Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. Itās a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter subscriptions (the Inbox), and looks remarkably similar to Twitter. But Substackās big innovation here for a social network is capitalizing on their subscription-centric model ā every other general-use social network on the internet to-date has been based on advertising. From the announcement, how Substack will differentiate:
By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.
With this launch, Twitter responded by variously blocking Substack links completely, preventing them from being liked/retweeted, or being embedded on Substack domains. Some of these have since been pulled back after some backlash (on Twitter), but still ā clearly Twitter sees this as the direct challenge that it looks like. Ben Thompson has a great write-up on the state of the competition between the two platforms.
Iāve been playing around with Notes this morning. At first glance it looks great; I love the feed from users I subscribe to, and it looks like it algorithmically includes users outside of my following network. Following plus adjacent similar users is good with me for discovery. As a writer of a Substack myself, the network effects on the platform have improved over time (with @mentions, recommendations, likes) and Notes stands to widen the funnel even more, hopefully.
Twitter has struggled to make inroads on something Substack has been gloriously successful with so far: long form writing. Notably, Twitter bought Substack rival Revue (which was a great product!) in 2021, and has already shuttered it. For some reason ā probably classic disruption theory crippling incentives, among other product execution failings ā Twitter canāt innovate away from its core 240-character timeline product.
Iām excited to see what Substack can do with the idea. Even though Notes is still in their domain of text media, the usage incentives for producers & consumers will change dramatically if this new product takes on a life of its own, standing alone from the deliberate, deep newsletter product theyāve been focused on the past 6 years. If they want to enter the social media game, nowās the time to strike, with Twitter seemingly still in a confused state about the future of the platform and where it wants to devote innovation resources going forward. They still donāt seem to know how to break out of the advertising-driven, engagement-bait trap, even with a Big Bet Maker in Elon in the driverās seat.
Arnold Klingis skeptical on the potential for Notes to fit cleanly into the Substackās existing incentive structure. But he makes a point here that I think points to the potential of combining long form and short form into a new recipe:
Daniel Kahneman has taught us that our brain has two systems. System One reacts rapidly and emotionally. System Two reasons slowly and rationally. Short-form writing is adjacent to System One. Long-form writing is adjacent to System Two.
We need both systems to have a functioning consciousness. Maybe the same could be true for text-based media.
A lot of Steve Jobs content is hagiography at this point, but this clip is fantastic:
Thereās an enormous delta between idea and execution. Someone can take a great idea and squander it. Or conversely, someone could take a middling and obvious idea and execute so well they build a billion dollar business. From the first part of the clip:
One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, Iāve seen other people get it, too, itās the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people āhereās this great ideaā then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that thereās a just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in-between a great idea and a great product, and as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find thereās tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are there are just certain things you canāt make electrons do, there are certain things you canāt make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want and every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. Itās that process that is the magic.
The idea of āmaking to knowā, or of starting the work in order to figure out the specific contours of the work, these are fascinating concepts to me. So many of the great innovations of our time are the function of the college dropout, or the less-educated craftsperson, experimenting through years of trial and error to make something happen. Often the only way to know the true bottlenecks, challenges, and chokepoints of bringing an idea to consumers (buyers, audiences, customers) is to get started. Make the map of the territory along the way.
I do most of my nighttime reading with my Kindle, but lately Iāve been reading a couple of books that donāt exist in ebook format. I actually do prefer reading paper books as an experience, but I still favor the ebooks especially for highlighting, but also for the obvious benefits of portability and availability.
Most of the clip-on book lights out there are clunky and annoying. Years ago I had something called a LightWedge that was pretty clever, but too expensive, fragile, and heavy for regular use.
I went out looking for a simple, affordable option that also had no blue light, since that can interfere with sleep quality. I found this option from Hooga thatās quite nice so far:
Itās a flexible, low-profile LED light that only has a single amber colored option (which is great). It charges via USB, and also flattens down nicely to fit in a bag when mobile or traveling. The clip on it works well. I just clamp it on to the back bunch of pages so it doesnāt interfere with page-turning. It stays out of the way but has a firm enough clip strength to stay on just fine.
Highly recommended so far. Iāve used it for several hours with no charging yet. Just what I wanted. For $10 itās hard to beat.
This post is part 3 in a series about my history in product development. Check out the intro in part 1 and all about our first product, Geodexy, in part 2.
Back in 2010 we decide to halt our development of Geodexy and regroup to focus on a narrower segment of the marketplace. With what weād learned in our go-to-market attempt on Geodexy, we wanted to isolate a specific industry we could focus our technology around. Our tech platform was strong, we were confident in that. But at the peak of our efforts with taking Geodexy to market, we were never able to reach a state of maturity to create traction and growth in any of the markets we were targeting. Actually targeting is the wrong word ā truthfully that was the issue: we werenāt ātargetingā anything because we had too many targets to shoot at.
We needed to take our learnings, regroup on what was working and what wasnāt, and create a single focal point we could center all of our effort around, not just the core technology, but also our go-to-market approach, marketing strategy, sales, and customer development.
I donāt remember the specific genesis of the idea (I think it was part internal idea generation, part serendipity), but we connected on the notion of field data collection for the property inspection market. So we launched allinspections.
That industry had the hallmarks of one ripe for us to show up with disruptive technology:
Low current investment in technology ā Most folks were doing things on paper with lots of transcribing and printing.
Lots of regulatory basis in the workflow ā Many inspections are done as a requirement by a regulatory body. This meant consistent, widespread needs that crossed geographic boundaries, and an āalways-onā use case for a technology solution.
Phased workflow with repetitive process and ādecision treeā problems ā a perfect candidate for digitizing the process.
Very few incumbent technologies to replace ā if there were competitors at all, they were Excel and Acrobat.
Smartphones ready to amplify a mobile-heavy workflow ā Inspections of all sorts happen in-situ somewhere in the field.
While the market for facility and property inspections is immense, we opted to start on the retail end of the space: home inspections for residential real estate. There was a lot to like about this strategy for a technology company looking to build something new. We could identify individual early adopters, gradually understand what made their business tick, and index on capability that empowered them. There was no need immediately to worry about selling to massive enterprise organizations, which wouldāve put a heavy burden on us to build ābox-checkingā features like hosting customization, access controls, single sign-on, and the like. We used a freemium model which helped attract early usage, then shifted to a free trial one later on after some early traction.
Overall the biggest driver that attracted us to residential was the consistency of the work. While anyone whoās bought property is familiar with the process of getting a house inspected before closing. That sort of inspection is low volume compared to those associated with insurance underwriting. Our first mission was this: to build the industry-standard tool for performing these regulated inspections in Florida ā wind mitigation, 4-point, and roof certification. These were (and still are) done by the thousands every day. They were perfect candidates for us for the reasons listed above: simple, standard, ubiquitous, and required1. There was a built-in market for automating the workflow around them and improving the data collected, which we could use as a beachhead to get folks used to using an app to conduct their inspections.
Our hypothesis was that we could apply the technology for mobile data collection weād built in Geodexy and āverticalizeā it around the specialty of property inspection with features oriented around that problem set. Once we could spin up enough technology adoption for home inspection use cases at the individual level, we could then bridge into the franchise operations and institutions (even the insurance companies themselves) to standardize on allinspections for all of their work.
We had good traction in the early days with inspectors. It didnāt take us long before we connected with a half-dozen tech-savvy inspectors in the area to work with as guinea pigs to help us advance the technology. Using their domain expertise in exchange for usage of the product, we were able to fast-forward on our understanding of the inspection workflow ā from original request handling and scheduling, to inspecting on-site, then report delivery to customer. Within a year we had a pretty slick solution and 100 or so customers that swore by the tool for getting their work done.
But it didnāt take us long to run into friction. Once weād exhausted the low-hanging fruit of the early adopter community, it became harder and harder to find more of the tech savvy crowd willing to splash some money on something new and different. As you might expect, the community of inspectors we were targeting were not technologists. Many of these folks were perfectly content with their paperwork process and enjoyed working solo. Many had no interest in building a true business around their operation, not interested in growing into a company with multiple inspectors covering wider geographies. Others were general contractors doing inspections as a side gig, so it wasnāt even their core day to day job. With that kind of fragmentation, it was difficult to reach the economies of scale we were looking for to be able to sell something at the price point where we needed to be. We had some modest success pursuing the larger nationwide franchise organizations, but our sales and onboarding strategy wasnāt conducive to getting those deals beyond the small pilot stage. It was still too early for that. We wanted to get to B2B customer sizes and margins, but were ultimately still selling a B2C application. Yes, a home inspector has a business that we were selling to, but the fundamentals of the relationship share far more in common with a consumer product relationship than a corporate one.
By early 2012 weād stalled out on growth at the individual level. A couple opportunities to partner with inspection companies on a comprehensive solution for carriers failed, partially for technical reasons, but also immaturity of our existing market. We didnāt have a reference base sizable enough to jump all the way up to selling 10,000 seats without enormous burden and too much overpromising on what we could do.
We shut down operations on allinspections in early 2012. We had suspected this would have to happen for a while, so it wasnāt a sudden decision. But it always hurts to have to walk away from something you poured so much time and energy into.
I think the biggest takeaway for me at the time, and in the early couple years of success on Fulcrum, was how relatively little the specifics of your technology matter if you mess up the product-market fit and go-to-market steps in the process. The silver lining in the whole affair was (like many things in product companies) that there was plenty to salvage and carry on to our next effort. We learned an enormous amount about what goes into building a SaaS offering and marketing it to customers. Coming from Geodexy where we never even reached the stage of having a real ācustomer successā process to deal with, allinspections gave us a jolt in appreciation for things like identifying the āaha momentā in the product, increasing usage of a product, tracking usage of features to diagnose engagement gaps, and ultimately, getting on the same page as the customer when it comes to the final deliverable. It takes working with customers and learning the deep corners of the workflow to identify where the pressure points are in the value chain, the things that keep the customer up at night when they donāt have a solution.
And naturally there was plenty of technology to bring forward with us to our next adventure. The launch of Fulcrum actually pre-dates the end of allinspections, which tells you something about how we were thinking at the time. At the time we werenāt thinking of Fulcrum as the ānext evolutionā of allinspections necessarily, but we were thinking about going bigger while fixing some of the mistakes made a year or two prior. While most of Fulcrum was built ground-up, we brought some code but a whole boatload of lessons learned on systems, methods, and architecture that helped us launch and grow Fulcrum as quickly as we did.
Retrospectives like this help me to think back on past decisions and process some of what we did right and wrong with some separation. That separation can be a blessing in being able to remove personal emotion or opinion from what happened and look at it objectively, so it can serve as a valuable learning experience. Sometime down the road Iāll write about this next evolution that led to where we are today.
Pieces like this often come off like geeks calling for a return to how it āused to beā ā āHyperCard was the peak of dev toolsā. But this author makes some excellent points about performance, responsiveness, and control. As a frequent terminal user, thereās a tactility to it that comes from its fast response to input, but it is true that consoles have lagged behind in other ways like media richness and user interface display.
Quantum computers promise to upend a lot of this. Because of the way they work, they excel at the sorts of computations necessary to reverse these
one-way functions. For symmetric cryptography, this isnāt too bad. Groverās algorithm shows that a quantum computer speeds up these attacks to
effectively halve the key length. This would mean that a 256-bit key is as strong against a quantum computer as a 128-bit key is against a conventional
computer; both are secure for the foreseeable future.
For public-key cryptography, the results are more dire. Shorās algorithm can easily break all of the commonly used public-key algorithms based on both
factoring and the discrete logarithm problem. Doubling the key length increases the difficulty to break by a factor of eight. Thatās not enough of a
sustainable edge.
Ryan Singer on the concept of products behaving like mathematical functions; they sit between an input and output, processing one into the other. Having known input and known desired output serves as a mental aid to āsolve forā f(x) in the middle.
