What We're Good At and Love - Business Plan Part 2 🌱

As we slide slowly and steadily towards the weekend, we realize it's the next best day to our favorite. It's Thursday, and we have an expansive throwback for you.

Thirty-seven years ago today, the first personal computer virus was released into the world. It was the creation of two brothers who ran a computer store in Lahore. They called it Brain after their computer service company. They originally wrote it to protect their medical software from copyright infringement—but oh boy, did it spiral out of control.

It was a harmless collection of crude code that went viral well before the term even came about. Later, the two brothers went on to establish the first internet service in their country.

Right on the heels of yesterday's welcome, it's time to throw your hands in the air for Kristen! Today's her first day at Hey Rebekah and we're pumped. In addition to wordsmithing, she knows a thing or two about organic growth and 9x more than us about SEO. 🤓

We can't wait to see how she helps us optimize to climb the rankings of your inboxes, ensuring Hey Rebekah's at the very top every morning.

Hit reply on this message and send her your semantically formatted welcome!

For ages, we thought: Why would anyone want to subject themselves to the pain and suffering of working out when there's HBO Max and pizza? But as our knees began to creak and our backs started aching, our attitudes changed.

We soon realized that exercise has more benefits than just getting a toned derrière accentuated by our stretchy pants.

For example, the ability to run around with four dogs that are completely infatuated with you for more than five minutes without getting winded. Or being able to thr-Ash the joy out of young basketball fans.

We're not trying to get all preachy on you, as Odin knows that's not our style. We'd rather inspire you with a great story from one of the timeless legends we ❤️.

On Tuesday, we began dropping this playbook series with part one. The questions we're answering? What the heck is Hey Rebekah and what are you doing?

If you haven't skimmed that drop yet 👆🏼, now may be a good time to get the gist 👇🏼.

🤖 The gist by ChatGPT: We've been in the digital marketing space for a while now, helping companies gain superpowers. But when we took on a new client in 2020, we realized that our business model was not scalable. So we did some research and broke things down to first principles to discover a new value proposition different than what we thought it was, focusing on our success as self-employed professionals. 🤯

Once we understood what we were good at, we shifted our attention to what we love. Given our recent client experience, doing meaningful work at scale was something that was important to us.

But first, so we're all on the same page, let's summarize what we're good at. Our planning started with an endless list of specific topics we've excelled at. Hey, look, we're flexing! 😇

That grueling exercise—somehow made even more mysterious by hidden columns to be revealed later—proved to be a real eye opener for the things we do—that we're good at. But it didn't necessarily explain who we are. So we modified our thinking and landed on:

We're successful self-employed professionals who are good at X.

Remember those stories of colleagues we shared? Well, that's basically what we love. After another few days of wiping the crappy dry-erase ink off our hands from white-boarding, we determined:

We're successful self-employed professionals who are good at X who love helping people become successful self-employed professionals who are good at X.

The hardest part was now past us, or so we thought. Next, we had to gather some benchmarks on scalability. We didn't want to run into the same plateau we met earlier. So it was time for some sodium, coding, methodic research, and melodiIc background noise. 🫣

Hey reader #177,306! Give us a minute, we're almost done, promise.

We started by exploring the TAM which indicates the maximum opportunity size we could theoretically address. Here's a snapshot of those findings based on 2019 data from the ILO and World Bank:

So this initial exercise produced one component of our TAM that was brain-numbing, even after slashing the figures down to numbers we could pronounce. We now had some initial validation that achieving scale was possible. More up-to-date analysis by the smart people at Exploding Topics reinforced our own.

Alright, we know how captivated you are by all of this and hate to burst your bubble, but we're going to continue the adventure on Tuesday in part 3.

With all the AI advancements creeping into our world it's easy to miss their physical manifestations. This is a whole new level of: I'm going to be replaced by a robot.

After watching this we couldn't help but imagine Atlas bonking us on the head with a massive wooden box after we repeatedly ask them to raise it over their head for our Boomerang to post to TikTok.