Why am I writing this

I’ve always chased the work by chasing the people. Samsung early on, then a few web3 teams, NGOs, investment startups, and now beehiiv. I admired them before I ever worked with them, and those have been my best experiences.

Here’s the filter + practice that got me in the room.

1 Insight

you don’t “convince” great teams

you signal alignment so clearly they recognize you. admiration is a compass. When your proof looks like their culture (how they think, ship, write), you become obvious to them.

1 Habit

the “admiration loop,” weekly—30 minutes, no drama:

  1. pick 3 teams you genuinely admire.

  2. study 1 fresh artifact from each (a feature, post, launch, or deck).

  3. ship 1 tiny contribution for one of them: a teardown, a 3-line bug report, a rewritten CTA, a two-slide concept, a micro-dataset—something they could paste in today.

  4. send it without a calendar link. “if useful, steal it.” repeat next week.

1 Story

beehiiv happened this way

i already loved what they were building, so i worked in public: case studies, systems, and notes that mirrored their bar—reader-first, specific, zero fluff. that work made the conversation easy because it felt like something from inside the team. the same pattern showed up in my earlier gigs (samsung, web3, ngos, investing): i was already aligned, and my first contact wasn’t “can we chat?”—it was a concrete improvement they could ship.

try this this week

  • pick one team you admire.

  • find one surface you can actually improve in under an hour.

  • deliver the improvement. no pitch deck. no “quick call?” just usefulness.

  • if nothing comes to mind in 60 minutes, you don’t admire them enough (or you don’t understand them yet). pick a different team.

a tiny template you can steal
subject: tiny improvement for {team}
body:
hey {name}, i’m a fan of {specific product/post}. noticed {specific gap}. here’s a paste-ready fix:
• {line 1: the change}
• {line 2: how it improves x metric}
• {link to the actual file/mock}
no reply needed—steal if useful. if you want, i can iterate once more based on your style guide.

That’s it for this week!!!

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