sari

New @ScreenshotEssay today: TikTok, Instagram, and the Quadrant of Deep Understanding

In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple.

But every once in a while someone puts themselves out there. Makes the leap. Faces rejection or failure or worse. And comes out the other side. Better. Changed. Bolder.Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything.

And the "who else" can now be isolated. I don't need to live in a city of 8 million people in order to be close to 5,000-50,000 cool/smart/specialized people that are relevant for me and my work. It is now possible for all of us to live in a much smaller town, enjoy each other, and have access to enough big-city-caliber services to be happy and... See more

HOWEVER, if consumers are finding a service useful and it becomes a part of their life, retention rates for the second-year approach 80–90% allowing CSS businesses to build extremely profitable cohorts of users that provide years of cash flow.

All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier. I think there’s an important lesson here: if solving a bunch of well-defined problems did not make our predecessors happier, it probably won’t make us happier, either.

And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.

Google Adwords changed all of that. That, as well as free weblog hosting, fuelled the blogging bubble. You wrote a blog using a weblog system that came with decent SEO baked in (semantic structure and cross-linking, that’s all you needed back then). Most of your traffic came from Google’s search results. All of your revenue came from Google’s... See more