Hatching Growth #14: How We Decide What to Do — Compounding, Long-Termism, and the Four Pillars
Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way. While we prefer not to use the term “user,” please note that we’ll use it here for convenience 🙇♂️
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Popular Episodes at a Glance
#3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded
#8: How We Doubled Down on YouTube Summary with Programmatic SEO
#12: AEO in Practice: Memory Hacks, Prompt Injection Experiments, and Honest Results
Introduction
In the last edition, we walked through how we shipped Glasp’s UGC → SEO system — an idea we’d had since the early days, but couldn’t launch until our domain authority, tech stack, and user-generated content volume all caught up.
This time, we want to zoom out.
Glasp receives a lot of ideas — from users, from watching the market, from our own curiosity. But we don’t build everything. We’re a 2-person team serving millions of users, so choosing what not to build is just as important as choosing what to build.
So in this edition of Hatching Growth, we’ll share the internal lens we use to make those calls:
Does it compound?
Can we sustain it over the long term?
Does it fit into one of our four investment pillars: Content, System, People, or Finance?
This is the operating logic behind most of the projects you’ve seen from Glasp — from YouTube Summary to programmatic SEO to our Post feature.
1. Our Primary Filter: Does It Compound?
If we had to reduce Glasp’s decision-making to one sentence, it would be:
We prioritize projects where the compound effect works in our favor.
Compounding is usually explained in finance — small returns reinvested over a long period turn into outsized outcomes. But the same is true for product and growth:
content that keeps getting indexed,
users who create more content for other users to discover,
systems that keep running even when we’re not online.
These are all forms of nonlinear growth. At some point, they flip from linear to exponential.
That’s why we like SEO systems, UGC surfaces, repostable content, and features that automatically generate pages. Once they’re live, they keep working. We don’t have to “push” every single day for growth to happen.
If something doesn’t compound — if it only grows when we manually push, sell, or run a campaign — we’re much more cautious.
2. Long-Term Thinking (and Why We Don’t Pivot)
Compounding only works if you stay in the game long enough.
Glasp’s mission — to democratize access to other people’s learnings and experiences that they have collected throughout their lives as a utilitarian legacy — is inherently long-term. Because we’re committed to that, we can justify investments most early-stage startups avoid, like SEO on a competitive English web or building internal systems before we “need” them.
Typical startup logic says: if it doesn’t work, pivot.
Our logic is closer to: we already know the direction — let’s build the rails so it can scale for years.
That’s also why we could start investing in SEO early, even though our domain wasn’t strong yet and we didn’t have many backlinks. Most teams can’t justify that. We could, because we knew we wouldn’t pivot away from “people highlight → knowledge becomes public → knowledge gets discovered.”
Long-termism is what makes compounding rational.
3. The Four Pillars We Invest In
When an idea passes the “does it compound?” and “is it long-term?” tests, we look at where it sits in our four resource pillars.
(1) Content
We often say, “Make your daily life content.” Conversations, highlights, transcripts, Glasp Talk — all of it can be turned into online assets.
Why content?
Content keeps working even when we don’t.
Content is distribution.
Content invites backlinks.
Content lets users market Glasp on our behalf.
This is why we invested in:
UGC → SEO for web articles and Kindle highlights,
moving blog and Glasp Talk content under the main domain.
All of that is the same idea: turn activity into assets.
(2) System
Content is the “pull,” but system is how two founders can serve millions.
Software has (almost) zero marginal cost. Once it’s built, it doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t reply slower, and it doesn’t forget. So we always ask:
Can this be automated?
Can this run without us?
Can this be standardized so we don’t need a person in the loop?
This is also why we don’t do things that look profitable but are highly manual — e.g. running ads manually for newsletters or doing 1:1 targeting for every partner. If it can’t be turned into a system, it won’t scale for a team of two.
System = how we protect our time.
(3) People
Even with automation, growth is still social.
We like to spend time meeting people who:
share knowledge,
build things,
have a giver mindset.
Why? Because your network defines your ceiling. If you only know people in one language, one geography, or one founder circle, your ideas and opportunities are capped.
Glasp Talk is also part of this pillar. It’s not “just content”; it’s how we stay close to people who are building, researching, teaching — and we can borrow their insight even if they’re not on our team.
So “People” here doesn’t just mean hiring. It means community, collaborators, and believers — the ones who will amplify what we build.
(4) Finance
The last pillar is cash flow and allocation.
We study companies like Amazon or Buffett-led businesses because they figured out something subtle: if your business generates cash before you have to spend it, you can reinvest faster than others.
For startups, this matters because:
cash gives you more experiment surface,
you can keep building long-term systems without chasing short-term monetization,
you can invest in assets (infra, content, even GPUs in today’s world) instead of one-off expenses.
The key question we ask is: Does this use of money create something that earns more later? If it doesn’t, we try not to do it.
4. How We Actually Judge a Project
Putting it all together, a project is more likely to get built at Glasp if:
It compounds
– creates content, users, or systems that grow on their own.It can be automated or systemized
– a human doesn’t have to repeat it forever.It becomes an asset
– SEO page, transcript, distribution loop, user-created content.It fits one of the four pillars
– Content, System, People, or Finance.The resource-to-return ratio makes sense
– not just money, but learning, visibility, and network.It helps users create content that brings the next user
– e.g. transcription → highlight → share → traffic.
If it fails at “can’t be automated” or “doesn’t compound,” we often drop it — even if it could make money. That’s why, for example, fully manual newsletter ad sales aren’t a priority for us right now.
Takeaways
Compounding is the core filter. If it doesn’t compound, we hesitate.
Long-termism lets us do “slow” things like SEO or system-building that pay off later.
Everything should become an asset — a page, a post, a transcript, a highlight.
We invest in four things only: Content, System, People, Finance.
Small team ≠ small ambition. It just means we must choose projects that can run without us.
What’s Next
In the next edition, we’re considering a deeper dive into either:
Finance and cash-flow design for small teams — how to think about float, reinvestment, and not wasting good revenue on non-compounding work, or
What we’re learning from Glasp Talk — how talking to experts keeps feeding the product roadmap.
If there’s a topic you’d like us to prioritize — especially around product-led growth, AI-era SEO, or knowledge distribution — let us know.
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