The Third Door

Life, business, success… it’s all just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in.

There’s always the first door: the main entrance, where the line wraps around the block; where 99% of people wait around, hoping to get in.

Then there’s the second door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires, celebrities, and the people born into it slip through.

What no one tells you is there is always a third door. The one entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, find a window cracked open and sneak in through the kitchen. There’s always a way in. That’s how some of the most successful people in the world people get started. They look for, and enter, through the third door.

Last week. I snuck into the Slow Ventures Creator Fund hackathon and got 4th place. Here’s the story of how I got in… and won.

I've recently been helping creators monetize their audience and get up to speed with AI. Two of my friends sent me a link for a hackathon that they thought I’d be perfect for. I've built multiple social media accounts to over +5M views but never hit escape velocity on any of them. So it makes sense that when I applied, I never got accepted. Instead of curling up into a ball of regret and sorrow, I needed to find a different way to get in.

I had an idea… My girlfriend is one of San Francisco's top content creators and an ex-software engineer. She said she’s been meaning to get back into building and I thought this was a great way for her to dust the wheels off. So I sent her the link for the event. Seems like a win-win, right?

12 hours later. She got in. Ok, this might actually work.

The day of, I showed up with her. When they gave her her name tag and asked me for mine I just slipped in “I’m with her.” I waited there nervously waiting to be told I couldn’t get in, for what felt like 5 minutes (it was a half second). I got sized up for a solid 3 seconds thinking, yeah I’m cooked, I don’t look like a big time creator, there’s no way this is going to work…

“What’s your name?”

“Jared Seidel”

She writes my name down on the name tag and says, welcome on in, there’s food and coffee in the back. Music to my ears… not the “welcome in,” the part about the free food and coffee.

Holy shit I did it.

When I walked in, I was in a room with people that were crushing the content game. People with millions of followers. Ranging from talking about food, AI, woodworking, boats, and fishing. Oh, and Sam Lessin, who was so early at Facebook I’m pretty sure he’s a billionaire (…confirmed by google)

Instead of building my own app, I built my girlfriend an automated inbound management tool so she could make more money and not lose out on any brand deals. Now she can make 2x more and not have to give a manager $10k/mo to respond to her emails.

Sitting in that room was a light bulb moment. These people had already done the hard part that every founder in San Francisco is desperately trying to crack: distribution. They just had no idea what they could build on top of it. AI is flipping that on its head. Creators can now build products for their audience and will no longer have to survive off brand deals. That's a massive shift happening now.

After 48 hours maxing out claude code, and learning new coding tricks, I presented my inbound manager tool and got 4th place. But what made it even better was that multiple creators approached me asking if they could demo the product themselves.

Not bad for someone who got rejected from the application, used their girlfriend as a human Trojan horse, snuck into a room full of people crushing it in content, and left with a business idea.

Until Next Time,

Jared

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Things Worth Clicking

A few gems I found on the internet this week - no digging required

• Justin Mares broke down the peptide boom and why its such a big deal

• Nick Gray wrote a cool article about a $31B ice company

• I cant stop watching these fishing videos from this guy that was at the hackathon:

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

1 Set:

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