Realizations, May 14, 2023

Sign post

Playbook one way, Differentiation the other way.

You get many opportunities to choose either playbook or differentiation. But often the argument is to always choose the playbook, because apparently each playbook is the most optimal choice for that signpost decision. But that’s simply not true. The choice of differentiation over playbook is one to make deliberately, but when you choose to, could create layers of differentiated decisions that add up to something truly differentiated, special, and defensible.

Heart

Do what you love feel off? No need to do what you love. Do what’s true to you instead.

If you do what’s true to you always, there’s less pressure on doing what feels right always. Because if you do what’s true to you, you will inject your personality into every job, activity, business, etc along the way. And the unique experiences from those will always add up to building something genuinely personal to you and special over time.

Discounts

The choices you can make for discounts are almost universal across industries and types of offerings. But the choices you do make

As you scale, it’s very easy to lose unique discounts in place, in the push towards operational efficiency and standardization. But when you lose something, it impacts the whole experience people receive.

Giving a tangible discount has a much higher impact to the customer than giving a percentage discount. For example, “your first month’s on us” vs “20% discount forever”

This is a variable or unplanned discount choice, for a specific type of customer. Maybe a friend, another business owner or team,

Who to expect today, who has hit a milestone? Who comes every Wednesday and has for the past 2 months? Etc.

Track and share that information with the team, and have whoever interacts with them first give the meaningful discount.

Surprise and delight increases LTV

Surprise and delight increases LTV. Taking immense care over every detail and personalizing the experience to a differentiated level for the user/customer, will increase their value from the product, and

Choosing specifically who should be a beta tester for a new feature, is a level of personalization and customer experience we provide, that enhances value form the product, and perception of the company. That’s the type of thing we can do at Buffer. There’s a lot we can do that still adds personalization that works for our scale. And if we do it, we suddenly differentiate over others and we’ll start seeing the value come back three, four-fold.

Whatever we spend on this differentiation in terms of discounts, is not something to optimize and reduce. It can be seen as lost revenue, but it is actually gained revenue. Because when the discounts are truly tailed and personalized and special, they are increasing the LTV of that customer. So you actually just chopped off revenue rather than chopping off cost, and reduced your revenue by removing discounts.

Did that choice improve our results? Or did it actually decrease them? We never ran an A/B test and couldn’t over enough of a timeframe to validate it. So it’s gone. But actually, if those discounts were done in a truly special and personalized way, they represented revenue rather than cost.

And at very high LTV, the level of surprise and delight should / can increase.

One of the CEO’s jobs is cross-team uniqueness

Only the CEO is positioned to make things fully connected and integrated across different areas of the company. And sometimes there is resistance as it may change the way an area works and even make something harder for them, but it must be done because it will lead to better integration which will lead to better customer experiences.

Notes could be developed fully into articles, but still evolve afterwards as they are notes

Once a note hits “article level” - it could be copied to a new “article” note which makes that note an article. It could essentially be an outline-style note that gets copied. Actually blog posts are essentially expanded outline notes. They exist in their own right, and become a narrative of a broader subject that’s useful to reference. But the thinking on that topic continues naturally, and will evolve again. In the future there may be a new article note on a new element of the topic, or a further learning that is sort of an update to a prior point.

So there’s this fluidity and continuity and cycling between notes and articles, back to notes, etc. that will now be possible for me that really wasn’t possible before setting up § My note taking system and § My digital garden.

Linking from fleeting notes to topic notes is more powerful than the other way around

The more I link freely and generously from fleeting notes to topic notes, the sooner I will take the leap to a topic note and start to develop a thought or topic. Whereas, linking back to an original thought will happen less, the more that topic notes are developed. It’s still useful, as maybe a separate fleeting thought now makes sense to develop out around the same topic, and you link to it then develop it out.

Each direction represents a different type of connection. From fleeting note to topic note says “this is worth giving real thought to”, whereas from topic note to fleeting note says “this could maybe be related to this”. The more I can encourage myself to give further thought to, the more interesting thoughts I am likely to have. They get reformatted in the process as they get added to relevant outline notes and other topic notes. They get embedded in the system.

Fleeting isn’t embedded in the system, topic is. So the more is pushed into topic notes, the richer a system is developed. And the level of linking and further reflection and work will differentiate the more important vs less important topic notes, so volume isn’t an issue.

Therefore, be very generous in creating a topic note out of a fleeting note. Do it more, and see what happens.

Sharing notes with people as they develop into blog posts is a way for me to bring people along

It's a way I can personalize, which will improve my results and make my blogging experience richer too. It can even lead to impacting the blog post too, maybe a quote or a reference is attributed to someone I shared a note with.

#topic/inbox