🦅 He picked a crowded niche. And yet, he hit 183K subscribers.

He picked a crowded niche. And yet, he hit 183K subscribers.

Packy McCormick wanted to write about business strategy. The space was already saturated. Ben Thompson and Mario Gabriele had it locked at the top, and underneath them, dozens of established voices plus hundreds of newer creators were competing daily for whatever attention was left.

The obvious move was to find a smaller niche. Packy did the opposite. Today Not Boring has over 183,000 subscribers and a $30M+ venture fund attached.

1) The "Monopoly of You" Formula

Going smaller is one way out of a crowded niche. The cost is usually the topics you actually care about.

When Packy took David Perell's Write of Passage course, the concept that stuck was the "Personal Monopoly." Combine a few things that already make you unique. Then write at the center of them.

Packy didn't pick a smaller corner of business strategy. He stayed in the main lane and filled it with the things he genuinely loved. Sports-blog energy from being a Bill Simmons fan. Pop-culture references that came naturally to him.

Same niche. Different voice. 

Picking a smaller corner works, but it usually means giving up the topics that pull you in. And writing inside a smaller corner gets boring fast.

Your best moat isn't a smaller niche. It's the combination of you that no one else can copy.

2) The Best Creators Look Insane Until They Don't

Packy's CV in 2019 was a mess. That gave him an edge.

He graduated from Duke in 2009, then joined Merrill Lynch, and later a startup (Breather). It was then that he started writing during meetings to remain intellectually sharp.

He quit Breather in late 2019, and he ended up living at his in-laws' with a pregnant wife and the idea for a newsletter.

He wrote for over a year before crossing 1,000 readers.

Then the curve bent. 1K to 50K in twelve months. 50K to 100K in eight more. Today: 183K+ subscribers.

Same pattern shows up everywhere.

Sam Parr ran moonshine arbitrage and a hot dog stand before launching The Hustle. Milly Tamati had a New Zealand teaching degree, then bounced through 65 countries with random jobs (Thai hostels, an Australian wine tour, a design agency in the UK) before founding Generalist World.

The detours weren't waste. On the contrary, they turned out to be the source material. These kinds of growth arcs only look obvious in reverse.

3) Stack the Skills No One Else Has Stacked

"It's really hard to do this every single week if you're not being yourself."

That's Packy on weekly cadence. It's also the test for whether your voice is actually yours. The optimism, the pop culture, the energy. All of it is who he is. Faking it would have collapsed in a few months.

Trung Phan ran the same play. He grew from zero to 300,000 Twitter followers in a couple of years. His posts are like no one else's. Comedy screenwriting energy stacked on top of CFA-level financial analysis and passion for history.

The intersection only exists because he tried stuff, made mistakes and learned in the process.

The "Personal Monopoly" isn't a marketing concept. It's the positioning that survives. You can't analyze your way into an empty niche. Instead, stack the skills and experiences that make you, you.

The audience for that intersection is small at first. That's fine. Nobody else can compete for it.

What to do:

• List the three or four things that make you different (career detours, hobbies, weird expertise, contrarian taste). Write at their intersection.

• Stop hunting for a smaller niche. Stay where you actually want to be and bring more of yourself to it.

• Use Hypefury to show up daily on social media on autopilot, so the voice you're building has time to compound.

Software is going probabilistic, and so are the founders building on it

Dan Nguyen-Huu argues AI flipped the software equation: generation got cheap, validation didn't. The founder who wins now runs cheap experiments in days instead of committing to quarter-long roadmaps, and treats "this could all change in two months" as a feature, not a risk. Forward-leaning AI teams are flipping Google's 80/20 split to roughly 70% experimental, 30% roadmap. The non-negotiables stay the same though: velocity, recruiting, and execution. Probabilistic does not mean casual.

Read more

OpenAI's prompting guide for gpt-image-2: structure beats cleverness

The new image model rewards prompts written in a fixed order: background, subject, details, constraints, intended use. Specificity does the heavy lifting, especially photography language for photorealism and explicit "what must not change" instructions to stop drift across iterations. Put literal text in quotes or caps, and spell tricky words letter by letter. Start with a clean base prompt and refine incrementally instead of stuffing everything in at once. Quality="low" is enough for most use cases; reserve medium and high for dense text, infographics, and identity-sensitive shots.

Read more

The podcast-first content system: one recording, fifteen pieces

Pierre Herubel's pitch: founders are the bottleneck in B2B content because writing is slow, but talking isn't. Record one episode in 4K, distribute it on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, then run it through AI to generate clips, blog posts, LinkedIn carousels, and newsletter sections. Pick one of three formats (expert interviews, solo thought leadership, or customer case studies) and stick to a repeatable episode structure. The whole system is built around the 95/5 rule: 95% of your market isn't buying yet, so make content for them, not for the 5% your sales team is already chasing.

Read more

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury