Another newsletter, seriously? Yes.

I’m the Product is a personal project where I write about what I’m reading, studying, and thinking about. I send it every Monday morning.

What I’m Reading

Product Led Growth is this year’s north star for Flywheel Studio, my agency. We’ve been helping our clients understand and implement it in our projects.

Product Led has been a great resource, with many helpful articles. I’m currently reading: How to Identify your SaaS Pricing and Value Metrics (Free Template).

I’ve also found Duolingo’s product blog. Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams is an extremely helpful read for how we think about product analytics.

Today, we, Flywheel Studio, are quite early in our understanding of product analytics. We haven’t had a client with enough traction or longevity to get into deep user analytics. I want to change that this year and unlock another level of value Flywheel can provide clients.

What I’m Learning

I started I’m the Product as an excuse to get through the courses I’ve purchased and never completed. Seriously, that’s why it’s a personal project.

I’m starting Sam Parr’s Copy That course. Over the next ten days, I will complete the course and share my learnings & thoughts in the next newsletter.

Next month’s course is Visualize Value’s Compound Content.

What I’m Thinking

Last week I read an interview summarizing Howard Mark’s interview. The discussion itself is interesting and was a good reminder I should be reading any memo he writes. But there was an underlying issue that I’ve been thinking about: there’s a major market shift happening and what does it mean for me?

First, I must admit I “missed” the last market cycle (as Marks explains it). In hindsight, I should’ve purchased more rental properties and financed the acquisitions with 30 year fixed mortgages at low interest rates. It seems blindly obvious now, but the ability to borrow at 3% may never come back.

So what does the next ten years look like, if it doesn’t look like borrowing the purchase assets?

I don’t know yet, but here are some thoughts:

1. Equities will underperform which means for me, my finances aren’t going to return what they used to.

2. I worry about pensions and retirement accounts. So many people rely on the assumption equities return 7% annually on average. What if they don’t?

3. Focusing on cashflow is going to be incredibly important for the next ten years.

Of course, this isn’t investment advice. It’s just my worry that a period of slow growth is going to hurt a lot of people who aren’t financially prepared. I expect we’ll see this manifest itself in politics, leading to another interesting 10 years of political turmoil.

About Erik

Erik’s the founder of Flywheel Studio, a software development agency. He’s also the founder of Thyme Real Estate, a partner in a real estate investment firm, and an angel investor.