📚 Understanding Bharat, 100 Big ideas for India, Price hikes & Power law in culture

+ Taylor Swift’s storytelling and more interesting ideas from across the internet

Hi & welcome to 2024. 

This is post #139. I’m back to the regular rhythm and excited to present today’s finds. Here’s a quick look at the list:

💡 100 Big Ideas for India

🇮🇳 Understanding Bharat

 💸 Price Hike Strategy

📉 Power Laws in Culture

🧑‍🎤 Person of the Year 2023

Let’s jump right in.

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💡 100 Big Ideas for India

If you’re exploring a new challenge, Antler’s Next100 curates 100 big ideas for founders. From AI to Fintech, they have shared ideas from a good mix of investors, operators and founders. 

This list may be just scratching the surface, but the observations that lead to these ideas give you a good way to explore more.

Here’re a couple of good examples of what I am talking about.

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🇮🇳 Understanding Bharat

I’ve spent the last couple of years building products & business that cater to Tier 2/3/4 audiences. I guess, we have a better name for this audience now - Bharat. It’s not been easy to understand this audience & their behavior. We struggle on every aspect - from their aspirations to willingness to spend. I come from a tiny town in central India, visit it regularly and yet I am surprised everyday at things we get to learn from our users' choices.

Dharmesh Ba’s The India Notes  and Mithun Madhusudan’s The Indian Pivot have some good posts to help discover some visible trends on Bharat. They share a fair mix of primary research and anecdotal references to make their content worth reading. 

Bharat is as mystical to us in our substack/twitter world as India is to the western world. So, you should take a lot of content written about Bharat with a pinch of salt (and some skepticism - there is very little absolutely established yet). But then, something is better than nothing.

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🧑‍🎨 Career tips for all

Dan Mall’s 10 Principles for a worthy design career is  relevant to more professions than what the title suggests. Anyone looking to grow, reach ambitious goals & create meaningful impact should find them useful. A couple of snippets for the keep.

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💸 Price Hike Strategy

I found this gem in Neal’s Demand Curve newsletter. He shared a brief piece on how to create a ‘price hike’ strategy to create urgency. 

The snippet below explains the challenge very well.

He goes on to share the example from Steph Smith's strategy for her pricing her course Internet Pipes about research. You can check Steph’s original post, or Neal's post for a quick overview including his thoughts on why this is a great example. 

Here’s the snippet that sums it up.

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📉 Power Laws in Culture

If you’re up to reading a long form piece on the evolving impact of social media & community on the content world, Doug Shapiro’s Power Laws in Culture is an excellent read. He talks of why hits will persist in an infinite content world. A couple of snippets on why social signals influence our choice (and thus lead to ‘hits’ in some shape and form).

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✨ Everything else

1. Little late to share this, but this is a really funny post-dinner interview with a twelve-year-old who sat at the grown-ups’ table for the first time on Thanksgiving. 

2. Person of the Year 2023: Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect.

3. Vishal Bhardwaj is a magician with his words. This hour long conversation with Mayank Shekhar is like a story that you don’t want to finish. And if you are not entertained, this rendition of Pani Pani Re is surely going to make your day!

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That's all for this week, folks! 

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

Please leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging. If that’s too much of an effort (or not required), at least hit the ❤️ at the start or end of the post to show your love. 

Pritesh