š§ The innovatorās dilemma, do any of us have trade secrets, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you donāt have to.
This is the 36th edition ofĀ Best 3 Podcasts of the Week š„š„š„,Ā featuring Startups For The Rest of Us, Rework, and Lennyās Podcast.
What you need to know
š One chance to name your business
š¤ Do any of us have trade secrets?
š§ The innovatorās dilemma
From the community
š¤ŗ Be critical of the critics
š One chance to name your business
š„ Third place (3 min read vs 31 mins listening)
I have a tendency to be black and white.Ā This complements my bias to action and fast decision making. But, life is often much more grey. There are always ifs and buts to consider. An example of this is starting a business. We preach āSpin up a site and launch todayā. Weāre not wrong. Itās crucial to fail fast and learn quickly. However, we shouldnāt be impulsive when picking our company name. Hereās why.
What they say
The difficulties of renaming your business
Names are pretty hard to change. Names get tied to your branding. You start getting mentioned everywhere and leaving a trail of naming breadcrumbs all over the place.
If you answer a question on Quora, if you write a blog post, if you get something quoted or published somewhere, it will say {your name} founder of {your business}.
Personally, I donāt like changing names because itās like a positioning or branding pivot. Itās pretty dramatic.
I know some founders whoāve done it successfully. They realized the name they chose was not ideal in the space.
One example of this is Ruben Gamez at a company called DocSketch, an electronic signature app.
At a certain point there was confusion where people would say DocuSketch. It was becoming an issue that he saw was only going to get worse.
He went through a renaming. Itās now called SignWell. Frankly, it was a lot of work. Itās not just taking a domain and redirecting things. Itās all the work that goes on behind that.
Rob Walling
What I say
Why it matters: The way I see it is you have two choices:
Donāt be impulsive. Take at least one night to sleep on it before deciding on your forever name.
Use a throwaway name. This is my preferred choice. Sam Parr says focus on getting your first sales. Once youāve figured out how to sell your product or service, pick a new name that will stand the test of time.
Arguably, thereās a third choice. Itās difficult to put (2) into practice because we get attached to the things we name (including the names themselves). Itās easier to settle with what you have rather than put effort into finding a name that can scale with your ambitions. Soā¦
Pick a name you hate. That way, once youāve made a few sales, you force yourself to pick a new name. The added benefit is that if you make $0 in sales, itās easier to kill the concept entirely because you donāt have an attachment to the name.
Between the lines:Ā Iām in the same boat as Rob Walling. The prospect of renaming makes me feel sick. Not least because of the money, time, and headspace taken away from the things that matter.
My tip? Pick a name thatās broad. Something you can grow into. Worry less about your brand identity and logo. That can be fixed later. Just look at Nike.
š¤ Do any of us have trade secrets?
š„ Second place (4 min read vs 25 mins listening)
We tend to overestimate our knowledge and performance relative to our peers.Ā This cognitive bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. In reality, our individual contributions arenāt extraordinary. Most of our playbooks and ideas arenāt new. DHH and Jason Fried explained the importance of accepting this fact and why you should start sharing your learnings.
What they say
We donāt copy and paste restaurants
Weāve always tried to emulate chefs. Chefs have restaurants and a number of them also write cookbooks.
The cookbooks share all of their recipes. The cookbook is like āHere, make my restaurant at home.ā
They know people arenāt going to buy that book, build a restaurant right next to them, and put them out of business. Thatās not how it works.
What theyāre going to do is share as much as they can so people pay attention to them.
Maybe one day, when theyāre in town, people will come to their restaurant because they made some recipes at home and want to try the real thing.
This isnāt a zero sum game. Sharing is just helpful. Itās better for our business. Itās better their business.
Jason Fried
We overestimate our secret sauce
Most businesses are not fucking CocaCola. They donāt have this secret recipe thatās the foundation of their success.
A lot of companies think they have a secret sauce when it comes to their codebase. The vast majority of code is not that unique. Thereās nothing there to steal.
Itās an old style of thinking based on patents. Maybe thatās relevant to some kinds of businesses in some ways. The vast majority of businesses? No. Not relevant to them.
Businesses succeed or fail on the basis of their execution and timing. There just arenāt that many profound secrets that can completely alter the trajectory of a company.
All your lessons that sit unshared are just deadweight. They earn you no goodwill or attention. Itās just waste. Why donāt you take that waste and turn it into some fuel? It doesnāt actually take that much effort.
David Heinemeier Hansson
What I say
Why it matters:Ā Caveat - not all sharing is equal. Itās important to know your audience and share the things that they find interesting. Letās use the chef analogy. Chefs share their recipes because people want to recreate dishes at home. Chefs donāt share how they manage their rota or how they train their staff. Most people find that boring.
Between the lines:Ā Value comes from sharing the right things with the right people. Here are two great examples of people sharing their ideas and playbooks:
(1) Sharing playbooks - Niche Site Lady
Niche Site Lady shares the SEO playbooks behind her $500,000 a year empire. She started posting in April 2022 and quickly grew to 30,000 Twitter followers and 6,000 email subscribers. She could have easily kept these secrets to herself and quietly expanded her business. Instead, by sharing actionable advice she can:
Learn new best practices from readers
Find new niches to build sites for
Connect with future hires
Build products/services for readers
Find buyers for sites sheās selling
(2) Sharing ideas - Shaan Puri
Shaan Puri is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to business ideas. From AI written student essaysĀ to influencer inspired vacations, Shaan reveals how heād build or grow each idea. By sharing his ideas for free, heās amassed 300,000 followers on Twitter, 150,000 downloads per episode, and monetized his audience via a rolling fund, a personal newsletter, and a power writing course.
š§ The innovatorās dilemma
š„ First place (4 min read vs 1 hour 11 mins listening)
Time after time, big companies perish when they fail to innovate in the face of disruptive technology. In 1997, Clayton Christensenās book The Innovator's Dilemma forewarned this exact issue. Yet weāve seen Borders, Toys R Us, American Apparel, and Compaq succumb to a slow death in recent years.
Matt Mochary has been an executive coach to business leaders like Naval Ravikant and the CEOs of Notion, OpenAI, Coinbase, and Reddit. He shared his advice on nurturing innovation and avoiding this fate.
What they say
Why big companies are super slow
Big companies have a hard time innovating because when a product is scaled, itās now got millions of users.
You have two things that need to stay true everyday: (1) The site is up and running (2) Thereās no security breach.
Every time you add code, youāve got to test it thoroughly to make sure it doesnāt take down either one of those. The review process is insane!
So when youāre writing prototype code and new features, you canāt get it approved. It takes so long.
Matt Mochary
The best way to innovate in-house
Thatās what youāre trying to decouple. You need to create an entity that doesnāt touch the core code.
You also donāt want to go through the approval process of the product team. That takes way to long as well.
Thatās why it needs to be a small team that reports to someone outside of engineering, product, or design. They should report directly to the CEO.
Matt Mochary
How we can learn from Clipboard Health
I had a call with Wei Deng (CEO of Clipboard Health) and she said she created 5 C corps in the last 2 months.
She said: The results are fantastic. The team doesnāt worry about trying new things because they know it doesnāt hurt our core brand. Theyāre iterating fast.
She said: Not only do they do that, I actually had two teams independently working on each new product. One is engineering focused. They build custom code. The other is customer relationship focused. They build a manual solution or use off the shelf products. We can see which one makes more progress faster.
Matt Mochary
What I say
Why it matters:Ā In his book, Christensen proposes that companies should innovate by founding or acquiring a subsidiary company with the right values and processes, equipping it with the necessary resources, and letting it do its thing.
Mid to large companies should heed Christensenās and Mattās advice but accept this will take a couple of years to get right. Company culture is very difficult to unwind the larger you get. Your team wonāt move fast enough. Youāll innovate much faster if you hire a new team, start a new C corp, and give them freedom to build.
Between the lines:Ā Another option is to buy your way to the top. If you own or run a midsize company, now is the time to dip your toes into M&A land. Itās open season over the next 24 months as more and more companies become distressed. Founders will want a fire sale to recoup something for all the effort they put in.
The same advice stands true if youāre considering buying a small business. Business owners are motivated to sell if theyāre looking to retire or if theyāre concerned about industry changes. Right now, weāre experiencing bothā¦.
š From the community
ThanksĀ DennyĀ for this refreshing take about challenging the so-called āexpertsā andĀ Ā making more informed decisions:
š¤ŗĀ Be critical of the critics
Crypto critics can be dangerous when they get their facts wrong, because some have the credentials to convince people to listen to them. In June 2022, a group of technologists sent aĀ letterĀ to Congress outlining various concerns about cryptocurrencies and stating that āblockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy usesā.
This caused Matthew Green a lot of heartburn. Matthew is an associate professor of computer science at John Hopkins University, and works in cryptography. After reading what he described as āfalse and scientifically unsupportableā claims, he published an article titled, 'In defence of crypto(currency)'. On this Bankless podcast, Matthew explains how we can expand crypto adoption and addresses common criticisms he hearsā¦
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Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, Iāll 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.Ā 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.
This very inspiring, and insightful.
this one was quite good. got 2 incredible ideas from this one.
started reading this newsletter again. quality content makes you come back.