📚 Great copywriting, Ways of working, Product waitlists, Tech job market, Architecting Aadhar
Secret hand gestures in paintings, Olympics stories and more
Hi, this is post #170.
I met some old friends in the last couple of weeks. We’ve seen each other through different phases of life. Some things changed with time. But, a lot more stayed as it was. We did not need to put effort to figure out what it was. It was super easy to go back to good-old-days and relive some nostalgic moments.
Our lives are shaped by the people around us. I'm grateful to have met amazing people along the way. The friendships I started back then have brought me so much happiness and pride. I hope to continue nourish these and make some more. There is no better joy.
That’s what is my top of the mind right now. And now, a quick look at today’s post:
Looks exciting right? Why wait any longer, let’s jump straight to it…
🕸️ Ways of Working
In any organization, things can work in three ways - Official, Real, and the Ideal. Here’s an easy explainer of what John Cutler means by these.
Official = Rules, the prescribed way of working
Real = how it actually happens, those unsaid ways of working.
Ideal = how it should be, if we take away all the constraints.
But, he does not stop at this level. He goes on to outline the possible ways we can move from one to another. Things get a little complex, but more actionable.
John is a master of astute observations. He describes nuances of our interactions that often go unnoticed. I was amazed to read what he said.
Just a casual warning - Don’t expect a solution here, Read this to appreciate a better way of seeing things.
📄 Managing Product Waitlist
This one is for the product builders and the growth managers.
Henrique Cruz wrote a great post covering do's and don'ts of managing a product waitlist. Henrique is the Head of Growth at Rows and has captured his learning from doing waitlists at Rows in this post.
It captures a lot of details, including tactical inputs on each stage of the program. However, my biggest takeaway is from the section covering why have a product waitlist.
There are tons of growth hacks, and we’re tempted to attempt them all. Knowing why a hack is suitable to your product/objective is a great starting point.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the whys:
1. Validate initial product hypothesis
2. People cannot successfully onboard themselves
3. Product is waiting legal approval
4. Long lead times to delivery
5. Create FOMO
The last one is the most tricky and good to get into some more details around it.
This is typically a bad reason to add a waitlist to a product. The potential upside - the product goes viral and word of mouth drives the waitlist up like crazy - will most likely be outweighed by the downside - losing customers because they can’t access the product.
Unless you have a unique insight on how to make the product go viral, you can skip this marketing play and work on something else.
(via Growth Unhinged newsletter)
🧑💻 Understanding Tech Job Market
I find it hard to describe why I loved Matt Stancliff’s “Panic! at the tech job market”.
Maybe because it covers a lot of ground on the topic:
Job Openings vs. Interest Rates
Company Structures
How to Get Hired
Everything Bagel and a Bag of Chips
to apathy, to entropy, to empathy
Conclusion
Maybe it’s Matt’s ability to connect the dots. He surprises with his deduction, time and again.
Maybe it’s his witty and clever writing. I was fully entertained, even though the discourse goes in academic & technical directions at times.
Let me know if you could figure out what worked for you.
(via Readwise)
🖼️ Don’t Bleed on the Artwork
In “Don’t bleed on the artwork”, Wendy Brenner recalls her days as a part-timer – or can I call it an apprentice – at an art-framing shop. Her boss, the proprietor of the shop, has been at this craft for almost 50 years now. This place is like a place of worship for him, and Wendy is learning to appreciate the world of frame-making and life in general as she spends her time there.
Wendy paints with her words. She has framed her world through those lines & vividly described paragraphs.
Here’re a few snippets for tasting:
Sometimes customers actually gasp when I show them their finished framed piece, or even when they see a frame sample held against some artwork. Maybe the art doesn’t look like much, or even like art. Maybe it’s a mass-produced postcard or a child’s crayon scribble. The frame changes everything.
My boss is laughing, of course. His long gray mustache covers the corners of his mouth, so it takes me some weeks working there to realize he’s smiling. Later I learn where on his face to look.
Reading this, I picture our customers, generation upon generation of people floating through the ages with their infinite torrent of saved stuff, their evidence of life, the photos and flags and newspapers, their kids’ drawings and baby teeth, their dead pets, their flower crowns, their diplomas and vintage candy wrappers. I love them so much, these people.
Good writing makes you feel traveled and satiated. I felt it reading this piece. I hope it does something similar for you too.
🪪 Architecting Aadhar
If you’ve been regular here, you will recall that India’s DPI (digital public infrastructure project), its poster child - Aadhar, UPI and ONDC - are some of my favorite areas of exploration.
Tigerfeathers did another post on them, this time on the behind the scenes from the architecting Aadhar. Here’s what the subtitle reads - The story of a software architecture decision that saved billions of dollars, millions of lives, and set the stage for a nation's prosperity.
With Pramod Varma as the main character, this piece travels to the realm of technical, social, bureaucratic aspects of this project.
Tigerfeathers has mastered their unique style of business writing and it does a wonderful help on a broad theme like this.
It’s a super long read, jumping between factual reporting and storytelling seamlessly. The witty, filled with latest memes but not overdone vibe, makes it a breezy read. Give it a read, you’re going to like it.
Here’s a sample of the kind of fare you can expect in this piece.
💯 Great Copywriting
Harry Dry and David Perell do a masterclass on great copywriting. 76 minutes of condensed lessons from two folks who know their sh*t about writing!
A great conversation, both are in flow, sparring over ideas. There is so much of “show, don’t tell” to make it super fun & engaging.
David Perell is a great interviewer and a good student. He is never afraid to ask dumb questions, and confirm what he understands. He knows his audience well. Whenever I felt confused or wanted to double click, he was already doing it in the next few seconds.
He has a pinned comment in the youtube video capturing the key takeaway. I am picking up the most useful bit here.
The three laws of copywriting:
Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant.
Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.
Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.
If you’re keen to explore more, Demand Curve recommends to find the benefit of the benefit. It can be a powerful approach if you know your customer & product really (really) well. Check out the examples and you know what I mean.
🏅 Olympics Stories
Your feeds must be filled with the news and memes from the Paris Olympics. I am skipping those and sharing a few stories that go beyond the usual coverage.
How to boost your medal count in seven easy steps. Not a clickbait. Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen discuss the economics of Olympic success in this piece from 2012. It’s a short piece but touches on some critical inputs that impact a nation’s chance at sporting glory at international level.
Rohan Bopanna’s path to the Olympics, via a Grand Slam and doubles world No 1. Inspiring tale of a hero who fought against all odds to rise from the ashes and was able to represent India at the world stage once more. Goosebumps!
Culture Tutor on why does Paris look the way it does? He is, of course, talking about the beautiful city it is today and not a garbage dump it was just 170 years ago. A good thread on the history of Paris.
David Epstein shares some interesting stats and trivia including why so many shooters are left handed.
✨ Everything else
During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body. Hence, representation of the position of the hands became a decorative element that was almost as important as the face. Thus, given its high visibility, hand gestures in portraits and paintings have been one of the most effective ways of conveying secrets, codes and messages. [...] This paper will examine the eventual hidden meanings behind a peculiar hand gesture that has been widely used by several painters.
These shoes are made for talking. Hand gestures are not the only way to pass secret messages. Dan Lewis takes us to the Cold War days and talks of a super ingenious way deployed by the CIA.
Karim Amr ‘s feed is filled with some stunning views of the Pyramids of Giza. In his words, you can see a lot of photos I share at the pyramids cause I just live near the pyramids so it’s easy for me to go and shoot there. Check his Instagram feed for more.
And finally, something I picked from Reza's Out of Curiosity newsletter.
⏰ In case you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
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, leave a comment or share with someone who will find it useful too. It’s highly encouraging.
As always, I look fwd to Mondays :-)
Thx for sharing the wealth of information. Pritesh. I don't say it as often as I probably should but a big, big Thank You!
Nice collection.
Some of Cutler's ideas remind me of Peter Senge in his biok Fifth Discipline. He adopts a systems thinking lens to org behavior issues. Related to this, wrt to the product waitlist piece, it struck me that a legacy conversation would involve stocks and flows. That you need to maintain appropriate stock to keep place with flow (market demand). Building software products turns that on its head. Software stock can be scaled up quickly (unlike say brewing beer or making cars), so an idea like product waitlist thrives. A question about maintaining a product waitlist is how can we make it customer-centric.