know, every book has to have an elevator pitch. You nailed it right there. But I think books are really kind of like broken elevators. On the one hand, you need both an elevator pitch but also it's like 200, 300 pages long. So if the elevator breaks, you need to be able to entertain people for eight hours.
And that challenge of being able to write something that's both focused, but also entertaining for 300 pages was really awesome.
Well, Adam Grant's a fan. He says this book picks up where the tipping point left off. Break this down, like my audiences,
is very analytical did you follow a process to really nail this book out and make sure you have open loops to pull the audience through you know any any productivity hacks to actually get all the writing done how would you actually build this this this piece this art this artwork
Oh, artwork is very nice of you, Nathan.
Thank you. It actually is very beautiful artwork on the cover.
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