Sterling Proffer

As I struggled with these thoughts early on, I wanted to explore what it would mean for brands and subcultures to merge more fully, to offer a much deeper and richer meaning. This set me on a quest to learn about cults. I read about organizations which were abusive and manipulative, but which still managed to create meaningful practices that... See more

You need to force the team to be the adjacent user by experiencing the product in the conditions and settings that the adjacent user is experiencing. This is commonly referred to as dog-fooding. This starts by making sure the team is constantly experiencing new user flows, empty states, and product states that require a certain amount of usage... See more

Great art, even good art, relies on the existence of individuals who are able to devote the lion’s share of their energy to producing it—in other words, professionals.

The first TikTok stars were slow to realize how much negotiating power they actually possessed—they’re just youngsters, after all. So they got dazzled by the promise of a big upfront payment from a label. But in the last few months, many have started to figure out that the so-called ‘advance against future royalties’ is actually just a loan under a... See more

Once you have hypotheses for who is successful and why they are successful, you can hypothesize possible adjacent users segments. This will involve changing one or more of the vectors that you identified.

Solving for your adjacent user is not short term thinking; it is this disciplined sequential execution that will enable your longer-term roadmap and faster growth.

Think about the last thing you made that fell flat. When you created it, did you have a particular person in mind who would especially appreciate and benefit from that work? Or maybe a group of people?