In my experience most of the companies are run by highly creative, idealistic people. Many of them started off with products that were optimized for the needs of the users and community and almost all of them ended up optimized for the needs of the company.
As customer acquisition costs rapidly increase, due to higher CPM rates and lower efficiency, the 2014 strategy of cutting costs by stripping out the middle-man no longer works. To be successful (read profitable), DTC needs to get a few critical things right:
research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning. Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet.
The problem was when you’re in hypergrowth like this, you don’t have time to see what is going to happen to the data in the long term. The churn would catch up with you. People would unsubscribe at higher rates, and then, before you know it, the service has just turned into something — if you look at Groupon now, it’s just this vestige of what it o... See more
An alternative approach to Notion is a knowledge management system that can live across different tools and without active manual curation because it’s based on really powerful search. The folder structure of your Google Drive, for example, doesn’t really matter because looking up documents via search is faster and more convenient. Meta search tool... See more
After the early kinks are worked out, the token launch model will provide a technically feasible way for tech companies (and open source projects in general) to spread the wealth and align their userbase behind their success. This is a better-than-free business model, where users make money for being early adopters. Kik is the first example of this... See more