🤫 Schemers - Tuesday 24 June 2025

Hey,

On the menu this week: a look at what gets lost when everything gets optimized, a way to break through growth plateaus, and a word-of-mouth lesson from a hidden omakase in Hamburg and a backyard jazz café in Kyoto.

Let’s get into it.

🤔 swing away from optimisation

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• So much of modern life has been optimized to a point where not a single drop of soul is left.

• Once you start dissecting something, put it under the brutal microscope of optimization, and start measuring and maximizing every little detail, you inevitably start creating soulless pieces of slop.

• Games like chess, poker, and soccer are now dominated by boring robot-like characters that execute statistically-optimal strategies.

• Creators, marketers and entrepreneurs online no longer follow their curiosity and hunches but just work on whatever their spreadsheet tells them is most promising.

• Shows, content, and music pushed by streaming platform like Netflix, Spotify, and X are engineered keep the average consumer pretty satisfied. Excellent content that sparks strong reactions or challenges the norm gets buried, because the algorithm is scared of making the wrong people mad.

• This is a fantastic read on the topic.

• To quote from it “In business, the most successful people aren't the ones with the best spreadsheets. They're the ones who get invited to the interesting rooms. You get invited to interesting rooms by being interesting, not by being optimal.”

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🤑 breaking through plateaus

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• I’ve written before about why every business ultimately hits growth plateaus. But regarding the best way to break through them I did not have a good answer.

• Now a few years later I think Christian Reber (founder of Wunderlist) is ultimately correct.

• There is only so many flaws in your product you can mask over focusing on growth. Churn will quickly destroy every little glimpse you get of what life beyond the current plateau feels like.

• The only way to sustainably reach the next level is by improving your product.

• This will fix churn, kickstart word-of-mouth flywheels, and lift you to the next level.

🪝 word of mouth hooks

• Last weekend I went to a quite expensive omakase sushi restaurant in Hamburg. When we arrived at the address there was no sign, the entrance was full of trash. The only sign that we were at the right location was a handwritten note for delivery companies written on cardboard.

• We had already paid for the menu in advance. Otherwise we probably would have turned around at this point.

• After we went in, we had to walk through a chaotic basement, then up some stairs that looked like they desperately need some renovations.

• But once we went inside the room housing the actual restaurant it quickly turned into the five star sushi experience we had been hoping for.

• They could easily clean up the doorway, buy a proper sign for the restaurant and improve the first impression. But they don’t do it intentionally because it creates a word of mouth hook that is working super well for them.

• The contrast between the intentionally bad first impression and the actually great sushi is just very storyworthy.

• And even though I think they do this intentionally it didn’t feel forced. The restaurant is relatively new and run by three young guys who are still very much figuring things out as they go.

• This article on “Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto” is getting at something similar.

• When you’re running a small café, don’t even try to compete with Starbucks. You will never beat them at the “polished café experience”. Instead, it makes far more sense to lean into the fact that you’re running a small and maybe a little bit weird business.

• I would love to see more of this online too. Instead of everyone trying fake act like they’re a big company offering a polished experience, why not lean into your smallness and weirdness. Not every website and UI has to look as polished as the Monday.com’s or Airtable’s.

• If people want a boring bland experience there are already plenty of options. And you will never beat them at this game.

• But there is plenty of ways to win if you decide to play a different game. One where personality, imperfection, and charm matter more than polish.

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That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob