Month: September 2021

Categories
Discovery and Curation

Substack isn’t blogging, but shares one big blind spot with it

Dan Kennedy, a professor who writes often about the business of news and journalism:

Substack isn’t merely similar to blogging. It is blogging, and it’s amazing that so many think that it’s new and different. Like Blogspot, WordPress, Medium (an earlier cautionary tale for journalists) and others, Substack will take its place as just another platform for self-publishing — better than some, but evolutionary, not revolutionary.

– Blogging is dead. Long live blogging, Dec 2020

The big difference between Substack on the one hand and software and blogging services on the other is that a newsletter lands up in your mailbox, like newspapers and magazines of old.

Things would have been different if RSS had taken off, but here we are. Email apps no longer support RSS; browsers don’t detect and highlight RSS feeds on web pages; Google Reader has been dead nearly a decade.

Dan’s core point stands: anyone can publish, but a rare few will reach a subscriber base large enough to support a full time job newsletter writing.

And that is because just like with blogging services before it, Substack too has struggled with discovery of new and interesting writers, as we have discussed on this site last year.

To that end, the Twitter owned newsletter service Revue is better placed for surfacing new, independent writers because people can set up their Revue newsletters show up on their Twitter profile, like so:

Substack has chosen to generate awareness by encouraging writers with a substantial existing following to start a newsletter. It highlights organic breakout successes. But it still doesn’t have anything beyond this, no directory or recommendation engine to bubble up the thousands and thousands of ordinary people who have their own Substack.

Endnote:

As things stand now, there are still too many steps to set this up. Not everyone sees a ’newsletters’ tab in their Twitter app that prompts them to set one up. Then, if you sign up to Revue with your email and a password, you need to link your Twitter account to your Revue one. And everyone needs to dive into settings and set your newsletter show up on your profile.

There’s a lot of room for Twitter to make this a lot simpler.

It could also build Revue into the Twitter app itself: have Twitter threads optionally published as a Revue issue and vice versa. Have Twitter super-followers optionally join the paid version of the writer’s newsletter for an additional fee. And so on.

Categories
Product Management Startups

Why don’t founders value the initial go-to-market?

I was recently asked

I can’t seem to understand why GTM (go-to-market) isn’t something that founders prioritise – is it cognitive friction? Is it a blind spot?

From my experience operating and advising early stage startups, here’s what I think is the answer:

I think it’s that in the early days of any company, in the pre-product-market-fit phase, the product and go-to-market are intimately connected. Unless you have a product with a captive market or captive IP (both rare), you need to develop and market the product in tandem. The marketing (or sales) head and the product head need to collaborate as peers. In fact, as one.

This doesn’t sit well with most founders. They usually have a clear idea of the product they want to bring to market. It’s why they set up the company in the first place. For many, it’s a chip on their shoulder, for instance they are now creating something they were not allowed to in a previous job. Consequently there’s a clear build phase where, as someone said about Steve Jobs, the only market research is looking into the mirror every day.

In turn, this means that by the time the product is ready to be taken to market, the founder is invested not just in the idea, but in its initial manifestation. The person in charge of go to market is given a fait accompli and told to sell it. The founder is confident it’ll sell because in their minds they’ve built the perfect version one.

If the startup is lucky, this approach’ll find traction. Usually, it doesn’t.

Finally, making things worse, because how invested the founder is in the product by now, they expect it to sell, quickly. And so they expect the try-learn-improve iteration phase to be dramatically shorter than it should be. That leads to a phase of short term, tactical fixes that usually doesn’t result in cracking go-to-market channels and positioning – or any learning at all.

Categories
Uncategorized

Systems over goals

The writer James Clear, in an interview with the excellent Morning Brew newsletter :

What is one of your ideas that most resonates with your audience?

There are probably two. The first is the idea of systems over goals, or rather than worrying about the outcome, focusing on the process and building better habits each day. The line that people bring up a lot from the book is, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

The other one that has gone over well is what I call “identity-based habits.” Rather than worrying about the results you want, focus on becoming the type of person who could achieve those results. So instead of worrying about losing 40 pounds, focus on being the kind of person who doesn’t miss workouts. Or rather than worrying about finishing the novel, focus on being the kind of person who writes every day.

I haven’t yet read Clear’s book Atomic Habits, but I found both of these useful ways to frame one’s goals, especially as someone who values systems and sustainability, as we’ve explored several times on this site.

They also potentially nudge you away from unhealthy behaviours: a brute force approach, or self guilt/self recrimination, overcoming both of which has been a long – and ultimately successful – struggle for me.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity

The proposed VPN ban in India is another security vs freedom debate we should but may never have

A few days ago I learnt about a proposed policy in India to ban VPN services altogether from the country. This puts the county in the august company of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey. So far, it’s a recommendation to the government from a parliamentary committee on home affairs. The Home ministry in India is responsible for internal security.

The intent is to deter criminals from communicating privately without interception. But the collateral damage is vast.

One is to businesses: for the most part, companies have been able to recreate the security of an internal network even with people working from home by having them connect via a VPN. The potential danger to this has been widely reported by the Indian press.

But this is also a blow to personal privacy, and of people’s freedom to choose and run the software they want on systems they own. I haven’t seen much coverage of this angle in print and online press – that discussion has happened mostly on Twitter.

I wrote a short Twitter thread about this, which I’m reproducing here:

Citizens use VPNs to protect themselves from

  • ~ profiling by ISPs via logging traffic
  • ~ profiling by sites via trackers
  • ~ attacks on attention & drain on bandwidth with nonstop ads
  • ~ attacks by scammers over open access n/ws

This must be addressed along with anticrime measures.

Taking away tools for self-protection online from ordinary citizens because criminals could use them is like disallowing anyone from carrying pepper spray because robbers could also use them to attack victims. Everyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Laying the onus of cyber security on citizens loses much its meaning when you also take away tools they can use to protect themselves. Take this post from the government’s ‘cyber dost’ twitter handle:

Imagine if the government itself encouraged citizens to protect themselves online through VPNs, Signal, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, tracking- and ad-blockers, educated people about PGP. But around the world they have taken the opposite approach. India is no exception.

These are questions policymakers and citizens going to face over and over again, around the world. The years-in-the-making ban on cryptocurrencies is a similar issue. As is the repeated threats of banning Whatsapp and other end to end encrypted chat services. If security wins over freedom every time, citizens will remain in the pre-internet nineties while most motivated criminals will continue to manage to access all of these.