“Positioning” is one of the most important books I’ve read.
“The basic idea is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
E.g. this is how we came up with the term “Custom Indexing”
As we tried to name the category for our Canvas platform (since it was first of its kind), we literally spent a year trying category names until Custom Indexing landed.
Here’s my message to the team back in 2019. Funny that I was wrong and we used “indexing”
One other thought after reviewing my old slack messages this morning: it is very, very fun to create a platform vs an app.
We’ve seen Canvas used for so many creative applications in past year that we could never have imagined or predicted.
36 today...weird age! One of the only ages where you feel simultaneously very old and very young.
I’m insanely fortunate to do what I love with people I admire. Seems a good opportunity to share some things that have helped me along the way...
Early in your career, work on “full stack” projects. A full stack project is one which 1) is your idea 2) is your sole responsibility and 3) requires sales (meaning you have to convince someone of something -internal or external-to complete the project). After, all else pales.
Schedule creative output. Pick some work product that you can do well (piece of content, small software tool, unique zoom meetings, whatever) and force yourself to produce one every [week, month, quarter].
1/ GameStop is one of the most fun businesses to study for both its success and failure.
Relative to other specialty retailers, it dominated up until the financial crisis, but has since done very poorly.
But unlike Tower Records or Blockbuster, it is still in business
2/ Thanks to the tailwind gaming has provided, its revenues have grown long-term but EBITDA and margins have been terrible as the gaming world has digitized over the past 5 years.
3/ As I learned in @joosterizer book One Up, their early physical retail edge rested on counterpositioning: doing things Walmart and others couldn't:
1. Accessibility 2. Deeply trained expert staff 3. Tailored loyalty program 4. Custom inventory management for used game sales
Starting to collect important questions for 2021 and beyond in this thread.
Please send questions you are interested in too!
1. Will demand for compute continue to double every few months? Tons of implications for semiconductor design and manufacture. mule.substack.com/p/gpt-3-and-th…
2. What will be the next major use of mRNA vaccines? What will our new understanding of protein folding lead to?