#106 | How can this be better?
To walk in nature is to witness a thousand miracles. — Mary Davis
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
― Mary Oliver
Elon Musk acquired Twitter — did you hear!? He then fired half the team.
While it's tempting to think that this is just a rich kid buying a toy with 450 million monthly users (68% of which are men, interestingly), it's also an opportunity for us to learn how to execute. He's doing a lot of his work in public.
We never have the opportunity to see products and companies built in this way, where a CEO (on the level of Ford & Carnegie) is chatting with users about what Twitter can do better.
A friend recently asked me to give feedback on his new business idea. The idea was for tech that identifies scam phone calls and protects vulnerable people. I had some ideas about whether or not it would work, but these were just ideas, so I told him the idea didn't matter too much.
The idea doesn't matter because it's always wrong at the outset. (And even if it mattered, I would not have known since I didn't consider myself a customer.) Only a customer can give feedback on an idea; the best feedback is buying it. I might merrily layer on my misconceptions, but it wouldn't make the idea any more likely to succeed — I'd just be obscuring the facts with my BS.
Better advice might be to say, "what does your customer think" or "have you watched a user use this feature".
Elon Musk knows this. We have the opportunity to see him in action because, now he's bought Twitter, he's crowd-sourcing ideas and surfacing the best ones (all on Twitter). After all, the users of Twitter know more about what should happen, and if Musk follows the scent they leave, he'll grow a more successful business.
For example, he's aware that 92% of revenue is from ads, creating a perverse algorithmic incentive that draws eyeballs at the expense of content moderation.
To monetise the network differently, he'll need to make it more appealing to be there, which means attracting content creators (from YouTube or elsewhere). But today, there are limits to the length of videos you can upload to Twitter, and creators benefit from no ad revenue. One creator commented:
Musk responded:
He asked users, "How does YouTube monetisation work & what could Twitter do better?" (YouTube gives creators 45% of ad revenue, to which Musk responded, "we can beat that").
For those of us starting something new, asking questions and not presupposing the answer is a shortcut. When I began Otto (my first *unsuccessful* startup), I never spoke to a customer. Had I done so, I'd have either failed much faster or succeeded. Even at Yokeru, despite this learning, we spent too long not talking to our users. Consequently, Mont's taken the drastic step of living in sheltered schemes to understand what users think.
Simply asking, "what do you think" or "how can this be better" makes all the difference.
My week in books
Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams. A wrenching book about a brutal time. The west (USA and Great Britain in particular) owe their immense wealth to the labour of slaves. A quote:
“Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior. “In each case,” writes Bassett, discussing North Carolina, “it was a survival of the fittest."
Live well,
H