Sterling Proffer

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.

For the last decade, it has been hard to imagine a world outside of the cultural production service economy. But we are leaving branded lifestyles behind, and stepping into a new world of belief, faith, and meaning. What types of culture is worth creating? What types of people do we want to become? Whether as founder, stewards, leaders, lurkers,... See more

On TikTok, new songs surge or flop based on how effectively they entice users to perform some slapdash feat: a simple dance, a costume change sourced from the bedroom closet, a cute or cringe confession. With a booming, young user base, TikTok has become a music-promotion ecosystem of extreme importance. That ecosystem thrives on calculated... See more

If you want to earn the sharing behaviors that lead to your work reaching a greater audience than the one you’ve already got, you’ll need a great answer to this question:Who Will Amplify This? And Why?

More hours of work don’t mean an increase in productivity — quite the opposite, actually.

Search engines, social networks, content platforms, publications with influence, word of mouth—none of them work unless people engage and amplify. That “amplification” looks very different from channel to channel, of course. In word of mouth, it’s literally whether someone talks or types about you. With publications, it’s whether their editor(s)... See more