This one is special. I’ve curated it while juggling between a bout viral fever, project deadline at work and completing preparation for Kashmir Trip. A lot of things coming together at a critical moment, keeping my fingers crossed that it will pan out well.
Thank you Haimanti & Nirjhar for the kind shoutout for “Stay Curious”. You’ve helped find some more curious folks and get them in our fold.
We think the best way is to start by focusing on how the customer relates to the problem your product solves.
There are different kinds of problems, and different ways customers relate to them.
Here’s a quick summary of the three models:
(Source: Sequoia Blog)
It further goes on to give some useful and actionable inputs on how to operate in each path. I found the three situations spot on and useful in assessing where we’re operating. Its biggest help lies in the fact that it forces us to think beyond our solution and about the customer’s problem.
You may relate to that challenge and thus might find this a useful read to help improve your approach to evaluating your PMF equation.
💣 Paradox of Creative Sense
The first sign of a brilliant idea is strongly divided reactions. And such ideas find it difficult to get the buy-in of the majority easily. And thus we get the Paradox Of Creative Consensus.
The post goes on to offer a couple of tips on how to protect a novel idea. Here’s one of those:
We reject a novel idea when we have specific criteria for assessing its usefulness. This of course requires us to identify the criteria upon which we should evaluate the quality of an idea in the first place.
So pin down your problem sharply and identify the solution criteria well and you may be able to give the novel idea its best shot at succeeding.
🏷️ Naming as a Tool
Deb Liu’s newsletter offers ideas that can address challenges from all walks of life. She can talk about anything - from how she manages her kids, to running her home and including challenges she faces at work. And her solutions are almost always built on simple insights; no fancy frameworks.
Naming is a powerful thing. It creates an image with just a word or two. A name means something to those in the know; it acts as a cultural touchstone by creating a joint experience. In our family, we marked things by giving them a name, and we used that to create a family language that memorialized our traditions and activities. It’s such a normal part of our lives, it can be easy to forget how much power a name really holds.
She goes on
This is the power of naming: It creates intimacy. It draws lines between insiders who are in the know and outsiders who are not. It creates culture and cohesion.
She shared some inputs around naming gone wrong and how to use this effectively. Worth a quick read. Her examples of naming things with her kids are really interesting and worth trying.
As it happens, I’ve saved a lot more fun ideas around the topic of ‘naming’ & how it comes to be. If you’re up for it, you can check them out.
When we name something, we gain a certain sense of ownership over it. This appeals to the endowment effect: we value the things we feel like we own. And the Ikea effect: we value the things we contributed to (even if it's just in deciding a name).
No matter where you put us, we humans always default to meaning-making. Naming things is just one of the ways we do that. And, when we do that as a team, we don’t just get personal ownership, identity, and meaning, we get collective ownership. Team identity. Shared meaning. It’s the best kind.
🤖 LLMs & Chatbots
We’re lost in the sea of all new cool tools that are letting us experience the magic of Generative AI. Many of them have a chat / chatbot like interface. Amelia Wattenberger warns and explains why she thinks that chatbots are not the future.
Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used. If we think about a good pair of gloves, it's immediately obvious how we should use them. They're hand-shaped! We put them on our hands. And the specific material tells us more: metal mesh gloves are for preventing physical harm, rubber gloves are for preventing chemical harm, and leather gloves are for looking cool on a motorcycle.
Compare that to looking at a typical chat interface. The only clue we receive is that we should type characters into the textbox. The interface looks the same as a Google search box, a login form, and a credit card field.
Of course, users can learn over time what prompts work well and which don't, but the burden to learn what works still lies with every single user. When it could instead be baked into the interface.
She is writing based on her experience as a researcher & builder of user interfaces. Her suggestions sound fair. It will be interesting to see how some of these challenges get addressed.
Benedict Evans trying to explain the evolution of tools & workflows in “Office, messaging and verbs”. This post was written in 2015, you can see some predictions that have come true in the decade since.
Here’s the core message:
Hence, channeling Marshall McLuhan, new tools start out being made to fit the existing workflows, but over time the workflows change to fit the tools.
On Microsoft Office
I'd suggest that Microsoft Office is actually somewhat unusual in the field of productivity apps in how broad its use ended up being. Most normal people don't use Photoshop just to crop their holiday pictures or AutoCAD to sketch out where to put a new sofa, but Office encompasses both people who are using it for what it's designed and optimised for, and people using it because it's there, since it's so widely and cheaply distributed (perhaps 1bn copies are in use today in one way or another) and so broad and flexible.
🗣️ Epenthesis
Epenthesis is derived from the Ancient Greek verb epentíthēmi (‘I insert’) and means a simple process in which a new sound is added into a word.
The Latin word camera is of course the direct origin of English camera, but its meaning for the Romans wasn’t anything photographic, but rather a kind of room. After later losing its second vowel, *cam’ra would gain an epenthetic /b/. This is how French today has chambre ‘room’, and is the source of chamber in English.
Old French also added in other consonants in other contexts. A voiceless /t/ consonsant inserted itself in a sequence of /sr/. For example, antecessor in Latin is literally a ‘before-goer’. Applied to genealogy, *antecess’re is recognsibly the origin of ancestor. This may also be why something’s reason for existing is a raison d’être. Latin esse ‘to be’ became essere and presumably then *ess’re. This would eventually lead to the Modern French verb for ‘to be’, être.
Check it out even if you’re not an etymology nerd. English is a very funny language, and this post can offer some clues as to why.
🤗 Little Moments of Joy
Our curiosity can take us places. The following two stories are a great example of what is possible when you go down a rabbit hole chasing one simple idea. These are also little moments of joy for me.
A celebrity in every taxi. An oral history of NYC’s talking taxi program. A celebrity making a public service announcement. We’ve seen it many times in the last couple of years. This one goes back a few decades.
PostSecret. It was a website where people mailed in physical postcards containing secrets from the mundane to the deep, which were posted anonymously every Sunday. Enjoy this interview with Frank Warren, the deliveryman who launched the project in the mid 2000s.
✨ Everything else
What the Tulsa race massacre destroyed. An interactive visual piece by NYT recreating a time & society that suffered massive injustice in the name of race.
Ghana must go. If you know the “Articles Of Interest” podcast, you know what to expect here. A touching story describing the history & cultural significance of a storage bag.
Top 10 smuggest pastas; I did not know many, but Sarah Gailey has shared convincing details to agree with her assessment. She knows her Pastas and has a great sense of humor. (via Trivia Mafia)
I may not have read most of these books, but I so want to go to this picture book museum.
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
If you liked this post, please hit the ❤️ below to help spread the word! Leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging.
There’s so much useful info you have packed in here Pritesh. I look forward to reading all the stuff over the course of the week! Stay well