pick your market / detour / sales metrics / social as soap opera

Hey,

I’m heading to Seoul and Chiang Mai for a few weeks. Send recs or hit me up if you're around.

pick your market

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• factors like the market you are in have an unreasonable impact on outcomes

• founders usually don’t want to admit this. We want to think that we can bend the market forces if we just hustle hard enough. Spoiler: you can’t.

• you can paddle all day in flat water. Someone else catches the storm surge and ends up a continent ahead. Markets decide who moves.

• luck is a major factor when it comes to market selection. Would have been insanely hard to predict the current AI wave and how it would lead to scraping products to take off. But one thing you can do is admit how little influence you have over outcomes once you zoom out and exit bad markets faster.

microns

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(microns sponsored this week’s issue)

detour

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• had no idea that this is how Descript got started

• and I agree that I’d love to use this kind of app

• with AI + text-to-speech APIs it shouldn’t be that hard to build

sales metrics

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• using metrics always sounds nice in theory but is so incredibly hard to do right

• no matter what metric you chose the cobra effect is always lurking just around the corner

social as soap opera

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• this is an interesting reframe of social media

• it’s less about that one tweet that makes you laugh or cry or angry or that one big insight from some random account

• instead people get invested in the story arc of certain characters and that’s what makes them come back

• of course lots of people use social media to see random posts from random accounts that triggers all the right buttons in their brains

• I find this incredibly exhausting and care much more about posts from people I care about even if, by any objective standard, they aren’t nearly as “good” as banger posts from random accounts

• for an example of a platform using this insight well look at Instagram where afaik people just watch stories now to get little updates from people they care about.

• if you want to use content strategically these are your two options: optimise for reach by posting random stuff or craft a compelling character and take people along for the ride

music

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That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob