Aaron McClendon

consumer, content, commerce | prev. @dvpfund

[Aaron McClendon @faintflex]

Finally decided to kickoff FaintFlex, my weekly newsletter covering new media & personality-driven startups ✍🏾 https://t.co/HXZJC3iksB

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I strive to make my writing unsummarizable, in the sense that it has so little fluff left in it that if you take any words out, as summaries by definition do, you lose a lot of interesting ideas.

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

James Clear: "Almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume."

"When you choose who to follow on social media or which podcast to listen to or which book to read or what YouTube channel to watch, you are choosing your future thoughts in a sense."

"If you want better, more productive, more creative thoughts, then you need better, more productive, more creative inputs."

@JamesClear on @hubermanlab

[Robin Rombach @robrombach]

Seeing Martin Scorsese using FLUX for storyboarding and scene exploration was absolutely insane. Experiencing how one of the absolute masters of cinema & filmmaking uses the technology that we developed, his curiosity and creativity, and the way he prompted our models, was humbling.

I am grateful to call Martin Scorsese an advisor to BFL, and to explore the next, multimodal and interactive phases of visual AI with him.

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

this happens in the horror industry about once every ten years or so and I can promise you they’re going to learn the absolute worst lessons from it.

[Aaron McClendon @faintflex]

@uploadthevid Return to your childhood obsessions and make new observations about them

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

die empty

[anu @anuatluru]

Re: Obsession and Backrooms,
Horror movies and psychological thrillers are experiences all on their own, even with unknown talent. Every other kind of movie now depends on expensive IP or nostalgia or known actors and insane marketing (Barbie / Oppenheimer / Marty Supreme).

[Jason Blum @jason_blum]

Blumhouse-Atomic Monster has the #1 and #2 movies in the country this weekend, both made for almost no money. Theaters are packed. What a time to be making scary movies.

[Adam Faze @adamfaze]

So sick

[𝔇𝔞𝔫𝔦𝔢𝔩 𝚟𝚜 𝔅𝔞𝔟𝔶𝔩𝔬𝔫 @DanielvsBabylon]

Addiction is proof that you are capable of intense devotion, you're just serving a false god.

[signüll @signulll]

it’s kinda nuts how much social media turned almost all of lifestyle into performance art.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

People treat imagination like it's a soft skill for children and artists, but it is the most dangerous capability a human being has

[Kallaway @kanekallaway]

I'm 100% confident I could take any person (with actual expertise) and build them a content engine that makes $1M in profit within 12 months.

I've done this for myself several times over in various models, but now I want to do it for someone else.

We're in the "shut up and prove it era" so this type of walk the walk is becoming critical.

Who should I do this for?

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Pattern Recognition is also the form of intelligence that causes the most stress.
You will see things that others do not.

You'll feel crazy.

Things will be *so obvious* to you, and others will just deny it.

[Pat Walls @thepatwalls]

B2B software is not a great model right now.

And I predict a small shift towards services/agency model (in B2B).

Just talked to a founder who proved it. For 2+ years, he spent $100k building an AI SaaS and only made $150,000. His margins evaporated into paid ads & compute costs.

So he killed the saas and pivoted to a services model. $1-2k per month per client for [redacted] services.

He's doing $1M/year now (and got there quickly).

His margins? 70%!! Because most of the agency work it's not being done by humans, but rather AI agents and automations.

Meanwhile a lot of SaaS founders I talk to are reinvesting everything back into the business in the name of growth, and are lucky to be seeing even 30% margins!!

Also:

- SaaS multiples are in the toilet.
- And DIY tools like Claude Code quietly killing growth

This is just something I noticed as I talk to founders all day.

This is mostly anecdotal, but I'm seeing less fast growing B2B saas products lately and more consumer apps and agency/services businesses crushing it.

[Simon Owens @simonowens]

For most of the social media era, comedians had to walk a fine line: they wanted to leverage social media to build audiences, but they also wanted to hoard all their best jokes so they could be released all at once in a comedy special — either one licensed by a company like Netflix or distributed directly from the comedian.

This meant that most comedians stuck to publishing lame crowd-work videos where they’d banter with audiences. Obviously, this was rarely their best material, and I even started blocking these comedians so I wouldn’t have to encounter their stuff in the feed. There are exceptions to the rule, but generally I really hate crowd work because it usually devolves into lowest-common-denominator improv comedy.

But I’ve noticed something recently: more and more comedians are publishing clips of some pretty stellar jokes to Instagram Reels/TikTok/etc. They’re no longer holding the good stuff back.

Why? Well, the Scalable interviewed Scott Dunn, the founder of a company that helps comedians develop their IP, and he said that comedians are starting to build more traditional creator businesses around their comedy.

Obviously, if your only goal in life is to do standup, then the hour-long Netflix special is still the north star, but this new direct distribution strategy makes it easier for comedians to branch out and build their own IP. They can segue their standup comedy virality into podcasts, game shows, or even acting roles. The standup clips are merely a stepping stone to other opportunities.

https://t.co/w0TzzhWktL

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Short dramas have quietly become a massive entertainment format.

Think next-gen soap operas: serialized, mobile-first, and monetized like games.

In China, they already generate more revenue than the domestic box office.

And now AI is going to blow this format wide open 👇

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

warren buffet supposedly lives the same way and i've always found this low-tech lifestyle to be the biggest flex

[Naval @naval]

What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.

[👍 @CLINT419]

if ur not ready to approach ur creative work with an athlete-like mindset in this current age then pack it in