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- The Connection Newsletter 80 - Marketing lessons, marketplaces, scams
The Connection Newsletter 80 - Marketing lessons, marketplaces, scams
The Connection Newsletter 80 - Did Instagram break us? The Away fallout. What makes marketplaces work? How Hipcamp became hip.
Hello!
This is edition #80 of
The Connection
, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) How are we already in the last week of January?!?
New article this week:
. I spent 6 months running marketing experiments at one of my dad’s restaurants. Here’s what worked and didn’t work.
I also published the second article on the new Pickleball website,
. If you’ve never stepped foot on a pickleball court, this is the perfect comprehensive beginner’s guide.
Published book notes from
Say Nothing
by Patrick Radden Keefe. It covers The Troubles in Northern Ireland, from the late 60s to the 70s, and leading all the way up to Brexit. Highly recommend -
.
Finally watched
Knives Out
, Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit film. It was a near perfect movie. This is a
(fun fact: two people’s work influenced my move to Los Angeles, and Rian Johnson was one of them).
Here are this week’s articles:
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A Deep Dive Into The World of Technology and Scams
(Airbnb, Uber, ebay) work so well, and why others (Wag!, Soothe) don’t. The reason: underutilized fixed assets. Favorite quote:
“In the early days, many marketplaces have found an underutilized fixed asset to be an incredible boost to expedite building the supply side of their market. The best way to think of underutilized fixed assets is as pure potential energy sitting in people’s homes, cars, and random tchotkes. Marketplaces take a tremendous amount of energy to get their flywheel spinning. But it’s easier when there is an external supply of potential energy that can be put to work.”
---
Speaking of marketplaces, how do you measure if a marketplace is efficient? Julia Morrongiello lays out different methods in this article in Medium.
Marketplace liquidity:
The probability of selling something you list or of finding something you’re looking for
---
. Hipcamp is a marketplace that connects campers with campsites. And those campsites are often supplied by private landowners whose property was literally sitting fallow before they started listing on Hipcamp.
Fun fact
: After founder Alyssa Ravasio had a particularly painful process booking a camping trip, she enrolled in a local ten-week full-stack development course. Then she got to work building the site while her sisters found campground images and her friend wrote the campground sales copy.
---
Emotional baggage.
The Verge published a story
fostered by the CEO of suitcase company/travel brand Away, Steph Korey. It covered a menagerie of offenses, including scintillating Slack messages back and forth with her employees. Since then she’s apologized and stepped down.
What does the scandal mean for Away’s future growth and ultimate success (e.g. acquisition or IPO)? Probably nothing.
The travel brand has an estimated 200% revenue growth and 11.7x Market cap/revenue (compare that to mattress brand Casper, with its 43% revenue growth and 2.8 market cap/revenue)
.
The takeaway
: Profit above all.
---
Did Instagram break us? I struggle
but think it’s an important conversation. Writer Rebecca Jennings posits that Instagram “broke us” by “feeding us, its users, a poison of narcissism and envy and prevents [us] from ever logging off."
I’ve struggled with this cycle too. It’s why I deleted the app from my phone.
But I don’t blame Instagram for those feelings that inevitably crop up upon scrolling through my friend’s highlight reels of them having more fun, having more business success, getting more ripped abs than me. Those feelings are on me.
Hot take
: Instagram or Tik Tok or Facebook or the social media network soup du jour of tomorrow did not break us. We were born this way -- it’s called being human.
---
. Business email compromise scams (like the
happening currently) rely less on hacking, and more on social engineering and manipulation. As these scams grow more lucrative (Toyota lost $37m, Facebook and Google were taken for $120m from one scammer) we’re going to see more of in the next decade.
---
To tie it all together: the nationwide marketplace scam.
ran across 8 major US cities: LA, Chicago, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Milwaukee, Indiana, and Orlando. After being scammed herself, senior staff writer Allie Conti tracked down the scammer… and called him on the phone.
Thanks for reading!
Q for peeps in long-term (5+ years) relationships: do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? Why or why not? I’d love to know, you can reply directly to this email.
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