I’m experimenting with tracking meals in a food diary, which (so far) has reduced my junkfood intake.
The best way to not eat 5 lindor truffles after lunch is to eat 5 lindor truffles after lunch, then write down in a food diary that you ate 5 lindor truffles after lunch, then just shudder.

So now I’m trying to track my media diet; hopefully it’ll make me more cognizant of consuming “media junk food”.

Thinking in Unit Economics

I took Econ 101 freshman year of college, during the height of my weed smoking career. So refreshers like this are always helpful, particularly when I can contextualize it within my current business. Went down a Byrne Hobart rabbit hole this month, as you can see below.

Metrics in the Mildly Viral

Internal Software as a Competitive Advantage

Using and Thinking About Factors

How Duolingo reignited user growth

Since 2015 Down Dog’s marketing has been almost entirely word of mouth. This year, I’ve built several referral systems, with the goal that eventually they can account for 10% of our new signups.

What we’ve built so far:

Affiliate Marketing: Select social media influencers join our payroll, then get a cut of sales from users who they refer to Down Dog
User to User Referrals: Current unsubscribed users can extend their free trial by referring friends (who also get an extended free trial)
Promotional links: Issue special links to organizations where referred users get extended free trials

It’s comforting to know that Duolingo’s User to User referral system post-mortem matches my own diagnosis of our system. I’m still somewhat optimistic about user to user referrals if we give the referring user something too; my best idea right now is entry into a lottery for an expenses paid retreat that we run. I’m optimistic about promo links since we can give them away eagerly to organizations for social good. Affiliates TBD, it really depends on the right partners.

Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams

Irrational Exuberance Ch 1 - 4

Slowly but surely reading this one. There was a surprising fact from chapter 4 that I wanted to write here but I forgot it. Going forward I’ll write notes as I read rather than weekly in lumpy commits.

State of startup compensation, H2 2022

The Streaming Business Model Is Hitting Its Half Life

Meditation app Simple Habit sells to wellness marketplace Ingenio, pivots the company to Sleep Reset

This one is weird to me; it seems reasonable triple down on Sleep (we want to invest more into sleep content & features too), but it also seems annoying to sell only the flagship app, espeically if there’s lots of shared code (IP) running the two products. Would love for somone to school me on acquisitions/spinoffs of small software companies.

Final thoughts

I’ll write more next time

March 2023 Media Diet