This Week I Learned #92
“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up”
2020–03-02
Learning from Farnam Street podcast interview with Ben Thompson, Founder of Stratechery:
On the strategy of not doing too much for free but being cognizant of the business model you are trying to create. When starting Stratechery 5 years ago, Ben wanted to make it his full-time job. He saw how people who created daily free content lost their traction and audience once they instituted a paywall system. He decided to only give one of the daily letters for free and kept the others as paid options where I would experiment from 3 to 7 additional articles. Given the free content I’m creating now, it makes me think more on what value-adding content could I create if I were to productize the site.
Applying how if your strengths are your greatest weakness... how that applies to companies too. What gave one company a moat can erode it over time and that can be their weakness. So its about an underlying system that can break that.
Ben ignores most metrics. The only ones he looks at are the number of emails that were sent to subscribers and as long as that is trending up, that’s what matters. It let’s him focus on producing quality work over trying to market and game things.
2020–03-03
Farnam Street podcast interview with Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert:
His new book Loserthink sheds light on persuasion on looking at the world as if everyone is Irrational. Though he made it seem like it was novel… I felt much of what he spoke about could be evident from work by Dan Ariely, Robert Cialdini, and Dale Carnegie.
The mental model is to always assume everyone is irrational. When making statements or trying to argue, assume they are irrational first. It’s always about them doing things and believing things because it serves an internal irraitonality
The best non-fiction books are in fact fiction because one can’t truly know enough of the world to make a statement of it. It is merely one’s version of the world the author is writing about. A different way of looking at writing.
To persuade, start by agreeing on areas you can so that they can start to trust you given a likeness in beliefs and slowly add on your disagreeing points.
2020–03-04
Indie Hackers podcast interview with Jason Friend, Co-Founder of Basecamp.
Basecamp made a job board (weworkremotely) and it was their most profitable product ever (considering the minimal effort) with $40k in profit in the first month. They sold it because that wasn't going to be what they focused on.
Though one can say you learn from failure... you might not now know why you failed. But if you look at what's worked... you can try to replicate that and iterate as you go to try and make more successes. The things that made you fail might not actually have been the true reasons for failure. At least if you replicate things you did for successes, you are hoping for another success. A way of looking at learning from success over failures.
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/105-jason-fried-of-basecamp
2020–03-05
Reboot podcast interview with Fred Wilson, Co-Founder of Union Square Ventures:
The company starts out as the entrepreneurs baby but as it grows it becomes the community's. It ceases to only be the founders but rather independent symbols for the customers, employees etc. Hence, the board and its investors need to consider doing what is right on behalf of this community. Thats who the fiduciary responsibilities lie on.
The founders who built the company may not necessarily be the ones to lead it out. This is commonly the case for rapid growing VC-backed companies. Fred had to ask Etsy’s founder to step down and allow for someone else to lead the company as CEO. Now, what has worked better is grooming the next CEO internally and promoting from within the company than hiring someone with 20 years of experience in the same industry.
2020–03-06
Sales tactics learned from speaking with successful entrepreneurs
Expect to have between 6-7 touchpoints for the sales cycle
Go fast, slow then fast (i.e. two reach outs in first week, then spaced out by few weeks, then fast again)
Start with exploratory conversations with the focus of “Would you pay for this if we started next week?” Get to the bottom of who makes the decision and if they would pay. Narrow industry types then switch to sales mode with greater specificity on what value you can add based on past experiences.