April 11, 2024

Welcome to this issue of Austin Business Review, a weekly roundup of great local events and insights for Austin business owners (plus some other cool stuff for your life outside of work).

This week, we’ve got a few things on-deck:

BUT FIRST… Do you like pickleball?

Then you’ve gotta meet Thomas Shields, a new reader here, and local founder of Upswing Sports.

Thomas founded The Dink a few years ago – basically THE media company covering pickleball – and reaches hundreds of thousands of players every week across newsletter, podcasts, and more.

UpSwing is in the process of expanding that model to other emerging sports.

He says Austin’s a great hub for pickleball fans. Major League Pickleball was founded here, along with killer brands like Recess.

There are also a bunch of pro’s living here, like Ben and Collin Johns (the No. 1 doubles duo), Zane Navratil (who co-hosts the PicklePod with Thomas), Vivienne David, Lea Jansen, DJ Young, and many others.

Two of his favorite public spots to play:

There’s also a great case study here on how he bootstrapped the newsletter to its first 150k readers. The story’s epic, so check it out, then hit him up on LinkedIn and say hey.

Great to have you onboard, Thomas! Okay, let’s get into it…

-Ethan

Upcoming Events

Running a business is tough. Here are a few great places to meet cool people going through the same sh*t you are.

Fun Stuff Coming Up

…because if you’re anything like me, you work too much already. So here’s some fun stuff to do around town that’s not necessarily related to business.

🤖 Warning To Your Content Team: AI Crackdowns Are Coming

A friend of mine was at a party here in town recently, chatting with a data scientist from Medium about AI-generated content.

“Technology can’t really detect it yet,” was the basic gist, “but humans seem to be able to.”

Fascinating. What this person meant, I gather, is that any individual human has barely a coin-flip’s chance of spotting AI content. But if you step back, and look at how large groups of people interact with human- and AI-generated content, it’s different.

In other words, it sounds like data teams are finding novel ways to detect AI.

There’s been a lot of debate over whether platforms and search engines will punish brands for AI content once they can reliably spot it.

Medium offers an interesting look at what’s likely coming.

Early in 2023, they updated their terms to say they, “welcome the responsible use of AI-assistive technology,” so long as writers were transparent about it.

Later that year, as they got a better feel for the effects AI had on users, they took a firmer stance:

“Medium is for human writing, full stop,” they wrote. AI augmentation would be allowed – technically even using a tool like Grammarly counts as AI augmentation – but not welcome.

Humans were the priority.

Behind the scenes, enormous resources have gone into refining their distribution system to limit the reach of 100% AI-generated content.

Fascinatingly, that has meant re-introducing humans into the loop. Their boost program uses two layers of human review to help decide what gets increased visibility on the platform.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, they came out and said that any partner using AI in their paywalled content – disclosed or otherwise – will be removed from the partner program.

What does all this mean for you?

There’s no doubt AI plays a role in the future of human creativity and content marketing (more on this in Brett’s piece below 👇 )

But never forget the incentives of the platforms.

Their goal is to serve up the best. Full stop. So experiment with AI, but only to the extent that it helps you create stuff that’s better than what’s out there now.

More than one great company has been killed overnight by Facebook or Google choking off distribution. And as platforms find new ways to spot AI content, they’ll be bolder about eliminating it.

The future is a lot more human than you think.

Word On The Street

Thought-provoking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. The Coming AI Renaissance: Okay, we already talked about how not to use AI. So what’s the good news? Brett Hurt, CEO of Data.World, penned this epic piece on how AI is unleashing human creativity, and forging renaissance 2.0 – innovation at an unprecedented scale.

It’s a case for AI optimism, and calls for (among other things) a new vocabulary that we can use to explore the concepts of AI-augmented human creativity as we head into this new “age of a billion dreams.”

2. Lessons From 25 Billionaires: Over the last couple years, Noah Kagan has talked with ~1% of the world’s billionaires. That might be more billionaires than most billionaires have met. Recently, he recorded 6 lessons he’s taken from those conversations.

For experienced business owners, I think this has some gems. For example, the focus on creating new non-obvious (and often boring) markets. Also, the price billionaires pay for success. Definitely worth a watch.

Side Note: Give him a shout on Twitter and say congrats – he’s gonna be a dad soon!

3. Inexperience Debt: A couple months ago, Cathryn Lavery, bought her DTC brand back from the PE firm that acquired it, and is now documenting the process of rebuilding it.

This week, she reflected on how strange it is to walk back into your company after a bunch of MBAs and consultants have run it for a while, and posed a fascinating question I think everyone should consider: If you sold your company tomorrow, what are the first 3-5 things a new owner would want to fix?

4. Do You Need To Struggle? This week, Codie Sanchez launched her new Big Deal podcast, and the first episode explores the nuanced ground between grinding, struggling, burnout, and freedom.

Some of the best real-talk on this subject I’ve heard in years. Listen to this one if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the business, or earmark it for any young person in your life who’s needs advice on how to get ahead.

5. Austin’s Housing Market – April Update: Maybe you saw the WSJ article saying that Austin’s real estate market is “running in reverse.” Well, some of my favorite local realtors dug into it deeper recently:

That’s all for this week.

You can email me here if you want to share any feedback, or let me know about an event you’re hosting.

Until next week,

-Ethan

Thank you to all the incredible local founders and leaders who share great insights and events. You can follow and connect with them here…

Thomas Shields, Chris Taylor, Valeska Pederson Hintz, Chris Ivester, Paris Bland, Devon Ambron, Paco Nathan, Cathryn Lavery, Bill Murphy, Marc Nathan, Angie Lee, Brett Hurt, Noah Kagan, Codie Sanchez, David Shapiro, Lee Abraham, Kirtana Reddy