😈 No more Mr Nice Guy, decisions drive momentum, ...
Watch out! This week you’re getting a brand new segment called ‘From the community.’ A big thanks to Matt for the idea.
This is the 33rd edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring How I Built This, Rework, and Limited Supply.
What you need to know
⛴ Be specific and ship quick
🏎 Decisions drive momentum
😈 No more Mr Nice Guy
BONUS segment
🃏Concentrate your bets
From the community
🌱 How to grow a community
⛴ Be specific and ship quick
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 51 mins listening)
Avoid building a product that’s all things to all people. This is especially true for your MVP. You must ship fast and start learning from customers, even if your product doesn’t work for most use cases. Cruise did exactly this in the self driving car race. They started offering a robo taxi service before their car was ready for the freeway.
In between running Cruise as CEO and running 7 marathons on 7 continents in 81 hours (yes, you read that right), Kyle Vogt sat down with Guy Raz to share his incredible journey to becoming a titan of autonomous vehicles.
What they say
The state of self driving cars
We think there’s a benefit to getting this technology out soon. As soon as it can provide a benefit to the community but before it could necessarily work everywhere all of the time.
For example, we can have these drive in San Francisco at 20-30 mph max speed even though the technology is not ready to go 80 mph on the freeway or drive through a blizzard.
The vehicle we’re building is called the Origin. When this vehicle drives you and is responsible for your safety, you want to know that every sensor has been inspected and that the vehicle is in good working order.
We take on that responsibility and manage this fleet so you know every time you get in one of our cars it’s safe and ready to go.
The quality of the end to end experience from when you pull out your phone to when the car shows up has a very large influence on whether you use that service again. There’s a lot of nuance to getting that experience right outside of the core driving quality.
Our view is the handful of companies that do this first and start these cycles of iteration and learning are going to end up with the best products.
In 50 years, self driving cars will be many, many, many times safer than humans to the point where it starts to look a little reckless to let humans drive cars in places where there might be pedestrians and cyclists.
Kyle Vogt
What I say
Why it matters: Speed has become an obvious factor for success. The specificity of who you’re trying to reach continues to be under appreciated among aspiring entrepreneurs. Start by targeting a single use case for a small group of people and ignore all edge cases. Then, and only then, do you expand from there.
Between the lines: Cruise heeded this advice despite raising $15 billion in funding. They built a car that’s a safe driverless alternative to Uber and Lyft for people living in cities. Now, it’s live and operational:
Cruise is building new competencies before its competition. They’re managing fleets of self driving cars, learning the nuances of every customer touchpoint, and optimizing their robo taxi app. All because they deployed in cities instead of building an autonomous vehicle that can do everything.
🏎 Decisions drive momentum
🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 25 mins listening)
DHH and Jason Fried are back with another killer episode. This time they break down everything to do with decision making, including:
Having an appetite for risk
Owning your decisions
When to measure success
How to measure decisions
What they say
Don’t cover your ass
Neither Jason or I have any need to cover our ass. If our decisions pan out poorly, we’re not going to get fired.
Unfortunately, in some organizations that’s part of the drag on decision making. People need to cover their ass.
If they stake a claim and reality doesn’t match their hypothesis, they think ‘Uh oh, is my job now on the line? It’s not so easy to make uncertain decisions if my job is on the line. I want to at least make sure the preparation is in order.’
Our argument is that preparation is a waste of time. It’s effort that could have gone into dealing with reality as it is. You need to be less attached to being right or wrong.
David Heinemeier Hansson
How to measure decisions?
It depends on the decision and the criticality of it. Can it be measured or is it just a feel? You don’t want to overanalyze some decisions.
There are things that you put a lot of money into that you want to make sure there’s some return on because if you keep doing it forever, you’ll exhaust all of your resources.
However, I don’t think you should be applying metrics to everything. You’ve got to think about the effort you put into it. The lower the effort, the less you need to worry about measuring it.
Jason Fried
Measure decisions based on motivation
If you look at the past 20 years of how we’ve run 37signals, we’ve measured very, very few things. Things have turned out alright for us nonetheless.
People often think of investments like ‘Was it worth the time?’ To me, there are very few things I measure in time. I measure in attention and motivation. Those are the scarce resources.
I could technically have 8 hours in a day but I could totally squander that 8 hours if I don’t have the attention or motivation to make the things happen that I want to do.
David Heinemeier Hansson
What I say
Why it matters: Focus on building your decision making muscle. Make decisions fast. See them as reversible. Don’t be emotionally invested. The only decisions you really need to get right are the few that have an outsized impact on the success of your business. Everything else is a small rounding error.
Between the lines: Fast decisions enable quick wins, quick wins enable momentum, and momentum creates champions. This is a reinforcing loop that applies in any team activity: business, music, sport, you name it. Why? Because momentum breeds motivation and confidence. You need to believe you can win in order to do so.
😈 No more Mr Nice Guy
🥇 First place (5 min read vs 57 mins listening)
The gloves are off. If they’re not, they should be. No longer can you lightly spar with competitors and both walk away as winners. Moiz Ali epitomized this by sharing a sure-fire way to make $500,000. How? By riding the coattails of the hottest D2C startups. By unapologetically plagiarizing their products.
What they say
Amazon is an arbitrage opportunity
You find a D2C brand that is really blowing up, is pretty new, and isn’t on Amazon for one reason or another. Go onto Amazon, create a competitor, and start buying their branded keywords.
When we were running Native deodorant, we weren’t on Amazon for the first 3 years of our business.
We wanted to have a relationship with the customer and be able to go to Target and Walmart and be like ‘Look, we’re not on Amazon, don’t you want a product that’s not on Amazon?’
Someone came out with a competing deodorant with all of the same scents that we had. They put it on Amazon and bid on every keyword for Native.
Once we put Native on Amazon we destroyed their businesses but for several years they made a fortune.
I know somebody else who’s doing this for Athletic Greens. I think Athletic Greens still isn’t on Amazon. It may not be a long term business but there’s a good business to be had.
Moiz Ali
What I say
Why it matters: It’s time to rethink the red lines you’re prepared to cross in order to win. Now that we’re heading into a down market, we’ll experience a dog eat dog world. Those that come out on top are often prepared to go the extra mile and notch up their aggression to level 10.
I’m not advocating that you break the law. No, no, no. I’m encouraging you to wear a hat that’s a darker shade of grey than you’re currently wearing. Here’s a list of tactics you can employ and where I sit on the ethical spectrum:
Things I’d do…
Sign up to a competitor’s product and copy their best features
Develop a free service to help customers migrate to your product
Buy all their raw materials so they can’t meet customer demand
Devastate their profit sanctuary by selling your product at breakeven
Send direct mail to their customers targeting their pain points
Advertise directly against their branded keywords on Google
Advertise or reach out directly to their customers on social media
Headhunt their staff, particularly lieutenants of lieutenants
Always, always, always click on their own paid ads to charge them $1 extra!
Things I’d avoid…
Create a competitor meme account on Twitter bashing their service
Pay for or write fake reviews about their business on Google or Trustpilot
Pay people to sign up to their emails and mark as spam to kill deliverability
Between the lines: Generative AI is another arbitrage opportunity. However, this is 1,000 times more lucrative than becoming an Amazon copycat. We’re still so, so early to the game. I keep asking people what they think of the latest AI tools and get rewarded with blank stares.
We’re about to experience content wars on a much larger scale than Netflix versus Disney. Now, everyone has the power to write well with tools like jasper.ai. We’re going to see a proliferation of AI generated content online. Whoever capitalizes on these tools first to build the largest and highest quality library of content will be rewarded by Google and YouTube for life.
BONUS segment
🃏Concentrate your bets
If you’re doing under $2M a year, you should focus exclusively on one channel. Figure out how to sell a product through one channel first.
I’ve never met anybody good at Facebook and Google in my entire life. It’s really difficult to be good at both search and social.
You might be like ‘I tried selling on Google and failed. I’m going to try Facebook now. If that fails, I’m going to try TikTok.’ That’s perfectly fine. Switching channels is fine.
What’s really difficult to do is spend time on Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Snap and TikTok. Your budget is stretched thin. You can’t really invest. Your time is stretched thin.
I always encourage people doing $2M-$5M a year to focus on one channel. Once you get to $5M-$10M a year you can focus on a bit more diversity. Until then, you’ve got to get one channel to work.
Moiz Ali
I +1 this advice. Medicspot relied exclusively on SEO in our early days of running a private doctor service. Naysayers say this is risky but our focus allowed us to do one thing really well. When COVID testing revenue exceeded $5M, we diversified channels to include affiliates, paid search, paid social, and retail. If we broadened our horizons too early, I don’t think we’d be standing where we are today.
🙏 From the community
Thanks Denny for this awesome roundup about how to grow a community:
🌱 How to grow a community
One project that’s recently taken over the attention of the NFT community is y00ts, founded by Frank. This is mainly because of their “y00tlist scholarship” process. Individuals had to apply to join the community and for days on end, Twitter was filled with people proudly sharing their acceptance into the “y00tlist”.
In this conversation, Frank joins Kevin Rose and Derek Edwards Schloss to talk about his experiences creating and growing DeGods and y00ts. It’s a great discussion exploring the experience of building NFT projects…
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