1) The consumer digital marketplace model does not work for sellers. Why? Imagine going to a flea market and EVERY stall is selling green apples. 1500 marketers selling green apples. And imagine you have 5 seconds to distinguish your apples from those around you.
2) The *easiest* way is to lower your price to consumers. Or if you create a brand of Buber Apples, you give a $10 bill with every $5 bag of apples.
3) Consumer digital marketplaces present brutal competition for generic products (flashlights, ear buds, speakers, jock straps, etc.). Prices beat a path to zero profitability while delighting consumers during this path
4) If you have unique products like selling Gone With The Wind and can control who sells, you can make marketplace economics work. see what brands are doing in the next tweet:
5) "According to data from FitForCommerce, retailers are launching their own marketplaces to fill in the gaps in product assortment, reduce the risk and cost of taking on inventory, offload shipping costs, and to strengthen relationships with suppliers." emarketer.com/content/the-ri…
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The most significant successes of my business career were completely outside of the *rules* learned in business school. Also, answers or direction most likely cannot be taught as solutions are invented on the spot. 1/
Flashback to importing masks fr China at the onset of the pandemic. People were going into Chinese factories LITERALLY with suitcases with cash to jump the order priority. We had representatives sleeping in the factories 24/7 to maintain our priority. School didn't teach that. 2/
Masks were being seized both in the US & in China as there was a shortage of masks in medical facilities. The plebs were last in line. So we had stickers put on the boxes at the factory "Not for medical use". This allowed masks to circumvent seizure. School didn't teach that. 3/
1/ I did not know what a bucket shop was until I read last year, "Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator" a really good 1923 book. Here is a link: thriftbooks.com/w/reminiscence…
2/ But here is an overview of what a bucket shop was (is) from Investopedia: "Historically, the term was used to refer to firms that allowed their customers to gamble on stock prices, often using dangerously high levels of leverage."
3/ "More recently, the term is associated with firms that practice bucketing, which involves profiting from a client's trades without their knowledge."
Evidenced based decision making in business: Entrepreneurs act WELL BEFORE there is data or evidence. If you wait for the data, you will more likely be late. But even the notion of evidence is different for entrepreneurs. 1/
In law, there is eyewitness evidence and forensic evidence. Both are used and abused. But in new businesses, "hard" forensic evidence or data takes a back seat to "soft" evidence. 2/
Similarly, regarding UFO evidence, there are thousands of eyewitnesses. People wanting hard, physical evidence largely dismiss the soft evidence. Most of those would not make good entrepreneurs. Debunkers requiring hard data will likely promote some mass psychosis hypothesis. 3/
What are the basics of Exchange Economics? How do they make money? This is a short guide. If you read this thread, you REALLY should consider getting your Bitcoin off exchanges. FYI 99% of other shitcoins will be going to zero on or off exchange, so do whatever you want w/ 'em 1/
A) Exchanges charge a % of the transaction buying or selling.
B) Exchanges trade against clients. You put a buy limit order, they buy & sell to you and make the difference. You put a sell order at X, they make $ the other way
c) Exchanges lend out BTC, charge interest. 2/
They own their own BTC, but like FTX, many of them lend out YOUR BTC. They thus have no cost of goods and as long as there is no bank run, they can satisfy withdrawals...until they can't. 3/
What is a "full reserve exchange"? This is supposed to mean that they hold your assets and do not touch them. In theory, you should never have a problem withdrawing assets from "full reserve exchanges". Just because an exchange SAYS they are a full reserve exchange 1/
(as opposed to a fractional reserve exchange), it does not mean that they are IN FACT holding 1:1 . The tell tale sign of fuckery is DELAYING WITHDRAWALS. This usually precedes HALTING WITHDRAWALS due to not enough cash or BTC (or other crypto) to meet withdrawal demand. 2/
Unless you are trading (buying or selling) take custody of your assets. This is one benefit of digital assets over gold and silver for instance. When you have Bitcoin on your own cold wallet, your risk is losing keys, but there is no counter party risk, meaning nobody can sell 3/
Those longtime readers of my tweets, I have used the refrain, Own Your Own Media. I discovered that few people really understand what media is. So a couple of months ago, reframed the mantra to "Own Your Own Data". Marketers understood this better.1/
On one of our companies' websites, I had the language changed to reflect the reframe. I felt distinctly stupid for not realizing this sooner. I would have iterated much sooner had I been selling, but I moved from selling to educating. 2/
I was always good at sales. Selling was *mother's milk" to me. But trying to teach others through essays & articles never connected because I was more interested in the elegance of the idea rather than really paying attention to how the info was received. 3/