Brandon is a a student at Columbia, a podcast host, and apprentice at Visualize Value. He has been recently building a profile in the productivity niche and is an advocate of working in public.
Student Mindset
Student Mindset is Brandons main website at BrandonZhang.com.
His articles focus on mindful productivity, intentional learning and leveraging Twitter.
Podcast
Brandon describes his newsletter as an ‘exploration of the toolboxes of the amazing people leveraging the internet to build audiences, foster growth, and generate wealth.’
You can check out the episodes here.
He has documented his podcasting journey on Twitter and his newsletter.
- In Weekly Wisdom #18, Branded shared how the podcast had lead to new opportunities and how David Perrell’s podcasting article helped improve his workflow.
- In October, he tweeted that he’d doubled the monthly downloads to nearly 4000 after hitting a temporary plateau.
He shares the podcasts on his Youtube channel. He reached 100 subscribers in September.
Newsletter
Each week, Brandon brand sends out his newsletter titled Weekly Wisdom. He shares original, high-signal ideas on mindful productivity, mental models and other interesting ideas he discovers.
You can see an archive of his past newsletters here. They take around 60 minutes to write.
He has posted some case studies about his newsletter growth.
- He had 400 subscribers when he sent out his 8th newsletter. He had 1500 by the time he sent out his 15th.
- In July, 2020, Brandon posted 19 Lessons to Grow Your Email Newsletter. He detailed how he reached over 400 subscribers in a month.
Top Articles
He has a great example of a public Personal User Manual.
Instead of trying to block and schedule every second of the day, I have shifted to a maker’s schedule mindset, emphasizing flow, and intentionality.
Brandon has quickly amassed a following on Twitter due to consistent tweeting and being referable.
He frequently posts case studies about his Twitter growth.
In August, 2020, he his follower count rose by 1000. He created a Twitter thread sharing how he achieved it. 2 weeks later, he hit 4k followers. He created a Twitter thread titled about 8 Lessons Learned from Growing to 4000 Followers. Within one week, he reached 5k followers.
In September, he wrote an Indie Hackers post about the Lessons Learned Growing to 6000 Twitter Followers Over the Summer.
He hit 10k followers in late November.
Projects
Working with Jack Butcher
Brandon is an apprentice with Jack Butcher at Visualize Value.
His journey started after he interviewed Jack for his podcast. Shortly after, he read Erik Torenberg’s Twitter Thread on Education. Brandon was particularly drawn to the concept of becoming an apprentice. He recalled the case study of Rishi Tripathy, who was an apprentice for tech veteran and VC Steve Schlafman.
He sent a cold email to Jack offering to work for him. Jack accepted, and the working agreement has extended beyond the original summer break timeline.
He shared more about the journey at:
- The Student Mindset Vision (blog post)
- The Art of the Cold Email (newsletter)
Part of his apprenticeship included completing the Visualize Value courses.
He created a Twitter thread about the biggest lessons he learned from Build Once, Sell Twice course