A sick archive of vintage ads

Issue 16: How to brag, AI in your pocket, and “underconsumption core”

by Sophia Amoruso and Melanie Ehrenkranz

Business Class is a weekly newsletter for people who work for themselves. Have a scoop? Wanna partner? Email us ([email protected])

Notes from a Messy Desk:

I’m moving out of my home, room by room. Last week, I made my way to the garage, loaded with bins full of ephemera I didn’t know I had. I can’t tell if I’m a nostalgic sap or a hoarder, but either way it’s been entertaining, and emotional.

I’ve done a lot in my short lifetime, and it’s all been well documented; magazine clips and covers positioning me as the entrepreneur of a generation, an unlikely poster child of the rags-to-riches American dream, the ultimate #GIRLBOSS.

Binders upon binders of scripts from the Netflix series. Galleys of #GIRLBOSS and copies in every language known to man. Badges to every conference I’ve ever spoken at, my eBay powerseller certificate, the ID card I scanned to get into Nasty Gal’s excessive office space, and early sketches of our first collection.

These things are reminders of who I've been, and the identity I've carried for so long. But even when I’ve tried to shake it over the years, I’ve been reminded over and over again of who I was – mostly by people I don’t, will never, and probably don’t want to know.

People love to remind us of who we once were. It’s easier for them than it is to grapple with the ambiguity of who you’re becoming. They’re lazy, and they’re afraid of change. It scares them. And that’s okay. You know the risk of sitting still and that it’s your job to keep mutating.

I'm currently moving into a rented flat that's less than one-third the size of my current home. The kitchen doesn't have a single drawer. The fridge is slightly larger than a mini-fridge. There’s no bathtub. And I'm inspired by it all. In fact, I’m thrilled.

It's a physical representation of this new paradigm I’ve forced upon myself. I want to be free to travel where I want, when I want, without paying someone to clean bathrooms I don’t use even when I am in town. Because that’s fucking embarrassing.

This move isn't just about changing spaces; it's about opening myself up to new possibilities. I'm curious to meet a new me who lives between this wildly efficient space and the great wide world outside of it. What new ideas will present themselves? Who will I become as a result of it?

I feel my values changing by the minute. I’m taking dynamite to an already beautiful, dynamic life I love and trading it for another one – one that’s just as dynamic, but my own.

My advice to you: don’t wake up tomorrow with a hangover of who you were yesterday. Choose who you are today, and every day, as if it were completely new. Honor your past, but don’t be afraid to leave it exactly where it belongs.

- Sophia

In today’s issue:

• How to brag
• AI in your pocket
• "Underconsumption core"
• And more…

This newsletter is brought to you by Sunsama, which we covered in a previous issue because we love it. The team there saw our enthusiasm for their product, contacted us, and were like “hey, talk about us more” and I was like “that’s perfect because my ADD ass uses it every day.”

Sunsama is like a digital assistant: it pulls in my calendar for the day, proactively prompts me to budget time for those items and reminds me to add time blocks for to-do items I wouldn’t typically schedule, like writing this newsletter.

I then turn my computer on do not disturb, and press play. Sunsama then goes into focus mode, shows me the time I’ve budgeted for the task, and even plays a cute little sound that reminds me to take breaks in between.

We’ve talked about a lot of productivity and mindfulness apps, and of them all, this is the one that’s actually stuck.

– Sophia

How to find the right investors for your business at your pre-seed and seed rounds

Last week, I led an AMA for Business Class members on all things pitching and winning investors. One question that came up a lot was, how do I find the right investors? So, here are a few tips I shared:

(If you’re into live AMAs and workshops like these, you should probably join Business Class.)

• Show up where investors are. Where are they speaking? Find them after they get offstage. Nectar AI founder Misbah Uraizee just went to a beauty conference a VC firm hosted. Even though she’s not in beauty, she’s building software that helps e-commerce companies sell and manage in DMs. Rather than just go and hope she meets impactful attendees, she looked at the full RSVP list and had me, an investor, send blurbs to a list of them on LinkedIn. (If it’s not an investor, it can be an advisor or another connected person in your lane that can reach out on your behalf.)
• Find out where the investors are based. Send them a note saying, “Hey, I’m going to be in [insert their city here] next week.” You may not even have an airline ticket, and they may say, oh cool, I’d love coffee. And then you book your flight. You “happen to be in town.” That’s one way to do it.
• Make sure they’re investing in businesses like yours. As an investor, I don’t talk to companies that aren’t within the sector I invest in. I see so many pitches, it’s impossible. When you look at other companies like yours, find out who invested in them early. So if you’re looking to fundraise for a beverage company, who invested in Ghia? Who invested in Liquid Death? Are there accelerators and incubators for this kind of business? Look at press releases, look in the news, look at the LinkedIn profiles of the founders who are building similar companies and see if they ever made a fundraise announcement that maybe didn’t make the press. Just keep digging.
• Make friends with those founders, and ask for intros. For every intro you get, ask for two more.
• If you have a handful of people you want to talk to, go refine your pitch. Use the people you’re least interested in investing in you to bounce your pitch off of. You’ll know what you can improve by the questions that they ask or the gaps that you have in your pitch.

You need a brag document

A brag document (or brag book) is exactly what it sounds like: a living page (or pages) with all of your accomplishments. If a potential client asks you why they should give you their money, it’s all there for you to reference. Ideally, updated regularly.

To be clear, this isn’t something you need to send in lieu of a resume or portfolio of your work. It’s essentially a reservoir of your successes that you can pick and choose from depending on the circumstance.

Aside from just wins, cultivate hype that’s a bit more holistic: what skills did you learn? What testimonials did you receive? Who did you help? What specific examples do you have of how you went above and beyond?

This doesn’t just have to apply to work you get paid for – think about projects you helped a friend out on, volunteer work, mentorships, or something really cool you’re proud of.

Here are a few templates to get you started:

This is a straightforward brag document template with space to track your accomplishments, project wins, goals, skills, endorsements, and positive feedback.

This is a brag document guided by the STAR method: a format that tells the story of each accomplishment by detailing the situation, task, action, and result.

This momentum tracker template is a more thoughtful approach to the brag document: it includes self-reflection prompts so that you regularly check in with your professional journey and if it’s headed in the direction you want.

Hiring gets a glow up

When you’re looking for new people to join your team, you want to be able to digest who potential hires are and what they’re capable of in an engaging way. A memorable way. You don’t want to sift through hundreds of cover letters that give ChatGPT energy.

Irregular Hours builds tools for people at junctures in their career (whether they’re starting out or looking to switch things up) and they just launched Cheat Sheet, a professional storytelling tool that has Hinge profile energy but to find new hires, not a date.

Irregular Hours founder Molly Logan told Brand Baby that they talked to 20k+ people building their careers and 5k+ employers and found that the resume in its current form is washed out and not working. It’s not joyful. So they created something called Cheat Sheet to make it a bit more fun.

We finagled beta access and can confirm it’s endlessly more fun than browsing resumes. The prompts are creative and open-ended enough to give people space to show more of who they are than just bullet points of experience. There’s a lot of room to inject images and data. It is indeed joyful.

If you are hiring for a position, you would much rather swipe through these professional snapshots with little pieces of trivia, photos, stats, and personality than read through hundreds of cover letters that barely capture who a person really is.

You can join the waitlist for Cheat Sheet here.

Apple is flipping out

And we’re here for it. Apple is reportedly working on a flip phone that will fold horizontally like a clamshell, and it could debut early 2026.

The best theory I saw on why Apple is getting its feet wet in the foldable space was a reddit comment “because it’s dope tech.”

And you know the dramatic hang-up memes are going to go off. They already are.

Plebs can study alongside Channing Tatum

Harvard Business School offers a four day, $12,500 class called The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports. It sounds like a highly relevant way to spend your money if you’re a celebrity looking to build your own business empire, or a normie looking to capitalize on the current creator economy.

The class is mostly getting attention, though, for its high-profile students. Just scroll through professor Anita Elberse 's class photos on Instagram and, if you’re even remotely tuned into the worlds of fame, ultra wealth, and power, you’ll spot a few familiar faces. Like Olympic gold medalist Lauren Holiday, actor Tiffany Haddish, Peloton celebrity Ally Love, and A-Rod.

Elberse has standards, though. “We sometimes say ‘no’ to people if I don’t get a sense they’re here for the right reasons. This is not about you taking photos walking around the Harvard campus.”

If you don’t have $12k, Elberse’s book Blockbusters is a chill $12.

Deinfluencing has a new name

Last year the #deinfluencing trend on TikTok had billions of views. It was a response to shallow, promo-ey influencers shilling a lot of, well, bullshit they’ve probably never used.

Deinfluencers used their platforms to instead encourage their followers to be more mindful about buying stuff they don’t need.

The latest trend of“Underconsumption Core” is born from a similar distaste for the romanticization and showing off of new possessions. And the trend is here to say it’s a new (non) consumer behavior: Fuck your $200 serum, we’ve got CeraVe.

So what does that mean for content creators making money on sponsored posts? Consider sustainable products that are reusable or have a longer shelf life, intangible services and experiences, and vintage and secondhand brands and platforms.

Maybe it’s time to unfollow those that glamorize shopping for the hell of it.

Guess we were right about this side hustle idea

A new study from Upwork found that 96% of executives think AI is great for productivity, while 77% of teams think it’s a time suck.

That’s probably because only 26% of those companies offer AI training programs for their teams, and even less (13%) have an AI strategy.

So yeah, of course workers aren’t feeling as amped about all of these new automated tools in the workplace. No one is showing them how to use them. Instead of being more productive, they’re spending their valuable time trying to decode how AI can benefit their day-to-day.

Now it’s time for us to brag a little and remind you that we called it early: AI consulting is a hot new, and niche, side hustle opportunity with a real white space to take advantage of. For reference, here’s our guide to making yourself a valuable asset to companies that want their workforces to adopt AI, but haven’t yet set their workers up for success.

Bookmark this sick archive of vintage ads now

Nobody Reads Ads is a gem of an archive of iconic vintage print ads curated by copywriter Miguel Ferreira.

This rules. It’s like a Tumblr for marketing professionals. I could spend hours here.

Stuff we're into

This brat generator because why not??

This AI voice recorder uses ChatGPT to create summaries, meeting notes, and to-do lists. Plus it’s sleek and skinny and fits in your pocket.

This padded pink iPhone case with a purse handle if you pack light.

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