Month: August 2020

Categories
Discovery and Curation Product Management

Understand your search; search to understand

A blogger describes their “best SEO tactic so far”

The single most successful strategy I’ve found for getting search engine traffic for a more niche site has been to pay very close attention when something is difficult to find online. This isn’t very difficult to do, since it’s easy to notice when something is frustrating. The key is to be aware and take notes.

Look at your browser history and write down the exact queries you typed…

… after you’ve learned what you were trying to learn during your frustrating search, create the very thing you were trying to find… Make your own version of the resource you finally found, but fix whatever issue made it difficult to find.

This strategy tends to be stable because it works with the search engine and doesn’t tend to get crushed by updates the way more aggressive techniques do. It leads to creating genuinely helpful resources for people to find online and Google has every incentive to return them in its results.

Content created this way tends to rank well because the entire strategy revolves around escaping competition.

This is less a tactic or a hack than the essence of SEO – literally optimising for what people are searching for. No wonder it is resilient to search algorithm updates – it’s not optimising for the algo. It goes straight to the human.

This made me think of what I learnt at some point when building direct to consumer products. When talking to your customers, pay attention to the terms they use to describe their problem or their current solution.

Often the designer or copywriter will use ‘industry’ terms on the site, in literature or within the product, because those are what the team uses to communicate with each other internally. You’ve probably noticed this yourself as a customer when you’ve called a helpline.

This is why it’s important for you, as a product manager, to handle customer support and have product-market-fit conversations regularly. Understanding words, phrases your customers use helps make your product more relatable, more human and ultimately more attractive in an environment saturated with options and alternatives.

Categories
Uncategorized

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 3

This comment on Hacker News, via Michael Tsai:

It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they’re keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that’s all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.

As we had seen earlier, no part of the Mozilla blog post announcing the layoffs and the new direction actually describes what the focus will be. It’s far too abstract, other than a reference to making more money. The future is no different than the past.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 2

(Part 1)

But it means so much more to be a viable alternative to the internet giants of today, particularly with regard to being a good steward of public information and interpersonal communication.

Imagine a neutral paid subscription service for the following:

  • Contacts, calendar, reminders/todos
  • Documents
  • Notes
  • Photos

Now imagine that neutral service expanding to include

  • A secure email service and client a la Protonmail
  • A private 1:1 and group messaging service a la Telegram
  • A private video-calling service – there is no good privacy oriented provider today. Telegram has claimed it will add video support later in 2020
  • Collaborative documents, such as that available with NextCloud Hub if you self-host

Let’s talk about self-hosting. Mozilla could improve upon the Nextcloud concept to bundle domain, hosting and productivity/communications right out of the box. We saw a few months ago how web hosting companies could be the new internet giants if only they could be more imaginative of their own role in the internet. Mozilla could be that web host.

The arc of awareness is bending inexorably towards a substitute to the centralised web that came to characterise the 2010s.

Tight bundling of PIM, media and messaging on mobile leaves little room for a third party. Microsoft has tried to be it, but has little to offer by way of differentiation. Mozilla on the other hand has a clear positioning – and two decades of delivering on its promises. It doesn’t need to win the majority of phone users today – it can count on a minority that cares growing into a plurality.

(Part 3 – Mozilla seems rather far from that vision today)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 1

Mozilla recently announced that it’d be laying off a quarter of its workforce. This also includes a “new focus on technology” and “a new focus on economics”.

The Verge’s article has the Mozilla Corp CEO say “… Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.”, although I cannot find that in the blog post she authored.

In the original blog post, the CEO stated that Mozilla’s long-term goal was “to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”, which is neither here nor there.

I think Mozilla has a huge opportunity here, but its vision, at least as articulated publicly, is not broad enough.

The opportunity I see is the following: there is a growing section of people who have become aware, through increased press coverage, of the dominance of a few american internet companies and their own dependence on these companies [1]. They aren’t going to be Stallman-like in their use of technology any time soon – the trade off is far too unfavourable – but they are looking for reasonable alternatives and are willing to pay for them. Baker the CEO has said exactly this, that Mozilla plans to “build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech.”

Well to begin with, Mozilla should create a set of paid privacy-oriented products that anyone can setup on their phone to attain a basic level of privacy protection: the Firefox browser (exists), a VPN (available in a small set of countries), an DNS-sinkhole adblocker, a password manager and a second-factor authenticator app. They’ll need great documentation and guides about how to set this up – in this regard the Mozilla community is a great asset.

[1] See the reporter Kashmir Hill’s 2019 attempt to go a month and a half without services from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

(Part 2 – It gets even bigger)

Categories
Uncategorized

Will to power feat. Thiel

Power is sought so it can be wielded. Just as no one builds a multi-billion dollar empire without some sort of savage determination and intense will to power (otherwise they would have stopped at some earlier point, taken their winnings and gone home), no one accumulates power and then declines to use it in the face of existential threats—of which Thiel counted Gawker as one to his business interests. A Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk doesn’t build an empire and allow others to encroach on their borders. And yet, it says something about our reflective, childlike understanding of the minds of these people that we condemn, the Koch Brothers or George Soros for various schemes, without stopping to think about why they are doing these things. It’s not simply to save on their taxes, I’ll tell you that. It’s because they have those same “privileged claims to knowledge” and “strong claims of human agency,” that Peter was talking about.

– Ryan Holiday answering the Quora question “How powerful and resourceful is Peter Thiel?”
Categories
Uncategorized

Measure to improve as a practice

David Cain of the excellent blog Raptitude is tracking his calorific intake for a month because he’s put on a little weight (The Covid Nineteen Pounds) when homebound:

My next official experiment is to track caloric intake for a month. I predict less overall intake, but I’m not setting a target, only tracking. I want to know:

-What I actually consume in a day

-Where the costliest habits are

-What’s worth consuming and what’s not

I’ll report daily intake each day of the whole month, and any weight change that occurs.

The working hypothesis is “What gets measured gets managed” — that simply charting the behavior will shape it in sustainable ways, whereas striving probably won’t.

The important bit is why he’s doing this:

As long as I’m tracking the numbers, however, I can’t escape the awareness that my choice will turn a 2200-calorie day into a 3500-calorie day, and I’ll have to ledger these figures.

Suddenly, no part of me entirely wants this “treat.” I can see the needless cost I’m about to incur, and it no longer feels like something worth rationalizing. The desires themselves have shifted, with no moralizing and little willpower involved

David’s tracking of calories is similar to my tracking of my water intake for the next 250 days, although unlike David I have a consumption goal.

I have always been a measure-to-improve approach especially given that I’ve managed consumer products for most of my career, but lately I have begun applying it daily life.

I’m considering a separate web property to catalogue people using the Internet to dramatically improve their lives, though not limited to fitness. By Internet I mean both software like MyFitnessPal and Strava, to iOS Shortcuts as well as connected consumer hardware like wearables, 3D printers and devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Categories
Personal Finance

“Five Rules to Build a Positive Investing Habit “

This is a draft of a post I wrote for Cube Wealth, where as of this writing I’m the chief operating officer.

We’re not taught personal finance well enough in school. Not even close. That’s why most of us start our adult working lives without a healthy relationship with money – I did too. It’s not even a subject taught at the best business schools in the country. This results, strangely, in highly paid MBAs working in banking and high finance who manage their own finances poorly.

I feel strongly about this, which is why I’ve been at Cube Wealth from Day One of its existence helping people invest well – it goes without saying I’m a customer as well. During this time I’ve been fortunate to spend time with some of the wisest and most successful investment advisors in the country. From what I have learnt from them, I’ve pieced together five exceedingly simple rules to build a low-overhead investing habit that creates wealth for you and your family. Here goes:

1. Start. Today.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now” is a proverb as old as time itself. It is especially true for investing because money compounds: when left untouched growing at a steady rate, your money accumulates faster the longer it stays invested. Look no further than the grandmaster of investing, Buffet. This Morningstar article charted the growth of his wealth over his lifetime:

The kicker is at the end of the article:

Warren Buffet made his first investment at the age of 14. Had he started investing late, say after 5 years, what is the kind of money he would not have made? The answer. The wealth bars missing would be the last five!

2. Pay Your Future Self First 

You’ll always have outgoings during the month: there’ll always be bills, there’ll always be something you’ve been wanting to buy for a while, always something you have to gift. You can budget all you want, but in reality your month’s expenses follow Parkinson’s Law: they expand to fill available space. To make sure you invest regularly, invest a set amount of money the day your salary or income hits your bank account. What’s left is yours to spend. Your future self will thank you.

3. Set Yourself Up for Success 

So now you know that you should invest before you spend your monthly income. But doing that every month gets tiresome very quickly. The well-known financial writer Ramit Sethi describes how he makes it easy for himself: he has one bank account that everything flows into, like an email inbox. From there, he moves money into a separate investment account. I’ve done the same thing: at the beginning of every month, I make one single instant UPI transfer from my salary account into another investment account. Out of sight, out of mind. If you have fewer control issues than I do, you can automate this and simplify your life by setting up a recurring transfer on a particular date of the month. Some banks call this a standing instruction. Make it easy for you to be good.

4. Get a Coach

At this point, you’ve automated the movement of your monthly investment amount into a separate account so you don’t end up spending it. The next most important question you ask yourself is where to invest your money.

The correct answer is Don’t. Don’t decide where to invest your money. Leave that to a professional investment advisor. Not just because they will likely do a much better job at it than you, but because you have a career to pursue, hobbies to explore, places to see, family and friends whose company to enjoy. Unless you find joy in investing – in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading this – spend time picking the right investment advisor, not actually investing.

That is the whole point of Cube: to give people like you and me access to the investment advisors that so far only the rich have had access to, so you can live your life worry-free.

5. Fill it, Shut it, Forget it

Never before or after has a motorcycle ad imparted such wisdom. The idea is simple: don’t touch your long-term investments once you’ve made them, no matter what the markets say or what your immediate financial needs are. In his 1994 shareholders’ letter, Buffet had this to say:

We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union… none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in [Buffet mentor] Ben Graham’s investment principles. Nor did they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices.

Too often I have seen people, including friends and family, treat their investments like a personal expense account. They are profligate when times are good, dipping into it to make gadget, vacation and other purchases, only to then panic when times are bad when markets fall.

That shouldn’t be you. Don’t use your long-term wealth chest for short-term stuff. First get good life and health insurance for yourself and your family. Then set up an emergency fund for 3 to 6 months of your typical monthly expenses. And save systematically for expenses you know are coming up in the next three years. Hand over everything surplus to your advisor.

Look at the five rules again. Start today. Set aside money for investments before you spend. Automate this. Let a professional handle the actual investment. And don’t touch your money as it compounds. None of these is complicated. None of these requires advanced financial know-how.

All it requires is a commitment to build a good habit. 

Good luck.

Categories
Wellness when Always-On

What is the opposite of not sick?

We have talked about burnout before (“Work and Success“, “Burnout as a Workplace Injury“), something I experienced a few years ago, and which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. This article describes the physiological response to the conditions that typically lead to burnout:

.. the body is handling all kinds of stressors through this allostatic process, the sum of which is also called allostatic load. All things going on in your life right now contribute to this load, including the stress from your work, finances, relationships, sickness, working out, and so on. The most important way that your body responds to these stresses is through the so-called HPA axis (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis) which results in the secretion of adrenaline and cortisol, the major stress hormones.

These hormones give an immediate boost to the system, preparing it for (intense) action and fight-flight behavior. In other words, when the HPA-axis kicks in you’re running on survival energy. This is great when you’re in acute danger, like escaping from threat or fighting of attackers. But it is unnecessary during normal daily living. And it can even become damaging when you’re functioning from your survival energy supply 24/7.

The rest of the article describes the progressive effect on the body of continuing to functions through such conditions.

The most important piece I think is at the end. The writer poses a simple question:

I want to also point to the necessity of defining the opposite of burnout. Sadly, in many medical and scientific literature pathology prevails. We know very well what sickness and disease look like, but what about the opposite? What’s it like to not be burning out?

This opens a whole rabbit-hole, but I think it is essential to think about this for oneself. Both our formal education and our societal norms condition us to think in terms of achievements. At no point does is one encouraged to consider what a desired end state looks like.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

The internet’s payments layer

This provocatively titled essay makes an important point about the economics of the online media today and its direct, immediate impact on society:

… the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!

A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access…

On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find. Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun.

– The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

In our series on 21st Century Media, we imagined an operation that was reader-funded: “I am confident that people across income and interest segments will pay for something truly useful”. While 21st Century Media would be paywalled, we also sketched the outline of a micropayments system through which readers would frictionlessly pay for every article they read.

However, when it comes to the issue that this essay writer raises, which is widespread access to truth, the micropayments based system gets in the way – unless it’s widely used. Signing up to the micropayments system cannot be too much friction for the visitor who just wants access to that one article important to them at that moment.

This is a challenge, but also an opportunity – a massive one – to create a frictionless, universal, cheap, privacy-first micropayments system.

It’s tough to check all these off at once:

If it needs to be universal, Apple and Google, who have a browser and mobile OS duopoly, are in the best position to create such a system, and would get the most publishers to sign up. But there’d be serious concerns about privacy, particularly with Google.

A privacy-first browser such as Brave has a better shot at addressing privacy concerns, and has attempted to create one such cryptocurrency-based system built in, but the browser itself simply hasn’t gotten enough traction (and there are concerns about privacy among those that do use it.)

For the system to be cheap, it couldn’t use credit cards on file, which Apple and Google have hundreds of millions of, because the transaction costs are too high. Cryptocurrency-based wallets such as the one Brave implements could work, but adoption is an even bigger problem, although one worth solving.

India’s UPI system is widely used within the country, is natively digital, has near-zero transaction costs, but its use reintroduces privacy as a concern.

It’s a problem in the vein of “fast, good and cheap: pick any two”. But the payoff, a payments layer for the internet, is incomprehensibly large.

Categories
Product Management

Solving vs building

(Also posted on Linkedin)

One thing I have tried to make sure wherever I have run direct to consumer Product is to that the goal of the product + engineering teams is solving business problems, as opposed to knocking items off a roadmap list, however efficiently.

Knocking items off a list is akin to treating the symptoms rather than the underlying problem. Typically, the business owner doesn’t see enough users or enough revenue on their top-level dashboard (the symptom), so they keep suggesting product improvements and enhancements hoping one of them will be a hit with customers.

This is instead of tackling potential underlying problems. Poor free trial conversion rates, poor repeat usage of a particular revenue generating feature, below-par referral rates from existing customers, frequent customer complaints about a common issue – these are what problems sound like.

Marty Kagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group contrasts these well in his influential blog post “Product vs. Feature Teams“:

Specifically, [product teams] are cross-functional (product, design and engineering); they are focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output); and they are empowered to figure out the best way to solve the problems they’ve been asked to solve… [but] much more often than not, the teams are not empowered at all. 

A team that builds line item after line item from sheet after sheet is a team that quickly feels it’s on an endless assembly line – because it is: product writes a specification, design translates it visually, engineering builds it, QA tests it, marketing sells it. Next.

If you had a cross functional team that instead tackled business problems, things’d be very different: 

  • Inherent to the idea of solving a problem is making explicit assumptions, forming hypotheses, building in order to test those hypotheses – otherwise how does one know one is successful? 
  • That leads to learning – what works and what doesn’t – so the next thing the team takes on is more likely to succeed with customers, and so on. That leads to momentum – the holy grail for any product.
  • And finally, teams that are cross-functional learn collectively instead of it residing in an individual, or being lost.

Such teams are rare because of the belief that solid roadmaps are what make management dashboards look good.

There are two important caveats to this:

First: Most DTC products will go though alternating phases of build and optimise. My experience is that companies spend far too long building and too little optimising. You build when you spot – and validate – a new opportunity: expanding into adjacent market or an externality like a welcome change in regulation. You optimise to get this right. Build is when a short list of features is in order. Optimise is when you solve problems.

Second: The problem-centric approach doesn’t apply to the early stages of a new product or a startup, where the point is to create and put out in the world something tangible. But once it begins approaching product-market-fit, leadership needs to make the shift from feature to product teams.