sari

@sari

making Sublime — for you and for me.

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Meta and Google are becoming more expensive and less measurable for brands, leading brands to start exploring new customer acquisition channels. Influencer marketing is one option, and the industry has swelled from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $16.4 billion in 2022 (a 46% CAGR). Influencer underpins discovery-driven commerce.

digitalnative.substack.com • CAC: Customer Acquisition Chaos - by Rex Woodbury

In beer mode, you find inspiration. And in coffee mode, you harvest that inspiration. If you only spend time in coffee mode, you’ll shut yourself off to transformative ideas because the fruits of genius are sown with the seeds of beer mode wanderings.

David Perell • Beer Mode and Coffee Mode - David Perell

The average American spent $640 (or $53/month) across all digital subscription services in 2019, according to The New York Times. That’s growing at a 3% CAGR over the last few years. The biggest growth area was streaming TV services, which is growing at 14% CAGR.

Brian X. Chen • How Much Are We Paying for Our Subscription Services? A Lot (Published 2020)

We all reach for tools that save us time. But used incorrectly, AI saves us time at the expense of thoughtfulness. If you had chatGPT write all your emails and a meeting bot write all your notes, you would get your work done faster, but you’d be doing a terrible job.

At Granola, our mission is to build tools that elevate you to do your best work. We... See more

Every - essay bits inspo

I think our competitive aim is always been... This is going to sound like very basic but it’s true. It’s just we do what we say we’re going to do when we say we’re going to do it. We just try to practice extreme reliability. And it’s an accruing advantage because the more people know that you’ll do what you say you’re going to do, you’re going to... See more

Brent Beshore – Building And Growing A Competitive Advantage At Permanent Equity – Ep. 76 - Searchfunder

Good Traits and Competitive Advantage

We talk about moats and competitive advantages the traditional way - IP, brand, distribution. I love the idea of "extreme reliability" as a competitive advantage for people and companies - very few people say what they mean, do what they say, and do so when they said they were going to do it.

A personality sketch of the marginal user

Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering... See more

Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User

what is Social Media doing to us?

perfect portrait of our pathological interolerance of friction

“Of course, “Marl” isn’t always a person. Marl can also be a state of mind. We’ve all been Marl at one time or another - half consciously scrolling in bed, in line at the airport with the announcements blaring, reflexively opening our phones to distract ourselves from a painful memory. We don’t usually think about Marl, or identify with him. But the structure of the digital economy means most of our digital lives are designed to take advantage of this state. A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people, armed with near-unlimited capital and increasingly god-like computers, spend their lives serving Marl.”

Venture capital should come with a warning label. In our experience, VC kills more startups than slow customer adoption, technical debt and co-founder infighting — combined. VC should be a catalyst for growing companies, but, more commonly, it’s a toxic substance that destroys them. VC often compels companies to prematurely scale, which is

Brandon Evans • Being a Startup Founder is a minimum wage job — Here’s the proof

perspectives on funding and venture capital (VC)

The contemporary idea that more is better, that follow counts are a good indicator of popularity, that basing the world almost solely around economies and GDP is reasonable would have appealed to him. He lay the groundwork for them.

thomasjbevan.substack.com • The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace

I still think Every will be significant over time, but our path is going to be a very different one from The Athletic. We are willing to trade speed for freedom. When we raise money again, it’s going to be on the basis of having figured out something explosive. Until then we can be honest with ourselves that A) we’re not there yet, and B) we will... See more