Growth
There are two ways that users can advocate for your product: One-to-one and one-to-many. Like most of my breakdowns, this is a spectrum, but the dichotomy should be helpful for building a mental framework...
Tech
Sometimes when I'm on the internet, jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink, I try to imagine what's happening from a bird's eye view. I imagine myself as a 2-dimensional point moving from node to node on an infinite graph...
Growth
Once you have your metric locked in as your north star for all things retention, the next step is visualization. This will provide you with the foundational understanding that you'll perform analysis and make decisions...
Reading
Derek Sivers has become one of my favorite thinkers. His writing is concise and just flat-out fun to read — I'm happy to say that his latest book, Your Music and People doesn't lower that bar one bit...
Growth
It's not super controversial that retention is a big deal for startups. What is a little more controversial, or maybe just less well-known, is how to go about improving retention in your product...
Reading
For a long time, I held the firm view that running sucks. Over the past few months, this view has softened considerably. While running still sucks sometimes, I've grown to kind of love it in a way...
Growth
When you think of a startup, you probably imagine a smaller team with some venture funding. In the past, they might have worked out of a loft in San Francisco. Paul Graham has a slightly different definition...
Tech
In my last essay, I spent a little time exploring the AI-focused Replika, a mobile app with the aspiration to be your virtual best friend. In writing that post, I found myself frequently branching off into the adjacent topic of avatars...
Tech
I was on my phone the other day and came across Replika, an app that describes itself as your personal AI friend. Surprisingly, I remembered reading a profile on the origin story of Replika a few years ago...
Tech
As someone who grew up on the internet, I occasionally think back to early memories online. When I fondly look back on these memories, I realize both how much and how little things have changed...
Reading
Lately, I've been doing a little thinking about how products should set pricing for consumers. I didn't really expect it coming in, but pricing strategy is actually pretty interesting...
Newsletters
Around this time last year, I distinctly remember thinking that newsletters were blowing up as a form of content consumption. Since that point, it feels like hype around them has continued to grow exponentially...