Rajesh Jain

Thinks 614

Pia Lauritzen: “Asking questions and listening to the questions of others helps leaders make better decisions…Having worked as an advisor to executives for 18 years, I have never come across another theory, method, or tool that in two minutes helps leaders make up their mind about what’s important, take other people’s situations into account, and think of their input in light of their company’s or team’s common goal. So, what is it about asking questions that makes leaders spontaneously do so quickly what no carefully designed manual or process manages to do? Let’s take a look at the ideas that make up the magical question triangle.”

FT on positive feedback: “Feedback is part of our everyday existence. It is widely viewed as crucial to improving our performance at work, in education and the quality of our relationships. Most white-collar professionals partake in some form of annual appraisal, performance development review or 360-degree feedback, in which peers, subordinates and managers submit praise and criticism…It really is possible to get better at giving — and receiving — constructive criticism.”

Matthew Ball on the metaverse: “It is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time, rendered, 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence. It has the technologies, capabilities, and standards to support what is essentially a parallel plane of existence that spans all virtual worlds and the physical world. From a human outcome, it means that an ever-growing share of our time, labor, leisure, wealth, happiness, et cetera, will exist in virtual spaces.” More from Matthew Ball.

MuApp: The Brand-Customer Hotline (Part 4)

Crypto Wallets

Coinbase offers an explainer on crypto wallets:

Crypto wallets keep your private keys – the passwords that give you access to your cryptocurrencies – safe and accessible, allowing you to send and receive cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. They come in many forms, from hardware wallets like Ledger (which looks like a USB stick) to mobile apps like Coinbase Wallet, which makes using crypto as easy as shopping with a credit card online.

Unlike a normal wallet, which can hold actual cash, crypto wallets technically don’t store your crypto. Your holdings live on the blockchain, but can only be accessed using a private key. Your keys prove your ownership of your digital money and allow you to make transactions. If you lose your private keys, you lose access to your money. That’s why it’s important to keep your hardware wallet safe, or use a trusted wallet provider like Coinbase.

Coinbase differentiates between its app and wallet: “The main Coinbase app (or Coinbase.com) allows you to buy and sell crypto or exchange it for fiat currency and transfer it to a bank account. If you just want to invest in Bitcoin or another digital currency it’s all you need. The Coinbase app will securely manage the rights to your private keys. Coinbase Wallet is a separate app that allows you to store your private keys and to send, receive, and spend digital money; browse and use DeFi applications, and more.”

Business Insider has more:

A crypto wallet is a software program or physical device that allows you to store your crypto and allow for the sending and receiving of crypto transactions. A crypto wallet consists of two key pairs: private keys and public keys. A public key is derived from the private key and serves as the address used to send crypto to the wallet.

The important part of a wallet — and the part where new users often find themselves getting into trouble — is the private key. A private key is like the key to a safe deposit box. Anyone who has access to the private key of a wallet can take control of the balance held there.

But unlike a safe deposit box, crypto users who hold their own private keys and make transactions using non-custodial wallets (i.e., a wallet not hosted by an exchange or other third-party) become their own bank.

“It is similar to a bank account but the main difference is it is controlled by a key that only you control. You use this [private] key to initiate transactions, which is called ‘signing,'” says Joel Dietz, founder of Art Wallet and contributing developer to MetaMask.

Blockchain is a public ledger that stores data in what’s known as “blocks.” These are records of all transactions, the balances held at any given address, and who holds the key to those balances. Crypto isn’t stored “in” a wallet, per se. The coins exist on a blockchain and the wallet software allows you to interact with the balances held on that blockchain. The wallet itself stores addresses and allows their owners to move coins elsewhere while also letting others see the balance held at any given address.

Crypto.com adds: “The term ‘wallet’ is actually somewhat of a misnomer as crypto wallets don’t really store cryptocurrency in the same way physical wallets hold cash. Instead, they read the public ledger to show you the balances in your addresses and also hold the private keys that enable you to make transactions … A wallet doesn’t actually hold your coins. Instead, it holds the key to your coins which are actually stored on public blockchain networks. In order to perform various transactions, you’ll need to verify your address via a private key that comes in a set of specific codes.”

Thinks 613

Nathan Baschez: ” Good market analysis is fascinating. It uncovers answers to deep questions, such as: why do some companies in an industry play such an indispensable role that they become huge, profitable, long-lasting businesses? And why do other companies in the same industry end up short-lived, thin-margined, and small? These are mysteries that should be fun to unravel! … The question is, what kinds of strategies generate market power? To answer it, I developed a process that fuses together the ideas of the three most important theorists in business strategy: Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, and Hamilton Helmer.”

Russ Roberts: “Human beings want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. The decisions we make in the face of wild problems don’t just lead to good days and bad days. They define us. They determine who we are, who we might aspire to become, who we might come to be. And this, I think, is the key to how we approach our own wild problems…My advice?…Spend less time trying to figure out the best path to get to where we want to go and spend more time thinking about where we want to go in the first place.”

Donald J. Boudreaux writes on the negative consequences of price floors: “Price floors are less common in reality than are price ceilings, but they do exist. By far, the most commonplace price floor is government-imposed minimum wages. Unsurprisingly, price floors, like price ceilings, have negative effects.”

MuApp: The Brand-Customer Hotline (Part 3)

Building Blocks

There are only two universal digital identities we have: our email address and mobile number. There are inboxes associated with both of them. Our email inbox is linked with a Gmail or Yahoo address. The inbox connected to the mobile number is either the SMS app or increasingly WhatsApp. The open identities are used by our friends, brands and spammers, with the result that we have a huge inflow of messages 24×7. Just navigating through our inboxes to find the useful stuff has become a chore. While Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is trying to address the problem, it also prevents useful information going back to brands. Google and other inbox providers have sophisticated algorithms to filter spam, but can at times impact genuine emails. WhatsApp’s origins in person-to-person communications is now being expanded to include brand communications in its quest for monetization, with the result that some unwanted messages are now coming through. A better, unified inbox is the need of the hour.

The email address remains the best starting point. Sending emails is inexpensive as compared to SMS and WhatsApp messages. There is no intermediary like the telco or WhatsApp determining what message flows are genuine.

This new inbox needs to have built-in interactivity. AMP for Email is a very good step forward. But Apple’s mail client does not support it as yet. In developed countries where iPhones rule the roost, this could mean half the customers will be unable to experience the interactivity. In markets like India where Android and Gmail have a virtual monopoly, that number is under 15%.

Atomic Rewards in the form of micro-incentives for non-monetary transactions can help drive engagement. The gamification that comes in via loyalty points for attention and data can improve engagement rates.

These building blocks thus help give the contours of the new hotline: an app (inbox) which works with existing email addresses and mobile numbers, supports AMP to enable 2-way communication, and offers Mu (tokens) for marketer-determined actions. It works strictly on opt-in, with customers determining which brands have access to their inbox attention. The interface can resemble WhatsApp with brand names replacing those of family and friends.

There are two additional elements that are needed. Mu tokens will need a wallet for storage, and an exchange where they can be traded. As I wrote in “The MuCo Future”:

Think of MuCo as a Mu factory. It takes fiat currency as input and produces Mu. The Mu can then be distributed by the buyers (brands) to their customers – MuCo has no control over that process. MuCo maintains a centralised database which tracks the flow of Mu (from source to destination). End consumers have to come to MuCo to use the Mu – they begin by activating it by identifying themselves (email address, mobile number) to claim the Mu that has been given to them by brands. Thus, brands and consumers have “wallets” and transactions are stored in a database. This is almost identical to how current loyalty programs work.

… Making MuCo as a Web3 entity is important for multiple reasons: governance is not in the control of a single ‘centralised’ entity but is decentralised, which in turn should lead to an increase in trust in Mu; Mu creation is decided by rules and is either capped or the increase is pre-planned, which should then lead to appreciating in the value of Mu over time creating an alternative to simply spending it; and the creation of a Mu Exchange, which allows trading of Mu without a central intermediary determining the price. This is how most cryptocurrencies work. The creation of new Mu can still continue with the proceeds being used for Mu operations. Mu transactions and the ledger can be onchain thus enabling Mu to be traded on other exchanges also.

We thus have the makings of the MuApp: an inbox connected to the two public identities (email address and mobile number), support for AMP and Atomic Rewards (Mu), a wallet to hold Mu tokens, and a link to one or more exchanges for trading. It thus adopts the best ideas from Gmail, WhatsApp and crypto wallet apps like Coinbase and Metamask.

Thinks 612

FT: “A good game needs to have three components: clear rules to follow, the potential for you to get better the more you play it (or at least to enjoy greater rewards) and a sense of achievement. The use of leader boards, badges, points or tangible prizes are all examples of how you might drive this. But the genius of gamification goes well beyond making monotonous tasks fun. It can also change customer and individual behaviour…The genius of a good points-based rewards system, for example, is that a supermarket or an airline is, in practice, encouraging you to stay loyal with your own money.”

Rita McGrath on the marketing and sales funnel: “With the widespread advent of instantly accessible information as the world went digital, both getting information and making comparisons between various offerings became radically faster, easier and cheaper. Buyers were no longer dependent on a seller to move through a funnel. Interactions rather than transactions became the norm, and the relationship didn’t end with a sale. Rather, the relationship between buyers and sellers began to resemble a continuous flow of interactions. In many modern models, the sale isn’t even the end of the process – it’s somewhere in the middle (particularly true with subscription and software-as-a-service models).”

Read: Becoming Trader Joe. (When I go to the US, I buy many cereal packets from Trader Joe’s. My favourite: Vanilla Almond Clusters.)

MuApp: The Brand-Customer Hotline (Part 2)

Problem and Solution

The problem that brands have is that many customers ignore their push messages leading to attention recession and data poverty. This leads to the relationship becoming inactive, which in turn forces brands to spend money on new customer acquisition via the Big Tech platforms. Reacquisition and wrong acquisition results in half of the brand spending being wasted causing a $200 billion hole. [See Martech 2.0 and Web3: Solving Advertising’s 50% Problem.]

The problem that customers have is that they are flooded with brand messages in their inboxes. Emails, SMSes, push notifications and now WhatsApp messages clutter the inbox creating a negative feedback loop: the more the messages from brands, the less the responsiveness of customers, which in turn pushes brands to send more messages. If only customers could signal to the brands what they wanted, they could end up with messages that are relevant, turning a “delete” mindset into “delight.”

The solution lies with adopting new ideas for a better brand-customer relationship. As I wrote in Profit-centric Marketing: Start with Email 2.0 and Loyalty 2.0:

I believe that email can and must become a marketer’s new best friend. Email is not what it once was – 1-way broadcast and semi-spam. Email is now ready in its new avatar: Email 2.0. This email can be interactive, informative, gamified, fun and exciting. It is email like customers and marketers have not seen or imagined. Email 2.0 is a way to convert the delete mindset into delight. It can become a powerful channel for getting customers to volunteer data about themselves. For this, Email 2.0 needs to be combined with Loyalty 2.0. Tokens for attention and data with a new spam-free inbox which delivers surprises and rewards can bring brands and customers closer in a win-win relationship.

With attention and data, marketers can then deliver omnichannel personalisation on their properties and differentiated 360-degree experiences for their Best customers (Martech 2.0) and slash acquisition costs via referrals and targeted new customer acquisition (Adtech 2.0).

This is the new world of marketing, reinvented for a digital world. The basics do not change. Marketing is about bringing customers back for more and ensuring they get their friends. What is different is the ‘how’ to get started – a new-look email format (what I call “microns”) and atomic rewards in the form of tokens for attention and data to nudge behaviour. These are the ideas that hold the key to building the pipe (hotline) with existing customers, and therein lies the secret of profit-centric marketing.

I wrote in Hotline: The Crux of the Brand-Customer Relationship: “Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website. In hindsight, the idea of a hotline seems so obvious and yet it is ignored. Marketers seem to have resigned themselves to 80-90% of their emails and SMSes being ignored, and most of their push notifications being undelivered. This is where the opportunity for smart marketers. The coming downturn and push for self-sustainability and profitability offers an inflection point to change the foundation in the brand-customer relationship.”

Thinks 611

Mike Hearn on Bitcon: “It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.”

The Milk Road on persuading big companies about Web3: “Every company has superfans. The top 1,000 fans. These are people who love you. They will line up outside your door to get your newest drop. I would gift them all NFTs. It’s a status symbol, and a membership card – all in one. Then I’d start giving out perks to those NFT holders. Early access. Behind the scenes. Free merch. That kinda stuff. And the asset is tradeable. If someone wants to show they are a top 1,000 fan, they have to buy the spot off someone else. So your current superfans get paid (and you get a cut of it too).”

FT on why an executive coach is now a must-have for CEOs: “Coaches act as a sounding board and help leaders to prioritise competing demands. A senior director at a footwear distributor, dealing with factory closures in Vietnam and supply chain snarl-ups, says: “If I want to talk about finance I’ll talk to the finance director. If I want to perform at my best, I’ll talk to the coach.””

MuApp: The Brand-Customer Hotline (Part 1)

Micronbox and More

In a previous essay “Building the Hotline Right”, I wrote:

Until now, brands had no easy way to bring interactivity to their push messages. AMP in email changes this. With interactivity can now come incentives for actions that marketers wish to drive. Atomic Rewards via a pan-brand loyalty program focused on the customer’s time (rather than money) is the way forward. The same idea of micro-rewards can be extended to other push channels for an omnichannel hotline. In the future, a WhatsApp-like inbox exclusively for brands (what I have termed as Micronbox) can further improve the hotline experience. Taken together, AMP, Atomic Rewards, Omnichannel and Micronbox thus become the pillars for bridging the chasm and building the hotline.

… The customer endpoint of the hotline is an inbox – the email or SMS clients on the mobile or desktop, or WhatsApp. That’s where the brand messages come. The hotline is about making the messages interactive and incentivised to enable not just content consumption and conversation but commerce … What is needed is a new kind of inbox for hotline-type engagement and interaction between brands and customers. This is the idea I call “Micronbox.” … The Micronbox completes the picture: a hotline is thus a 2-way connection between brands and customers, built using messages with AMP and Atomic Rewards, expanded to supporting omnichannel engagement. The micronbox becomes a repository of all these messages (microns) and conversations – just like WhatsApp today for our 1:1 and small group chats. Together, they can help drive brands to profitability by eliminating the AdWaste and enabling the 4 Rs of retention, repetition, referrals and reactivation.

… If brands can build their hotlines right, especially with their Best customers, they will find that they no longer need to keep spending big bucks on wasteful and cash-guzzling new customer acquisition. That money freed up can power better relationships with existing customers – and help with the bottom line. Profits don’t come from newly acquired customers; they come from existing customers coming back for more and bringing along their friends. In a world where capital is no longer free and investors are demanding clear paths of (growing) profitably, the hotline can become the marketer’s best friend in delivering customer delight – it not only bridges the chasm between acquisition and retention but is also the crux of the profitable growth challenge CEOs and CMOs must solve for.

In “The MuCo Future”, I wrote: “In the new world of two-way engagement where customers are digital and can engage in myriad different ways with the brand, Loyalty 2.0 and MuCo provides for a deeper and better relationship – a true, long-lasting ‘friendship’ that transcends money. Web3 elevates MuCo to beyond the control of a single entity; it makes the community central. Brands (with their marketing managers) and customers can come together to create a better relationship without Big Tech as the intermediary. A trust platform based on Web3 principles and the blockchain can serve as the perfect foundation. Welcome to the Mu-niverse!”

In this series, I will build on the “Micronbox as Hotline” idea. I will explain how the Micronbox needs to become much more than an inbox for brand-customer engagement. It will need to become a Web3 wallet storing Mu (crypto tokens) and XRTs (eXtreme Retention Tokens), and a gateway to the µniverse (Muniverse, with the Mu Marketplace and Exchange). The prize for getting this right is the $200 billion Adwaste which can be split between brands and customers, creating a win-win for both.

Thinks 610

Noah Smith reviews Brad deLong’s forthcoming book (Slouching Toward Utopia): “Why did the world become rich? DeLong argues that only after 1870 did technological progress accelerate to the point where it managed to outstrip human population growth, thus freeing humanity from Malthusian constraints. He attributes this acceleration to three key innovations: the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and steamship-driven globalization. I would have liked a bit more definitive proof that these were the key causal factors, but DeLong’s arguments in favor of them are fairly persuasive. With these pieces in place, DeLong shows that total factor productivity — which he calls the “value of knowledge index” — accelerated dramatically right around the time that these things appeared. That acceleration, according to DeLong, continued up until the mid-2000s; thus, he conceives of 1870-2010 as a “long 20th century” characterized by rapid productivity growth and the social and political upheavals it caused.”

Lenny Rachitsky on how to kickstart and scale a consumer business: “Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea. Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who. Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch. Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale. Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around. Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine.”

Nitin Pai: “I think parliaments do perform an important function: they allocate political power and confer it with legitimacy. Digital democracy will continue to need parliaments to make high-level political choices, allocate public funds and hold the executive accountable. MPs should have the power to depart from public opinion or expert determination. After all, they are not merely agents of their constituents, but consolidators of constituents’ interests with that of the larger collective. However, digital democracy will set baselines. Ultimately, the aim of such a digital upgrade is to assign the right job to the right entity: enable every citizen with an effective voice, aggregate society’s expertise in making laws and leverage the political legitimacy that derives from elections. Think of it as separation of competencies. The executive also needs to be re- imagined for the information age and that is a topic for a future column. But I think an overhaul of the parliamentary structure is overdue, and getting urgent by the day. Political polarization in the US, UK, France and India is perhaps masking an underlying dissatisfaction with the ‘system’ itself, even as China’s authoritarian model advertises its competent superiority. Unless it embraces the open and the digital, democracy itself is in danger.”

Web3 and India: A Wrong Turn (Part 14)

Maria Bustillos:

…The marvels of the internet multiplied, magic that by now seems unremarkable: a map of the world, street by street, in your pocket; instant translations from almost any language; a look-up service for every branch of knowledge; global, near-instantaneous news. Today’s internet is deeply woven into the world’s economies, media, politics, industry and social life, in good ways and bad.

A similar evolution is in the works for crypto. Blockchain, the technology that makes cryptocurrency possible, has the potential to be just as transformative as the internet innovations on which we depend every day, and industries like supply chain management, finance and pharma have already begun to find uses for it.

It’s possible to imagine a future where you might look up the fate of every tax dollar you’ve paid, and government corruption becomes all but impossible; where beautiful and important stories and music, games and art would never disappear from the internet; where, instead of being forced to rely on a big power company, you might buy and sell surplus solar energy from or to your own neighbors, and never face another blackout. Wherever tamper-proof, independent record-keeping is needed, blockchain could keep all the receipts, available and safe, for anyone to see.

Jaspreet Bindra: “While the arc lights focus on Bitcoin and crypto, Blockchain has been at work to solve problems in the less glamorous world of supply chains, financial services, large enterprises and energy. It is being harnessed to untangle complex supply chains by shippers and retailers. Blockchain-based solutions can make remittances less painful and expensive for itinerant workers who must send money home. Blockchain experiments to authenticate educational and other qualifications, making them less cumbersome to store and share, can make education loans more affordable. Blockchain-based energy grids are trying to take cheap energy to underserved areas. Governments are testing the technology for secure identity systems. Tamper and fraud proof transaction records may be enabled. The decentralized nature of blockchains is being harnessed for distributed business models like Helium, ‘a people’s Wi-Fi’ that’s not owned by any telecom firm but collectively shared. Blockchains are striving to reward online art and creativity with NFTs, while powering parallel (if unproven) worlds like the metaverse and laying the base for a ‘creator economy’.”

Marc Andreessen: “I think this is a foundational technology change, a new architecture for building an entirely new generation of computing systems. We have become convinced that Web3/blockchain/crypto is foundational. It’s a big hill. It’s as foundational an architecture shift as the ones from mainframes to PCs, from PCs to web, from web to mobile, or from traditional software to AI. It’s a fundamental shift and building this out is a 25- to 30-year process.”

So, to summarise my key points: By coming down hard on everything crypto, India is making a wrong turn. India needs to let its entrepreneurs free to create tomorrow’s world. Yes, there will be some negatives as they are there with many new innovations. But the good will be far greater. India needs to leapfrog with new technologies to remove friction in people’s lives and create prosperity. Web3 is one of those paths. I hope (but I am not optimistic) that we can learn from our past mistakes and create a policy environment which allows Web3 entrepreneurs to flourish – in India. Because flourish they will.