🌿 Learn from biomimicry and psychology, 3 AI ideas you can start right now, and more
Post #21. Winners include: Nudge, My First Million, Lenny's Podcast
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What you need to know
😨 Why most analytics efforts fail
🤖 3 AI ideas you can start right now
🌿 Learn from biomimicry and psychology
😨 Why most analytics efforts fail
🥉 Third place (5 min read vs 1 hour 3 mins listening)
I’d hazard a guess that you’ve never heard of Gojek. If you have, give yourself a pat on the back and skip this intro. For everyone else, it’s a South East Asian super app with 190 million downloads. Think of it as WeChat for Indonesia - it offers ride hailing, food delivery, streaming and much more.
Crystal Widjaja was SVP of Business Intelligence and Growth at Gojek. She shared tons of insights on Lenny’s Podcast, many of which were new to me as I’m not overly familiar with the nuances of the Asian market. I’ve packaged up the best bits and put a bow on it for you.
What they say
Why most analytics efforts fail
A lot of people look at tracking data as ‘How do I track my OKR?’ They don’t use it to track and identify insights.
Measurements do not equate to insights. A measurement is an observation. It’s a datapoint in your database. It’s not an insight because it doesn’t have context. It doesn’t give you information that lets you act on it and better understand the problem.
For our purposes, if we find a Gofood user is more likely to use a voucher, that’s a fact. It’s not an insight.
An insight would be something like ‘Gofood users who are power users are more likely to use a free shipping discount on a high GMV basket versus non power users.’
This means when it’s a high GMV basket, give power-users the ability to get a free discount, but do not do this for non-power-users because they won’t convert any better than they normally would.
Crystal Widjaja
Signs your analytics strategy is failing
The symptom of a bad data tracking approach is you have a ton of rows with a ton of events, but every event has one property or no property being tracked.
For example with Gojek, when a user lands on the map to select a drop off point, the event would be map loaded.
The property there should be things like how many drivers do they see on the screen? What is the pick up location? What city are they in? Is there surge pricing? What is the current minimum fare? Do they have a voucher code?
All of these characteristics of the experience and the context help you to identify insights like ‘When a user only sees two drivers on the screen, they are much less likely to convert than a user who sees five drivers on a screen.’
Now we can look at in what cities do we mostly only see two drivers versus five drivers. You can do the second layer approach of the why and not just stop at ‘Hmm, that’s weird, when you have two drivers, you’re less likely to book. But you never ask why.’
The inability to even know there’s only two drivers on the screen means you’re missing so much context. You’re unable to make assumptions about why the user didn’t convert.
Crystal Widjaja
What I say
Why it matters: 65% of leaders claim they are sometimes forced to make business-critical decisions without adequate data or information (The Drum).
Take this with a grain of salt - we don’t know what adequate means. What one leader sees as adequate, you may see as inadequate.
The real takeaway is that most leaders lack the confidence to make decisions with the data they have to hand. Be introspective and ask yourself ‘Am I in this boat?’
Between the lines: Now, ask yourself ‘How mature is my product?’
If you’re pre product market fit and you feel like you don’t have the data you need to do your job, think again. You’re likely putting your foot on the brake and slowing momentum unnecessarily. In her post on Reforge, Crystal shares an anecdotal story that helps you to have confidence in your decision making without any data. Common sense is often all you need to get you 80% of the way there.
If you’re post product market fit, I’m not going to pretend this is my area of expertise and give you well researched but unpracticed advice. All I’ll say is so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. Oh, and I’ve heard good things about this Reforge course (this isn’t an affiliate link btw).
🤖 3 AI ideas you can start right now
🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 14 mins listening)
Marc Andreessen needs to update his statement ‘Software is eating the world’. There’s a new king in town. Artificial Intelligence. The OpenAI team are working miracles with DALL-E 2 and GPT-3. Shaan and Sam breakdown the three exciting opportunities you can work on right now on My First Million.
What they say
Speech as a Service
Number one is fake speech. I’m investing in this company called Unreal Speech. [Plays example clips of AI generated speech at 14:35].
There’s a world where we do this podcast and Unreal Speech could translate this and the ad reads into another language in our voices, with our tones.
Shaan Puri
Outsourcing homework
Number two is student essays. I told you about the guy who built a thing called writelikeshaan.com. He trained AI to write like I do. It was pretty damn good. But this isn’t about me. You can take any corpus of text data and train it to write like that.
If you remember growing up, you have to write essays in school. Some people would pay other people to do it for them. Some people would find one online and try to plagiarise it. Well this is going to screw that whole thing up.
I’m going to be able to go on there and say ‘Hey, write an essay about WW2 and Germany’s role in it in the sophistication of a 10th grader.’ It’s going to spit out a full essay and I can edit it in 5 minutes to get rid of any crappy computer mess ups.
Shaan Puri
One-sided marketplaces
Number three is print and patterns. People talk about using AI for stock photos and auto generated music. That’s all going to happen too. Here’s what I think is more low key.
There’s a huge market for pattern making. This is for clothing, blankets, and curtains. If you want to go and make clothing you will often use websites that have large libraries of patterns and prints. This is all going to go AI in my opinion.
I think [AI powered marketplaces] is one of the multi billion dollar trends that you could go after right now and I don’t just say that for hyperbole.
Literally, this is the window. The tech is just now good enough. You need to start now and you could disrupt all of these marketplaces.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters: We’re at the precipice of a new paradigm. AI will likely become the next battleground in the war for our wallets.
Between the lines: Sure, millions of people will lose their jobs thanks to AI. Sure, AI is trained on our work without giving us compensation. I’m not here to cover these ethical debates. I’m here to have fun and think about how we can make . Here are a couple of ideas of my own:
Moonpig, but you’re the artist. Rather than pay for a cheesy card, you can instruct an AI what the card should say and how it should look. The marketplace becomes a printing and logistics company on top of DALL-E 2.
Cameo, but you’re the star. Rather than pay a celebrity to sing Happy Birthday, you can pay for an AI version of you to rap the recipient’s favorite song. Case in point - someone turned Sam into the Missouri version of Eminem.
🌿 Learn from biomimicry and psychology
🥇 First place (3 min read vs 29 mins listening)
Nudge has quickly become one of my favorite podcasts. I’m not alone. Several readers have reached out saying they discovered Nudge via Podup and now they listen to it religiously.
Hopefully, I can do Phill a favor and inspire a few more of you to join the cult. This episode explains how biomimicry can help you to become a better problem solver by looking beyond your field.
Before we get to the entrée, whet your appetite with this amazing video introducing biomimicry.
What they say
The bullet train origin story
Ideas adapt. Rather than seek revolutionary thinking, an assumption that we need to conjure something the world has never seen, there’s a lot of value to be found in what has evolved around us.
The Shinkansen is a stretch of rail that connects Tokyo with Osaka. When challenged to reduce travel time, the challenge wasn’t a speed challenge, it was actually a noise challenge.
As the train reached near 300km, it created this loud bang because air pressure built up behind the train through the tunnel. It’s a bit like firing a bullet from a gun.
Rather than conjuring entirely new physical solutions, they looked to the skies. The kingfisher was the final piece of inspiration.
The kingfisher was evolved perfectly to go from the air into the water (that’s 800 times denser than air) to skewer it’s prey.
The team wanted to learn from the kingfisher. [The shape of the Kingfisher] was the solution for the nose of the Shinkansen.
It’s a lovely example of looking at spaces you may not typically explore to solve the challenge of reducing the speed and staying within the noise regulations in Japan.
Sam Tatam
Study adjacent fields to solve problems
This wonderful example shows the value of stealing good ideas from other realms and applying them to your problem.
No amount of whiteboarding could have solved the problem of the booming noise when entering a tunnel. But, a love for birdwatching helped.
One of the best adjacent fields for business to study isn’t biology, it’s psychology.
Phill Agnew
What I say
Why it matters: Biomimicry helped engineers build one of the fastest trains in the world by replicating the head of the kingfisher. This is pure, unadulterated infotainment - it’s informative and gets your gears turning just as much as it’s entertaining.
Between the lines: At Medicspot, we sold PCR tests for travel. The process was anxiety inducing. Customers had to receive their test, perform their swab, send it to the lab, and receive their results, all within 48 hours. We wanted to reduce their anxiety and thought that a buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) approach could help. The problem? We didn’t have stores.
We setup partnerships with pharmacies to stock our kits and hand out to customers who ordered online. How did we verify their order and design a seamless customer journey? We looked at restaurants with BOPIS and applied their best practices (i.e. when and how to notify customers and what to include in confirmation emails).
When you next have a meaty problem to solve, look at what has worked well in other industries or relevant lessons from biology, psychology, and other disciplines.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
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Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.