If we’re lucky, we invent something that’s going to be in high demand. Reservations at a hot restaurant. Limited edition trading cards. Concert tickets…
How to decide who gets them?
One attractive option is “first-come-first-served.” It feels fair, after all. The theory is that people who really want what you have will spend time (waste time) in line to show their commitment. But of course, this is a tax, and an uneven one at that, since some people value their time more than others.
Another is to simply auction off the scarce items. The good news is that the value of the scarce item won’t be squandered on time wasting, but will go to the company. But this might feel unfair, as it rewards people with more assets, as so many things do. On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that people allocate resources differently than we might expect.
The third method, the fairest of all, is to have a lottery. Invite your best customers, or charge a commitment fee, and then randomly allocate the loot. The good news is that you won’t alienate customers who feel as though it’s their fault that they didn’t wait in line long enough, or spend enough.
Each decision has effects. And it’s up to the producer to decide which emotions they want to be responsible for creating.
I started agitating for this in 1997 and wrote about it in 2006. The problem with the magical medium of email is that it’s an open API. Anyone with a computer can plug into it, without anyone’s consent.
This creates an asymmetric attention problem. The selfish, short-term-thinking sender benefits by emailing as many people as possible, and the recipients suffer.
This doesn’t happen with traditional mail, because there’s a cost to sending it.
With GPT arriving, expect that spam is going to increase 100x, and that it will be eerily personalized, invasive and persistent. That it will be really difficult to believe that an email isn’t junk, because there’s going to be so much junk, and it’s going to be harder to filter.
And yet, email is powerful, and convenient and we’ve been using it for our entire careers. Is it doomed?
Some apps are showing up that are trying to create a paywall for email. An unknown sender has to make a donation to charity (the recipient specifies the amount) to reach your inbox. People have tried this off and on for decades, but it’s hard. There are two problems with this being widely adopted.
The first is that it creates an attention obligation on the part of the recipient. It’s socially awkward to sell access to your inbox and then ignore the email.
The second is that there isn’t much of a network effect, and while a few people might adopt it, the problems with email don’t improve unless it’s widespread and persistent.
Here’s an alternative:
A simple plugin for gmail (and then, eventually other providers) that tags the email you send and receive.
Senders who send more than 50 emails a day need to buy “stamps”, perhaps for a penny each. The money goes into escrow.
Recipients can easily mark an email as unwanted. They can also upvote an email, which will send a signal that allows their peers to be sure they don’t ignore what they just got.
If enough people mark your emails as unwanted, you lose your escrow, it goes to a worthy cause. If it’s legit, the escrow remains and you don’t have to buy more stamps.
If a sender doesn’t use the system, they’re not going to be able to reach any of the people who do. So not many people have to be early adopters before it becomes widespread–if you want to reach most people (and you don’t know which people have it and which don’t) you’re going to need to turn on the tagging. It’s a tiny cost to pay for attention in a world where attention is scarce.
Normal people won’t have to pay anything, and email will get better for them as senders and receivers. And businesses that mean well and do well ought to be happy to pay.
If too many senders view the penny stamp as a chance to spam people (and lose the penny) then just increase the cost of the stamp to a nickel, etc. Pretty soon, algorithmic spamming is simply not going to pay off.
Giving anonymous people and organizations the chance to steal your attention all day, at scale, seems like a worse idea every day.
I considered myself someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of a narrow range of mid-1960s TV and certain strains of pop music as well.
I was stunned, then, to hear the song Zilch for the first time recently.
Mr. Dobalina, Mr. Bob Dobalina. It’s unforgettable. And it’s from the Monkees. Go figure.
We’ve long passed the point where anyone can have an encyclopedic knowledge of anything. Even the encyclopedia doesn’t.
The method, then, is simply to expose ourselves to a stream of provocations and interesting problems, and have a hunch on where to look up what we don’t already know.
The traveling circus didn’t have to appeal to everyone. They rode into town with the elephants, the bearded lady and the Tasmanian Devil, and the people who came, came. Once the folks who wanted excitement were exhausted, the circus left.
The problem kicks in when the circus becomes permanent. When the company seeks to scale. When the public markets want the organization to move beyond novelty seekers and reach the masses.
Suddenly, the dancing that used to work is the very thing that is a problem.
Tesla launched the difficult-to-make and controversial Cybertruck years ago. It was a mammoth error for a public company, ceding the most popular segment of the car market to Rivian and Ford in precisely the moment they could have launched a boring, reliable electric truck that would have created significant and permanent market share. And the company’s overhyped FSD feature is now in wide recall, and half the large advertisers on Twitter are now gone. Public companies aren’t supposed to sacrifice mass for the for early adopters. They’re there to grow horizontally.
Dancing for the early adopters is a great strategy, if your scale is right. If you embrace your 1,000 true fans, if you organize and connect and challenge and interest a group of people who can’t wait for the caravan to return, you can build a successful practice.
Bob Dylan famously alienated his top 40 hits fans so he could go back to having his own circus. The Grateful Dead’s touring community was dismayed when they had their one and only hit, bringing a new wave of ticket buyers who weren’t part of the tribe. It takes guts to say, “no thank you” to the masses and to go back to having your circus.
On the other hand, most tech companies and fashion brands lose their mojo and their masses when they try to be the regular kind. They either make the product stale and dumb, or go back to having a circus, but this time filled with compromises.
Many projects are never finished. There are countless broken and not-quite-fixed cars in garages. There are crafts projects, massive redevelopments and everything in between. They sit unfinished because of bad planning, lack of resources, and most of all, a lack of resolve and skill in overcoming challenges that might have been surmountable.
Often, projects get done, but over budget and with missed deadlines. They hit roadblocks (some foreseeable) due to the difficulty of coordination, supply chains and the status quo, and they get done, eventually. This is the roadwork near my house–it’s been two years of construction, and without a doubt they’ll get there, but it’s slow and expensive going. Normal work, normally done, with plenty of delays and a bit of drama.
The sweet spot is a project that is run by someone who has earned the skills to anticipate and deal with all the challenges that come up along the way. This isn’t a project where the deadline was met because of hope or good luck, but because effort and planning were put to good use. We see examples of well-run projects all around us. They show up when they’re supposed to because we organized to make that happen.
The last kind of project is one that broke all the records and happened despite the obstacles. Unfortunately, these red zone projects create a lot of scar tissue and negative side effects. You might be able to do them once or twice, but you can’t rely on them.
A fundamental building block of civilization is the understanding that contracts matter.
Regardless of where someone is on the current political spectrum (from Alinksy to Mises), things can be understood to work better if the boss, the vendor, the client and the freelancer all consistently do what they said they would do. Regardless of who has more power or clout, especially then.
Hustlers and con artists can try to cloud the discussion by bringing in irrelevant and emotional arguments, but we can come back to a simple understanding: If two independent entities, without coercion, agree to legally transfer effort or assets without harming others, that agreement should be honored.
It’s a moral obligation, but it turns out that it’s also the most effective way to have things work in the long haul. Centuries ago (everywhere) and in some places (still), people and organizations with power can simply decide not to honor a contract or agreement.
Stealing time, labor or other irretrievable assets is stealing. And theft isn’t a sustainable way to grow a society.
If you’ve borrowed money or sold shares, you’ll need to build something that’s worth more than your labor. Here are some key pillars where value lives:
Customer traction Permission Distribution The network effect Smallest viable audience
Customer traction is the big one. Every day, are there more people who would miss you if you were gone? More customers who don’t want to switch to save a few dollars? More organizations that are building their future around what you do?
Permission is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to the people who want to get them. It’s not a legal construct, it’s an emotional one. Who wants to hear from you?
Distribution is a practical way to measure brand. How much shelf space do you have? Mental shelf space and physical as well.
The network effect is built into your product or service. Does it work better if I tell my friends and use it with them? Is this actually happening or are you simply hoping for it?
And the smallest viable audience is the building block of all of this. Have you figured out precisely who it’s for? And do they agree?
A startup exists to find and build assets like these.
Particularly when it comes to the future. And perhaps about the past.
More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know. Where we can’t know.
That’s a given.
The open question is how often we claim that stance. If it feels uncomfortable or awkward to acknowledge that we don’t know, we’re pretty certain to lose trust, waste confidence and find ourselves in a jam now and then.
Not knowing is going to happen. Acknowledging it is a sign of confidence and awareness.
Finding leaders who have this skill is worth the effort.
Perhaps you only acknowledge and focus on problems where you know and are comfortable with the appropriate response. Denying the existence of the other ones is easier than dealing with them.
Or it might be that you only choose to see the problems that are actually situations, that can’t be solved, and that amplify our sense of hopelessness.
It could be that you prefer the quick, urgent and easy problems, because solving them is thrilling.
Or it may be the long-term, difficult and distant problems that show up on your radar, because after all, how could you be responsible?
Problems don’t really care whether we acknowledge them or not. They still exist. What matters is how we choose to direct our energy, because our tomorrow is the direct result of the way we spend our resources today.
Pick your problems, pick your future.
March 4, 2023
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