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Dept. Dispatch #013
Filed Under: How My Business Has Gone in Q1
Status: Sleepless night. Spiritual awakening. Courage. Accidental creation of a new business species?
YELO! Reader
👋 YELO! Reader,
I’d planned to drop a polished essay this week. A shiny artifact of intellectual labor.
But—spoiler—the universe called my bluff.
(Or maybe it was just me procrastinating in a more poetic costume.)
Either way, here we are. Me, on the tail end of a power outage. A little fried. A little free.
And ready to admit a few things most creators won’t say out loud.
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.
After Dispatch #012...
I stopped showing up on LinkedIn. Not because I think social media is bad. Or beneath me. Or the enemy.
I just…couldn’t pretend anymore.
The rituals—content batching, carousel polishing, “engagement hacking”—started to feel like a church I’d stopped believing in.
Let me be clear:
I know it’s necessary.
I know eyeballs matter.
But I also know the cost.
The cost of waking up and feeling your brain has turned into a notifications dashboard. The cost of forgetting why you started creating in the first place.
And yeah—I tried outsourcing it to AI this time.
But the drafts it spit out felt...haunted.
Like they’d been written by a ghost who’d never had a real thought.
So I scrapped them.
And then I did something even scarier:
I ran a Q1 business review.
📂 ICYMI: Filed Reports
Missed this week’s research drops? Here’s what’s bubbling:
Small confession: I started a second newsletter.
Not because I’m disciplined.
Because my brain needed a room with no expectations.
A place to be absurd.
Norm...less.
Imagine Ogilvy had an existential crisis.
Then met Camus in a browser tab.
That’s the vibe over there.
If you’re curious what happens when you strip the creator veneer, here’s where I left the breadcrumbs:
👉 What Does It Mean to Be Norm:less?
📈 Quarterly Log: How My Business Actually Went in Q1
It is tempting to begin with triumph. To pretend I knew what I was doing from the start, that all these pieces fell neatly into place because I am some enlightened architect of intellectual property empires.
But here’s a more honest opening:
I spent much of Q1 jumping between conviction and quiet dread, certain I was onto something important but equally certain I might accidentally smother it under the weight of my own overthinking.
“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
— Hunter S. Thompson (probably thinking about my Notion dashboard)
This dispatch is a record of what I built, what I almost built, and what I quietly dismantled behind the scenes.
🎯 1️⃣ Core Positioning & Philosophy
The first order of business was to figure out what, exactly, I stood for. Not in the way most creators slap a tagline under their name and call it strategy, but in the slow, frustrating process of uncovering an idea worth staking your identity on.
Somewhere around day 28 of my sabbatical—possibly mid-coffee and existential fatigue—I articulated what would become the center of gravity for everything else:
“Experts deserve better than courses. We build premium IP ecosystems.”
This single sentence felt like discovering the coordinates of my future.
Of course, clarity doesn’t arrive without collateral damage.
In defining this, I had to discard the safer labels—course creator, consultant, digital freelancer—and adopt the posture of an educator who refuses to play the volume game.
Quick Recap of What Got Locked In:
- A philosophy stitched together from Expertise Economics, Proof of Work, and the quiet rebellion against the commodification of knowledge.
- A commitment to serving mid- to high-level knowledge entrepreneurs—those tired of duct-taping yet another PDF together.
- A voice that sounds, hopefully, like Ogilvy if he binge-watched Daniel Dalen videos and read Sugarman in a blackout.
Impact, or What My Mirror Told Me at 2 AM:
I finally have a message that doesn’t need to be shouted to be heard.
(And if you’ve ever tried to explain your brand to your own mother, you know that’s saying something.)
🧩 2️⃣ Offer Development
If positioning was the heartbeat, offers became the skeletal structure.
I started by designing the Profit Calibration Call, a compact offer priced at $117, intended to be accessible yet substantial—a first handshake that also feels like a diagnostic MRI.
At the same time, I architected the Co-Creation Partnership, a 12-week high-touch engagement meant for the rare client who wants to build a flagship info product without losing their sanity.
Note to Self: It is remarkably easy to design an offer that sounds brilliant on paper and then discover you would rather set your laptop on fire than deliver it every week.
What Made It Past the Drafts:
- An unshipped—but fully outlined—Genius Mirror Kit, designed to reframe expert identity into something monetizable. (for my BIG OFFER)
- A suite of frameworks: CLEAR, VITAL, IMPACT, each named to feel both memorable and suspiciously like something an overpriced consultant would pitch you at a Soho House brunch.
Impact:
For the first time, I can point to a product ladder and say, without wincing, “This is the architecture.”
(At least until I change my mind again. Which, statistically speaking, could happen before you finish this sentence.)
🪜 3️⃣ Pipeline & Funnel Design
No creator wants to admit they care about pipelines. But the truth is, in Q1 I learned that having no pipeline is simply romanticizing failure.
So I began constructing the Dream 75 Strategy, an elegant little system for identifying, engaging, and eventually converting high-fit clients who don’t require my self-esteem to be bundled with every proposal.
While I was at it, I also assembled the Zero Clout Networking Kit, a toolkit of emails and sequencing guides to make outreach feel less like begging and more like offering a premium seat at the table.
Side Observation:
“If you want to know how serious someone is about their business, ask them to show you their follow-up system.”
— An imaginary quote I pretend is from Peter Drucker
Impact:
Even if social media imploded tomorrow, I’d have a plan. Not a perfect one, but something resembling an escape hatch.
🧠 4️⃣ Brand Assets & Messaging
I spent more days than I’ll admit tweaking brand visuals, determined to land on a look that said “premium operator” rather than “course-hawking bro.”
Among the outcomes:
- A gold bar as a visual metaphor for IP. (Obvious? Perhaps. But it feels right.)
- A suite of LinkedIn banners that might make Monocle’s art director nod in mild approval.
- Signature PDFs and Notion guides with layouts so clean they’d make your inner minimalist weep with joy.
Impact:
For the first time, my brand feels cohesive—like a single, unbroken sentence instead of a stack of bullet points.
🏗️ 5️⃣ Infrastructure & Systems
Ah, the infrastructure phase. This is the part of the quarter when I realized that if I didn’t build internal scaffolding, I’d be recreating chaos on a loop.
What emerged:
- The Founder OS Manual, a living document of operating principles.
- The Fail Bank and Win Bank, repositories of experiments that worked, didn’t work, or simply exploded in my face.
- An AI Agent Stack—which, to be clear, sounds cooler than it sometimes behaves.
Meta Aside:
I’m aware it’s slightly absurd to call a Notion page a “system.” But if naming things well is the path to accountability, so be it.
Impact:
I can finally track what I build—and more importantly, why.
🟢 🟡 🔴 STATUS OVERVIEW
✅ Strategy: 85%
✅ Messaging: 80%
🟡 Products: 60%
🟡 Distribution: 40%
🟡 Proof: 30%
Translation?
I’m on the cusp.
I just have to ship, document, repeat.
🧭 Final Thought
Somewhere in this labyrinth of frameworks and half-finished assets, I discovered a quiet truth:
It’s not the clarity that feels scarce.
It’s the courage to act on it.
This is the quarter I stopped pretending I could keep one foot in the old game. The quarter I admitted the creator economy is shifting. The quarter I finally said out loud:
“I would rather build something slow and true than fast and hollow.”
And if you’re here, reading this all the way through, maybe you feel that pull too.
“An idea becomes a business the moment you stop asking for permission.”
— A quote I scribbled on a Post-it. Possibly in a fever dream.
📡 Proof of Work: Major Q1 Highlights
Consider this a declassified folder of small experiments and stubborn insights—each one a clue about where the creator economy is drifting next.
(Meta aside: I’m aware it sounds dramatic to call them “highlights,” but if you’ve spent your week battling your own resistance, you’ll understand the triumph in simply finishing something.)
🔍 Issue No. 3 — The Course Economy Is Hollowing Out
At first, I thought it was just me.
But the data didn’t lie: Only 40.7% of top educators still make their money from courses.
If you listen closely, you can hear the collective groan of a generation that tried to package everything they know into a four-module program and woke up realizing…
…it felt suspiciously like microwaving a home-cooked meal.
Key Realization:
Selling knowledge became cringe—until you stopped treating it like fast food and started treating it like architecture.
A house is more trustworthy than a vending machine.
(Note to self: Maybe the next offer should feel more like a blueprint than a buffet.)
Read the full breakthrough here.
🔍 Issue No. 5 — The Rise of the Interpreter
This dispatch hit me right in the ego.
I spent years trying to sound like the cleverest person in the room, only to discover that cleverness is mostly just camouflage for insecurity.
What people actually want isn’t another instructor barking directions.
They want an interpreter—someone who can walk beside them, gesture at the absurd puzzle of their own expertise, and say:
“That. That’s the piece you’ve been overlooking.”
Core Lesson:
Proximity beats authority.
When you trade the pedestal for the passenger seat, everything changes.
Read the full breakthrough here.
🔍 Issue No. 6 — Metrics as Mirrors (But Also Funhouse Mirrors)
For a while, I was hypnotized by reach.
I thought big numbers were evidence that the work was working.
But then I noticed how often my most viral content did almost nothing to deepen trust, build relationships, or spark offers.
Refresher Equation:
Reach ≠ Resonance.
Resonance ≠ Revenue.
You can fill your calendar with applause and still end the quarter with an empty pipeline.
(And if that sounds like a contradiction, congratulations—you’re probably a creator.)
Read the full breakthrough here.
🔍 Issue No. 11 — Proof of Thinking > Proof of Polish
The final dispatch of the quarter was the one that quietly flipped a switch for me.
I realized my most effective content wasn’t the glossy stuff.
It wasn’t the carousels or the carefully diagrammed frameworks.
It was the unvarnished projects—the evidence that I am in the lab, not the lounge.
Core Principle:
Proof of thinking is more magnetic than proof of polish.
Projects > Posts.
Process > Perfection.
(Probably a good moment to remind myself that shipping is better than strategizing.)
Read the full breakthrough here.
Closing Reflection:
If you’re reading this thinking, “This sounds messy,” you’re correct.
It is messy.
It is unfinished.
It is sometimes humiliating.
But it is also the reason I trust this work more than anything I’ve built before.
Because every highlight above is a receipt that I showed up and did the thing—imperfectly, awkwardly, but honestly.
And that, I suspect, is how you build something that lasts.
🗣️ Help Me Build This Thing
I don’t want this newsletter to become another dusty email you skim while pretending to read Slack.
I want it to feel like a surveillance tape from the edge of the creator economy.
A story unfolding in real time.
Half case study, half fever dream.
So help me calibrate, cause it’s more fun when you shape it with me.
What do you want more of?
- Behind-the-scenes chaos?
- Case studies like this one?
- More failures, fewer filters?
- Spicy takes on the creator economy?
Reply. DM. Send smoke signals.
Stay weird.
Stay asymmetrical.
Burn the course. Brand your genius,
Because Dispatch #014 is coming.
And so is the next evolution of this thing we’re building together.
—Sudhanshu Pai
Day 77 in the Dept.
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