Product priorities, drop-shippers, & ChatGPT
Focusing on what matters and blocking out all the noise...
Happy Monday!! After a sweet escape to Italy and lots of tweaking with App Store Connect, I’m back with some tidbits.
In honor of a recently finished read, here’s a little inspiration:
“Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.“
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
And here are some thoughts:
I found this from Elad’s Blog useful:
The takeaway is that serving a customer need well is often more important (and harder) to think about than defensibility. In many cases defensibility emerges over time - particularly if you build out a proprietary data set or become an ingrained workflow, or create defensibility via sales or other moats.
…and this I found very funny:
There is an odd form of competition-centrism with a subset of early stage founders - where all the founder talks about is their competitors - often in a bitter tone about how X company is getting too much press and is raising money too easily and they do not deserve it - and maybe they too should go and do a giant unneeded funding round. For some reason, most bitter founder companies tend to fail.
Ahahahaa
Max Read talked about drop-shippers’ recently increased exploitation of Twitter’s desperation for ad revenue:
What multi-storefront drop-ship mogul could resist this kind of opportunity? And there, at the nexus of cheap shipping logistics and Elon Musk’s hubris, Narry, Rotu, Himmo, and Tadu are born.
And he talked about fake movie posters being leveraged for attention:
If you’re lucky, sometimes that garbage is entertainingly strange -- there’s 97-minute YouTube video called, simply, We’re the Millers 2, which consists of Ken Burns-style pans over unsettlingly filtered stills from the first film while a voice synthesizer reads, over a piano soundtrack, an extremely poorly written splog article about the hypothetical sequel, first in Russian, and then in English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
For some reason, the last part about the various languages it was read in really got me ahaha
While discussing the technology of ChatGPT, I found this was really funny:
For me, all technology is about humans. If we remember that, we be okay. If we don’t, we end up with the likes of Meta.
Matt Levine cited this about a football team owner, which is really funny:
They… found Snyder was using the team as his "personal piggy bank," including charging the team $4.5 million to put its logo on his private jet, they alleged in the arbitration petition filed with the NFL. …
When Rothman complained that the team's board had not met in years, Snyder responded, "What the f--- do I need a board meeting for?" according to the documents.
And he made this amusing comment:
The thing is that if you are the high-profile owner of a football team then in some sense everything you do really is somehow on behalf of the team: You are the face of the team, your yacht parties are team-related events, your jet has to be in team colors, etc. Your whole lifestyle is bound up with the team. And if the team has some minority investors, well, they’re going to help pay for that lifestyle.
And that’s all for today, have a lovely week!
Angeline