📚 Game of inches, Dating apps, How to build a subculture, Embracing paradox, Experimental playgrounds, Year of dinner parties
Problem with tennis balls, Nigerian email scammers, Stained-glass sculptures
Hello, this is post #197
I picked up two interesting books last week—one dives into gaming, the other unpacks culture. Mixing things up keeps it fresh. A few great conversations added extra spark to this week’s discoveries. What more could I ask for?
Now, let’s jump in and see what we’re exploring today:
Let’s get started…
🛴 Game of Inches
It’s been a while since I came across a great operator breaking down the real nuts and bolts of their business. So when I saw the outline of Wayne Ting (Lime’s CEO) episode on the 20VC podcast, I was all in. And it didn’t disappoint. It was a deep dive into on-the-ground realities and the kind of hands-on leadership that makes a real impact. Here are some standout moments.
On the biggest competitor:
Harry: Who is the competitor that you most respect when you come up in an RFP against?
Wayne: The competitor that I spent most of my time thinking about is the car. The car is our biggest competitor. The majority of car trips are under five miles in cities. The most common number of people in a car is one person. If we can convince all the people driving for three miles, four miles by themselves to give up that car and use a bike and scooter instead, that is the biggest opportunity for growth.
The game of inches
And it is a game of inches. A lot of these things are tiny, imperceptible things. We have a down tube and the scooters, and we like to increase the length of the connector. So it takes less time to connect the connector with the CCU that saves, let's say 30 seconds, 40 seconds.
When you do that thousands of times in our latest bike, for example, the battery pack sits behind the chair of an operator when they swap the swappable battery, sometimes we'd have to move the chair up and down an inch or two to get the battery out again. That's maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds, but when you multiply that by millions of times, that becomes real dollars for the real cost to the P and L.
So we made it so that an operator can always swap a battery. Regardless of any, they don't have to make any incremental changes to the seat. And we started to share parts between our Gen 4 scooters and our Gen 4 e bikes.
I love how Harry Stebbings asks sharp, probing questions that pull out fascinating details. That’s what separates a great podcast host from an average one. Tyler Cowen is the master of this craft, and Guy Raz (of How I Built This) is another solid name. Who else would you add to this list?
👨❤️👨 Behind the Scene of Dating Apps
In “The reality of dating apps,” Paul Gonsolin dives deep into the mechanics of user engagement and what goes on behind the scenes of a dating app. As an engineer and product builder, he unpacks the business with impressive detail.
I love this piece for two reasons:
It covers a lot without feeling overwhelming or too technical.
He blends data with real human behavior. It’s rare to see such a sharp, well-rounded take on consumer products.
Honestly, I’d love to work with product builders who can break things down like this. Sample this snippet on “Perceived attractiveness”
Perceived attractiveness is one of the few big problems of dating apps. To summarize, perceived attractiveness of guys is lower than their real attractiveness in real life. And perceived attractiveness of girls is higher than in real life. And it all comes down to your ability to have good pictures. And actually on a dating app as a user level it only comes down to the quality of your pictures.
To me, if you are a guy on a dating app and your pictures are not taken by a professional photographer then you are losing your time, and if you are paying you are also throwing your money.
The issue with this difference of perceived attractiveness from dating apps/real life is that girls will internally build a feeling that they can have any guy (even if they rationally know this is wrong). And will not accept to like at their level, which is a problem as they will be dissatisfied with their matches. For guys at the contrary they will receive less attention on a dating app than they receive in real life and will conclude that dating apps don't work. While the truth is just that their pictures suck.
One thing that has been suggested to standardize looks is to use video, and especially video on the go. But it doesn't work, we tried to make it work a lot, but at the end of the day, girls they don't feel pretty all the time. And also a lot of them don't accept how they look and will only accept a video where they have filters. So by forcing everyone to use videos, then you basically prevent girls that look pretty in pictures from signing up. Guys were much more willing to do a video, about double than women. The only videos that work are videos that you have on your phone, but they are usually taken in the exact right conditions to look good so they don't at all help to standardize looks.
It’s a long read, but totally worth it. You rarely find such a deep dive into a product category as tricky and layered as dating apps.
(via Sidebar)
☮️ How to Build a Subculture
Jeremiah Johnson lays out a user’s guide to building a subculture, and it’s packed with sharp insights. I’ve been diving deep into community-building, and this post nailed a lot of things I’ve noticed but hadn’t fully put into words.
The first and most important ingredient? A cause people care about—something they can rally behind. This is where many so-called “communities” (especially those built by brands) fall short. They focus on structure but forget the spark that makes people actually want to belong.
Like a real-world flag, a good Flag is distinctive and memorable. It should be easily identifiable, even from a distance. It should give your group a purpose, a reason to gather and form a community. An ideal Flag will scratch a cultural itch, fill a hole that people didn’t even realize needed filling. A Flag gives your group an identity to share. It’ll give you a purpose. It will likely give you a name.
Then comes in-group symbolism—deliberate markers of belonging (and, let’s be real, ways to keep outsiders out). Every strong community has these, whether it’s slang, inside jokes, or visual symbols.
If I were to reference wanting taco trucks on every corner or show you a picture of Janet Yellen with lasers coming out of her eyes, most of you would be confused. But a few of you would get the jokes formed in neoliberal communities and feel a small thrill at being an insider who understood the reference. That’s the point. Mutual recognition of an inside joke or an in-group meme cements a sense of belonging — and is especially thrilling for new members. For the first time, they’re in on the joke.
Johnson outlines four more principles, each of which hit me with an “aha” moment. I started mapping them to communities I’ve been tracking, and suddenly, a lot of things made sense. If you're thinking about community-building and culture, this is a must-read.
🧭 Embracing Paradox
Following up on last week’s post about divergent ideas, Muskan shared a brilliant piece from Rumi Partners titled “Embracing Paradox.” It builds on Schumacher’s categories of problems: convergent and divergent.
The author gives a simple example—designing a human-powered transportation system is a convergent problem. The solution naturally leads to a bicycle. But ask, “How should we educate our children?” and you’re facing a divergent problem. There isn’t one right answer. Many solutions exist, each backed by solid logic, experience, and reasoning. Some even contradict each other—that’s the paradox we have to accept.
The post also explores other paradoxes: trust vs. skepticism, patience vs. urgency, transparency vs. confidentiality. There’s a lot to chew on, especially for those building organizations. I love when a piece surfaces these deep, often unspoken tensions in a way that makes you stop and think.
🛝 Experimental Playgrounds
When you picture a playground, what do you see? Perhaps a space with slides, swings, climbing bars, and merry-go-rounds, with asphalt underneath, or maybe a bouncier, colourful surface that undulates. If it’s a bigger playground, it might have wooden huts on stilts with wood chips underneath – even a zip line, if you’re lucky.
Here’s what it won’t have: kids setting fires, sawing wood, cooking food, writing operettas, or constructing 50ft towers. It won’t look like a literal bomb site or junk yard. And it probably won’t have kids aged two to twenty.
But during the 20th century, all of these things happened. The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and in doing so, inoculate them against fascism. For a while it seemed like they were the future. Not any more.
That’s the premise of Adrian Hon’s Experimental Playgrounds — a deep dive into a forgotten era of public spaces designed for kids to explore, experiment, and take risks. Through vivid visuals and stories, Hon brings these playgrounds back to life, showing just how different childhood looked back then.
Today, most of these wild, hands-on spaces are gone. But maybe we haven’t lost them entirely. If you look inside Roblox or Minecraft, you’ll see kids still building, experimenting, and learning by doing—just in a digital world. In a way, these sandbox games might be the closest thing we have to that era of unstructured, creative play.
🥂 Year of Dinner Parties
In “My year of dinner parties (that weren't),” Somika Basu shares her journey from struggling with dinner parties to finally discovering their real joy. Her words pulled me in like a strong magnet—I couldn’t stop reading.
I don’t remember the last time I spiralised a zucchini. But I do remember potato chips dunked in garlic pickle, filter coffee after failed feni cocktails, and conversations that echoed through my kitchen long after the food was gone. Because isn’t that the point: not the performance, but the people. The glorious, messy, beautiful people who remind you that imperfection isn’t something to be fixed — it’s something to be shared.
🎾 Problem with Tennis Balls
The best way to snap an athlete out of platitude autopilot in a press conference is to get them to vent about some technical complaint. Like everyone else, they have esoteric gripes about their workplace, and are happy to explain them in full when given the chance.
Giri Nathan loves tennis, and while covering the big leagues, he set out to answer a question that’s been floating around — Tennis Ball Gotten Worse? (Archive here)
The ball-bashers had a few interwoven complaints: Different tournaments use different brands, making it annoying to switch between different balls from week-to-week; a single manufacturer's balls can vary vastly in quality from can to can; and, most interestingly, the quality of all tennis balls has become worse across the board.
He tracked player complaints and dug into the details. The post gets a bit technical but offers a fascinating look into the world of tennis and the science behind the game. Most of it was new to me, which made it even better. If you love learning about the hidden mechanics of sports, this one’s worth a read.
(via MR Blog)
✨ Everything else
Why do Nigerian email scammers still claim to be from Nigeria? A great example of the “Greater Fool” theory in action?
Timo Fahler makes sculptures from stained-glass, unlike you’ve seen in most stained glass work. Super creative stuff! (via Colossal)
ICYMI…
The Direct Marketing Archive was a hit last week—both for me and for readers. If you’re into great ads, it’s a goldmine. Also, I’ve got two fantastic podcast episodes lined up if you're craving some top-notch audio storytelling. You can check them out here:
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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