🌱 5-Bit Fridays: How to win on the internet, water bottles and viral growth, the hard question to ask when planning your strategy, and more
It's good to be back! Kicking 2024 off with edition #51 (and as a husband!)
Aaand we’re back! Happiest of Friday’s, friends.
As you can tell I haven’t published in a while—just over a month, in fact. Sheesh. 🫣
But I have a good reason, promise. Here’s why…
I love writing, and even when I’m taking time off I usually still do some writing/thought dumping to keep the ball rolling. But this trip to Cape Town was obviously different, and I’m so glad I took every moment to be away from the computer and just fully present.
It was by far the best experience we’ve both ever had. I personally had no idea it was possible to have so much fun. Dancing with Julia and our friends and family was just the purest feeling of overwhelming happiness—and yes, I cried like a baby during the ceremony 😄. Anyway, if you care to see me dancing like an absolute care-free chop, I’ll drop a link to the wedding video in a few months when we get it.
Last thing on this note before we get into it—thank you for your patience. It’s taken me a little longer than I hoped after getting back to brush off the ice and get back into the swing of everything properly, but as these gents put it…
And I’m pumped for this year. We have some great companies on the roadmap for deep dives, ideas for thought-pieces I’m itching to unpack, and there are also a few knowledge products I have planned (one is already in the works, and it’s going to be a banger I think).
Alrighty. Shall we?
In case you missed it this week:
At last after much back and forth, the SEC announced Wednesday that they have approved spot bitcoin ETFs for trading in the US. The approval of an ETF like this will likely lead traditional Wall Street firms to push deeper into the space, something many in the crypto industry have been begging for. The short term is always volatile, but in the long run this is likely an excellent thing for the crypto market. Pomp outlines his thoughts on what this means for BTC specifically.
Yay…more layoffs. Honestly seeing tech layoffs kicking off early in the year sucks to see. Amazon, Instagram, Duolingo, and Twitch all announced drawbacks, and mostly because they’re doubling down on AI departments. It makes you wonder why everyone still idealizes big tech in the face tens of thousands of layoffs. In reality, you’re just a number and sadly that’s not the type of number they care most about. This is why side-hustles continue to rise in popularity with folks looking for defensibility to this shit, and the “fuck you” position where they can break free of this fear-based, "you'll be laid off next" chopping block lifestyle. We have some wisdom today worth reading about this.
Speaking of big tech, on the podium for the biggest of the big, Microsoft yesterday closed the day with a bigger market cap than Apple at $2.86 trillion. This makes them currently the largest company in the world. Obviously their AI positioning is playing a huge role here, and they certainly are betting big on their Copilot as a user experience layer with the first change to their keyboard in decades—a new key that signals a shift toward a more personal and intelligent computing future.
Cool, let’s get to the meet of 2024’s first 5-bit. 👇
Here’s what we’ve got this week:
8 forecasts and implications for the years ahead
How to win on the internet
Water bottles and lessons in viral growth
The hard questions to ask when planning your strategy
Spotify Wrapped: 6 psychology principles that make it go viral every year
And what would a January post be without some predictions? So, we’ll start there.
p.s Annoyingly, all my post gets cropped in email. Hit the button below to read the full thing.
(#1) 8 Forecasts & implications for the years ahead
(CPO at Adobe) recently dished out eight insights and their implications about where the world is heading. As always, Scott’s thoughts are some of my favorite pearls of wisdom to noodle on for a bit, so here they are for you to think about:The future will be personalized to your preferences.
Local OS-native AI models change our everyday lives, and win consumer AI.
Small brands will be 10x more competitive with big brands, and all brands will compete with our objective hyper-personalized AI agents that increasingly make purchase decisions on our behalf.
Digital products continue a rapid path to commoditization and go-to-market advantages compound as AI makes (and replicates) software effortlessly.
Education undergoes an overdue refactoring that completely transforms K-12 curriculums, higher-education, government budgets, and the role of teachers for the next generation.
The talent stack collapses across functions in organizations, refactoring operations for both quality and efficiency.
We will realize our sensitivity to algorithms and our vulnerability to being polarized.
Traditional business models are disrupted and reimagined in the age of AI.
Key quote 💎
Of all my convictions, this is my strongest. Every digital experience should be personalized for you based on the information you want brands to know about you - always in your control. E-commerce websites should welcome you by name, use your preferred language, know your gender, preferred sizes, colors, and ages of your kids. Restaurants should know your allergies, favorite dishes, and dietary restrictions. Hotels should know your preferred room temperature, and whether you have rewards status at other hotels or airlines, or if you are an influencer. Future AR and mixed reality experiences should be hyper-personalized, including your favorite colors and personal tastes and interests. Your preferences should be managed by you and shared purposefully, not deduced or purchased from others. What implications can we expect in the coming years?
— via
Insight 💡
Non-portable data will be the ultimate moat.
Three vectors of differentiation matter most for new products:
Is there a unique dataset, or at least a proprietary understanding OF a dataset, that yields an advantage?
Is there a significant distribution advantage or a final mile advantage (like critical adjacent tools in a given workflow)
Is there a revolutionary interface advantage that, for some reason, is 10x better?
Take action 🛠️
This is such an interesting prediction and insight to consider, in part, because we’ve all heard the personalization song before. But I do agree with Scott’s sentiment here that this will just continue to double down as a user experience and product advantage. I mean, just look at Microsoft with that Copilot key—it’s all about personalization. So, with this in mind, here are some tactics/strategies to think about:
Are you emphasizing personalization into your product development? And that goes beyond greeting users by name in your app. As Scott notes, “Recommendations” will kill “Favorites”.
Are you investing in data management and privacy? People want personalization, and to get that, more and more consumers will sync themselves with the apps they engage with. But that means builders have to have the highest standards for respecting user privacy by allowing them to control what info they share. AKA, hyper personalization means you need to have systems that let users manage their preferences and share them selectively. This approach will require thoughtful data management capabilities that prioritize user consent and data security.
Are you focusing on long-term relationship building with users? The folks who win personalization with be the ones that recognize the compounding benefits of a long-term relationship with users. This is Microsoft’s enterprise and B2B advantage. It’s just data flywheel 101 stuff. As a system learns more about our preferences and behaviors thanks to ongoing trust and usage in a product, it should be able to offer more personalized and engaging experiences.
Finally, are you thinking about how to innovate in data utilization and user interfaces? If non-portable data (i.e platform specific data) is going to be the ultimate moat in our near future, how can you differentiate your product by leveraging your unique datasets or proprietary understandings of data, developing significant distribution or last-mile advantages, and creating new types of user interfaces that significantly improve the user experience?
Read the full post by Scott Belsky
(#2) How to win on the internet
I’ve said it before, and I predict I’ll say it many times more throughout the year—
is on the fast-track to becoming the G.O.A.T of internet multipreneurship. Greg has a way with online communities and audience building, and his track record for spinning up successful products and businesses that are community-led is dizzying.In short, if you’re someone who cares about writing online, “side hustles”, creating an audience of your own, or just building a product rooted in a true need, Greg is a man you must follow.
Yes, I’m a fanboy. 👀
As just one example, here’s a recent LinkedIn post of his I just had to share. Sorry for the long quote, but it’s just an insane amount of insight and actionable stuff worth sharing. 😄
How to win on the internet:
Marry the niche, date the product.
Make a meme page. Understand the meme culture, own the community, use the insights for a product you'll sell.
Educate over entertain. You can have more fun entertaining, you can make more money if you educate and if you do both you'll never need to find a job in your life again.
Make friends with people in your industry. Earn their trust. Don’t ask for anything for a long time. Overwhelm with value. It’ll payback.
Be different. Don’t just copy what other people do. Be the one that gets copied, not doing the copying. Way more cool.
Listen to podcasts and take notes each time. It’s basically like you’re sitting in the room with the world’s greatest founders and entrepreneurs. Share notes with others, discuss.
Throw small 10 person events in major cities. You can’t win on the internet by just being only on the internet.
DM someone new everyday. Send them a Loom on why they should care.
Have an email list. Don’t trust any social platform. Bank on your email list, not your follower count.
Be good at introducing yourself. Your bio should reflect that. Everyone is interesting in one way or another.
Have goals. Quantify them. Ask people how you're doing.
Have a monthly investor update but just for trusted industry friends. Make it max 25 people. Ask for feedback on how you're doing. You can include your friends and family on it.
Don't raise VC if you don't need to. Spoiler alert: you probably don't need to.
Spend money on ads. It'll teach you how to write well in your niche because you don't want to waste any dollars. And you'll learn quickly what resonates with your niche.
Focus on 1 social platform first, with one format of post. Until you have 100k followers, do not look at anything else.
Be data-informed not data-driven. Don't do things because your analytics are telling you to do. You're a human being, you understand your community, act with a mix of art and science.
Put buy buttons on the internet. Let people buy your products in many places. Don't be shy to sell.
Get on the internet to post content ideas, get off the internet to get content ideas. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Set post notifications for the most interesting people in your space. Reply thoughtfully. You'll learn a lot.
Big conferences are a waste of time and money. Better spend time/money elsewhere.
Don't get jaded. They'll be bumps in the road, jerks on social, people copying your product but the internet is your oyster. Yours for the taking.
Get smart at AI and hiring global talent. It'll save you time and keep you profitable.
— Greg Isenberg, via LinkedIn
Take action 🛠️
Literally every point Greg made is an action item, so much value. 👏 My recommendation would be to pick one or two things there that you feel a natural pull towards and that you think will have the most leverage in your life/work. Then lean in hard and keep an eye on the results.
To keep up to date with Greg’s work, follow him here with a free subscription:
(#3) Water bottles & lessons in viral growth
Regardless of how you feel about it, you’ve probably heard of the recent interest in the Stanley Quencher—the insulated water cup that people are absolutely losing their marbles over.
Stanley, the 111-year-old company that makes thermal cups has seen their sales grow from $70M in 2019 to $750M in 2023. That’s insane growth. And usually when seeing a hockey stick revenue curve like that, there’s an innovative new product released coupled with a brilliant go-to-market strategy.
Except…. 🥁…. the golden-goose product that people are breaking into Target’s to steal and sell on Ebay for 4x the price is the same thing they’ve been selling for years. Not a single thing changed about their existing product. IT’S JUST A CUP!
But rather, it was a move (by the same marketing exec who made Crocs “cool”) in shifting Stanley’s audience and marketing tactics.
It’s worth unpacking this viral sensation, and
did a great job of doing just that.Key quote 💎
If a 111-year-old water bottle company can suddenly become the hottest product of the year, the sky’s the limit for savvy tech companies that test new growth channels, iterate based on user feedback, and get creative with distribution.
— Rex Woodbury, via
Insight 💡
Up until very recently, Stanley was the cup company for adventurous and outdoorsy men. Just take a look at their homepage back in 2019. It’s very clear who they’re targeting.
Then rather suddenly, thanks to a group of three social moms in Utah who ran a blog, an unpopular SKU of Stanley cups took off in their community—The Quencher, with a handle and a narrowed base that helps it fit into cup holders.
These Utah moms loved it, thought it was excellent for on the go moms, and they also thought the product was woefully under-marketed and under-appreciated. In fact, it was a product on the verge of discontinuation. And since Stanley at the time had no influencer or affiliate program, these moms took matters into their own hands by buying over 10,000 units and directly selling them themselves!
In less than 4 days, they were completely sold out. This woke up the execs at Stanley who learnt that their audience was 98% women with the highest age concentration being 35 to 44. Thankfully, this got them thinking about their target audience.
This led to two key changes at Stanley:
They started listening to this new market segment of women that they’d previously ignored
They created a product feedback group with these moms, leading to:
An affiliate and influencer program
New pastel colors for their cups that “would look good on kitchen countertops”
In other words, there was a new focus around the same product. Marketing changed in a big way, and Stanley leaned heavily into working with influencers and collaborating with brands, doing limited edition drops, and investing heavily in social media to embed their “new” trendy cup all across TikTok.
Look at their website today:
And in 2023, something else happened online that led to an insane viral boost: a women’s car got completely destroyed in a fire, but her Stanley cup not only survived in great condition, but it still had ice inside. She shared it on TikTok (could there be better UGC marketing?), and Stanley quickly jumped onto the virility, with the CEO replying to the video and gifting her a new car…it’s worth the quick watch:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
That’s how you do it. This drove hundreds of millions of views, and probably insane sales volume.
There are 4 big insights here:
Sometimes it’s not the product that needs to change, just the audience. Rex says it well: Stanley is a good reminder that an excellent product is table stakes, but that distribution is king. Otherwise, a good product just sits on the shelves.
Always keep tabs on your customer demographic and how people are using your product; it can change.
Be nimble and ready to pivot based on market demands.
And lastly, as the Stanley president showed us, when viral moments come, move fast and capitalize on them. Inserting yourself into the zeitgeist can be an excellent way to boost the chatter about your brand.
Take action 🛠️
Of course there was a lot of luck here. Those Utah moms—just three customers—changed the trajectory of Stanley. However, one thing to walk away with here that you can immediately think about is whether there might be a small cohort of your users driving an outsized usage of your product. Looking at your data might reveal nothing unexpected, but in the odd chance you have some Utah moms gobbling up your SaaS product and begging for an affiliate program, there may be something there.
Again: Always keep tabs on your customer demographic and how people are using your product; it can change. Product-market fit is not a one time thing that you just achieve. You can absolutely experience product-market-drift ™.
Read the full post by Rex Woodbury
(#4) The hard questions to ask when planning your strategy
I love it when strategy is boiled down to its barebones fundamentals. There are so many templates out there prescribing what strategy is, many of which do people a disservice of (1) over complicating it, and (2) pushing people towards a format that isn’t relevant to their own context.
Templates and worksheets should always be taken with a grain of salt and serve as inspiration, not gospel.
However, what all the good ones have in common is the same simple thread of what true strategy is:
Where are we now?
Where do we want to go?
What obstacles / problems stand in the way of getting from A to B?
What’s the plan for overcoming them?
If you’re thinking about those things, you’re most likely practicing good strategy.
Simple, but not easy.
And it’s not always easy and done right because people often mess up the first step: an honest assessment of where they currently are.
The folks over at Harvard Business Review wrote a great (paid) piece in this.
Key quote 💎
Many market leaders do not truly understand why they are number one, largely because many of the executives who are running market-leading businesses inherited the business and their market leadership. They can no more explain their success than a trust fund kid can explain how to build wealth. Because the strengths of their business are often inherited rather than something they built themselves, executives may fail to fully understand and pinpoint their one true source of strength.
Non-market leaders make similar but inverse assumptions. These leaders are also trapped in the past. They assume they are weak across the board vis-à-vis the market leader. Even if they believe they have strength, they lack a challenger brand mindset and assume failure is more likely than success.
The key to answering “Where are we now?” with a strategy therapy mindset is to be embarrassingly honest about your core belief regarding strategy and the one true strength of your products, company, and category. The first step is to admit you have a problem.
Insight 💡
One reason most companies fail right out of the gate with strategy (and I’ve made this mistake before too) is because they do not answer “Where are we now?” with real honesty about their strengths and weaknesses.
To successfully use these overarching questions to chart a course and head in the right direction, people must be brutally honest with themselves about where they are now. Honest about what the state of their business is, and how they truly fit into the larger landscape. If your bottom line is down YoY, are you huddling with your team and having the hard conversation of what you could be doing wrong?
This meme puts it well: don’t skip the necessary, perhaps boring seeming, context.
Take action 🛠️
The authors of the piece posit that you ask yourself these three questions:
1. What is the one thing that makes our business special? Is it your product? If so, is it the benefits, experience, or price? Or is it the company because of your marketing, sales, or supply chain? Or is it that neither your product nor company is special, but you are in the right category at the right time?
2. How special is the one thing that makes our business special? Just because your product is special to your company doesn’t mean it is special to the category.
Price elasticity tells the truth about your product or service. If you can’t command a price premium, you can’t say your product is special to the category.
Marketing mix modeling tells the truth about your marketing. Does the math say a dollar of marketing spend yields more than a dollar of gross margin? Love this line…“Marketing that does not produce revenue or market capitalization is just arts and crafts.”
3. How far are we willing to go to make the one thing be truly special? There are three levels of specialness to aspire to— be better, be the best, or be different/unique. Most leaders settle for better versus aspiring to be the best or different.
Being better is only about being the winner by competing and defeating others.
Being the best is about improving and increasing the price premium.
Being different is about designing and differentiating. These companies identify a category problem and articulate a radically different point of view.
This statement captures it well:
The choice to be better, the best, or different is rooted in a leader’s fundamental belief about whether the world is full of scarcity or abundance. Leaders who default to scarcity often compete to chase market share with little regard for the long view. Leaders who default to abundance fall in love with innovation or category design and create a new future that solves existing problems the present category cannot solve. Most executives have never really examined their belief system at their core.
This is why strategy therapy matters more than strategy planning. Strategy therapy is about brutal honesty and embracing a seemingly naïve belief in abundance. Honesty is a superpower available to all, and abundance creates new possibilities and the greatest strategies.
Read the full (paid) post by Eddie Yoon, Christopher Lochhead, and Katrina Kirsch
(#5) Spotify Wrapped: 6 psychology principles that make it go viral every year
A couple of weeks ago we all eagerly tapped into our Spotify Wrapped’s, those little stories summing up who we are and our emotional rollercoasters of the past year.
Does Spotify know me better than I know myself? Who’s to say. They certainly know my taste in music better than I do.
Anyway, Louis-Xavier Lavallée and the folks over at Growth Design unpacked this brilliant feature in detail from a design pattern perspective, specifically, how Spotify uses psychology to consistently create one of the the most viral events of the year.
It’s a great case study that itself is gorgeously crafted. Since it’s not a written piece (rather an interactive slideshow) there’s no key quote to pull out, but here’s a rundown of all the insights Growth Design shared:
Insight 💡
Spotify uses 6 principles to help make Wrapped such a success:
The Curiosity Gap. The curiosity gap is the space between what users know and what they want or need to know. Gaps cause pain, and to take it away, users need to fill the knowledge gap.” From the very first touchpoint (a notification one week before the release), Spotify use the curiosity gap to prime you, teasing what you wrapped might be with some mystery.
Anticipation mixed with variable rewards. People especially enjoy unexpected rewards, and things like not knowing who your top artists or songs will be is one of the key ingredients in Spotify's Wrapped success.
Storytelling. Spotify could easily send you a simple summary list of your year Wrapped. But, they know that there are better ways to capture attention, so, they tell stories. Stories engage with multiple areas of the brain, making stories more memorable than simple facts and stats alone. Spotify use stories to play into our love of narratives (and of ourselves as the hero of them) by telling the story of how music played a role in the events in our lives.
Delighters. Spotify use beautiful and playful animations as we're more likely to remember and notice these creative ways of presenting data. And each year is different, again, keeping things new and fresh.
Numbers: By associating the time spent on Spotify with past memories—Spotify frames the data (the time we spend on their app) positively. This creates a great association with Spotify. Compare this with how you feel when you see high numbers on Screen Time—definitely a negatively framed association that makes you want to chuck your iPhone away.
Social value and the Bandwagon Effect: Spotify Wrapped has become super popular thanks to the wide social sharing of people’s Wrapped across Instagram. And since people like to do what other people like them are doing (shoutout to the Stanley cup), it kicks off a nice viral flywheel where for a week or so every December, everyone is just letting everyone else know how diverse of a human they are.
Take action 🛠️
Every time users interact with your product, they:
Filter the information
Seek the meaning of it
Act within a given time
Store bits of the interaction in their memories
So, as the Growth Design experts put it, “to improve your user experience, you need to understand the biases and heuristics affecting those four decision-cycle steps.”
A good place to start is by scanning through a list of cognitive biases and design principles. Luckily, they put one together. Start here with Hick’s Law, and just keep scrolling.
Meme of the week 👀
Not quite a meme, but in light of the recent news of the door blowing off an Alaskan Airlines flight, this made me laugh:
🌱 And now, byte on one of these 🧠
What's Coming in 2024 on the Monopoly Front? by
The Cultural, Psychological and Collective Impacts of Generative AI, by
And that’s everything for this week, folks.
If you learned anything new, the best way to support me and this newsletter is to give this post a like below or a share. Or, if you really want to go the extra mile, I’d be incredibly grateful if you considered upgrading.
Thanks so much for reading. I hope you have an awesome weekend.
Until next time.
— Jaryd✌️
Don't have time to read yet but quickly a big congratulations to you and all the best for the future. Even though we don't know each other I am happy for you since you are such a nice person, making the web a better place :-)
All the best from Germany!
Manuel
Congrats!!! So happy to have you back but even happier for you!!!