Hi All,
Hope you all are doing well and continuing to stay safe! I feel my days “Zoom” from one day to the next and speaking of Zoom, I found the below hack hilarious! That kid is brilliant!
On e-commerce penetration:
10 years v 8 weeks!
On communication:
The below excerpt from an article is interesting though I wonder why so much of tech communication is broken:
All Braun Company’s communications required the five W’s:
You had to tell
Who was going to do …
What
Where
When
Why
And if you wrote a letter or directive in the Braun Company telling somebody to do something, and you didn’t tell him why, you could get fired. In fact, you would get fired if you did it twice.
On Masa; whaaaat is he thinking?
On Webcams:
Did you know? How the world's first webcam made a coffee pot famous
On Airbnb clones:
There was this article on Airbnb hosts building their own direct booking websites recently since they were upset at Airbnb for several reasons but also the % cut that Airbnb takes. This reminds me Spotify’s beef with Apple. If companies like Spotify and Netflix find it hard to go direct to consumers how can these hosts? One could argue that these hosts can advertise on social media and get customers or use SEO or any other growth tactic. The problem they will face with paid acq. is similar to what D2C companies face; too expensive; too crowded and CAC>LTV.
On CloudKitchens and the OG of CloudKitchens:
Dominos is the OG cloud kitchen. Scale, franchises, larger AOS make it likely for this model to succeed. The comparison is Starbucks in the article but an even more interesting comparison is McDonalds which does have a franchise model but also does have seating : How Domino's Stock Returned 4,595%
On the Giphy acquisition:
This isn’t about data. Not in the sense you think anyway. This isn’t about “tying” together user data. This is purely about usage. Remember Onavo? Remember why they shut it down? This is their new strategy in the guise of innocent GIF’s (or is it JIF’s lol) Remains to be seen how smart our regulators are
With the suspicions about tech giants and looming regulation leading to more intense scrutiny of privacy practices, Facebook has decided that giving users a utility like a VPN in exchange for quietly examining their app usage and mobile browsing data isn’t a wise strategy. Instead, it will focus on paid programs where users explicitly understand what privacy they’re giving up for direct financial compensation.
On payments : The sheer size and scope of China payments and US adoption:
On “innovation”
Adding blades got old so now we get a warming bar. Hey don't get me wrong, differentiation is important. I wonder when my soap is going to innovate and add a shower-head and heater. That being said the differentiation strategy worked for so many years so lets see how this pans out...
A martingale is any of a class of betting strategies that originated from and were popular in 18th century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins the stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double the bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. The martingale strategy has been applied to roulette as well, as the probability of hitting either red or black is close to 50%.
On Personal Monopolies from David Perell:
COVID 19 Articles
As i have indicated in the art of reading it is important to know where you are reading from. Look these COVID-19 contact tracing apps have just 4 combinations. It isn't that hard but such poor and lackluster reporting results in people misunderstanding that in fact this time round, Google and Apple are actually trying to protect users privacy. Would you rather your data go to a cloud system on a government with likely less competent technical people?
Location (GPS) based or bluetooth based
Locally stored (on device) or stored on a cloud
John Gruber’s teardown on the above article
From Ben Evans on COVID-19 and cascading collapses.
Which changes are temporary and which changes are permanent. Retail in the form we know it is likely a permanent change. This will allow failing retailers to restructure and come back strong enough, For example. Is that true? Is that enough? Can retailers build the capabilities to survive (I get that the article is macro and my notes are mico, but many micros do make a macro) COVID and cascading collapses — Benedict Evans
Atul Gawande on the 6ft rule : Amid the Coronavirus Crisis, a Regimen for Reëntry
Interesting points to note:
Public-health guidelines, in fact, originally set the at-risk distance at three feet or less, based on theoretical models going back to the nineteen-thirties, simulation studies, and experience in previous outbreaks, such as a 1981 outbreak of infectious meningitis in a Texas elementary-school classroom. That outbreak began in a cluster of five girls seated together on one side of the room. One infected the other four. Investigators later took measurements: the distance from one girl’s seat to another was about two and a half feet. Close contact at lunchtime spread the Meningococcus bacteria to other children, who transmitted the disease in their classrooms. In all, thirty-one children became ill or were carriers, and the spread was mainly in two classrooms where the chair-to-chair distance was three feet or less.
It has now become well recognized that, under the right conditions of temperature, humidity, and air circulation, forceful coughing or sneezing can propel a cloudburst of respiratory droplets more than twenty feet. Yet it wasn’t until the SARS epidemic in 2002, after several cases documenting more distant spread, that authorities doubled the at-risk distance from three to six feet.
We don’t know exactly how long is too long, but less than fifteen minutes spent in the company of an infected person makes spread unlikely. (For instance, among four hundred and forty-five people who were within six feet of a COVID-19 case for ten minutes or more, only two tested positive, both of whom had confirmed cases in their households.)
This week’s chart from PEW
This week’s dozen:
All websites are starting to look the same : Remember "Blanding"? Well, Websites Are All Starting to Look the Same Now, Too
The fascinating world of drop-shipping : ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping
A great read on broken education systems from David Perell : Teaching Like a State
Vertical job networks are going to be the next big thing post COVID-19 : COVID-19 and the Great Rehiring
Product zeitgeist fit - The market mood has to exist. This is a good time to start something in the jobs space (see above article) : Product Zeitgeist Fit: A Cheat Code for Spotting and Building the Next Big Thing
How to lead your company through a pandemic : Leading your company through a pandemic - Issue 20
Ideas that changed my life from David Perrell - Great List!
50 Ideas That Changed My Life — David Perell
Scenario planning for COVID-19 : How to scenario plan for Covid-19 – Dan Hockenmaier
Brilliant read from Byrne Hobart at The Diff on VC investing:
VC Incentives: Logo-Hunting and Optionality
Passion economy and Disruption Theory
From the article, a must read!
How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1000 users
Key questions to ask yourself to determine where to focus:
Who are your early target users, and where are they currently congregating, offline?
Who are your early target users, and where are they currently congregating, online?
Do your friends fit into the target user group? If so, have you invited them yet?
Does your product rely on UGC? Consider curating the early community.
Is your value-prop incredibly strong? Consider throwing up a waitlist.
Is your product innately social? Consider relying on existing users to invite new users.
Who are influencers of your target users, and how could you get them to talk about your product?
What’s a unique, compelling, fresh story you could pitch press?
Could you build a community now, to leverage later?
What we know about the barter system may not be correct. Debt came first, not last. Interesting!
Thank you for reading! Stay safe be well and of course if you liked this I’d appreciate if you can share this out!
Great find Promeet: "Vertical job networks are going to be the next big thing", glad I am reading your blog!