The Media is a concentrated market, and this is great for policymakers. If a country did not have any control whatsoever over their media, the modern democratic process would inevitably suffer, as the free flow of information would prevent nations from forming homogeneous opinions. This is a sad, inconvenient, yet very real truth. 

Studying Media control forces us to take a deep look at Propaganda design. Controlling the democratic process is very important for both incumbents and challengers. Donald Trump’s propaganda machine was scientifically ruthless in 2016. The Democrats fought fire with fire and unleashed an equally vitriolic string of attacks that highlighted the paradigm shift: it was now fair game to insult and demonize the opponent to levels never seen before. 

Despite the American people being used to strong rhetoric, Trump’s media team had to learn how to speak more loudly than ever - precisely because the Media battle was uphill, at best.

Most Media groups support the Democratic party. This called for a new strategy that culminated in a baffling, even comic, exchange of unprecedented insults in the history of western democracy. In the end, the need to be heard by swing voters was so strong, neither side could be taken seriously.

But what happens when Free Speech threatens national security at home and abroad?

Elon Musk buys X.com and reinstates Donald Trump on the platform

After the January 6 2021 events, America was shocked to see people storming capitol hill. Trump was impeached for the second time after questioning the election result and failing to curb the escalation.

The world watched with mixed emotions as Americans flirted with the idea of a full blown civil war. The Pax Americana was officially over. 

Regardless of one’s political views, it was an extremely  distressing time for both the American people and its allies. 

But wait - there’s more. Donald Trump was suspended from Twitter two days after the Capitol Hill unrest, here’s a screenshot from Twitter Blog:

This all changed when billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Twitter was, in fact, part of the Democrat’s circle of Media Companies. After all, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have suspended Trump from their platform. 

With Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s founder) out of the picture, Musk transformed Twitter into a “free speech” platform where the common conceptions of “decency” was scrapped in favor of a Tumblresqe approach. X.com is full of degradation, but it does provide users with a place to share their most controversial views without fear of censorship - which is what is needed to contrast the much stronger Democrat circle of friends. And this is why Trump loves X.

We have recently seen how the UK government would crack down on British citizens (at home, and abroad) expressing questionable views on modern society - specifically immigration. Who knows what George Orwell would have said had he been alive today.

We must conclude that the notion of Free Speech has been grossly distorted to favor policymakers - be it Congress, the European Commission, or the good friends of Fleet Street. Free speech is classified as “racist” when it involves Anti-Immigration stances, “Bigoted” when it defies the policymakers’ objectives and “alt-right” when the word “totalitarian” would be the correct adjective.

The Internet has further exacerbated the “Us versus Them” mentality that the democratic process naturally brings about - the Anglo-sphere is trapped in a toxic relationship where both parties don’t even try to talk to each other anymore. It would be even fun to watch if it did not bear such disastrous consequences for the whole world.

But Trump is back on X.com thanks to Elon Musk’s successful Twitter acquisition. And he can go back to sharing his vitriolic attacks on Democrats and the establishment. Hey, at least he has a place to do it now. Not that the Democrats are any better - the game of politics is ruthless and complex. Technology only made it slightly worse. 

Durov’s arrest, France, and Russian operations in Africa

Less than 24 hours ago Pavel Durov was arrested in France - both the French Interior Ministry and police had no comment.

Elon Musk and his supporters have already expressed their support for Free Speech, and thus for Durov. Yet the implications of unmoderated free speech for western policymakers is clear: it is much harder to control the flow of information today and this can cause new problems. At the same time, free speech is the cornerstone of Western society. We have, in fact, cultivated the view that the West was in fact better off than the rest of the world thanks to free speech. Therefore, how can Free Speech, Media Control, and national security coexist?

Enter the equation Foreign Policy and, specifically, French foreign policy in Africa. France has never really left Africa but is also a prominent advocate of Free Speech, especially in the West - where left-wing stances have crippled the ability of domestic news outlets to share right-wing perspectives. 

France is also experiencing a resurgence in nationalism - it is not by chance that the Front Nationale (now known as the Rassemblement National) led by Marine Le Pen is gaining traction in France. Just look at the EU parliament election results:

But France is not happy to see Telegram in Africa. Because it cannot control it. The Russian group Wagner seems to have a firm understanding of how the app works and exploits its encrypted messaging service to propagate information that serves Russian interests in Africa. What happened in Niger in 2023 and 2024 is a clear example of why the French are not happy to see Telegram being used in their areas of influence.

Specifically, Russia allegedly ran anti-French campaigns in Niger through the Wagner group on Telegram channels in 2023.

This is not the first time that Russians express interest in expanding their influence in Africa: the Soviets were particularly interested in the Niger in the 50s but France had been in control of the region since the 1890s. 

The US also has interests in Niger and things have not gone well since the African country opted to side with Russia last year. You can read more in these articles here:

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20240317-niger-revokes-military-cooperation-with-us

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20240412-russian-military-instructors-air-defence-system-arrive-in-niger-amid-deepening-ties

https://www.logically.ai/resources/russia-amplifies-anti-france-narratives-following-coups-in-niger-gabon

Telegram is a platform that favors Free Speech not only in the form of information but also financial services as we can see with their cryptocurrency services. The fact that an app is:

1. Encrypted

2. Not controlled by the West

3. Being used in conflict zones (Ukraine, Niger)

4. Capable of transferring funds privately

comes at odds with Western interests. Not just domestically, but also, and even more prominently, on the international stage.

Robert Kennedy tweeted this today:

Elon Musk went with these two:

We cannot help but wonder what is going to happen once Foreign Policy needs clash with Western values, specifically Freedom of Speech. Are we going to see Freedom of Speech relegated to Western Countries? Is it going to be a right or a privilege?

Is the notion of “Acceptable Free Speech” going to change in the coming months?

While a lot is at stake, I’m afraid that we are incapable of comprehending the vastness of the implications that this Free Speech philosophical war is having not just in the West, but abroad as well. 

Frankly, I was impressed with how many people don’t know how to monetize 100k followers. But then again, 100k followers on Instagram or TikTok, or YouTube (the name for a YouTube follower is subscriber, but we already know this, right?) do not translate directly into a lucrative business. 

To become a profitable content creator, you need to be relentless. First, you need an audience. Then, you need to deliver value to your audience. Then, you need to ask for something in return. It sounds easy, but it takes insane dedication.

Follower Inflation

Over time, a person with 100k followers became easier to find. The “aura” effect changed from “Wow, this person has 100k followers” to “Ah it must be a professional creator”. And this is normal. 

It is now easier to get to 100k followers than ever before and the methods keep revolving around four principles:

1. Consistency

   1. POST EVERYDAY - FIrst 6-24 months of a Content Creator

   2. POST EVERY 2-3 DAYS - Most Content Creators

   3. POST EVERY WEEK OR TWICE A MONTH - Substack writers

   4. POST WHEN YOU CAN - Non-creators

2. Authenticity

   1. Nobody is looking to keep up with the kardashians. You need to be authentic and deliver real content to the table. What’s your area of expertise? 

3. Uniqueness

   1. It’s a competitive world. You need your killer feature for your content to make it out there. What will it be?

4. Community

   1. Focus on building and do not be afraid to ask. Feel free to connect with others. Again, do not be afraid to ask others. Build a community. 

I would also add one extra principle that comes around not as often: Fun. It is important to make content that elicits a fun sentiment in your audience. You want people to have an “internal trigger” that makes them want to consume what you create.

You may buy courses to help you get to a high follower count. You may study your nights off. Trust me, it’s all about what I outlined above. 

How do Content Creators Make Money?

So yeah, there you go. Succesfull creators make money with Brand deals. Companies exist to sell, and if you help them sell, JACKPOT!

Now, how can you extract the maximum value off of your follower base?

YOU NEED A NICHE. 

A niche is how you can monetize your personal brand. With a niche, followers know what you do and why - and they trust you for that (and this is why courses became such a natural type of product for these Creators).

With a niche, a brand belonging to the same niche will waste no time trying to hire you as an ambassador. That’s how you win. You need to gain the trust of your audience, but you need to have a specific area of expertise.

Here are some easy niches:

1. Pets

   1. Just get a dog/cat/bearded dragon and treat it well. It’s very easy to create pet-related content.

2. Career advice

   1. Are you in your 30s/40s and successful? No brainer.

3. Videogame-based comedy

   1. Just play a videogame that you like while you record yourself doing your monologue. you can make 10 clips out of 2 hours of playing

4. Minority Culture experiences and explanations

   1. This is a really good one. Are you Italian? Perhaps Italian-American? Why don’t you tell people about your experience growing up etc.?

Be careful with the niche you pick - you may experience a surge of interest all of a sudden and find yourself stuck in a niche forever. Please plan ahead.

To conclude, Creators make most of their money with Brand Deals and if you want to sell Collaborations as a Creator it is very much easier to do so if you have a niche.

After working at Amazon for around 2 years, I decided it was time to pursue something I had always dreamt of, so I resigned in February 2024. Given the sheer quantity of startup-related articles I had been devouring, I was already expecting it to be hard.

Launching a startup turned out to be at least as hard as I had expected. My reads weren’t lying: it quickly became the greatest challenge of my professional life. 

But this had been accounted for, and I was not surprised. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the first months, I actually thought it was going to be fairly simple. “This is incredible.” - I used to think daily, overstimulated and high on my adrenaline, as I gazed at the product interface we (the team and I) were building. 

Nevertheless, things became harder to manage as the project’s complexity grew. And in order to keep up with the pace, I came up with some rules for keeping productive and creative at the same time. Because when we are down to it, what truly matters in a startup is finding Product-Market-Fit and generating cash flow as fast as possible.

Productivity and creativity are no easy juggle. You may be tempted to support the corporate mantra: “Creative thinking should be used to enhance productivity” … yeah, no. We can do better than that.

You can be creative in addressing your lack of productivity, that’s for sure. But creative thinking and sending 100 emails a day cannot co-exist. Sometimes, productivity needs to be favored, and creativity is best used at a different time. 

Creativity and the Cost of Flexibility

Creative founders see the opportunity and snatch it. This is what makes startups so exciting: startups are small enough to perform high-risk tests that larger companies would never undertake due to something I call “Cost of Flexibility”. 

The Cost of Flexibility (COF) is what kills companies down the road, and is a direct result of the incentive schemes that are used to keep managers from making dangerous, risky bets.

When I was working at Amazon, if I had an idea to propose, I would usually get told that “all you need to do is gather the data, write a whitepaper (it’s called a “doc” at Amazon) and then present it to the right stakeholders (your manager)”.

Given the pressure to hit targets in a less-than-stellar year for my team, I managed to write one (only one in 2 years, Jesus Christ…) short whitepaper about an AI product designed to ease prospecting for new Amazon Sellers (my job revolved around growing the marketplace with fashion products). The product made use of an LLM and a scraper to shorten the time spent on manual prospecting. I called it Bullet Bill.

The paper was well received and I was even sent to the Netherlands in my second-to-last week of work at the company to help build something very similar to Bullet Bill. It was great. I could discuss the project with some of the most talented product architects in the world, but it was a workshop designed to compensate for the infamous Cost of Flexibility that affects all large companies.

Large companies adopt bureaucratic systems because the finance team likes predictability. The chaotic environment that is typical of startups soon leaves in favor of the rigorous rules that managers love. And this is even more pronounced in public companies, because investors demand a solid return on their investment.

Managers love rules because their job mainly consists in not being wrong. If a manager makes a few bad calls, then they are quickly regarded as a liability. This is the Cost of Flexibility: in large companies, people have an incentive to make no risky bets, thus lowering the potential for a reward, sure. But if a corporation is large enough, its sheer size will compensate for this risk-averse attitude. 

Therefore, the Cost of Flexibility is far too high for managers to incur in potential errors. Their careers are at stake, after all. I don’t blame them. I would do the same if I wanted to become a successful manager.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, need to experiment as much as they can in order to find Product Market Fit (PMF) as fast as humanly possible. And they need to do this with limited resources, more often than not. This is where productive creativity comes into play: finding PMF is no easy feat and flexibility is paramount. 

Productivity in chaotic environments

The exact opposite of what just outlined in the paragraph above can be observed in startups. Startups thrive when the chaos that surrounds them becomes the enabling factor to create better solutions, faster. Startups can only become productive by surrendering to the coercive creative process that the market operates. This is the daily reality of working in “Little Tech”, as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

like to call startups.

Long gone are the days of dreading to write a whitepaper to pass up the chain of command, although in hindsight it was not THAT bad after all. Startups are responsible for their own success: they can’t afford the luxury of blaming VCs, the market, or (even worse) users. 

Nevertheless, what I personally love about this new chapter of my professional life is the ability to cut to the chase and build things that matter to customers. This is what we did with Microsh. 

In february, I got started with developing the solution and the first thing we did was contact users when our MVP was ready. 

The MVP was absolute dogshit. I personally hated it. The first 2 months were spent basically showing the product only to those users who exhibited even a remote possibility of becoming a real user down the road. Heck, I even refused to show it to some of my closest (and judgemental) friends. 

And this was good. We used our creativity in a productive manner - which is exactly what larger companies strive to do. 

But this is not enough. A startup needs a clear execution path that can be sustained over time, especially when it comes to generating new business. 

Therefore, the startup mental game is all about giving direction to a company that is looking for a route to follow. It is maintaining a positive attitude in the face of adversity. It is experimenting everyday to seek the most productive manner of doing things. 

In a startup, there is no productivity without creativity.

The 5 Strategies to master the mental game of a Startup

This is a no frills paragraph. If you want to master the mental game of a startup you should:

1. Test your assumptions by speaking to users, customers, and other industry insiders.

2. Always balance your creativity with being productive. You need both. One cannot compensate for the lack of the other.

3. Question the quality of the feedback you receive. Feedback is important but not all feedback is correct.

4. Be bold in your communication. What you tell the market is crucial for receiving the right feedback.

5. Force yourself to spend time alone or with people you do not work with. If you are always working and being productive, you cannot be as creative.

Are you interested in launching a product or a startup? Drop me an email. If there’s anything that I can do to help a fellow founder, I will. I know the feeling!

I can lose myself into the deepest of rabbit holes, it matters little whether it’s the history of Polymerase Chain Reaction or the life of the creator of my favorite animated show; what matters is that I get to decide “where“ to wander with my nightly reads. 

But when I read Medium, for instance, I notice that the hyperlinks have been constructed to increase my time spent inside a very specific, albeit intricate, web of content.

Hold on - I get it. If you want to make a living off of content you need to play the game - there are far too many stimuli out there to compete with, and it is unreasonable to expect quick wins.

However, while personalized feed is what makes it easy to digest so much information, we are losing something - our ability to discover information that is outside of our “comfort zone”: which means that we have folded the purpose of the internet on itself. 

Living in a perpetual echo chamber

The point is that with these algorithms, you spend a considerable amount of time being exposed to:

1. Politics

2. Economics

3. Music

4. Scientific takes

5. Societal issues

6. Global policy

And in the end, you have little control over what information you are effectively receiving. 

You won’t pick up a book in a store, you won’t buy a selection of newspapers, and you most likely won’t ask experts their opinion.

What you do is the farthest thing from information research, in fact. 

The modern “reader” (or rather, content consumer) is always busy, strapped for time, and dependent on consumer technology. It only makes sense that they consume content through their devices. 

Technology and Feed ranking

A book won’t place its best chapters in the beginning, an article won’t give you its juiciest part right from the start, and a film won’t trigger any feelings unless the spectator watches it all. 

The dopamine released at the end of content consumption is not misplaced. Stories do help us as a species because they let us store valuable knowledge in our collective conscience. There is a reason why stories have battle-tested structures. Cognitive narratology is a relatively new branch of literary science, but it is something we are going to see a lot more of in the coming years. This is due to the proliferation of content, which is made possible by GEN AI. More and more people will be consuming content, because personalized content will be easier to create, distribute, and consume. 

When we hear a story that is very “sticky”1, we are captivated by the narration, but it’s not just that. We catch a glimpse of ourselves in the story. We ask ourselves, "What would I do in that particular situation?” - our imagination surfs of the waves blown by the narrative structure. 

But there is no such structure in aggregators. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube Shorts - these are all places that deliver a quick dopamine fix with every piece of content you consume. 

Content Aggregators rank content through algorithmic selection and push creators to:

1. Follow trends

2. Create content that is extremely easy to consume

3. Become obsessed with their contents’ performance, thus reinforcing this loop

As a result, viewers:

1. Spend time consuming content that delivers a quick dopamine fix

2. Get very little value from the content they consume

And this is because:

1. The reward mechanism of narration is hacked to deliver a dopamine fix even in the absence of real, narrative value

If you feel drained after doom scrolling it’s because your reward system was hijacked to favor the consumption of content that delivers little to no value. You effectively got high on fast content. 

I don’t believe in god but…

…Jesus did speak some facts.

Among my favorite quotes of his is: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God,’” Matthew 4:4.

Why did Jesus say this?

Because humans need more than food to survive. They need culture. They need to be continuously reinvigorated in their self identification as a piece of a larger community.

All cultures have rituals and rules - and they all need content to transfer knowledge. Mythological representations of human concepts, intricate cosmologies, legends - these are all useful for creating a sense of identity. 

In the modern era, wars have been used as a powerful source of meaning for defending the concept of sovereign nations, for instance. Think of World War II - at the expense of the defeated and the dead, the West has created a powerful sense of justice centered on democratic values and tolerance. 

And this is why we have all this content about World War II still going around, almost a century later. Not all conflicts receive this degree off attention.

Culture through technology?

The fact that we consume content on new devices shouldn’t be cause for concern.

However, the fact that we consume content through a personalized feed system that influences creators as well as consumers, is a big problem. 

One may argue that free will doesn’t really exist, and therefore you shouldn’t be concerned with this. I refuse to accept this point of view in the most categorical way. 

Technology helps shape cultures in ways that are hard to deny: think of how the car culture of America came to exist. Hint: it was thanks to cars. But what type of culture are we building around the emotional detachment that social media breeds?

We no longer care for stories or interesting things. We have effectively accepted our personalized feeds as our digital pacifiers - it is a new addiction that resembles a codependent relationship a lot more than a substance problem. 

What type of culture are we building in the West? Our ever-increasing confidence that we can shape our own destiny is not matched by real freedom. We are just free to rot away on our couches, chasing a dopamine fix that won’t give us any satisfaction, effectively turning a fun video into a digital cigarette.

The need for propaganda-like content

A french philosopher called Jacques Ellul explains in his book, Propaganda, that:

“[...] propaganda standardizes current ideas, hardens prevailing stereotypes, and furnishes thought patterns in all areas. Thus it codifies social, political, and moral standards." [...]”2

America is blighted by the polarization of opinions and this is due to how social media algorithms are conceived. 

Platforms need to:

1. Maximize content consumption

2. Maximize content output 

And this is because they need to retain users on the screen as much as possible, in order to create more occasions for generating sales (think of TikTok Shop).

Once these algorithms influence the way content is created (and in this analysis we are completely disregarding the role of human censorship) and do so without human intervention, we are effectively putting the algorithms in the driver seat. 

Our culture is, in fact, not a human product anymore, but rather a hybrid of what the algorithms of the major sharing platforms want you to see (AND CREATE!). 

Ellul also states that:

“Propaganda eliminates one of the causes of tension by driving man straight into such a climate of opinion. This greatly simplifies his life and gives him stability, much security, and a certain satis-faction.

At the same time, this crystallization closes his mind to all new ideas. The individual now has a set of prejudices and beliefs, as well as objective justifications. His entire personality now revolves around those elements. Every new idea will therefore be troublesome to his entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire. Propaganda has created in him a system of opinions and tendencies which may not be subjected to criticism. That system leaves no room for ambiguity or mitigation of feelings; the individual has received irrational certainties from propaganda, and precisely because they are irrational, they seem to him part of his personality. He feels personally attacked when these certainties are attacked.”3

This is the problem that America has exported to the rest of the world inside of its technological trojan horse (which we all love, don’t get me wrong -I am effectively typing this on my Mac). Political polarization is nothing new, but its pervasiveness is a byproduct of how technology exposes us to a continuous stream of information that needs to be consumed by people on either side of the political spectrum - there is no in-between.

Therefore, people want to see what already resonates with them or they feel physically attacked, and this makes them feel bad, which is bad for user retention. We cannot survive without this type of content once we have been exposed to it. We would be giving up part of our social identity and, while possible, it is far from being an optimal solution.

Full circle (kinda).

Life discovery can be re-discovered

The thing about technology, modern life, and propagandesque content is that we cannot do much about it. It’s the way the world is today, and, for better or worse, it came to be this way for reasons that are beyond our control. What we can still control is the effect that this new environment has on our psyche and our way of thinking about societal problems. 

When we go to work and detach ourselves to focus more, and perhaps we use social media as a means of escape, at least for a moment, we should remember that nothing is what it seems on the internet. There is a very specific reason for why you are consuming that very piece of information; it could be excellent SEO work, or it’s just your personalized TikTok feed.

But when something makes you angry, or happy, or sad - ask yourself: why is this making me feel like this? How much time am I spending on this app/ What does my feed look like?

When was the last time I picked up a book just because it sounded nice after skimming through a few pages, no reviews involved?

When was the last time you did something because it felt like a good idea, without technological intervention?

When was the last time you entered a restaurant without checking the reviews?

When was the last time you went to see a film without checking the trailer?

You don’t need to live in the past, but sometimes we need to remember how life can be discovered to truly appreciate all the technological comfort we are used to.

The beauty of the unknown is still out there, go chase it!

“What’s “little moons”, sir?”

“Oh it’s this, this…it’s like ice cream, but it’s made of rice, and…”

“ think I got it, is it this one?”

The shopkeeper shows you a picture on his phone’s cracked screen. You nod, happy to see what you were after - at least on the small screen.

A week after, Little Moons are stocked in that very same freezer. You are happy. You take two boxes from the freezer and bring them to the counter.

“Hey, so you are stocking these now?”

“Yeah, I mean, you asked for it so we ordered a small batch and if more people buy it we’ll keep it in stock.”

”Hey sounds great, thank you!”

As you walk back home (we are in London, so yeah, we can actually walk back home) you start thinking about how fast the shop restocked only because of your request.

And this is why you go back to that shop - because they listen.

It’s just an example

It is just an example but the core problem addressed by the shop is the core problem that most startups cannot help but avoid.

Most startups don't want to listen to their customers.

It doesn't matter how many times you are going to repeat “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I know Henry Ford -  everybody knows Henry Ford. 

You know what Ford did? Ford invented a revolutionary method of transportation and made it possible to purchase it on a salary. Of course he was not going to ask his customers what they wanted. They wouldn’t know what a car was.

Fast forward several years and yes - there is a lot of room to create novel products - but there is no room for excitement, because there are new things popping up every other minute.

It’s the economy, stupid

“It’s the economy, stupid” - Bill Clinton rocked this slogan in the 90s. I wasn’t even born but I can imagine the effectiveness of that slogan.

In perfectly competitive economies, firms do not make profits. And this is why perfectly competitive economies only exist in textbooks.

First exist to make profits (Startups exist to create value, but this is a different story) and firms that have a hard time making profits succumb to competition.

Competition erodes profits and creates the conditions for some very interesting things to happen.

1. Competition forces companies to really deliver to the customer. 

2. Competition creates better service quality.

3. Competition fosters efficiency as a means to recover profits lost to competition itself

4. And so much more!

And these are just some of the things that competition does, and I won’t ahem - delve - (I swear I did not use chatGPT to write this) deeper into this matter.

If you think about it, some competition is always good for the economy. Unless we are talking about natural monopolies. Ah, economics! But yes, most of the time, under normal conditions, some competition is a lot better than no competition.

Competition forces small businesses to scrounge for profits because they're up against a never ending line of competitors. Think of small shops in London. There’s so many of them. And you can find pretty much anything there, although they do tend to stock different items depending on the area. If you are charging 6 £ for a Magnum you are not going to attract many customers.

Small shops teach the art of listening

If there is one thing that cannot be ignored is the exceptional listening ability of small shops. They will understand what you want because they want you to come back. 

I was recently working on my first product and I was wondering if I was not being overzealous on the additional features we were implementing. Is it really needed, all this extra effort? 

I think it was - but I’ll write about this some other time.

The problem with building a product is that sometimes the best approach is to invent and test with users. I think this is the best and most effective way of testing ideas. There is no better way, really.

Unfortunately, this requires product people to dream and then see their very dreams getting shattered, which is good, albeit a bit painful.

Sometimes arrogance can drive us to create products that the market does not need. I myself always try to look at the market first. 

Small shops teach you that. When a small shop owner takes the initiative and buys your favorite ice cream brand, well - you know that you gotta buy it. 

Micro-Creators have a harder time earning a living compared to their more famous counterparts. 

But things are changing, nowadays Brand Deals are the largest source of income for Creators, and two things are happening:

1. More companies want to spend their marketing budget on influencers, even the smaller ones.

2. Companies know that, even if a Content Creator is famous, a collaboration may capture traffic coming from irrelevant audiences.

I know this because I used to work at Amazon as a Seller recruiter. I managed accounts for Fashion sellers from all over the world. These people really want to showcase their brand to a peculiar niche, not the highest number of people. 

If you did not think about it, companies out there are desperate to reach their Audience of Interest. 

What is an Audience of Interest for a company?

It is an audience that:

1. Is interested in what the company has to offer

2. Is able to buy what the company has to offer

That’s it. This is what companies are looking for. They want to partner with Creators that can reach their Audience of Interest better than Google Ads.

Selling to your Audience of Interest

Everybody hates being sold something, no matter how useful or valuable that thing might be for them. It’s human nature, we tend to be wary of others. It is not by chance, after all, that countless sales books exist. 

How can I sell something without sounding too salesy and without alienating the interest of my followers?

I have drafted a list of simple rules:

1. Do not promote products or services that are not useful to your audience. 

2. Be direct with your audience and explain why you are promoting these products or services:

   1. “I thank COMPANY X for supporting me in this journey, I highly recommend checking out what they do. It’s an amazing service for people like us.”

   2. “Hey guys, we talk a lot about XYZ here, and company CYU asked me to promote this service , because we are so into XYZ - how cool is that?”

   3. Etc.

3. Become an expert on something very specific. Be the person that people go to for getting information about that specific topic or product. For example, if you are a barber, other barbers or aspiring barbers may want to ask you about the best electric clippers out there.

Keeping the audience happy

As a micro-creator, you need to balance two forces:

1. The need to make your content operation financially viable

2. The need of feeding relevant content to your audience

Striking a balance is not easy because internet users are used to not paying for things, but this is something that you can leverage. 

People love free stuff and if you can provide at least some real value for free, they will be back for more.

It is more important to create valuable content for your audience than to earn an income through it, especially when you are getting started.

If you keep creating valuable content for your niche, and not for “attempting to go viral”, you will eventually unlock your audience’s earning potential.

If you try to “oversell”, this will eventually alienate your audience of interest.

If you try to “go viral” with content that is unrelated to your niche, this will eventually push away your audience of interest.

Brand deals are not fan subscriptions

You need to imagine your TikTok, YT channel, Insta or Substack as a micro-news publication - and you are the Editor in Chief.

You are not just a Content creator or Infuencer, you are the Editor in Chief of a micro-news publication that provides information on a very specific topic in a unique way.

Now, as a micro-news agency, you have quite the cult-like following of a very specific niche - right?

That’s right. 

Now ask yourself the following questions: 

1. What brands need to reach out to my Audience?

2. What are my audience’s favorite products?

3. What brands does my Audience support?

4. What other accounts does my Audience follow?

Your account is as valuable as your audience. 

If your audience is composed of poor Indonesians who are looking for ways to make money online → you can promote simple gigs or coding courses. 

If your audience is composed of wealthy Americans looking for a house in a vibrant Californian sea-side community → you can promote real estate agencies, or realtor profiles.

Your fans are likely not going to subscribe and pay for seeing your content, but they are interested in your niche. Just give them what they want!

The future of online sales

After a decade (and more) of:

1. Affiliate links

2. Online Ads

3. Clickbaity content that only leads to product pages

4. “Free” ebooks that are just a way for the sales team to grab your email and pester you until you wish you had never downloaded that useless ebook

Things are finally changing. The internet is mature enough to welcome micro-creators and help them earn a living. No more working a 9-5 AND a side hustle. 

Just focus on your niche, understand the market, understand your audience, and give your audience what they seek.

Understanding how to deliver real value to your audience is simple, but everyone is still trying to go viral to rack up as many followers as they can. There is no money in short-lived virality. This is why what you write, post and share should be really valuable for your audience.

Anybody can create images with AI, anybody can follow trends, but very few creators really master their niche.

Be that creator.

Even images are being affected by this phenomenon. And Gen AI is only going to make things more complicated. Hey, at least we can still spot an image created with Midjourney.

I was binge-reading some Medium articles late at night and I noticed that I ended up in an interesting rabbit hole. One where the defining undertone was a general aversion to AI, but not ChatGPT…?

Basically there’s a bunch of engineers out there that understand better than the rest of us what is going to happen in a few years, and ChatGPT does not seem to bother them that much.

I agree. A fundamental truth that we do not want to accept is that AI is going to get a lot better, but it’s likely not going to be LLMs that are going to revolutionize the way we design artificial thinking. 

Today, LLMs can helps us:

1. Serve customers better

2. Recognize patterns in long, otherwise-daunting-to-read, texts

3. Improve our code

4. Browse the web more easily

What they cannot do is create interaction that is on par with a human. And this is not a good or a bad thing. It’s just the state of things. 

How we spend our time

The truth is always depressing. We spend most of our time on social media, consuming content and sharing it with our closest friends and acquaintances. 

It is how we spend our nights, early mornings, and every moment in between that makes us bored. 

And while some of us are perfectly fine lurking in these digital spaces, others crave some form of human connection. This is evident. 

Everyday, we spend more than 6 hours in front of our screens (source: the Independent). And for some people (writers like me, for instance) the figure may be even higher. 

Granted, not all screen time is the same. Some of it is mandatory, even. But to check how much time you spend “didgeting” (just made up this new word, it’s a portmanteau of “digital” and “fidgeting”), go check your Screen time on your iPhone. Here’s mine:

Some people asked me how it could be so low. Full disclosure: I also own an iPad!

So we spend a lot of time on our phones, and there’s laptops, TVs, tablets, smart watches. It feels like we are now fully dependent on these technologies to live a modern life.

And this is not related to AI in any way. This happened before the public interest for GEN AI.

So what caused it?

Digital Dopamine

Boredom is the best ally of online Content Creators. It’s very hard to craft content that is capable of stimulating interesting conversations, or content that can make you change perspective on a specific issue. 

On the other hand, it is a whole lot easier to create a video about some sort of “life hack” (I dread that word nowadays, tbh). A”life hack” video will trick your brain into thinking you are actually doing something useful for yourself.

There’s a nice book1 about how to write “riveting novels” that really captured my attention: the author suggests that we are hardwired to listen and learn from stories. This is the problem. Online content creators have hacked storytelling to generate content abominations incapable of transferring any real value to the viewer.

This is changing, fortunately, as more content creators understand that growth at any cost can alienate the interest of their “real” audience. The traffic will come from those that I call “Zombie Scrollers” (hey we all are ZSs at some point of the day) - but Zombies don’t care about that specific content, they seek the digital dopamine fix, not the content. 

The “real audience” for a fishing channel is either composed of:

1. Fishing enthusiasts

2. People that are contemplating becoming a fishing enthusiast

3. Entrepreneurs active in the fishing niche

4. Other Fishing Content Creators

Why am I saying this? Can you not watch a fishing video and enjoy it? 

Yes, yes you can, but you are never really going to subscribe to that channel, let alone buy some of the merchandise or products recommended by the Content Creator. You are effectively Zombie Watching something to kill boredom. And yes, I do this a lot, so I know what I am talking about. 

Creating addictive content is great for keeping Zombie Scrollers in your audience. And this helps Creators, because they are in a state of constant battle with the algorithm to get their content out there. The higher the number of people consuming their content, the better the discoverability.

But this comes at the expense of engagement with the “real” audience. It is impossible to serve both Zombies and real people with the same type of content all the time. 

Real Audiences seek:

1. Content Depth

2. Expertise

3. Out-of-the ordinary takes on specific topics

4. Authenticity

5. Credibility

And this is incompatible with what the Zombies are out for:

1. Short videos

2. Lists (3 ways to blah blah blah etc.)

3. Generic Content 

4. Conspiracy theories

5. Emotional content

6. Celebrity Gossip

7. Daily Mail style news

You cannot serve them both.

Micro-influencers will inherit the internet

One thing I noticed when I was working at Amazon is that online sellers have a terrible time driving traffic to their products. And they spend an awful lot of money on big tech to get their products showcased on big tech’s platforms (which is incredible, they literally create demand for their products and then profit off of advertisers). 

But these platforms would be worth nothing if it weren’t for content creators. All the money that is going to big tech could be spent on people creating informative content on specific niches. We want to watch real people, with real experiences, having real discussions.

Micro-influencers produce that type of content we all crave today (at least wen we are not in Zombie-mode).

If micro-influencers got more brand deals, they wouldn’t feel the pressure to attract Zombies to their channels, and could thus focus on delivering real value to their real audiences. It is hard to make a content creation operation financially viable without compromising quality.

By the way, this is why I left my Amazon job. I moved back to Rome and founded a company in the US. I am building a marketplace for brand deals for micro-influencers because I am tired of seeing the same pattern of behavior across all creators. They start with amazing, incredible content only to succumb to the algorithms’ pressure to keep the zombies happy. 

There seems to be an ever growing supply of content creators, and people are more and more interested in micro-creators because, in the age of AI, coming across human-made, valuable content is becoming impossible.

The future is already here - let’s make it better

We are living in a world where machines are beginning to sound eerily human. Where people are detached from their basic needs thanks to society and technology. Where we live long enough to start asking ourselves very deep questions. 

I recently read that in Victorian England, lower class people (they were in fact, not even called “working class” back then) had a slightly higher life expectancy than a healthy dog. This is still true in some countries, unfortunately. 

We can’t help but accept that society is making us richer, healthier and smarter. This comes at a cost, it is now harder than ever to find a purpose in our lives.

I am convinced that humans see themselves as a reflection of the problems they can solve, be them personal or exogenous problems. Yet it is scarily difficult to find a purpose in a job that forces you to spend 9 hours a day engaging in repetitive tasks. Some people enjoy the feeling of security this provides, but my closest friends share my view, and I think there’s a lot of people out there who cannot find their sense of purpose because the security of a job, of living a normal life, is really hard to pass on. 

But now, the internet and new technologies make it exceptionally easy to share our thoughts and our experiences with the rest of the world. 

Sure, most internet users act like Zombies, not really caring about your content when they scroll through it, but there’s an ever increasing number of people out there that decide to be loyal to micro-creators. They engage with them and they support them - because they realize that these are real people, making an effort to create valuable content. 

And this is also why I don’t write articles with ChatGPT. What good is an article if it’s written by a machine? I believe that humans should come before algorithms and technology. We create algorithms to help us, not the other way around. 

The future of work will be more and more about experiences, content creation, art and creative takes on STEM and hard technologies. In a world where programming becomes easier, more and more people can become a product designer (this does not mean, in any way, that you will learn Kubernetes on the fly). This is the inescapable beauty of AI. AI is being developed to help people, not to make them useless - and this is splendid.

We will change the way we think. We will change the way we dream about work. 

I know we will :) 

The only thing that matters is determination.

Charlie (just made up a name) cycles fast to the office in Hackney, where his employer (a *ahem* SaaS company active in the E-commerce industry called SalesCap) recently set up shop. 

“Hey look who’s there!” 

“Hey Charlie, ready for the Sprint day?”

“Looking good mate - nice shirt!”

After the round of “Hi”s “Hello”s and “Yes, it’s a sprint day today”s Charlie reaches his desk and fires up his laptop. He plugs the headphone jack in the computer and fills half a dozen of Salesforce entries that he “could not get around to the other day because of an important in-person meeting”. It’s 8:13 and his day has already started. 

“Hey, hey, hey - look at our stars!” cheers the Sales Manager as he bombs the team with his energy, “It’s a sprint day everybody! Are you ready to smash your targets?”

Everybody looks excited for the day. Some fake it. Others are new. 

“OK, let’s get started!” and the sprint begins.

Charlie sits at his desk, his eyes glued to the Salesforce dashboard. He goes through his Close Lost list and desperately looks for a quick win to get his name on the leader-board before the others. 

“Hey Charlie, we expect some big numbers from you today mate!” grins the sales manager, as he slaps Charlie’s back and walks off to get his coffee.

“Hey, yeah! I am already eyeing this deal for the day that…” he goes back to his list after noticing Clarke is on his way to the kitchen.

5 minutes later an alert pings on his dashboard, he cannot believe it: it’s an old prospect for whom Charlie had set a reminder months before. “This guy needed SalesCap - he was just busy with something else at the time. I’m gonna straight-up call him now” , he thinks.

The phone rings, Charlie is sweating.

“Hello.”

The toughest corporate job

I’ll tell you how the story ends later. And it will be cool, trust me. It will be an interesting cold call. 

But now, let’s discuss who are the people behind the phone. When do these people call you? What do you think? Do you hate them? Do you feel sorry for them? 

I used to be one of them. In some ways, I still am. It’s a habit that it’s hard to get rid of. 

Cold calling and cold emailing are two skills that, to this day, I couldn't live without. They have opened doors beyond my wildest dreams in such a short time it felt like magic.

One day, I realized that my job consisted in speaking to the CEOs and CFOs of some of the most important European companies, and very few people had the ability to do what I did. 

But the allure of sales is matched by its fast pace, ridiculous expectations and a generally toxic environment. This is not because sales is a bad profession, quite the contrary, in fact. I think it’s the most valuable profession in a company, when the machine works well as a whole.

When times are good, being in sales feels like you are a rock star. You close deals, engage conversations with important people, others may literally look for your guidance just because you are doing well. And when the hard data is on your side, it’s hard to push you around. If you sell, everybody loves you. 

Unfortunately, companies have ever increasing targets AND internal politics. The two rarely come in the way of helping employees, especially salespeople.

Pressure can build up quickly, in sales. A bad month can happen to anyone. Two bad months in a row and you will start to get strange meeting invitations. 

Hey don’t get me wrong. I get it. A salesperson is useful as long as they bring in sales. 

All I’m saying is - have you ever wondered why cold callers sometimes sound robotic?

Cold Calling and Sprints

What is cold calling?

Cold calling is the sales practice of calling phone numbers not contacted before to pitch them a product opportunity.

Sales Gurus will shout at me for saying this. But I am not trying to teach sales here. It’s just a definition. Chill…ok? I get it - cold calling is much more than that. I know…I know…

Anyway, a successful cold call is always cause for celebration. It’s the most direct type of approach that you can have and it’s the one that exposes you to the highest number of assholes.

A sales sprint is a lot of cold calls and cold emails (A cold email is like a cold call but with an email address instead of a phone number) crammed in a single day. 

Sales sprints are incredible events where everybody gets stressed. Sales Managers are desperate to deliver results to their bosses in the form of metrics (pipeline moves, closed wons, new prospects etc.) and salespeople need to go above and beyond to show they are actually making something useful. 

Truth is, in my experience, sales sprints exist because sales is an extremely demanding job. You are squeezed to the bone and pulled left and right to do something that nobody, in their sound mind, would do for free. So it’s best to cram the efforts in one day every week to make sure nobody is slacking away.

During sales sprints, managers check how many calls/emails you make/send or how many prospects you take forward towards a Closed Won (oh btw, sales is a lot like a cult. We have our own Newspeak. A successful sale is called a “Closed Won”, a non-sale is called a “Close Lost”) - this is usually reported on a public leader-board to *sighs* foster internal competition.

A simple framework for managers 

Sales, as we have discussed, is a tough profession. The expectations are high and the job is generally very demanding. The customers come first and the sales manager is a close second. 

But there are ways to make your sales team happy. A happy salesperson comes to work relaxed, they always manage their pipeline in advance and do not rush to meet their quota (more Newspeak, how exciting!).

Salespeople can be happy, if you let them. How do we achieve happiness for our team then?

1. Make calls with them. Get down in the trenches. Show your team you can work their job (or at least, that you are not afraid of trying). Managers that pull Salesforce reports and crack the whip are going to be hated by their team regardless of the team’s performance.

2. Objectives come first, but you can only reach them if your team respects you and works with you. If you get frustrated at them, they will fear you. But they won’t respect you. A sales team is not a Program Management team. You need to be understanding without being too “friendly”. A friendly sales manager can make an employee feel “betrayed” when the times get tough and a change of attitude is needed.

3. Cultivate the image of an “enabler” rather than a “dictator”. At the end of the day, you want your team to succeed. It is your responsibility to make sure they are able to do so. 

4. Give your team time and space to “let off some steam”. They absorb all the negativity of your customers and it is not an easy position to be in. If your team always feels they need to be ready for an audit of their pipeline, they will find ingenious ways to fake work. And this will create another problem for you.

5. Do not directly pass your stress to the team. Buck passing is only going to grow resentment towards you - this will eventually come in the way of reaching objectives. 

6. Foster competition among team members but don’t make it “toxic”. Some level of competition can increase performance but a “free-for-all” environment will exert the opposite effect. 

7. Do not shame team members in front of the rest of the team. You may think this will foster competition, but in truth, it will likely cause trust issues in your persona. Other Team members may start to think “Will it happen to me if I miss my quota?”. This is absolutely a no-go. If you need to fire somebody, just do it. Be professional.

8. Do not rush to make changes to the compensation plan. Sales is the toughest job in an organization. It attracts people primarily because of its earning potential. Changing the comp plan will push A-players away.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

“Drinking the Kool-aid” is an expression that comes from an event that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. 900 people drank a poisoned Flavor-Aid concoction and died as a result. 

They did so willingly, because the People Temple’s cult had ensnared their minds so effectively they couldn’t help but believe the BS they had been fed.

Working in sales closely resembles being in a cult. 

It’s a rewarding job that is capable of teaching incredible skills. But I have noticed some harrowing patterns that seem to affect most sales orgs:

1. The job comes first, the customer comes first, the employee is always expendable. And this is never seen as a bad thing.

2. From the beginning, the organization will attempt to make its mission your constant focus. 

3. Unique terminology is applied to describe standardized functions (a customer becomes a “partner”, a sales manager is “a leader” etc. etc.) - this is Newspeak. Be very wary of Newspeak at work. A word of advice for managers: try to be “real”. Newspeak can backfire when people experience “sales fatigue”. Salespeople are not stupid.

4. There is a general tendency to classify other colleagues as “non-salespeople”.

5. Delusions of grandeur become a coping mechanism for addressing tough times that do not fit the narrative the salesperson builds for themselves. As the mental game of sales wears you down, you try to find clever ways of justifying why things are not going the right way. Failure to do so will  result in a state of depression and lack of motivation. This is typical cult-like behavior, where followers gave up their sense of purpose in favor of the organization's. 

So yeah. I think that good sales managers keep it real and tell their employees that sales is a job, not their ticket to heaven (Thank you S.R.! You were a really good manager!). Always look up your next sales manager before taking on a job and try to get an interview with them.

Charlie’s Cold Call

“Hey David, can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can, who is this?”

“Hello, this is Charlie, remember me? We had a brief exchange a few months ago!”

“Oh yeah I remember you. You’re that bloke that moved to London! How’s the job?”

“Ah! It’s good. Sales is tough, but you come from this environment so you get me.”

“Ahaha, yea I sure do. It’s tough. I guess you are calling me to sell me that product.”

“Hey David, no use lying here. We have a sprint day today and I need to make a sale. I remembered you were interested in the solution. So I called you. But if it’s not the right time, tell me and we’ll talk again next year.”

“Charlie, actually this is a pretty good time. I still have the trial account credentials. Let me log in for a sec…”

“Sure!”

Seconds feel like an eternity for Charlie, as the prospect is re-exploring the platform he feels like his stomach could explode at any time. 

“Look Charlie, I really like your product.”

“OK, here comes the catch…”

‘But…yeah, yeah. Sorry but it’s too expensive. 300 £ a month is something I do not want to spend on this.”

“Hmmm, OK. But is the price the only problem here? It’s a sales tool so it could fetch you more earnings as you use it.”

“That is true, but still 300£ just feels too high for me at the moment.”

“Ok, hold on, are you telling me that if I dropped the price significantly you would buy it?”

“If you drop the price and payments are made monthly, yes.”

“David, give me one second, I think I can make this happen for you.”

‘Sure.”

Charlie runs to the kitchen to find Clarke chatting to a bunch of eggheads from engineering.

“Hey Clarke!”

“Hey look at our star! How’s it going?”

“Look I have a prospect that’s ready to pay but the price is too high for the Standard Package.”

“Can you steer him to the Lite Package?”

“I don’t think so, he is ready to buy, we just need to drop the price a little.”

“OK, but then he needs to pay for the full year.’

“He said he is not available for paying the year in full - this is why he is asking for a price drop.

“So he wants to keep the monthly payments and a price drop?”

“Yes, but this guy can be helpful to us. He could make a video for the product and perhaps even an interview that we could use as a testimonial.”

‘OK, OK - ask him to commit to making the video and I will give you a special one-time code.”

Charlie runs back to his desk.

“David, I need to ask you something. We can drop the price. We can even keep the monthly payment plan. But could you help us get known by participating in one of our videos?”

“I can, sure, if the product works well and I am satisfied I can do that for you.”

Charlie gives a thumbs up from the other side of the room to Clarke, who sends him the code right away.

“OK here’s the code.”

“Ah nice, it is now 150 £ a month. Much better. Let’s do this.”

Charlie is ecstatic. The sale was reached. The day is saved. He could go and grab some real breakfast now.

“Hey wait a minute. It says I need to pay the year in full.”

“What? Wait a second.”

Charlie rushes to Clarke’s desk.

“Clarke the prospect was ready but the platform is forcing a full year payment.”

“Oh really? Hold on, let me call finance, go back to your desk and I’ll be there in a sec.”

‘OK, thank you Clarke.”

Charlie walks back to his desk and apologizes to David. He starts to talk about how these things never happen and that there must have been a mistake because the code provided is something they do not just grant any customer.

“Hay Charlie” shouts Clarke, from his desk.

“Yes? Can we proceed?”

Clarke nods.

“OK David, let’s try again.”

“Ah, perfect! Now it’s asking for a monthly payment. Great stuff. I am buying it”

Charlie is happy. His manager is happy and the customer seems satisfied. He looks at the leader-board. He’s already there. It’s 9:05 AM and he’s already there. Time to celebrate. Charlie hits a Pret’s downstairs and grabs a bacon roll. On his way up, people are cheering loudly. As he enters the room, he notices something. He is now 4th on the leader-board. 

It’s 9:15 - another 3 sales were made. 

Charlie walks back to his desk and starts the search again.

The beauty of sales

Sales is the corporate job that most closely resembles being an entrepreneur. It is not for the faint of heart. It attracts a lot (an awful lot) of toxic people and it can be detrimental to one’s health (been there, trust me).

Nevertheless, if you don’t “drink the Kool-Aid”,  it is the profession that will teach you the most about how to run an organization, meet deadlines, talk to stakeholders of all types and much more. 

Because sales is where the value created by a company gets transferred to the customer, and no company can exist without generating sales. Some companies require salespeople, some don’t.

What is certain is that if you work in sales, you will eventually understand the customer, and this is the most prized capability that you can learn in this thrilling position. 

And please, please, please. Do not treat salespeople that sound like robots as if they were not humans. They are human beings and they are having a bad day. The fact that they want to sell you something is only due to their job. Sales is a real job. It is tough, and it can be very rewarding. 

My advice is to have at least one professional experience as a salesperson. Worst case scenario, you’ll become a lot more polite when you receive a cold call (speaking from experience here) 😀.

Happy Wednesday!

Because we are not used to paying attention to anything anymore, online writers came up with the clickbaity formulas we all know:

1. Here’s X things to do if you are looking to Y

2. X strategies to make sure you do not X

3. X products you didn't know existed

4. X strategies to completely change your life

5. Dating X people in under Y days - my story

And the list goes on and on and on. I call these “cigarette articles”, because you read them, get a short-lived dopamine hit, but you are never really satisfied.

This is the problem with content today. It’s a lot like cigarettes. You know it’s bad for you, but you do it anyway.

How many times a day do you find yourself reading utter bullshit? Or worse, watching TikToks (or Reels, or YT shorts) and then showing a really funny one to your friends?

Yeah far too many. I began dreading the sight of a friend approaching me with their phone cracking the usual “Hey you gotta see this”. And then it's something that will make me laugh, sure, but I won't even remember it the day after. This content clutter is making it impossible to focus, and this is why I don’t watch Reels anymore. 

Frankly, when I was a kid, I thought that having a portable TV would be fantastic. Now, I hate portable TVs, because TV is not what TV used to be anymore.

I feel surrounded by an ADHD-affected crowd that is incapable of appreciating anything longer than 30 seconds. Drunk on short, dopey content whose only purpose is to make you waste your time. 

It used to be Facebook posts, then Instagram pictures, then Stories, then TikToks and Reels. Now, it’s everything. 

What is incredible is that people don’t even seem interested in creating valuable content. The gamification of the interface of TikTok, Insta, etc. pushes people to create crap. Crap is what keeps users glued to the screens, so why bother creating valuable content?

And then we train AI models on this very content. What the hell. This is a recipe for disaster. this is why we are now drowning in bad content.

Even Text-based content is becoming terribly dull

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we should be reading scientific articles or investigative reports all the time. 

But for God’s sake - thes 10 point, 3 point or 5 point lists are becoming the norm. All I see on the internet is bullet points and lists. It’s as if McKinsey interns were writing all of the stuff we see on the internet.

I even see articles about writing articles that claim the following: “People like structure, and if you want to reach the maximum number of people and have them read your article, you should use this structure blah blah blah.”

Breaking news: most people don’t read. They don’t like to read, and they are not interested in reading at all. And that's fine. That's normal human behavior. I love reading, and I know I am not the norm.

But I guarantee that if a person needs to know something, you do not need to use clickbaity structures or downright dumb content. You just need good SEO for your articles. Actually, the crazier the content, the narrower your  niche, the stronger following you will attract. Let me explain why.

The artist’s curve

You know how artists say the craziest things at the beginning of their careers? Especially rappers. Think of Eminem.

2000: 

They said I can't rap about bein' broke no more

They ain't say I can't rap about coke no more (Ahh)

Slut, you think I won't choke no whore

'Til the vocal cords won't work in her throat no more? (Ahh)

Yeah, pretty crazy - even for before the woke era. Now let’s take a look at one of his most recent hits.

2010: 

I'll do whatever it takes

When I'm with you, I get the shakes

My body aches when I ain't with you, I have zero strength

There's no limit on how far I would go, no boundaries, no lengths

Why do we say that until we get that person that we think's gonna be that one?

And then once we get 'em, it's never the same

Yeah that’s right. It’s changed hasn’t it? This happens to all artists. All of them. It’s the artist’s curve.

Artists follow a pretty standard curve. So do companies - but we’ll talk about this in another article or I will never get to the point.

Here’s a pretty accurate representation of the artist’s curve:

This usually happens to artists that are not a product of the “industry” (i.e. this graph does not apply to Justin Bieber).

I think that there is a positive, linear relationship between the amount of “crazy” things said and fame. Eminem said some pretty provocative things at the beginning of his career and this certainly helped him become well-known in an otherwise very competitive world.

This also applies to online content. In the beginning, you can attract a pretty narrow audience that is very loyal to your content just by posting things that people are not willing to post for fear of retribution/disapproval. Eventually though, as your name becomes more well-known out there, you will cease to be as provocative. Because you don’t need to. 

Is it natural? Is it artificial? Is it just a pre-designed winning strategy?

Hey, maybe all three. But what matters for this analysis is the following: text-based content is dull nowadays. And it’s hard to find good articles that are actually entertaining to read.

So if you’re a writer, please - do not fall into the trap of using structures all the time. They suck. You know it, I know it, the readers you want to reach know it. At least not in the beginning.

Standard structures do work for established authors

Thanks a lot, Sherlock. Once you are famous you can write about whatever you want and people will flock to read your stuff. 

Think of Sigmund Freud. He showed up to a lecture high on cocaine, blathered about things he did not know and then privately praised the drug for helping him talk nonsense for half an hour. If you know German, you can read the excerpt below. If not, you can trust me because I read the translation on Twitter.

But this guy was Sigmund Freud, not your average coke-head. He could command a level of credibility in the field of psychoanalysis that is unmatched to this very day. 

Starting small means bringing a lot of content to the table. And this is where AI becomes an obstacle to brand success, especially for startups. 

AI is not bold enough

If you ask ChatGPT to craft a captivating article, it will likely be as captivating as filing your tax return (for the kids reading this, it ain’t fun). 

This is not an engineering problem only. Remember the curve? I hope you do. If you don’t remember the curve, google “Alzheimer’s” - your Google links will likely be purple.

OpenAI is now a global company and, for better or worse, subject to international scrutiny. There is no room for public experiments anymore. There is very little margin for error. In simple words, the fun is over. And so is fun ChatGPT - say welcome to boring, compliant, as-fun-as-an-accountant-can-be, ChatGPT. 

These AIs cannot write compelling pieces or explanations, but they are great for customer service operations or other standardized tasks.

I invite you to ask chatGPT to write a nice article and then read it without any modifications. It will not be very interesting. I know this because I tried (hey, I’m a lazy person just like you).

Because companies are strapped for cash and people are generally a lazy bunch, I am seeing more and more botched articles being posted (as well as images, don’t get me started on midjourney images. They suck. We all know they are AI generated, and they suck.).

RAG will not save you from bad content

RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. Because I hate complex explanations, I will tell you what it is.

RAG is when you give a Large Language Model (Like GPT-4 , the model that powers chatGPT nowadays) special access to a database where specific information is stored.

LLMs are probabilistic models pre-trained on internet content (thence, its low creative quality).

What do I mean by “probabilistic”? LLMs are probabilistic because they use “embeddings”. Embeddings are words converted to a numerical value stored in a vector database.

What the fu&^ does it mean?

It means that I translate a word in a machine language made of numbers. Numbers can be ordered, so I can put them in a special place. In this special place, words like Dog and Dog-food are very close, numerically speaking, because they have a related meaning. 

So, models find the word with the highest probability of being the next one in a phrase and put them together. This is why LLMs are probabilistic models. 

Now go and teach a probabilistic model about humor, or sadness, or why on a rainy day, seeing somebody falling in a puddle and not getting hurt can stir up a good laugh. Yeah you can’t teach that to a model, even if you increase temperature.

Temperature is how you define the level of randomness in the text generated by the model. You can adjust temperature and the answer will be “wilder” - but not necessarily funnier, or better. 

RAG can help us give specialized knowledge to an LLM. Check out this chatbot that I had built to explain how to sell on Amazon: Thufir (I called it Thufir because a human computer in Dune is called Thufir).

Chatbots are perfect cases for RAG applications. As a user, I am not looking for creativity there, just answers to my questions. 

Don’t use RAG for creating nice articles! Use it for documentation, customer service or other functional applications. Creativity is still human. Not for long maybe. But it still is 🙂

Online Content and AI

It is inevitable: we will see more and more AI generated content. I guess that it is just a matter of time before we become proficient at spotting it. After all, online ads were at first very crude and stupid but as we grew bored with them marketers came up with new formulas and better ads. 

So it’s just a game of cat and mouse. AIs will get better at generating online content, and it will be perfectly tailored to the masses. We will get better at spotting such content. It ill go on for some time until things really change. 

Happy Monday!

“So, did you get it?”

“Yeah, yeah. I think I did.”

But, in fact, the customer did not get it. Rarely he happened to be so confused after such a thorough explanation, his thoughts being: “what am I supposed to do now? Ask him to re-explain everything he just said? He clearly made an effort there. Maybe it’s just me...”.

Does this situation look familiar to you? If it does, you are in good company. Communicating ideas is complicated enough, communicating ideas that persuade somebody to give you their hard-earned money is even more complex, and for a good reason.

There are countless books, and papers, and research docs, and blogs, and Youtube videos on how to convince people. Some of the most iconic books out there keep selling on the false pretense that “anybody can convince people to do something”. 

You may have heard of the classics:

1. How to win friends and influence people

2. Influence 

3. The Challenger Sale

…and many others. 

I spent the better part of my university years reading all that crap. It’s damn interesting and it can be applied to several, unrelated aspects of one’s life.

But when it comes to business, less is more. So let’s focus on that.

How to explain your product/service to your customers - Strategy 1

Let’s imagine the following scenario: You are an American tourist in Europe. You are visiting Lyon, a fantastic city in the south of France. After a few days spent experimenting with traditional french food (which you love), the cravings for a big, fat, and juicy hamburger are so strong they can’t be ignored.

But wait a minute, you are in France, and you get 2 weeks of paid vacation every year (the European mind cannot comprehend this) so you say to yourself “Hey you know what, I really wanna know what a ‘real’, french burger tastes like. I’m not hitting a McDonald’s - let’s try a local burger spot.”

Everybody is looking for something “familiar”, even when we put ourselves in an unfamiliar situation for leisure (e.g. traveling to France), even when we are looking for something new.

We know that humans are risk-averse when it comes to losses, and this applies to every purchase we make. When we spend our money, we want to make sure it is actually worth spending. Sure, we can be more or less relaxed with our purchases, depending on the situation (you are more likely to splurge when on vacation, or when you are having a very good time), but, in general, familiarity makes us feel safe with our purchasing decisions.

Therefore, the first strategy is (in corporate jargon):

Understand what feels familiar to your customer, then leverage it when designing your buyer’s journey.

Now, in “regular people speech”:

Make sure that your customers do not feel surprised when they enter your shop. Study what existing competitors do. If they don’t come to your shop, where would they go? What type of experience do they have there? Somebody who is used to shopping at XYZ’s wants to have a familiar -  and better - experience when shopping from you. This is how you win the communication game from before they enter your shop.

Fighting familiarity is expensive

If you have to convince the world that something is better than the status quo, you are in for a fiery, long, and daunting battle. And it’s not guaranteed that you will succeed.

Think of when Tesla (the Serb, not the car company) and Edison were at odds over Alternate and Direct currents. 

Think of when Microsoft released Bing to compete with Google.

Think of when Sweden switched to driving on the right overnight.

Spoiler: it was a mess.

Fighting familiarity is expensive, costs us money, time, energy and a number o chores we could definitely forget about if we design our buyers’ journeys with familiarity in mind.

Think of the iPhone - the pitch was literally:

“It’s a cellphone, with Mac OS, and a big touch screen that works better than other touch screens. It also looks good. It also costs a lot because this is an Apple cellphone.”

Nothing unusual here. Typical Apple-style communication for a typical product, re-engineered to be easier to use. What’s not to like?

Strategy 2 for communicating with your customers

It’s really easy to understand. It’s a lot harder to adopt and apply. And you need to do so consistently.

So there are two strategies.

1. Make your Customer Experience familiar and - ideally - better than the “familiar alternatives''. Do not reinvent the wheel if you are not prepared to spend more energy educating your customer.

2. Make your communication dumb. Ensure that even the dumbest of potential customers can understand it. The smarter ones will get it, and the dumb ones too. That’s how you win.

How do you “dumb it down”?

Let’s use a framework from a book I love: Made to Stick by Chip and Dean Heath.

To make sure that your point comes acros, we are going to use the framework I found in this book. It’s an “Off-Label” use, because the book specifically addresses the concept of “Sticky Ideas” (i.e. ideas that stay in your mind and can get understood easily). It’s good enough for us 🙂

To communicate effectively with your customers, make sure that your communication is:

1. Simple 

2. Unexpected

3. Concrete

4. Credible

5. Emotional

6. Story (Yeah, this actually means that storytelling can be used to make your communication even “Stickier’, personally I hate backronyms - this list spells “SUCCES” - but whatever)

“Simple” communication is - you don’t say - simple. No need to use big words, no need to impress anyone. Smart people will buy because they see value in your product, dumb people won’t get it if you make your communications too complicated.

“Unexpected” communication is very useful. It captures the attention of your user. (Makes me think of the paper “Attention is all you need, if you are into AI, check it out). Think of popups on websites. We hate them, but they work. That’s why we keep seeing them. Yikes.

“Concrete” is not just what roads and buildings are made of. Concrete communications add real value for your customers. They want to see what you do. That’s why “We planted 10,000 trees in 2014 thanks to your donations” is a lot better than “Your donations help us plant trees”.

“Credible” is why you don’t hire Saul Goodman if you are a reputable person. Saul Goodman is a fantastic character and a captivating, unorthodox lawyer. But he looks like the lawyer guilty people would hire. His defenses are not really credible, don’t you think? Would you trust a fat dietician? Nobody would. Credibility is built around Authority, Experience and Familiarity. Have you seen the old Camel Ads? Where doctors recommend Camel Cigarettes? I have.

Kinda want to have a smoke right now. If a doctor says Camels are smoother, they likely are, right? 

“Emotional” communication is especially prevalent in politics. Politicians try to stir up the emotions of their voters even when the matter to be discussed is a rather dull tax increase on processed cheese. Think about it - would anyone bother voting if they did not feel the “emotional urge” to do so? (Perhaps I’ll write something about this too, in the future).

Alas, “stories” are perfect for conveying complex ideas. They give the listener a structure to follow and to learn from. Fables and other short stories have been used for millennia to transfer knowledge easily and effectively. Why would a mother tell the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” instead of teaching their children not to trust others too easily? Because the story has a much more powerful effect. 

Make it familiar, make it dumb

Something familiar and easy to understand will enable your customers to remember why they even entered your shop.

There are no special tricks to learn. My recommendation is to apply this framework to all aspects of business communications when the objective is Customer Acquisition.

Everything else is nice to have, but far from necessary.

“Uh? What is that supposed to mean?” you may say. Let’s take a step back - here’s a cool story.

I have recently founded a company and I am currently working towards the product launch after 3 months of beta testing and customer-led development.

In “regular people speech” this is the equivalent of “We are building an app and -because we want to make sure it is actually useful - we pester people all around the world to use it and push them to tell us why it’s not good enough. Sometimes, we don’t even tell them it’s a beta.”.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it all up. Some tough months indeed.

But what really changed me is the realization that, as a founder, the need to wear as many hats as possible is painfully strong. So much so that I had to get back to studying what I had already studied some years ago: that’s right - Marketing!

After graduating in Marketing Management, I started my career in sales because no matter who I talked to, sales seemed to be “The profession” that entrepreneurs and CEOs would swear by if you wanted to learn how to do business.

Needless to say, I was quickly entrapped into the most modern cult of the 21st century. Salespeople are convinced (and I was convinced, too) that no other profession adds as much value as theirs to the company because “they are the ones paying your salary with every sale they make.”.

Yeah…no.

I am a master cold caller, an amazing cold email writer and I am able to manage huge pipelines, even when I am not feeling 100% (yes, this matters, a lot - because sales is a mental game). Also, I love training salespeople,: there’s nothing like teaching these skills to a young professional who wants to do business. Even I swear by sales, if you want to learn the hard truth about (again) “doing business”.

Yet this is reductive, at best. Organizations are born everday, and while selling makes operations sustainable, it is not the reason companies exist.

Why do Companies exist?

I was taught at school that companies “exist to generate profits”.

Oops - I disagree. I want to use a re-adapted definition from my marketing studies here, because it sounds so much better.

Companies “exist to create value for a limited number of stakeholders”.

Ok, ok - I am using corporate speech here, but the difference is clear. If companies existed only to generate profits, they would try to do so at any cost, even if they don’t create real value. Sadly, this is the case for a lot of organizations out there - not only do they not create any value, but they simply make profits by (for example) restricting the supply of a particular, necessary good.

If companies exist to create value, it is clear that Sales Departments are the stars of Value Transfer. Value is created inside a company (shoes) and then transferred to the customer (a stakeholder) thanks to a *wink wink* shop assistant!

Yet what happens when the shoe looks terrible? Or when nobody knows the brand? or, even better, when there is no after-sales assistance available and the customer inquires about it (“can I return the shoes if they make my feet sore the first day I use them?”)? Yeah, a sales becomes a lot less likely.

Salespeople can transfer value, but they cannot create it by themselves. Even if they are convinced they can, they can’t (sorry guys, we need to be honest about this - my advice is to not let the cult-like mentality of sales take the best of you).

An organization needs to do several things to create value and then transfer it, here’s a barebones list:

1. Create Value (Product/Service Development)

2. Make your Value understandable (Communications)

3. Understand who your best customer is and why (Strategy)

4. Make your value known to the right stakeholders (Marketing)

5. Transfer your value to new Customers (Sales)

6. Continue the Value transfer Process after the purchase (After-sales/Customer Success)

7. Make the above processes possible and compliant (HR, IT/Digital Infrastructure, Legal)

Point 7 is not a catch-all clause: also, the main stakeholder in companies is always the State. Always and forever. This means that, as an organization grows, not only some parts need to be built keeping compliance in mind, always.

As a founder, I need to wear all of these hats. And, for this reason, I have one, huge problem: I was only given ONE head!

Why I had to unlearn Sales

I was the first Outbound Sales Development Representative at a French Fintech Scale-Up for Italy. I helped pave the way for a SaaS Fintech service (a simple, consolidated, cash-flow managmeent tool) that is becoming increasingly successful in Europe (and they are even expanding to the US now). I was then promoted to Account Executive. Then, I moved to Amazon UK to work a similar job. I was so in love with sales that the new job seemed so slow (it was indeed a business development job, far away from the land of pure sales where everyday the phones keep ringing and bells are supposed to follow)! Chasing the next customer would prove to be a remarkable adrenaline fix for me. I was devouring sales books at an incredible pace and all I thought was: “How does this thing work at scale? How many salespeople does an organization need to scale? How do I convert more prospects? How do I convince that-guy-from-Florence to schedule a meeting with me?”.

I had forced myself to enjoy a very demanding occupation that i later learned to look at with much more rigor and rationality. Sales is a very cool way to make a living - and lucrative! - but there’s more to that, and it is important to understand this when launching a startup.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I learned the hard way that exceptional sales skills cannot compensate for a faulty, incomplete, or confusing products and lack of communication and awareness.

In the early days of development, no matter how convincing I sounded, the first users became confused - they were interested in the service we provided but also disappointed in the quality of the user interface or the lack of colors ( we used a B/W schema to ease development).

So I stopped punishing myself for not contacting enough potential users to pitch them and I went back to every “Non-Sales” aspect of the thing that I was building.

What I did after

Did I mention that I am also a software architect? I’m not top of the class, don’t get me wrong, but good enough to put together a web app and have it run in production mode (it’s geek speech for “Make your app available to users”).

Eventually, I believed that my focus should shift to making a name for the platform I was building. Of course, generating revenue is an important objective and thus we worked backwards from the moment of potential “Sale” for our product.

I thought to myself: “Where does the customer journey for a marketplace even start?”

Thank God I had worked at Amazon Marketplace up to a few months prior! So I did what Amazonians love to do: I wrote a doc. Somebody put this article together if you wanna know more about Amazon docs.

And the doc really helped me take two important decisions to make usability much better. All I needed was to rework the feedback I was receiving by potential users and transform it into application pieces to be developed. It was clearly not the right time for marketing, my gut feeling finally agreed.

Because I was spending considerable time on product architecture, I realized: “Hey we do not have any notifications, we don’t tell the user where to go and what to do to setup their account. What the hell are they supposed to do? Learn by themselves? Learn about a service that nobody knows, all by themselves?”

Quickly, I understood that communication was a big problem ad we needed a big solution, fast.

I was pretty quick to explain the whole thing in person, but I could not scale my complex explanations (I was spending considerable time on Google Meets with potential users and guiding them through the whole experience, one by one).

I designed a simple notification system and our main developer came up with an elegant solution that would keep the UX’s ease of use untouched. It was a success, users could finally complete the onboarding process autonomously. No more pressing need for onboarding calls.

Marketing woes

My solution for the onboarding problem was successful enough, but I had not solved what i had set out to solve in the first place.

I often wondered: “Let’s assume that the product is almost ready. How do I make it visible to as many in-target users as I can without resorting to paid ads?”

There’s this misconception in the Outside-of-marketing-world that marketing is “a campaign and ROAS”.

Yikes.

Painful sales processes taught me to love good marketing. Sales is the engine of the company, but even the best of engines cannot run without some good oil. Marketing is the lubricant that makes the sales machine work.

(Re)-learning good marketing

Salespeople and Marketers tend to have very dfferent objectives. This is particulary evident in larger organizations.

If I had a dollar (I’d say penny but inflation is a big meanie) for every time I heard the phrase “These leads from marketing are s**t” I wouldn’t be writing about this stuff.

Marketers also have a hard time making themselves understood by Sales. They know that time is sometimes all that is needed for campaigns to start working. But Sales departments. have quotas to reach and an unbearable pressure to deal with. Time is, quite literally, money.

To the struggling salesperson that spent 2 hours vetting leads generated by a marketing campaign, Marketers look like impudent, lazy, paycheck collectors.

On the other hand, marketers grow frustrated with Sales because they do not bother to comprehend the dynamics of online marketing, message creation, the marketing ‘Mix” etc.

To the marketer that spent 20 minutes listening to the advice coming from an Account Executive, Salespeople are competent, determined, energetic, but lack the basic understanding of what marketing really is.

Marketing is much more than Lead Generation, it does shape every aspect of the buyers’ journey, even (and especially) before the prospect decides to turn into a customer.

Making sense of marketing as a founder

I am going to go straight to the point here:

1. Study and understand SEO. SEO is free. It does not cost money. It costs time, energy, and effort. But these are things that can be gathered easily at first. Pick a way to publish content easily. Research keywords. Make some noise.

2. Read books about marketing that are simple and valuable: New Power, Story Genius, On Writing Well, Cashvertising. These are some of my favorites.

3. Read books about communication and psychology: Made to Stick, A theory of cognitive dissonance. (the latter is currently my favorite book)

4. Speak to your customers and understand what they are seeking, then wrap this up into your marketing message. Remember to speak to them. Do not read feedback. Actually make an effort and talk to your customers!

5. Do not be “salesy”, but learn when to be so, even in crafting your marketing message. There are several stages of the buyers’ journey and different messages are meant for different points. Do not push to conversion too early.

Yeah that’s about it.

Is Marketing better than Sales?

No, of course not. Marketing and Sales are both needed for operating a company well. And by this I don’t mean you need two huge teams. But the two things need to be separate and be able to “communicate” with each other. Keeping them in isolation will only create problems for the customers.

After all, companies exist to create value, profit only makes this objective sustainable over time! :)