🎁 Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, why ignore your competition, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 44th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Y Combinator, Rework, and Marketing Against the Grain.
What you need to know
🎁 Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
🫣 Why ignore your competition
🎓 Master the dark arts of ChatGPT
🎁 Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
🥉 Third place (5 min read vs 29 mins listening)
Why set goals? Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, says the purpose of a goal is to motivate yourself to act smarter, faster, and more intelligently than you would have otherwise.
These benefits are all well and good… if you set the right goals. Seibel embraces the phrase ‘Play stupid games, win stupid prizes’. He and Dalton Caldwell discussed their favourite examples on the YC podcast.
What they say
Silly game #1 - Raising the most money
One of the stupid games people play is how much money can I raise? Let's say you won the game. Congratulations. What prize do you win?
You lose control of your company. Suddenly your board can fire you when you're confronted with challenges.
You find yourself burning tons of money because a lot of people who gave you money expect you to spend it.
You have the wrong people on your team. You have people who think you've made it when in reality you haven't.
You might have to pivot in some significant way but now there are all of these people, money and momentum going in a direction that's driving the company off a cliff. That pivot becomes 10 times harder or damn near impossible.
But you won the fundraising game. Congratulations. Here's your prize. You have a messed up company and you've got to dig yourself out of a disaster and everyone's mad at you.
Michael Seibel & Dalton Caldwell
Silly game #2 - Hiring an executive team
Here's another one. I need an executive team. It's time for my company to become a real serious company and to do that I need an executive team.
This idea will get imprinted on your brain if all you do is consume VC content. Maybe there is a time where this is a good answer but so much of the VC content is aimed at late stage founders, not 2 or 3 person startups.
You can get someone with a title to leave Google or Facebook. You think you're a big winner that you got someone from this cool company. Then you wake up and you're like wow, what did I do?
What usually happens is they either joined your startup because they weren't doing well or they had expectations that you were farther along or more successful than you actually are and they get very upset with you.
Michael Seibel & Dalton Caldwell
Ending on a positive
Some of our best companies get so good at goal setting and accomplishing goals that they move faster than we would have ever imagined possible.
I would argue that most people don't start doing this well. Most people who set goals get better at it over time.
Michael Seibel
What I say
Why it matters: Founders play silly games out of fear. They succumb to external pressures and societal norms, rather than focusing on what’s important for their startup. We know this as ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’. It’s a common problem that permeates our work and personal lives.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by social media and the press. Twitter creates a narrative where $100,000 a year means you’re broke. TechCrunch glorifies fundraising and team size instead of profitability. We’re encouraged to spend, spend, spend at all times. Biggest is best.
These markers of success may not be right for your startup, for your happiness, or for your wallet. It's important to be aware of these pressures. Evaluate your goals based on their alignment with your values. Is this the kind of business you want to build? Is this the kind of life you want to live?
Between the lines: Setting aggressive or ambiguous goals can cause more harm than good. When goals are too unrealistic or unclear, your team will view them as a pointless exercise. There will be zero motivation to achieve them. On the flip side, the most productive periods of my career embody a Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) approach. When Medicspot hit record sales in 2021, the entire team focused on two things: delivering an exceptional service and selling more Covid tests. By setting clear but stretchy goals, the team worked with a velocity and drive I never knew existed.
🫣 Why ignore your competition
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 26 mins listening)
Startup founders are a different breed. We embrace change. We thrive in ambiguity. We break the rules. But startups die when we lose this spark. Innovation comes to a grinding halt when we start blindly following the crowd. Hear from Jason Fried as he explains why herd mentality is a one way street to mediocrity.
What they say
Avoid blindly following others
Avoid paying too much attention to product development choices that other companies are making.
It’s very common to look at whatever everyone else is doing and feel like ‘They just launched that, we need to launch that. They’ve got these 12 things, we’ve only got 6 of them. We need the other 6 so we can compete with them.’
When you start doing that you always end up behind because your strategy is to follow. It really quickly shuts you off from original thinking.
Of course, it’s good to know who’s out there. You’re going to pay attention to the industry at large.
But this isn’t about breaking down what they do and saying we need to do this too. It’s a dead end in my opinion.
Jason Fried
We don’t know the whole picture
There’s this weird assumption that other companies have figured things out that you haven’t.
It’s easy to assume that because people make a big splash about a new feature or a big release that it’s got to pay off. Oftentimes it doesn’t.
There’s a really good chance that what everyone is doing isn’t working. You might be following someone into the pit.
This is one of the things about following. You don’t have complete information. All you know is what you see but what you see is a tiny sliver of the whole thing.
Jason Fried
What I say
Why it matters: Tesla didn’t beat Ford by making a better F-Series truck. Airbnb didn’t beat Hilton by building bigger resorts. Rather than using your competition as a benchmark, use your competition as a source of inspiration for how to differentiate:
Identify segments of the market they don’t serve well or don’t serve at all and own that niche
Identify the weakest part of their product or service and make it your greatest strength
Identify business models they can’t adopt without cannibalizing their existing business
It’s best to myopically focus on areas where you can differentiate rather than going toe to toe with the incumbent. Don’t worry about the things you’re not. Spend time on the things you can control and do those things exceptionally well.
Between the lines: Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation says new entrants to a market can succeed by targeting underserved customers and then moving upmarket. Start by picking another lane and executing flawlessly. Then, and only then, can you challenge the big boys.
🎓 Master the dark arts of ChatGPT
🥇 First place (4 min read vs 36 mins listening)
Last week I read 4 threads about how I’m using ChatGPT wrong. They offered zero value. Their only goal was to get more followers. Take this guy as an example:
I’m not like Marko. You’re getting these ChatGPT nuggets for free. No following, no retweeting, no replying with “👋” needed.
What they say
Outthink ChatGPT
ChatGPT tries to give you results an average person would expect. If you want to write something that's novel you almost have to start from the point of view that you have a semi-adversarial relationship with the way that it's designed.
You need to be thinking 'Okay, how can I get past what it thinks first? How can I get into the deeper stuff that's less average or less expected or less predictable?'
Use a prompt where you ask something like 'What are the counter-intuitive things here? What would I not think of on this topic? What's something that most people believe that's untrue? What are some uncommon answers to the same question?'
Then you get the real list. You almost need to give it a chance to get those bad ideas out to get to the real meat of something.
Rob Lennon
Clone your customers
I start with the intersection of what content I want to create and then what does my audience have problems, challenges or frustrations with.
I use a framework called FFGAS which is fears, frustrations, goals and aspirations. I use this exact prompt.
Let's take email copywriting as an example. I'd ask 'For email copywriters, what are their really important fears, frustrations, goals, and aspirations?'
It'll give you a list of common challenges that people need to solve. You can start to go 'Okay, these are some really good subjects.'
Rob Lennon
Your personal note taker
Let's say you've now spent an hour on ChatGPT. I have this huge long conversation. An awesome trick that you can do is say 'For this chat that we've had can you summarize all of the most important information that we've been developing together?'
It'll go back through the conversation and return to you a modified version of that hour-long session that you can use as the outline or basis for your content.
This can take care of the excesses of information that it will produce for you. Because it will, right. It's analysis paralysis and information overload.
Rob Lennon
What I say
Why it matters: History has a way of repeating itself. The rise of ChatGPT and its societal impact is nothing new. Machines propelled factory workers into a dystopian future in the 19th Century. Specialist labor was replaced by machines. Entire industries were upended. And who came out on top? Entrepreneurs who capitalized on this new, disruptive technology.
We’re seeing the same happen now. Knowledge workers will lose their jobs. The best will improve their output tenfold. Wait, scrap that. The best already are. Research. Writing. Design. Tasks that took an hour now take 5 minutes. ChatGPT helps us deliver work faster, better, and more creatively. And who comes out on top? Entrepreneurs who capitalize on this new, distributive technology.
I laugh when I see people on Twitter bash others for spending hours on ChatGPT. I don’t think they get it. Prompt engineering is a new skill. If you master it now, you’ll get a huge leg up over the next decade. By using AI to augment your work, you’ll be able to do so much more with less. I recommend you read this post if you want to learn more about the importance of this emergent skill.
Between the lines: How can I write about ChatGPT without doing the obligatory ‘Here’s what ChatGPT wrote me’. So, over to you AI. Tell us about some uncommon ways you can utilize ChatGPT:
“Using it as a tool for brainstorming and idea generation by asking open-ended questions
Using it to generate multiple variations of a piece of content to test which one resonates best with the target audience
Using it to generate automated responses to frequently asked questions, such as in customer service or support
Using it to generate automated reports and summaries of data and information
Using it to generate dialogue for interactive fiction, games or chatbots.”
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
I asked Twitter for newsletter recommendations for entrepreneurs and founders like yourself. Rob Belk shared a few great suggestions. My favorite - one that was new to me - was Growth Croissant. Not least because I love croissants. But seriously, having read a few posts, it’s a great source of actionable tips and ideas for how to grow your business. Check it out!
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.