Staking My Claim In The Scalable Class

Using media and code to thrive in the new age of digital leverage

Feb 11, 2024

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Stagnating at the Ceiling

2 years ago I began to wonder what was next for me as a creative professional.

I had spent a decade in design, engineering, and strategy jobs and held a coveted role as a principal product designer for a billion-dollar tech startup.

I had made it!

Except, I didn’t feel like it. I felt stuck.

I didn’t see a place further up the corporate ladder that appealed to me and I knew that my earning potential as an employee was capped.

This got me thinking about entrepreneurship.

The status quo for a creative service provider would be to start an agency. But that didn’t appeal to me either. I’ve been around long enough to know how hard that business is.

Selling your time just doesn’t scale.

We only have 24 hours in a day after all.

I wanted to find a way to remove my career ceiling but I didn’t know where to turn.

Discovering a Way Forward

Around that time, I discovered the work of a savvy brand designer, Jack Butcher, and a book he illustrated called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Jack’s work is inspirational in its own right, but it was Naval’s words that unlocked a new way of thinking about my skill set, my career, and my future.

I discovered the power of being a digital creator in the age of infinite leverage.

In the Almanack, Naval outlines 3 forms of leverage that allow business owners to scale the impact of their work:

First, labor: where you employ other humans to work on what you decide.
Second, money: where you employ financial capital to multiply the returns of your decisions.
And third, products with “zero marginal cost of reproduction”: where you employ media and code to scale your decisions infinitely (for free)

The two traditional forms of leverage (labor and money) are better understood but more challenging to acquire and manage.

It’s the third form of leverage that caught my eye.

“Media and code? That’s my entire career!”, I thought to myself.

Where I had been seeing dead ends, I saw a glimpse of a new opportunity.

I saw my skills as a designer and technologist in a new light.

I didn’t have to be stuck selling my time by the hour for incremental returns.

And I didn’t have to raise a bunch of money or hire a big team to start affecting the change I wanted to create.

There was a third way to take the cap off my career.

I could use media and code to create my own infinitely scalable path.

I could detach my earnings potential from my scarce time and leave behind the Working Class to join a new group of savvy creatives thriving in the digital economy.

I call this group The Scalable Class.

The Scalable Class

"The Scalable Class" is a group of modern entrepreneurs and creators who leverage the digital economy's unique traits—mainly media and code—to build scalable businesses that transcend traditional time and resource constraints.

Members of the Scalable Class use digital tools and platforms to create products, content, and services with no marginal cost of reproduction. This allows them to amplify their reach, impact, and earnings without corresponding increases in effort or expense.

Unlike traditional business models that rely on linear growth strategies, like adding more labor or capital, the Scalable Class focuses on exponential growth strategies through the creation and distribution of digital assets. These assets can include software, digital content, online platforms, and other intellectual property that can be easily scaled.

The Scalable Class isn’t defined by a specific industry but rather by a mindset and approach to work that prioritizes independence, innovation, and the strategic use of technology to achieve growth and impact.

In essence, the Scalable Class represents a shift towards a new economic paradigm where value creation is decoupled from the constraints of physical presence and traditional measures of input, such as time and labor, offering a new blueprint for success in the digital economy.

Determining My Path

The first question when determining my path to The Scalable Class was: media or code?

While I had been a software engineer early in my career, I was no longer fluent enough to easily prototype my software ideas in code.

Since I didn’t want to retrain myself as an engineer, media became the obvious choice. But what kind?

Looking at the modern media landscape, two formats stood out as ascendent in the marketplace: video and writing.

While I was curious about making videos, it felt too complex and intimidating to me at the moment since I was still working full-time.

That left me with writing.

A creative task simple enough that I could do it every week on top of my day job and scalable enough to be able to share my ideas with people all around the world.

Jack Butcher on X: "Request: Almost everyone I speak to that has figured something out on the internet has a graph from a dashboard that looks almost exactly like this. If you're — Source: Jack Butcher / Visualize Value

Facing the Challenges

I won’t lie to you, laying the foundations to succeed on this path has been the most challenging project of my life.

The amount of work has surpassed my expectations. The demand for consistency has tested my willpower. And the timeline for external validation has been much longer than I’d like.

It’s anything but a get-rich-quick scheme. But it’s also the most rewarding project of my life. I feel excited to get out of bed again.

I’m still a long way from achieving my vision. I’ve felt like giving up multiple times. But I’m forging ahead because I believe I have something unique to offer and that the best is yet to come.

Jack Butcher’s famous graphic sums up my experience (included above).

Scalable Foundations

Two years, 114 articles, and 4500+ readers later, I’ve laid the foundations of a scalable business I plan to build for the next decade.

Through thousands of hours at the keyboard, I’ve earned a new understanding of my business as a creator in the age of digital leverage.

Along the way, I’ve sought out and studied fellow creative entrepreneurs using their expertise to carve unique paths for themselves into The Scalable Class.

It was this study that led to my article “The Era of Design Entrepreneurship” which was featured in the UX Collective’s annual trend report for 2024.

This movement is only gaining momentum for those who want to ride the wave.

Final Thoughts

Media and code.

These are the keys to the new digital kingdom.

If you’re willing to keep an open mind and experiment, there has never been a better time to have one of these skill sets than right now.

Will you join me and leverage your powerful skills on the new frontier?

Will you stake your claim in the Scalable Class?

Until next time,

Pat

Conversation Starter

What are the biggest challenges you foresee or have experienced in scaling your skills or business digitally?

Community Hype

I’ve been using community member Chase Adams’ vector scribbles a lot. One of them is on all my recent cover images! Chase has three of these libraries available in the Figma community: lines, arrows, and shapes. Grab copies for yourself!

Give me scribbles!