You are what you eat

Brex shared the top 15 newsletters purchased by their customers.

Unsurprisingly, Lenny's Newsletter is at the top. I'm curious what other newsletters for PMs are popular among startups. There are a few that come to mind, but they're all derivative of the style Lenny made famous.

On the whole, the landscape for software-related media is bleak. Based on what's popular, you can tell that the appetite for content is exclusively big picture. It's all about "strategy", war stories, and unempirical pontification. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great stuff from Lenny and company. But more and more, the top players in tech media feel like empty calories.

And it shows. The fat are getting fatter, gobbling up talent and VC dollars in pursuit of the singularity. Basic technical and economic fundamentals don't apply, at least not right now. Sooner or later, bad habits will catch up with them. You'd hope they will shape up with diet and exercise. But more realistically, they'll push the peptides and act like nothing was ever out of sorts.

I miss the days of old, where you could actually learn your craft one blog post at a time. Entire brands and businesses were born by sharing practical knowledge that readers could apply to the work they were doing that very day. I owe my career to Chris Coyier and the team that ran CSS Tricks. And I learned how to become a designer thanks to many podcasts, YouTube videos, and other how-to content on the web.

There was a type of clean eating I practiced early in my career that accelerated my growth. All that media molded me into the pro I am today. But I look around now, and take stock of the calories I've eaten lately, and it's no wonder why everything feels bloated.

As the great Logan Roy says,

"Where's the protein?"