To stay ahead of your competitors, start building your narrative on day one: from Techcrunch, quoting Peep Laja. “Any startup is competing on innovation or messaging, and, ideally, on both. Usually, you want to start with innovation — do something new or something better. However, competing on features is a transient advantage. Doing what no one else is doing won’t last: Sooner or later, you’ll get copied by big players or other startups, so innovation is not enough. Features are a transient advantage that lasts maybe two years, but rarely more. Meanwhile, having the right narrative and messaging can give you a long-lasting advantage.”
A Refresher Course On Free Trade: by David R. Henderson. “The easiest way to understand comparative advantage and gains from trade is to consider two people deciding which of two goods to produce. John and Jason can both produce wheat and apples. The more of one good that John or Jason produces, the less of the other good he can produce. Let’s say John must give up fewer bushels of apples per bushel of wheat than Jason. That necessarily means that Jason must give up fewer bushels of wheat per bushel of apples than John. The fancy economists’ way of putting it is to say that John has a comparative advantage in producing wheat and Jason has a comparative advantage in producing apples. The less-fancy way of putting it is to say that John is the lower-cost producer of wheat and Jason is the lower-cost producer of apples. If John and Jason didn’t know about each other and, therefore, didn’t trade, each would produce some combination of wheat and apples. But if they find out about each other, they can find a price of wheat in terms of apples that makes them each better off by trading. That allows each to do better by specializing in producing the good for which he is the lower-cost producer and trading that good for the one for which he is the higher-cost producer. The bottom line is that there is more total output if each person specializes in the good for which he is the lower-cost, or in the case of more than two people, the least-cost, producer.” And a follow-up.
Naval Ravikant: “Creativity starts with an empty calendar and ends with a full one.” [via David Perell]
