Research is an art and a craft. We are back to do both. 📝

Due Dilly was initially an idea that came out of an Apple note. We simply asked: do people know that Jay didn’t own all of Rocawear, and it didn’t matter? Do we know who else did? So we dove into NY court documents, old presentations, news clips, and anything else we could get our hands on.

We knew people liked Jigga; we just didn’t expect that people would want to hear about how he did what he did, using documents. We were wrong.The response was overwhelming. People found it insightful, exciting, and deeply resonant. You can’t prompt engineer taste. You also can’t expect growth without consistency and distribution. We had the former, and not the latter.

We also had a bunch of things we did not account for. Early traction breeds a different set of questions you have to account for?

• How to continue production in a scalable way?
• How often should we drop?
• What do  we want to focus on?
• Is this a business? Do we want it to be?

While the aspiration was there, we were still trying to figure out the operations to sustain it. And we told ourselves if we stopped having fun, we would stop it altogether. 

24 months is enough time to reconsider what you want and what you don’t. It is also enough time for technological advances to fill in some of the gaps you had. It also lets you strip everything down to the studs, and decide what you want to keep, and what can’t stay. 

The Thesis

We believe that media and markets shape what we think, what we build, and what we see as possible, together and separately. Due Dilly wants to explain what we see changing, what we see shifting, and what continues to remain the same. We stumbled on an audience, and frankly were surprised by the response. 

We want to build a public research layer that can engage the businesses and creativity we see and believe are interesting.

Typically, reading and finding research on businesses and creativity is pretty opaque. Due Dilly is our effort in democratizing that.We write to think and understand things and believe you should too. We believe that by making it open source, we can find people who find it valuable and want to see it as well as engage with it. To achieve this, we must produce a volume of work worth investing in, over a long enough period of time.

We believe it’s an opportunity that people do not explain things clearly and directly. We recognize there are more beginners than experts. A beginner has an advantage that an expert struggles to embrace; there is no risk to the beginner when learning something, because they engage in experimentation without the same risk their reputation being cooked. An expert has to manage the perception of the knowledge they are supposed to have; a beginner can simply learn and keep going. If you keep the beginner’s mindset, you can always begin again. 

We built and are building Due Dilly for anyone who  thinks like a beginner and embraces that mindset to execute on what is in front of them.

We believe depth is a distinction in a world of exclusively sound bytes and clips. We do not want to do what we see; rather, we want to bring to life what we discover. The map is not the terrain, and recognizing that allows you to explore things that are right in front of you but may not be clear at first glance. And we get to have fun doing it.

There are all kinds of new businesses, formats, opportunities, and insights springing up everywhere. Much of how you can grow and scale something has been, and will continue to be forever changed. But some things are enduring. Product-market fit is not going anywhere; it might just be that the fit looks different and is represented by different things. There’s no reason that we can’t be boundary-less with what we cover and where we go to explore it. Our audience deserves it. 

How We’re Trying to Build This

Media is a terrible business to be in, if you do not have a product. Ours is research. 

We write everyday. That is who we are. We do it to clarify our thinking, expand on new ideas, and make sense of a world that continues to change rapidly, and stay the same. That paradox is where we feel like we do our best work. So that’s what we’re starting with. Our core activity is to write the best analysis on markets and media through our lens. We aim to earn a place in your inbox with consistency, clarity, and memes. Tons of memes.

To begin, we’ll have two newsletters, arriving weekly. 

1. The Dime💰 - Carl’s analysis on the market for the cultured and the curious. To sign up to get The Dime💰, click here.

2.  Free Agency 📈 - Jonathan’s analysis on the media landscape for the prepared and proactive. To sign up for Free Agency 📈, click here.

These will be the core of your communications with us. Our promise is that it’ll be fun and that we won’t miss. 

Our focus here is to give enjoyable, informative, and contextual looks at both these massive worlds weekly, and give insight into what we are seeing and experiencing. Good thinking begets good writing, and that is hard to find. The better we write to you, and put our ideas in public, the more you get to know us, what we are doing, and subsequently, the better everything else we produce is. 

The podcast is coming back, and we’ve got a slate of topics we think you’ll enjoy and find insightful. There are new narratives, emerging markets, and deeper insights to recognize and be a part of.

Fun Games, Great Prizes

We are convinced that there are people who want to see how things work, and then take action on that understanding. We are also aware that there is a continuous influx of merchants competing for attention.

We don’t want to play that game, and instead, we’d rather build and create things that people want to occupy time with, find interesting, and want to support. We also want to build community; real, bona-fide, see you in person and give you a dap and ask how your moms is, community. We have thoughts and plans on that, but it is an area we think is sorely needed and deeply overlooked.

If you have thoughts, things you want us to cover, or just want to reconnect, feel free to reach us at jonathan@duethedilly.com or carl@duethedilly.com.