The Pryor Week #3: Hustling to the Top
Hey there, I hope your week is going thrillingly.
Here’s how mine went:
Played hockey for the first time in a while ☝️. I have a nagging wrist tendon injury from the summer so I’ve only been playing goalie. Good thing I kick ass at it! And yes, for those keeping track of my weirdness, that is an iceless ice rink in Taiwan. It’s also located in the middle of nowhere, making it even more of a hilarious oddity.
Finished a couple big pieces. One (3 Famous Awards With Incredibly Dark Origin Stories) was my first attempt at a ‘master listicle’ (really need a better name for that), but it’s the idea of making several full-depth related-theme individual articles, then summing them up into a listicle later on. The results were so-so so far, but I like the idea. Much more work than I envisioned but I’ll have to do another attempt at a more click-worthy subject perhaps. (“5 Foods as Tasty as PB&T?”)
The other was an extrapolation of a really interesting study that took place a decade ago offering a group of ‘The World is Ending Next Tuesday!!!’ peeps up to $500—a few weeks after the Tuesday. I may have stretched the premise a bit too far, but it was fun to work on nonetheless.
I also created a list of the highest traffic Substack newsletters out of curiosity.
And lastly, I took a bunch of submissions from Medium members to showcase their published works in The Unofficial Medium Authors Book List. If you’re an author and are on Medium, let me know, I can add it to the list.
Drank 4 coffees and 20 teas.
This Week’s Pryor Learnings
#1. Hustling with Extensions
I always like reading about new ways to make money, if for anything just out of curiosity. This guy named Tony launched a self-made Chrome extension and now makes $3,000 recurring monthly revenue from it just a few months later. Pretty cool.
Who knew you could make a living off of browser extensions? It’s also neat to see his ‘build it in public’ approach as a marketing/fun strategy.
#2. Hustling with Weird Humor
I love weird humor, I’m sure some of you have grasped that by now. So I had to click when I saw this URL pop up.
Someone made “youfeellikeshit.com” as a self-care browser-based ‘game’ to try to help people. IMO it’s a bit limited in its assumptions and functionality, but hilarious to see the poop emojis.
#3. Hustling with Weird Objects
This one is a bit on the dark side, depending on your perspective. Worth a click though just to see the main image. Some dude made a fully functioning guitar—out of his dead uncle’s skeleton.
It’s actually an interesting story to read about—“I believe part of my uncle Filip is still there, literally and figuratively. Just a warm presence, maybe enjoying his next life as a totally metal guitar.”
#4. Hustling with Illegal Downloads
I’m not sure your feelings on the torrent industry but I like to view it as a counter measure to the entertainment industry’s greed levels.
When their business policies lead to higher prices, less availability of movies/tv-shows, etc, more piracy occurs. And vice versa of course (ex. when Netflix dominated for years before the wave of countless TV apps, piracy nose-dived).
One of the more popular torrent downloading sites is called BitTorrent, which has apparently cleaned up its image over time (makes sense why I haven’t heard of them in years).
But back in 2012/13, they teamed up with the greasy-sales-machine-pretending-to-be-a-human Tim Ferris, and he leveraged the platform to launch a best-selling book by giving away chapters for free as torrent downloads, slowly over time.
Weird strategy. Paid off, but hard to tell if it was effective in itself (as he was already famous).
#5 Hustling with Buying Your Way to the Top
I’m slowly working on a big boy piece about this topic. It’s driving me nuts. Went on a 5-hour rabbit hole the other day and came out quite annoyed. There’s a prolific amount of rich people buying their way onto the top of Best Sellers lists out there.
So far, most of the culprits seem to repeatedly fall into the same two groups.
Pause and take 10 seconds to guess what they are.
Now clench your fist and look:
Prominent Republicans and Fox News Talking Heads
Evangelical Preachers
I only included one link above, but trust me, it’s a rabbit hole with a lot of evidence out there over the past 10 years. Save yourself 5 hours of frustrating rabbit holing and wait for my article on the subject.
That’s it! Thanks, everyone.
J.J. Pryor
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