From Growth Hacks Weekly:

Dangle the carrot!

Outcomes > Features

The formula is 🥕 + How = $$$

Customers don’t want to know what you’re selling. They want to know what what you’re selling will do for them.

Add New Jersey to your list of states with privacy laws

The bill covers any company doing business in New Jersey that controls or processes the personal data of at least “100,000 consumers,” or any business that processes the data of at least 25,000 consumers and makes money from it. Like California’s consumer privacy law, a “sale” is defined as “sharing, disclosing, or transferring” data for money or “other valuable consideration,” which could apply to third parties like ad-tech vendors.

If NJ is like CA, sending data to your analytics tool could qualify as “selling.”

Whenever there’s an economic upheaval, there’s two kinds of dancing that emerges: line dancing and slam dancing.

Late 1970s, you had disco and you had punk at the exact same time.

In the early 1990s, you had the emergence of country line dancing and you had grunge.

There’s an idea of freeform negation that happens in things like punk. And there’s things like rigid conformity that happens in at least the white version of disco that took over in the 70s and country line dancing.

-Dr. Ian Brodie

Yes, this is about more than music.

Brands are culture.

Is yours punk or disco?

Manton Reece on Apple’s EU App Store game:

Because of their decades of truly great products, Apple thinks they are more clever than anyone else. Because of their focus on privacy, Apple thinks they are righteous. Because of their financial success, Apple thinks they are more powerful than governments. The DMA will test whether they’re right.

Apple is trading on brand reputation and trust, which is a dangerous game. Once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get back.

I wonder how much of this is driven by needing a revenue engine not tied to user data for AI, since their privacy stance makes it hard.

Netflix Inc. has acquired the exclusive rights to Raw as well as other programming from World Wrestling Entertainment, marking the video service’s first big move into live events.

via Bloomberg

Streaming is about catalog. Live events add a wrinkle to the traditionally bingeable streamer line ups.

Wrestling is likely cheaper than one of the major sports leagues, but has a devoted fan base.

Netflix’s aim now is to add a bunch of different pieces to their catalog to keep the subscription sticky as churn and rebundling accelerates.

A Costco anecdote:

When Amazon was going through a difficult time after the dot com bust, Jim Sinegal and Jeff Bezos met for coffee and Sinegal explained to Bezos that there are two kinds of companies. The first focus on extracting value to[from?] customers and the second focuses on always giving customers value. Costco was firmly the second kind.

Costco inspires a crazy amount of loyalty, largely because of their obsession with the customer.

You might learn something from this post about the warehouse chain.

Everything is customer service.

John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast said on the Nudge podcast that in a post-AI world

Trust, and then verify

becomes

Doubt, and then verify

How does this shift change your messaging?

& an always timely reminder from Ben Evans:

Your MPs’ WhatsApp group can be secure, or it can readable by law enforcement and the Chinese, but you cannot have encryption that can be broken only by our spies and not their spies. Pick one.

Ben Evans on reactions to new rules or regulations but also probably on your customers & target audience:

when people say ‘no’, they might actually mean one of three different things, and it’s important to understand the difference.

First, and this is the default, they’re saying no because they just don’t like it. ‘No’ just means ‘that’s annoying’.

Second, though, [they] might be saying no because this really will have very serious negative consequences that you haven’t understood.

If the second kind of ‘no’ is ‘that’s a really bad idea’, the third kind is ‘we actually can’t do that’.

Third-party cookies have been killed in the name of privacy, but the short-term replacement is the opposite of privacy-aligned: IP addresses

Once cookies fully deprecate, ad-tech systems already using IP addresses will likely target them with greater frequency as they search for signals to meet advertisers’ goals.

But advertisers shouldn’t expect performance at the level of third-party cookies. IP addresses are more likely to be linked to several individuals than a cookie, meaning that they aren’t as precise, and they are also useless if a user is using a virtual private network

Finished reading: Big Boy Leaves Home from Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright 📚

We are underestimating how cheap it’s going to be to copy an existing business in 2024.

You’re no longer measuring in decades when a company will be subject to disruption, I think you’re measuring it in—frankly—months.

If you’re profitable, you have a chance to survive. If you’re unprofitable, you’re going to be under a lot of pressure.

-All-In Podcast

Distinctiveness is the key to brand survival.

When you have a generic content generator, everything looks generic content

generating the content isn’t the expensive part, generating the knowledge is where the cost (and the competitive advantage) lies. AI helps with both, but you need an internal culture that understands the difference.

Techmeme Ride Home with some interesting Apple AI bits:

• has an open source LLM
• working on deals with publishers for training data
• research towards complex AI on device (custom AI-friendly chips already in use)

Apple has the best shot of shifting AI from data centers to the edge, is it beginning?

TikTok usage is starting to slow — is TikTok Shop to blame?

new data indicates that TikTok’s growth has started to slow, begging the question if the app’s move into e-commerce via TikTok Shop is to blame.

The price (for platforms) of enshittification?