Luc Cheung

Simplicity is difficult because most of us are overcompensating for uncertainty. Adding something is easy. But removing something is hard, because it requires conviction. It’s easier to hedge against uncertainty, entertain multiple paths, and dilute your focus than to develop a strong opinion about what to exclude.

How to convince people to join your startup

I actually researched and covered this in a previous issue, so go read that post. Here’s the high-level summary of what you need to get right:

1. Captivating vision —Make it easy for candidates to visualize what you are building toward and to feel like their work will be meaningful.


2. A++ early team —The best

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When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping... See more

One of the most difficult things to forecast was our adoption rate. We were a public company, though, and while Jeff would say, publicly, that "in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run, it's a scale," that doesn't provide any air cover for strategic planning. It's your job to know what's going to happen in the future... See more

Finding Your Niche

You want people to eventually be interested in you for you, to “be the niche,” but you’ll need to start with some focused topic to get picked up by the algorithm.

Finding the right niche on TikTok is a combination of:

1. What topic do you have a meaningful competitive information advantage in?


2. What topic are people already following?

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As the amount of content grows, so does the market for credible curators.

A great case study is Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper’sEverything Bundle. In April, they decided to offer a bundled version of their newsletters, expecting a few extra subscribers from the experiment. Instead, they grew together from 600 to 1,000 paying subscribers within the... See more