🌱 5-Bit Fridays: Product lessons from the West’s politics on Russia, novelties and dopamine, pre-mortems, brand ROI, and what's the right question?
#64
👋 Hey, I’m Jaryd and welcome to another edition of 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly roundup of 5 actionable insights, bringing you brief advice before the weekend on how to build and grow a product.
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Good morning, folks! ☕
After catching up on Survivor late last night, I overslept a tad. So, I’m writing to you today on a short deadline.
But, we’re up in the suburbs while we’re in the middle of a move. The sound of rain and birds certainly beats the sirens and the constant hum of stress. AKA, the NYC soundtrack.
Anyway, big welcome to the 216 new folks who’ve joined us this week, including Sergey, Rachell, Georgia, and Tim. We’re now a solid 20,766!
Real quick, I posted the below to Chat yesterday. I’d love your input. If you have any questions, please do send them over, ideally in Chat, the comments, or by replying to this email.
Cool. Since I’m sitting down to write later than usual, let’s just get cracking.
I hope you enjoy and learn something new!
— Jaryd
ICYMI this week 🗞️
Bloomberg asked Adam Neumann why Andreessen Horowitz invested $350M in his new startup, Flow, after everything at WeWork. His reply: “That’s a question for Andreessen Horowitz.” If you missed my story on Why WeWork Died…read it here.
Paramount is in talks to buy Sony. Last week, they submitted a non-binding letter of interest to buy them for around $26B in cash.
My favorite created, MrBeast, is going solo and cutting ties with his management company. Honestly fair enough, Jimmy Donaldson is such a beast he doesn’t need a manager. He just turned 26 and as a creator with his own business is pulling in $600M in revenue a year. Just think about that for a second. Jimmy is the biggest, but it’s an example of the growing power of giant creators across the entertainment industry. Speaking of YouTube…
YouTube is planning to compete with Spotify and Apple in podcasting. As video podcasts grow on YouTube, the platform is leaning on its ability to offer both video and audio to draw in listeners. Read the high-level strategy.
Apple launched a strange commercial, called Crush!, for the new iPad, leaving many with a bitter taste. They’ve since apologized for the ad, showing a huge hydraulic press destroying all the beautiful things in the world, just to replace them with an iPad.
Today’s 5-Bits ☔
+ Quote, tools, chart, and rabbit holes of the week
1️⃣ How novelty effects and Dopamine Culture rule the tech industry
, if you see this, welcome to Substack, and congrats on 6 years at a16z! I’ve been a big Andrew Chen fan for a while, and his book The Cold Start Problem is a must read for anyone building networked-based products.We’ll get today started with one of Andrew’s first Substack posts.
Key quote
It’s obvious that a new product has to tap into any new emergent culture in order to succeed. In a world where visual media is the dominant force — whether that’s photos, videos, or clips — any product that figures out how to naturally produce media in its usage will succeed. No wonder we’ve seen the Novelty Effect of diffusion models that produce media, being shared on social media, become so viral so quickly.
And, yes, ride the Novelty Effect. Build upon Dopamine Culture. But also keep in mind that to be successful in the long-run, your product must also be useful. It must retain. Because when the S-curve progresses to the next stage, anyone who is novel but useless will surely come to an early end.
— Andrew Chen, via
Insight & Action 🛠️
Andrew shared this hard-hitting graphic by Ted Gioia:
You can pretty clearly see that everything in our world today is optimized to be quick and super easy to consume. Minimal attention span. Mindlessness. All online. No realness.
Everything has become more accessible. Sure, there’s a case accessibility is good and given power to the people, but the tradeoff is a lack of substance.
From the online side, that’s one of the big reasons I love the culture engine that Substack is creating, because writers create, and readers generally prefer, depth.
And more broadly, I’m absolutely all for the trend of shifting back to “slow and traditional” culture. This is nested in the nostalgia movement: more vinyl records, film cameras, physical locations to play sport, etc.
I’m not going to even bother to go find the data, because I know that the further to the right of that chart we go, the unhappier we’ve become.
I personally want more tactileness. The actual feeling of doing something vs just having my day lost in the sauce of pixels and bits. Give me the atoms, baby.
So, two observations:
Big picture, there’s growing opportunity in the physical world. IRL experiences, hardware, play, and things that work to actually bring people together. Worth noodling on.
But, in the world of software building where most of us sit, a big implication of this accessibility is a constant battle against retention. Which means your product has to deliver value incredibly fast. If you’re not giving first session value (nay, first few taps value), brace yourself for big drop-off rates. And once people abandon your product in search for quicker gratification, it’s exceedingly harder to convince them to come back.
Read the full post by Andrew
2️⃣ Have you done a pre-mortem yet?
In short, before:
Starting a company;
Making a big change/bet in life, or;
Launching a product
Put in some legwork upfront to find out what could go wrong before you even start.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the concept, but Luca Dellanna put it very succinctly.
Key quote
Imagine you wake up in a hospital. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?
Imagine your partner breaks up with you. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?
Imagine you lose your job. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?
—Luca Dellanna
Insight & Action 🛠️
Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then working backwards to figure out what happened (the classic post-mortem), rather unlock the power of 20:20 hindsight with a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong and asking some questions to deduce why.
The pre-mortem is a technique to help you do what’s right for your customers, your company, and your team, by foreshadowing and mitigating the most blatant (and obscure) would-be blunders.
The process is relatively straight forward:
You list out all questions you can think of. Some of these will be clear questions, but some could be fuzzy, for example:
What's the go-to-market strategy?
What does that go-to-market strategy cost?
Why do influencers wanna promote this?
What's my exit strategy?
What is the multiple at IPO that this company is going to have?
And how does that work backwards to a series A?
You then go an answer all of those questions. The idea is to force yourself to think about it and write an answer for each one, then organize it into sections, and then turn into something that's relatively readable.
A super handy exercise to minimize risk and think of the edge cases.
3️⃣ Broken Record: Lessons from the West’s politics on Russia
don’t often publish content without a paywall, but when they do, I read it.A recent post of their’s is an open letter to Western politicians on Russia.
It’s a geopolitical piece, but while reading it, I found some broader lessons that could be abstracted out worth sharing.
Key quote
The Russian economy is booming while Europe battles recession and Ukraine nears collapse on the battlefield—in large part because Russia produces vastly more weapons than the West can supply. Russian imports have been replaced by members of the Global South, especially China. China and Russia have gotten so chummy on trade that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Beijing and threatened to sanction the country just last week. The Chinese sent him packing, all but daring him to do something about it.
The “lost companies” that represented “~40% of its GDP” merely sold their businesses to new Russian owners on their way out of the country—often at pennies on the dollar—and those businesses quickly reopened under local management. Starbucks is now “Stars Coffee” and McDonald’s is now “Vkusno i tochka,” and both menus are virtually indistinguishable from their pre-war predecessors. The sanctions simply forced a change in the equity stack of the grand Russian capital table, and in Russia's favor at that.
— Doomberg
Insight & Action 🛠️
Some practical things you can take away from the piece with regards to the West’s strategy towards Russia.
Stress test your operating and strategic assumptions. Run wargame scenarios where competitors are stronger or more nimble than you expect. Have contingency plans.
Look for indirect and non-obvious paths to victory. Attacking a problem head-on (e.g. sanctions) may be less effective than an oblique approach, like flooding markets.
Be willing to make hard tradeoffs. Be care to not let side priorities stop you from doing what's needed to win.
Build agility into your culture as a first-class citizen. You have to be able to rapidly pivot strategies, replace vendors/partners, and adapt to shocks. Any level of rigidity is a vulnerability.
When you see an opening, act decisively. Once you spot an advantage, move fast and go all-in to press it. Hesitation gives competitors time to respond.
Read the full post by Doomberg
4️⃣ Asking the right questions
The greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers, but from asking the right questions.
In a recent essay, Sahil Bloom shared 7 questions that have had a big impact on his life.
Below I share my favorite 3, as well as 2 questions of my own I’ve shared specific to company building.
Try asking yourself at least one of them today.
Key quote
You live your life zoomed way, way in.
It makes it difficult to assess the quality of your daily actions and whether you're on the right course.
On a regular basis, zoom out by asking yourself this question:
How would your actions from a typical day compound in your life?
Would they be driving you forward in the direction of your goals and vision?
Would they be steering you off course?
Remember the 1-in-60 Rule: A 1 degree error in heading means a plane will miss its destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown. Small errors in heading are amplified by distance and time.
Course correct early and often.
— Sahil Bloom, via his newsletter
Insight & Action 🛠️
If someone observed my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are?
Why: This prompts us to examine the alignment between our stated intentions and our actual behaviors, revealing any discrepancies and areas where we may be cutting corners
If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?
Why: Oof, good one! We’re so bad at taking our own advice, but forcing ourselves to take the bird's-eye view perspective on the situation gives us a nice vantage point to see the bigger picture.
Where am I allowing more information to get in the way of more action?
Why: There’s always more data or reassurance you can find to build confidence, but it can easily become a silent excuse for inaction. As Sahil says, “When in doubt, it's safe to assume the balance is found with more action.” Spot on.
And then, related to work and building products:
What are the top three skills or knowledge areas I need to acquire to take my product to the next level, and how can I prioritize learning at least one of them?
Why: You will always have gaps, but often we don’t think about them and just focus on the now and getting what’s in front of us done. Building skill is a longer game, but taking a step back to think about your growth in relation to your products growth is an interesting exercise.
If I could only work on my product for 2 hours a day, what activities would I prioritize to maximize my impact?
Why: This gets you thinking about three things: a) what moves the needle the most, b) what your comparative advantage/biggest leverage on the team is, and c) what type of action you should take each day to move your product forward.
Just remember, it’s mainly about the questions, not the answers. Simply asking yourself a question can bring you new clarity and perspective. Also, it’s a good habit to circle back to questions like this somewhat periodically. Your thoughts will change.
Read the full post by Sahil
5️⃣ Rethinking the brand ROI
Brand is one of those things that can sometimes be tricky to nail down. Like, what exactly is our brand?
Sometimes people spend a lot of time thinking about it and focusing on all the details you’d never even think about. And other times, often like a team’s culture, it just becomes what it is quite naturally.
That isn’t always a good thing. Like Uber’s bro culture under the leadership of Travis. Kalanick—the culture just emanated him.
But your brand and culture are deeply tied.
In a great post,
gets int how brand marketing— which is all about the production of “cultural artifacts” and “experiences that carry your story"—, when executed well, create a "cultural influence strategy" than can be a great competitive advantage and profit driver.Key quote
Brand marketing was invented to create a link between a company and culture. It conveys the brand identity that transcends what a company sells. In contributes to cultural conversation through stories about humans, their aspirations, and their life.
Brand marketing is the strategy of cultural influence. Brands used to influence mainstream culture through their advertising on mass media like TV, print, billboards, or public relations. Today, they influence culture through the cultural products they create: content, merchandising, events, aesthetics, experiences, archives, history, entertainment, fandom. These cultural products are directed to subcultures, taste communities, and consumer niches. Through these cultural products, brands tell their story.
— Ana Andjelic, via
Insight & Action 🛠️
A few observations from Ana’s post:
Try to connect brand marketing to financial results by focusing on cultural influence. Your brand's ability to shape culture through stuff like content, experiences, and aesthetics is what will help drive long-term financial outcomes like pricing power, market share, and customer loyalty.
You want to develop a strong, clear brand story that permeates everything you do. Your products, advertising, and all user touchpoints should tell a compelling, differentiated story that draws in attention in. A story that stands out from the noise is the foundation.
Plan to create a steady stream of "cultural products". That’s things like events, collaborations, content, merch, IRL stunts, etc. They will help carry your brand story in a more engaging way. Ask yourself, is there some new (bold) idea we can test in the real world?
Like your roadmap, balance the short and long-term in your cultural influence strategy. Some things should focus on driving immediate engagement, while others plans could be to plant seeds for the future. Manage across timelines.
Read the full post by Ana
Quote of the week 💡
“What you resist not only persists but will grow in size”
— Carl Jung
Tools of the week 🛠️
Here are 3 tools I use, either at work, personally, or both :)
Sprig: Sprig is great for capturing user insights with micro surveys right inside your product. They also have an epic tool to gather user feeding form interactive prototypes.
Webflow: I use Webflow to spin up landing pages and websites without writing a line of code. They have gorgeous templates to get started in minutes, and there’s a really robust community of resources to help build pretty much anything.
Passionfroot: I use Passionfroot to manage my sponsorship storefront. If you’re a brand looking to find a creator, they also have a marketplace for brands and creators to match.
👉 View all my recommendations.
Chart of the week 📈
Trust is everything.
Unfortunately, people in the US don’t trust anything (or anyone) anymore. 👇
Byte on one of these posts 🧠
Other favorite reads from the week…
Screenshot marketing = the ultimate curiosity hook, by
10 Lessons From 2024 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting, by
Which Music Stands the Test of Time, and Which Does Not? A Statistical Analysis, by
Whenever you are ready 🤝
Here are 2 ways I can help you:
Are you looking to grow your team? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team. Their product, service, and talent pool is just amazing. Just reply to this email if curious, or learn more here ↗
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And that’s everything for this week’s edition.
As always, thanks so much for reading and being part of this growing community. It means a lot. If you enjoyed today’s post, don’t be shy to hit the heart button or forward this email to a friend.
Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️
Sahil’s article was a great read, thanks! I was not familiar with his content.
I enjoyed the others too :)
Thank you and have a great weekend