📚 JTBD in Practice, Flounder Mode, Building MSCHF, Masterclass on China’s Hypergrowth

Hard Work, Home Cooked App, Poetry Camera, No Joking & more

Hello, this is post #220.

Eventful week with its share of ups and downs. A new place brings its own surprises, and one such challenge took up most of last week. Things are settling now, back to normal. Not much more to say; let’s see what’s on the table.

Let’s jump into this week’s wonders, oddities, and new stories …

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🔬 Putting JTBD In Practice

I first learned about the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework through Prof. Christensen’s famous milkshake story. It’s one of those rare anecdotes: memorable, believable, and instantly useful. I’ve always wanted to apply something like that in my own work. And why not? Who’s ever been fired for using JTBD?

But looking back, I’ve never really pulled it off. And after reading Commoncog’s field report on Putting the Jobs to be Done Interview to Practice, I finally understand why.

They explain the core challenge well:

If we take a step back, the JTBD interview is actually really simple. It is just a way of getting your customers to tell you the story of how they bought your product.

The problem with it is two-fold. First, most customers can’t remember how they bought your thing. Second, the human mind is not designed for self knowledge. Humans will make up reasons for why they do things, and you have to catch them when they do. Skill at the JTBD interview is about getting better at both things separately.

Commoncog shares a few practical tips. The one I’m holding on to is this:

Ask for specifics — Always ask for the name of the dog. If they mention that they purchased at the kitchen table, ask them if they did it in the morning, or at night. If they tell you they’re married, ask for their spouse’s name. If you hear a dog barking in the background, ask for the name of the dog, and whether said dog was present when they made the purchase. Asking for concrete detail helps with recall.

Their example around solving for their own subscription business is a good case study if you want to see this in action.

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✨ Flounder Mode

So Brie Wolfson profiled Kevin Kelly and titled it Flounder Mode. That’s it. That’s the intro. My top pick from this week.

I’ve always loved Brie’s writing. It’s thoughtful, grounded, and quietly inspiring. Her career path has been an interesting one, and this essay offers a peek into one of her most life-shaping stints. Suddenly, it clicked — maybe that’s why her words resonate so much. Some parts of her journey feel oddly familiar. Similar challenges, similar excitement. I should study her path more closely. There might be a pattern worth chasing.

I spent nearly five years at Stripe, but the lily-padding continued—only this time it was all under one roof. A year into my tenure, I was given the choice between management or a nebulous role focusing on projects that would impact company culture. Like evolving our tradition of work anniversary celebrations, standing up company planning, establishing Stripe as a carbon-neutral company, getting non-developers to participate in our annual hackathon, defining our version of the ‘bar raiser’ interview, and printing and distributing a book (which eventually became Stripe Press). With very little pressing, I learned this nebulous role had emerged from the growing pile of projects that the former McKinsey consultants on the Business Operations team were avoiding.

And then there’s Kevin Kelly. What do I even say? Let me just share a photo Brie included in the piece. It’s a tiny window into the output of Kevin’s curiosity.

You’ll want to know more.

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🎧 Building MSCHF with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

MSCHF’s story is fascinating, and I can’t get enough of it. Patrick O'Shaughnessy’s conversation with its founder and CEO Gabe Whaley is packed with incredible stories about nurturing creativity, scaling it through culture, and everything happening behind the scenes of this phenomenal brand.

Here’s how Gabe describes what MSCHF is or does. It gives you a sense of the kind of mind & spirit we’re dealing with:

If you really had to think about what we're doing here, we're manufacturing cultural output. And so with that statement alone, it sort of removes the need for sticking to a category or having these arbitrary lines set up that dictate and define what you do over a long period of time.

For us, it's just purely cultural output. How can that live in whatever format, medium, device makes sense to resonate the most in culture, both now and in the future? And so if you look back at our body of work, what that has yielded is everything from, most obviously, very viral pieces of footwear to, maybe more interestingly, software that helps you do your taxes via going on virtual dates with a cute anime girl in a cafe.

Over the last decade, they’ve evolved constantly and stayed relevant in a world that keeps shifting. As Gabe says, the real test is whether they can keep doing this for ten more years to create lasting cultural impact.

I’ll be watching them — for inspiration and to spot what’s coming next.

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🇨🇳 Masterclass on China’s Hypergrowth

One more podcast pick for the week — this one’s from the folks at the ASSYMETRIC Podcast (Shantanu, Revant, and Chirag). Adi Sehgal, former President & COO at Reckitt, delivers a Masterclass on China’s Hypergrowth.

I had very little context on this topic going in, so I found it genuinely eye-opening. The episode is fast-paced and fun — two hours fly by without you noticing. Here are a couple of takeaways (compiled with a little AI help):

1. Iteration speed is the strategy

In the US, Reckitt launches one or two innovations a year. In China, it’s five per segment, per year. Most of them flop, but the learnings stack up fast. It’s not about designing the perfect pot — it’s about making 100 pots and improving with each one.

2. Brands are built on platforms

Chinese brands grow by riding platform waves. It used to be Alibaba, now it’s TikTok. They obsess over platform trends and move quickly with the algorithm shifts. That’s how they grow and stay relevant.

Definitely worth a listen if you want to understand what hypergrowth looks like up close.

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🦉 Hard Work as the Tuition for a Life Worth Having

Maalvika asks a bold question - why are we lying to young people about work?

She flips the script with a simple truth: “Hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having.”

This piece is packed with gems. A few that stayed with me:

Everything worth having lives on the other side of effort.

Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.

The people who understand this most deeply are often the happiest, because they've made peace with the beautiful burden of nurturing. They know that the dishes exist because they've been eating good meals all week. The laundry piles up because they've been living a life worth getting dressed for.

Good work should do at least one of these things: fund the life you actually want to live, align with values you can defend at dinner parties, surround you with people who challenge you to grow, or teach you skills that compound like interest over decades. Great work does several of these at once.

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.

You’ll get more than enough food for thought from just one read. Repeat as needed.

I just discovered her writing; and something tells me this won’t be the last time she shows up in this newsletter.

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🧑‍🍳 Home Cooked Apps

In An app can be a home-cooked meal, Robin Sloan writes about a handmade little app called BoopSnoop.

It launched in the first week of January 2020, and almost immediately, it was downloaded by four people in three different time zones. In the years since, it has remained steady at four daily active users, with zero churn: a resounding success, exceeding every one of its creator’s expectations.

What the app does, and how it’s stayed useful for so long, is one part of the charm. But the bigger story is why it was built — and the spirit behind it.

With all the AI tinkering and tool making happening again, it feels like the world is returning to home cooked apps. That can be a great thing for everyone involved, as long as we remember when we are cooking and when we are coding.

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📖 For the Joy of Reading

These last two pieces are for the pure joy of reading something beautiful.

1. Anish Ramachandran’s Tell Me Your Biggest Fear. I Will Tell You Mine. This piece contains references to sexual violence and harassment. But that’s not what left me speechless. It was Anish’s way with thoughts and words. He weaves them into something powerful, something that lingers.

2. Abhishek Verma is back with his new book: No Joking. This time he’s publishing his new book chapter by chapter on Substack. The first few posts are already live. The premise is fresh, and the narrative looks promising. Definitely worth following.

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✨ Everything else

1. Lessons about games, especially competitive ones, from a pillow fighting arena. This might be the first Bluesky thread in my curation, but it’s well worth reading. No download needed.

2. If you’re ever feeling generous and want to gift me something, here’s what’s high on my wishlist: a poetry camera.

3. Also, Charlotte Love makes faces. Everywhere. And they are so ridiculously cute.

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ICYMI…

Last week, my favourite bit were 1) 30 Minutes with a Stranger, 2) The Brotherhood That Watches Over You and 3) Your Baggage and Insecurity Inspection

There are on lighter theme but offer a lot of positive energy. Don’t miss them, here’s the link to the post:

📚 A/B testing at Booking.com, Vending machine run by Claude, Brief history of motion, Apple presentation

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That's all for this week, folks!

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If this piece sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what stood out—leave a comment and let’s keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone who’s always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what they’ve found.

Pritesh