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- The Connection Newsletter 65 - Influencers Pay Double
The Connection Newsletter 65 - Influencers Pay Double
The Connection Newsletter 65 - Influencers Pay Double
Hello!This is edition #65 of The Connection, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad you're here.I’ve mentioned before about how I’m (slowly) learning SQL, as part of a broader, year long effort to become more technical.The tiny bit I’ve learned so far has really become useful these last few days, as Reforge gets ready for our new application period. Last season, tracking all the metrics was this incredibly arduous process. Even something as simple as tracking people’s behaviors to our emails (sends, opens, CTRs, CTORs, etc), would require me to open the app, find the campaign, open the report, then copy and paste the data into my own spreadsheet.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Now, with just the tiniest bit of SQL knowledge, I’m 10x more comfortable navigating our database and modifying previously created SQL queries to get the specific data that I want for a given situation.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Looking back on it now, last season I was trying to build a house with a hacksaw. The work would get done, it just took too long. I'm still a novice, but just this glimmer of insight is a major up level. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀It’s like the first time you go into a Boss Fight in a video game. You only have access to low-level weapons and items, and it’s a struggle. But by the third time, you have upgraded weapons. You maxed out your stats. So you cut through the problem like cake 🍰Other things I’ve been reading and watching:
Netflixed by Gina Keating. About the battle between Netflix and Blockbuster. Highly recommend. Notes coming soon.
A Simple Favor. Recommend
Mary Queen of Scots. I’m ambivalent. Saoirse Ronan was terrific. Hard to follow the plot
The Wire. Finally finished. Took a few years.
Onto this week’s articles:
Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics.
For months after moving to Los Angeles, I heard the hype about the Kogi truck. It wasn’t until years later, at an Abbott Kinney First Friday event I finally get to sample the wares, after queuing for half an hour.
Roy Choi’s journey to launch the food truck revolution is amazing:
Choi was constantly in the weeds [at RockSugar]. He couldn’t handle the huge menu, and found himself breaking down on the line, forgetting how to do things and what he’d ordered and what he needed to tell the line cooks. Ismail fired him.
Choi went to his car and threw up, and then, for three days, pretended to his wife that he wasn’t fired, getting dressed in the morning as if he were going to work and then just driving around the city, numb.
No one was hiring. The economy was on the brink, and he was either overqualified or underqualified or overconfident or underconfident. He couldn’t even get a full gig, even an entry-level one. Things were becoming dire.
The call that saved him came from the place that almost killed him: Koreatown. His buddy Mark Manguera, a Philippines-born, Cali-raised fellow chef from the Beverly Hilton, had been drunk eating Mexican food with his sister when he’d had an epiphany: Why the hell wasn’t anyone putting Korean barbecue on tacos?
The most fascinating part about the journey is how it wasn’t changes to the product (which was good and different to start with) that launched the revolution.
As we talk about in the Reforge Growth Series, it was how they leveraged a new distribution channel - Twitter - that created the Kogi truck cult following:
The nascent social media company had launched two years earlier, but it took off in 2008, going from 1.6 million total tweets posted in 2007 to 400 million the following year. Choi started tweeting to let followers know his location in real time, and the combination of his addictive and affordable fusion street food and the in-the-know feeling of discovering the truck’s latest stop created a cultural food phenomenon.
I thought it was important for these two unrelated articles to be shared together.The first describes the story of how a sibling rivalry of second-generation inheritors of wealth destroyed a $800 million Louisiana family dynasty. It’s what happens when you no longer strive to build an empire, but you’re just trying to hold onto the one you were born into. The builder of the company, Eddy Knight, held sales meetings at four o’clock in the morning. He slept in the closet at his satellite offices. His sons spent the money on homes, cars, and drugs, until one brother used dirty cops to try and put the other in jail, in an attempt to cut him out. He went to jail, and in August 2017, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The second article, Why Things Break, explains not just how this family and company fell apart, but how all successful things fall apart:
Success pushes you away from whatever made you successful to begin with
Success increases size, size increases complexity, complexity plants landmines
Success teaches you how to win the last war, which becomes the only war you know how to fight
Success reduces the impression of needing room for error
What looked like success was random, mismeasured, or a temporary trend
The Browser sends you one email a day with five of the best articles they can find all over the web. They have +10,000 subscribers, paying between $12-$49 a year.
It’s a great example of a sustainable business that took its time to grow over the last 10 years. Paid subscriptions weren’t turned on until 2013, and prices didn’t start to go up until 2017.
Writer Carina Chocano followed a group of mom influencers living on Byron Bay in Australia who paint an idyllic “mom surfer life” that they portray as realistic and achievable on their Instagram feeds.
Chocano captured the dissent from the critics of these influencers succinctly:
Authenticity is a big part of what Adamo is selling—as is the idea that the life she lives is achievable. Her response to criticism suggests she feels accused of hiding things—a fleet of nannies, say—that she’s demonstrably not hiding.
But this take is off. Her privilege on its face isn’t what gets to people.
What gets to people is her reluctance to acknowledge how that privilege holds up a pristinely simple life. Because everybody knows how excruciatingly hard it is to raise children, to keep house, to stay solvent, to survive. And following people who appear to do this with ease, who make a talent and a virtue out of being lucky, creates an unbearable feeling of cognitive dissonance in the beholder. It feels like gaslighting. It makes Instagram look like a giant, continually updated portrait of Dorian Gray, stashed in our collective closet, getting prettier and prettier as the world becomes increasingly grotesque.
(This doesn’t change my opinion that if it bothers you, stop following. But I think she nailed the sentiment of many influencer critics.)
Meanwhile, this ice cream truck owner put up an anti-influencer sign on his truck: request a free cone and you’ll have to pay double.
“There’s something so redeeming about outing influencers,” he said, adding that many small businesses have written to him thanking him for speaking up. “I hope that more people do not allow likes and comments and followers to hold weight in the business. I want people to go to a restaurant because the food and service is fantastic.”
Disney+ announced they’re looking to move from the traditional profit participation to a point-based model.
In my opinion, the move from traditional profit participation to this point-based model is a good one.
The long tail of television programming works along (at least) two axes:
(1) long tail in terms of number of shows available to watch
(2) long tail in terms of longevity of shows, e.g. The Office doing better now than when it was live on NBC, The Wire doing better now than when first broadcast on HBO, etc.
Because of this long tail, we're going to see more singles and doubles than home runs. The creators of those singles and doubles will capture more upside, and it’ll cap the upside for the home runs (though in success, it sounds like renegotiating deals is still an option.
Parent and educator Zachary Wright (he taught 12-grade world lit and AP lit at a Philadelphia Charter school for 8 years) shared his decision to move his family out of the city for the suburbs… and proceeds to get massacred via Facebook comments about it:
(1) Your choice to intentionally move your family to a white suburb and "good" (read "white") schools has shown your children that you don't value integration in practice, only in theory.
(2) This so very much reeks of a self-righteous, self-serving "do as I say not as I do" man who is obnoxiously vocal about his "principles" in an attempt to convince himself and others that claiming to have the right ideals is the same as walking the walk--literally here, putting their money where their mouth is.
(3) Let me be the first black person among your faceless and nameless friends to tell you I don't agree. Your choice is a choice against my neighborhood and the kids that live in it.
The level of rancor is astounding. What gives one person the right to pass judgment on another person’s decisions on how to best care for their family? (ht/ Amy for sharing this one :)
Thanks for reading!Last thing: Is there anything I can help you with? If there's any way I can help out, please let me know. Or if we just haven't chatted in a while, I'd love to hear from you. Just reply directly to this email.
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