Experiments win. I am a huge fan of small data, in a world of big data small data wins more frequently. How so?

With age, I have developed a core belief, that in the most successful people I have interacted with, there is one trait, as dominant as their dominant hand, their willingness to run small experiments.

If you are a teacher, a parent, a manager a friend, over index on the experimenters. They win more frequently. Why? Because they believe in the power of using small data, small victories small iterations to prove to them selves that the path they are on is a path to victory.

It’s easily accessible and small-sized data that can be easily comprehended by humans looking to get actionable insights. Indeed, small data is all about people.

As you can see, small data can point out the specific attributes that are unfulfilled prospective customer needs(if you are a builder this is huge). The irony is that only 12% of companies are analyzing their existing small data, as per Forrester research.

That means that data for 88% of them is getting wasted.

Imagine for example the intelligent social media marketing strategy and business decisions that you could have made with this ignored data. For that matter in any setting, the price of ignoring this data is some thing we are not capturing but should.

Think Small.

Outcomes

A fantastic thread from a friend. An insightful perspective on outcomes.

One New Thing (That I Learnt today)

Virgin Atlantic kept having passengers steal their popular salt and pepper shakers.

The chief executive came in one day and said to Branson the Founder, “We’re losing thousands of these. It’s costing the airline tens of thousands of dollars a month. You’re going to have to take them off. They’re far too popular.”

And Branson thought, “If they’re far too popular, do we really want to take them off? It’s a compliment.”

So we just put underneath them, “pinched from Virgin Atlantic.” We then found that people were continuing to steal them, and they were ending up on their dining-room table. They hadn’t looked underneath. Their guests would look underneath. And the whole evening was spent talking about Virgin Atlantic in one of our best advertising tools ever! That was a fun one which worked really well.

Every thing is a promotional tool!

Boring stuff that Scales

Boring scales beautifully. An unbelievable story of Toronto pizza restaurant General Assembly - less than a year ago they closed for the pandemic. In that time, they pivoted to a frozen pizza subscription service and closed a $13M Series A funding round. Incredible pivot.

Subscriptions are boring business and frozen pizza is not a new category, its been available across grocery stores/retail for decades.

So what happened here?

In September 2017 they launched their e-commerce platform for their monthly pizza subscription service. The goal was to get 100 subscribers in the first month, ideally 250 the next. Instead, they got 50 on the first day, 500 by the first month and over 1,000 subscribers in eight weeks. Over that period they were doing everything out of the restaurant—making the pizzas, packing the pizzas, delivering the pizzas—and they realized that wasn’t going to be sustainable. If they wanted to keep going they were going to have to level up their production, so they had an internal meeting where they asked ourselves “Are we in or are we in?” We needed to try to raise some capital and double down on becoming an e-commerce company. With an initial goal of 3.5m$ they closed at 13. The rest is history.

Some times solutions stare us in the face. They could have shut down the restaurant during the pandemic or just given up, but they didn't tire in the face of boring aka frozen pizzas, instead they pivoted and built the worlds first subscription pizza service. The full story here.

Can you build an incrementally driven subscription service?

Heres how you should think about subscriptions.

What you should be watching

Understanding how Chinese money impacts Africa is a good primer in understanding our own reality.

Monetize your time (by learning Notion)

If you do one thing today to enhance your outcomes, spend/invest time in learning Notion to impact the rest of your life(by learning a low/no code tool). Dramatic statement, perhaps, but a great starting position for those who thought they were missing out on the tech revolution because they could not code.

Start here.

https://thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals/

As recommended by Faisal Khan and after spending many hours going through the tutorials, that view is fully endorsed.

Made in Pakistan (not for long)

Whether that is true or not, modern research suggests that the tabla were invented in the first half of the 18th century (about 1738) by a drummer named Amir Khusru, who was instructed to develop a more subtle and melodic percussion instrument that could accompany the new style of music called Khayal.

One Last thing

Tony Robbins calls this the “Science of Achievement and the Art of Fulfillment”

We think they are related, but they are really separate skills:

1. Learning how to get what you want

2. Learning how to want what you have