🎧 Why Tidal lost the streaming wars, how to build a culture remotely, ...
We’re back, folks! I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Year.
This is my 2nd year of writing this newsletter. Welcome to the 41st edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring My First Million, a16z, and Nudge.
What you need to know
🏴☠️ Plant your flag in the sand
🌎 How to build a culture remotely
🎧 Why Tidal lost the streaming wars
🏴☠️ Plant your flag in the sand
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 1 hour listening)
An Us vs Them mentality can be dangerous to society. Many issues in American politics are characterized as Us vs Them conflicts, from climate change and gun control to immigration and abortion.
As divisive as this can be, it’s not all doom and gloom. We can learn from this. Heck, we can even benefit from this. We can harness the power of the social identity theory to position ourselves within our customer’s in-group.
What does this mean? Well, a shared interest or identify will increase the likelihood customers trust us and buy from us. If we fight for them, they fight for us. Shaan shared an example of this on MFM.
What they say
Take inspiration from The Adventurists
The copywriting is great. I'm just going to read it out loud because I think it’s worthy of of a little oral speech here.
We’re The Adventurists. We’re fighting to make the world less boring. Our planet used to slap us about the face-cheeks with iron fists of adventure every day. Maps had edges to walk off. Whole continents lay undiscovered. But now, the entire surface of the Earth has been scanned by satellites and shovelled into your mobile phone, tagged with twattery about which restaurant serves the best mocha-latte-frappeshite. We live to find ways to make the world a bit more difficult. To bring chaos into our over-sanitised lives. To create adventures where you don’t know what will happen tomorrow or if you’ll even make it. Because we think there’s no greater moment than those seconds as you leap into an abyss of uncertainty and disaster.
Okay this is art. This is really amazing copywriting. I'm going to use this in my power writing course as one of the examples of an us versus them frame.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters: Startups win for two reasons:
Speed. We make faster decisions and avoid perfectionism like the plague.
Risk. We push the boundaries and tolerate considerably more risk.
You can take risk to create a powerful Us vs Them story. Startups can be more openly critical of competitors, institutions, and governments. We can stoke fires underneath our customers by pointing fingers at a common villain. We can become their advocate. We can become one of them.
Between the lines: Disclaimer - this isn’t easy to pull off. This is marketing at its finest. But when it works, it works wonders. Here are a few examples to give you a bit of inspiration:
Slack - Us vs Email. We all hate email. Slack helps us to avoid the dreaded inbox.
Monzo - Us vs Traditional Banks. Monzo finally makes banking convenient.
DuckDuckGo - Us vs Google. We want our privacy back. DuckDuckGo avoids tracking our every click.
These are all great, but my favorite is Shopify. They built their brand around arming the rebels. They arm defenceless mom and pop shops in the battle against overbearing empires like Amazon and Walmart. Shopify is the embodiment of Us vs Them storytelling. Hopefully, this is the catalyst for you to consider this approach.
🌎 How to build a culture remotely
🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 14 mins listening)
Remote doesn’t equal success. Poor execution can negatively impact employee engagement. Just look at Salesforce. You can’t go from a strong in-office culture to a ‘you pick’ approach overnight. But, if you get remote right you can hire top talent, eliminate office costs, and improve productivity - all in one fell swoop.
Darren Murph, Head of Remote at Gitlab, talks about the importance of culture for remote companies and the infrastructure needed to create an environment where remote teams can thrive.
What they say
Why going remote isn't enough
The market for top talent has become more competitive because all of a sudden there are far more options for people to work fully remote. It used to be a very small pool of employers. Now it's much larger.
Top talent are entering the remote market and they're specifically looking for organizations that not only allow remote work but empower people through remote work.
It's no longer good enough to just be remote. You have to be intentional about investing in teams and leaders and tooling to build the infrastructure to make it an awesome experience.
The backbone of that is a rigor around documentation. The infrastructure needs to be there so even if you’re in a different time zone than the founding team you can still function well.
Darren Murph
Operationalizing your company values
Defining how we work plays a big part in culture. I think a lot of companies don't pay enough attention to how work gets done and how communication happens.
If you look at the Gitlab values page it doesn't stop with the six core values. There are literal behaviors that you can practice.
Short toes is one of those. It's where you have permission to give feedback or input on anyone else's function or domain and they should collaborate with you with short toes i.e. you can't step on anyone's toes.
If someone is receptive to input or feedback from another function then you're doing it right. If not, you're doing it wrong. That's how you can operationalize your values.
Darren Murph
A tangible idea you can copy
I want to give one example that leaders can implement tomorrow. I came up with this idea called a community impact outing.
You give people an hour a week to go and do something meaningful to them. Maybe it's volunteer at a food bank. Maybe it's reading at a local library.
The only thing you ask them to do is to wear company swag and take a selfie while they're there. They share all of this content back in a public channel.
Instantly you build authentic bonds. For example, I'm an adoptive father. I might choose to spend my hour working at an orphanage. When I share that back, if someone else on the team is considering adopting or they were adopted, we have a connection.
This is a real, genuine, authentic relationship in the workplace that you won't get out of a Zoom happy hour.
Darren Murph
What I say
Why it matters: Founders can fall into the trap of desperately hanging onto their culture as team size changes. No matter how tight you hold on, your culture will evolve. Instead, lean into the fact that change is inevitable. Be intentional and redesign how you work and communicate as you grow from 5 to 50 to 500 people.
The easiest way to do this is by documenting and operationalizing your company values. Capture your ideal way of working on paper then create a set of behaviors and rituals to help teams embrace this on a daily basis. The act of this process alone will help you to rethink and improve how you work remotely.
Between the lines: Here’s an example of what great looks like when it come to culture and documentation. Gitlab’s handbook is an open source guide to how they run their company. Just think how helpful this is for a prospective, new or even current employee…
🎧 Why Tidal lost the streaming wars
🥇 First place (2 min read vs 32 mins listening)
Tidal created an Us vs Them story. They positioned themselves, the artists, against the greedy streaming companies. So why did Tidal lose to Spotify? Surely their David vs Goliath plight should have won our hearts, minds, and wallets? Phill Agnew hosted Dr J.J. Peterson on Nudge to breakdown how Spotify succeeded where Tidal failed.
What they say
Tidal prioritized artists
When Jay-Z launched Tidal, the music streaming service, he launched it with all of these stars on stage. Kanye, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, they're all up there.
Their story was about how streaming services are ripping off artists and it did not go well because I'm sitting there going 'Oh so I want to give more money to millionaires?'
There was no story about me as a consumer. It was all about them. You need to communicate clearly why this is important for me, why I'm the hero of this story, and how this benefits me.
If you make it all about Tidal and about Kanye and Beyonce becoming richer because streaming services are ripping them off, I don't care. That doesn't help me live a better life.
Dr J.J. Peterson
Spotify prioritized you
Tidal failed despite huge investment and celebrity endorsements that even the biggest brands couldn't dream of.
They spent millions to launch and market their product but they never captured more than 2% market share for streaming music platforms.
Tidal failed because their story was wrong. Compare this to Spotify. Spotify is all about you.
Discover Weekly showcases a curated playlist just for you. Spotify Wrapped shares your year in review. Spotify's suggestions tell you about upcoming performances by artists you love.
Tidal was all about what the celebrities wanted and Spotify is all about what you want. Perhaps, that is why Spotify has won.
Phill Agnew
What I say
Why it matters: Too many companies have terrible marketing. They focus on features instead of fortunes. Instead of talking about what your product can do, talk about the impact this will have on your customer’s life. Here are a few examples to help make this more concrete:
Everydae
Dormio
Silva
Between the lines: A simple copy change can have a huge impact on sales. It’s worth the time to review how you communicate with prospective customers, particularly if you haven’t done so in the last 6 months. Your customer’s pain points, priorities and desires may have changed in line with the economic climate.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
I’m mixing it up this week… I enjoy a good board game. My wife got me Codenames Duet for Christmas and we love it already. It’s a great co-op game that’s quick and easy to play in the evening.
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.