I continue to be fascinated by Instagram’s cultural and economic impact. Taylor Lorenz writes in Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job:

Helen Boogzel, CEO of Boogzel Apparel, said her company receives a steady stream of messages from young people — almost universally girls — looking to make extra money, and that teen marketing has been critical to the young company’s growth. “Some companies buy positive reviews or try to get into fashion magazines,” she said. “That’s fake and it kills your brand. It’s better to work with teenagers directly and know their honest opinion about your brand. Our clothes are inspired by culture and the internet. Young people create this culture.”

They also, crucially, don’t charge much: Depending on the teen’s audience and experience, most shops typically pay $5 to $20 for a post.

“Teenagers are more affordable to work with because of their follower count and age,” said Christy Oh, an 18-year-old who handles marketing for DouxLashes, which sells fake eyelashes. “They’re not doing insta as a full time thing, they’re just trying to make extra money, so it’s not super expensive to partner with them.”

Here are a few other interesting articles about Instagram’s impact and… bizarreness:

• How Instagram Became the Art World’s Obsession
• Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts
• The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed
• Fake it till you make it: meet the wolves of Instagram

I’ve been really intrigued by Ryan Singer’s thinking around Products as Functions:

Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation.

This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user’s circumstance instead of a bundle of features.

I’ve been using this thinking on a new project we’re working on at Postmark. I like this approach because it gives us a framework to communicate why something is a good idea to work on, and it focuses on the benefit for customers. If our answer to the question “How much better is this new outcome?” is “Not better enough”, then we need to define a better Output situation, which would lead to a better Process.


Nicholas Carr chases down the origin of the phrase ”It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature.” This bit stuck with me:

INABIAF—the initialism has earned a place in the venerable Acronym Finder—is for programmers as much a cri de coeur ¹ as an excuse. For the rest of us, the saying has taken on a sinister tone. It wasn’t long ago that we found software ­dazzling, all magic and light. But our perception of the programmer’s art has darkened. The friendly-seeming apps and chatbots on our phones can, we’ve learned, harbor ill intentions. They can manipulate us or violate our trust or make us act like jerks. It’s the features now that turn out to be bugs.

It seems that more and more, we simply don’t trust our software any more. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Cal Newport has some thoughts on the “digital ethics” movement. In his post Beyond Digital Ethics he argues that large companies will never turn their backs on revenue just because it’s “the right thing to do”:

Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle.

We don’t need to convince YouTube to artificially constrain the effectiveness of its AutoPlay algorithm, we should instead convince users of the life-draining inanity of idly browsing YouTube.

This approach will be challenging too, because we are up against some really strong brain psychology. As Don Norman notes in Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The continual bombardment of tantalizing tidbits of information deliberately designed to grab our attention away from other, potentially more valuable activities are distractions that can lead to accidents, injury, and interpersonal problems.

We are in uncharted territory and there are no easy solutions.

Don Norman attempts to explain Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The continual bombardment of tantalizing tidbits of information deliberately designed to grab our attention away from other, potentially more valuable activities are distractions that can lead to accidents, injury, and interpersonal problems. What kind of business exploits curiosity for its own ends? Almost any business that discovers there are profits to be made by continually engaging people’s curiosity, hopes, and interests. For example gambling, computer games, social networks, and even television series that can go on and on, week after week, year after year, trapping their viewers into addiction.

We talk a lot about “personal responsibility” and how it’s up to each person to make good choices about how they spend their time. That is true as far as it goes, but it brushes over the incredibly strong forces of persuasion theory and how easily humans are manipulated. “Personal responsibility” doesn’t give us a hall pass to exploit the human brain’s weaknesses.

Nikhil Sonnad writes that Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason:

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

Here’s the crux of it:

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

This bit from Raluca Budiu and Page Laubheimer’s user study of digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri echoes my thoughts exactly on why I don’t like interacting with them:

Many participants started speaking before formulating the query completely (as you would normally do with a human), and occasionally paused searching for the best word. Such pauses are natural in conversation, but assistants did not interpret them correctly and often rushed to respond. Of course, answers to such incomplete queries were incorrect most of the time, and the overall effect was unpleasant: participants complained that they were interrupted, that the assistant “talked over them”, or that the assistant was “rude.” Some even went as far as to explicitly scold the assistant for it (“Alexa, that’s rude!”).

Yep. When I interact with voice UIs I spend way more time and energy planning the exact sentence construction and pronunciation than when I simply type and swipe and figure it out as I go. And then, if one word is out of place, the whole thing falls apart. It’s just too stressful. I can’t.

Eugene Wei’s Invisible asymptotes is a long, excellent article about the importance of not just thinking about product-market fit, but also product-market unfit:

For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and I suspect the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit.

For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It’s an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance.

He goes on to discuss those asymptotes for different companies (for example, shipping fees for Amazon). Another interesting bit:

We speak often of the economics concept of the demand curve, but in product there is another form of demand curve, and that is the contour of the customers’ demands of your product or service. How comforting it would be if it were flat, but as Bezos noted in his annual letter to shareholders, the arc of customer demands is long, but it bends ever upwards. It’s the job of each company, especially its product team, to continue to be in tune with the topology of this “demand curve.”

I see many companies spend time analyzing funnels and seeing who emerges out the bottom. As a company grows, though, and from the start, it’s just as important to look at those who never make it through the funnel, or who jump out of it at the very top. The product market fit gradient likely differs for each of your current and potential customer segments, and understanding how and why is a never-ending job.

Figuring out what your product’s invisible asymptotes are sounds like a really good thought process to me. At the beginning of the article Eugene mentions one way Amazon tried (and succeeded) in answering this question:

For people who did shop with us, we had, for some time, a pop-up survey that would appear right after you’d placed your order, at the end of the shopping cart process. It was a single question, asking why you didn’t purchase more often from Amazon.

Another technique he mentions:

One approach I’ve taken when talking to companies who are trying to achieve initial or new product-market fit is to ask them why every person in the world doesn’t use their product or service. If you ask yourself that, you’ll come up with all sorts of clear answers, and if you keep walking that road you’ll find the borders of your TAM taking on greater and greater definition.

A good way to frame this could be to ask yourself something like this:

If we didn’t change anything about [product name], at what point would we hit a growth ceiling, and what are the factors that would cause that?

If you can have a reasonably confident answer to where the S-curve inflection point will be, you can start planning on avoiding it early. That’s a worthy effort, and definitely something I intend to think through for our products.