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Dept. Dispatch #011
Filed Under: The woman who built a 6-fig business by questions and curiosity
Time: Sunday, June 15 | Location: Coffee-stained table. Overstimulated brain. Tomato Jam still unexplained
👋 YELO! Reader
Welcome to the 39 of you who just joined — and welcome back to the rest of you strange, signal-obsessed creatures.
New here? This is the Dept. Dispatch — where I dissect how creators build weird, durable empires from obsession and IP. Start with Dispatch #010 for context.
If you’re here for viral hacks and “3 Trust Tips Using Fonts”…
You’re in the wrong Dept.
This isn’t a newsletter.
It’s a field report from the weird backrooms of the creator economy — where ideas are raw, experiments are half-broken, and frameworks emerge from 3AM breakdowns.
We don’t summarize reality.
We dissect it. Awkwardly. Sometimes with graphs.
Yes, it’s a newsletter.
But it’s also a season.
A running log of what happens when one person builds an IP-first business with AI ghosts and no chill.
So this week in Dispatch #011:
- I accidentally hired 11 invisible employees.
- I studied a woman who built a 6-fig empire from questions, not content.
- I ran a real-world test: attention vs. architecture — the winner? Trust.
- And for the first time in 63 days, I cracked open the “offers” drawer.
This isn’t content.
It’s calibration.
Smell the metaphorical ink. Share it if you survive.
And if it moves you in any way—let me know. I’m lurking on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. Probably too much.
Have a curious weekend.
— Sudhanshu Pai
📍 Previously in the INFO CREATOR DEPT.
Last time in Dispatch #010…
The cameras cut, but the chaos didn’t. Behind the scenes, something shifted.
The founder ghosted social media — not out of burnout, but blueprinting.
Instead of chasing clout, he entered a cold, fluorescent-lit machine room where ideas get dismantled, re-welded, and fitted with better leverage screws.
The experiments? Risky.
First: a co-creation tribute that wasn’t just content — it was a tactical admiration play, dressed as a carousel. It broke 25,000 impressions, but more importantly, it broke into new circles.
Second: a creator breakdown that should have scaled, but flatlined at 470 impressions. A quiet flop… but a loud insight.
And underneath it all? 11 new AI agents came to life. Not just bots — operational ghosts. Codified collaborators.
Suddenly, the Dept. wasn’t a one-man show.
It was a modular system disguised as a brand.
And while everyone else optimized for visibility…
He started engineering invisibility with impact.
Now, in Dispatch #011 —
The question isn’t “how do I grow?”
It’s: “What if I was never building for beginners at all?”
Some days it feel like he hired an invisible startup.
Other days, it feel like he interns. Either way…
Roll the tape.
📂 ICYMI: Filed Reports
Missed this week’s research drops? Here’s what’s bubbling:
🧠 Essay: Why RoX Is the Next Creator Power Move
Forget attention economics. The next wave of wealth isn’t about who shouts loudest — it’s about who structures expertise the smartest.
In 2019, she left Google.
She didn’t raise a round. She didn’t “scale.”
She just asked better questions.
From a quiet little blog named Ness Labs, she built something stranger than a startup:
120,000+ newsletter subscribers, Thousands of paid students, A book, Chrome extension, and neuroscience-powered content engine
No ads. No funnels.
Just curiosity, compounded.
While others were duct-taping products and chasing hacks,
Anne-Laure did the unthinkable:
She turned insight into infrastructure.
She wasn’t building a “personal brand.”
She was building a cognitive company.
And it worked.
🔎 This week’s breakdown dives into how.
From her idea engine to her monetization stack, this is how questions became capital:
→ Read the full deep dive
📡 Proof of Work: Hypothesis Confirmed (And Then Some)
🎙 This would’ve been an audio log...
But it’s 7:56 AM…on a Sunday Morning and the sleep is winning me over.
This week was my best & most exhaustive weeks in months, for more than one reason but let’s get down to the data…
This week, I didn’t go viral.
But I did go visible — to the right people, in the right rooms.
And it all started with a misdiagnosis.
📌 Hypothesis
I tested an hypothesis from Issue no. 6
“I thought I was building for 0 → 1 creators. The freelancers. The fresh starts.”
That made sense at first. My old self was one of them — scraping together pixels and hope.
But as I kept publishing, experimenting, co-creating…
…I noticed a pattern in my DMs.
They weren’t from lost beginners.
They were from tired builders.
🧠 People with IP, but no ecosystem.
🎯 Clarity, but no calibration.
💼 Offers, but no positioning.
This wasn’t a crowd that needed content.
This was a crowd that needed diagnosis. Direction. And durable scaffolding.
🧪 The Experiment: Cast the Net, Count the Ripples
So I set a trap. Two, actually.
- A mock project carousel
- A creator breakdown thread
Both were meant to test what kind of content triggers meaningful connection.
📊 Results:
- Carousel: 25,914 impressions
- Breakdown: 470 impressions
But the numbers weren’t the headline.
The real data came in forms no social graph can track:
- ✅ 2 trust-based pings
- ✅ 1 partnership opportunity
- 🧠 10+ new warm conversations with high-fit, IP-rich creators
One of them even opened with:
“I didn’t think anyone else was thinking this deeply about our kind of work.”
🧭 The Diagnosis
So here’s what I learned:
It wasn’t the polish. It wasn’t even the visuals.
It was the proof of thinking.
The evidence of obsession.
The clarity that comes from solving real problems out loud — instead of pretending to have all the answers.
🔁 What Now?
So yes — the thesis holds:
Projects > Posts
Architecture > Attention
Identity > Algorithms
And apparently, I’ve been designing for this “1 → 2” tribe all along.
So I’m doubling down.
🧱 More narrative scaffolding.
🎬 More co-creation blueprints.
📉 More behind-the-scenes postmortems like this one.
📖 And eventually... frameworks disguised as fiction.
Let’s call it The IP Underground.
Where signal beats spectacle.
And your next evolution isn’t a better funnel — it’s a better foundation.
🏴☠️ Dept. Internal Memos
Okay, cards on the table.
Until now, I’ve never really sold anything. Not on Twitter. Not in DMs. Not even here.
That changes now.
After revisiting the forgotten Profit Calibration Session I shelved months ago, I ran it through Katelyn Bourgoin’s Pitch Audit bot.
I expected feedback. I got a green light.
So I’m quietly opening 3 spots this month.
What is it?
→ A 60-minute strategic deep dive
→ For experts with real IP
→ Who want leverage, not more launches
No fluff. No funnel.
Just a Notion brief, a thinking lab, and the tools to turn scattered genius into sellable, scalable intellectual assets.
If you know someone with deep expertise but no flagship offer —
→ Send them to my Linkedin
Or apply directly here.
🧳 Let’s pack your genius for scale.
Let’s not let it sit idle another month.
🗣️ Help Me Build This Thing
I don’t want this newsletter to become another tab you scan between meetings.
I want it to feel like a surveillance tape from the edges of the creator economy.
Like a field report.
From someone still figuring it out, but doing it with unreasonable conviction.
So tell me...
- Do you want more teardown-style deep dives?
- BTS breakdowns of how I build tools and offers?
- Stories of failure, pivots, and near-delusional bets?
- A mini audio diary at the end of every issue?
Reply. Ping me. Drop a voice note. Send a raven.
Let’s not build a newsletter.
Let’s build a Department.
Stay weird. Stay asymmetrical. And stop turning $10K ideas into footnotes.
—Sudhanshu “I leak therefore I build” Pai
Day 63
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