(Thoughts on Ecommerce, Pt 1)

With much fanfare and many hot takes on Twitter, Shopify launched one of their “most significant products ever” a few days ago: a consumer-facing shopping app, simply called Shop.

Many have been interpreting this as a massive shift in Shopify’s strategy to compete more directly with Amazon.

I’m not so sure that’s the case.

Inspired by the launch of Shop, I decided to write a two-part essay on ecommerce. The first part – the article you’re reading right now – looks at the current state of online shopping. It explains the business model behind Shopify (and Amazon) and how Shop fits into that strategy.

The second part – which I’ll release next week – is an outlook on the future of ecommerce. It describes what I believe is currently missing in the shopping experience and what Shopify should build next.

Let’s dive into it.

To start things off, let’s first take a look at how Shopify and Amazon operate – because while both of them are ecommerce companies, their strategies are actually fundamentally different.

(Disclaimer: This section is essentially a brash copy summary of Ben Thompson’s excellent analysis on the same topic)

Shopify is first and foremost an infrastructure company. It provides a platform on which merchants can build their own stores to have a direct relationship with their end customers. This is why the type of business Shopify enables is often referred to as “direct to consumer” (D2C).

Amazon, on the other hand, is more of an aggregator. Alongside its own supply, Amazon lets any merchant sell their products on the Amazon.com website. But it is always Amazon which owns the customer relationship – never the merchant. The supply side becomes commoditized.

It’s not just the two companies’ strategies that are different – they also serve two completely different types of shopping behavior.

Any internet service can broadly be categorized based on two types of user actions: Pull and push.

Google is the perfect example of a Pull service. Users are actively looking for a particular piece of information or an answer to a specific question (e.g. “how to make pancakes?” or “are koalas bears?“). Google’s search engine lets you pull that information.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a typical Push service. The user behavior is a lot more passive since you don’t have to actively ask for information. Instead, Facebook automatically pushes the most relevant content into your newsfeed.

Amazon is essentially the Google of ecommerce. It’s primarily a search engine and works best when you already have an idea of what you want to buy. Amazon is not great at discovery though. It doesn’t show you things you didn’t even know you were interested in.

So who, then, is the Facebook of ecommerce?

That question is a little more difficult because there’s not one clear answer. Instead of one dedicated platform for product discovery, we have seen social networks like Instagram and Pinterest slowly morph into product discovery channels. And the fact that they are not pure ecommerce apps, but insert products between organic content, is probably exactly why they perform so well.

The types of products that work particularly well on Instagram are things that are visually appealing. You don’t see ads for HDMI cables or windshield phone mounts on Instagram – those are typical Amazon products.

Instead, it’s products like jewelry, cosmetics, fashion or home accessories that do well on Instagram – and those are classic Shopify D2C brands.

Shopify is powering the infrastructure of the “Facebook for ecommerce”, but it doesn’t own or control the entire channel. And that’s a risk.

Shopify’s model actually looks a bit more like this:

While some of that Instagram traffic might be organic, the most significant chunk of customers is coming from auction-based ads (due to Instagram’s no-link-policy). This means that as competition increases (and it always does once one D2C brand in a particular segment sees some success, because there aren’t any real barriers to entry), ad prices go up.

As a result, many of Shopify’s merchants aren’t really direct-to-consumer brands, they are more like direct-to-consumer-but-with-Instagram-in-the-middle-eating-all-of-their-margin brands.

Instagram capturing most of the value is a perfect example of why demand aggregation is always more powerful than supply aggregation. Too much reliance on a powerful gatekeeper like Instagram is a risk for Shopify and its merchants.

Luckily for Shopify though, there are several ways to mitigate that risk.

The first thing to note is that Instagram isn’t the only product discovery channel driving traffic to Shopify stores. As mentioned earlier, there is not one leading contestant for the role of “Facebook for Ecommerce”. Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter are also product discovery engines (among many other services trying to do the same).

One of Shopify’s options is therefore to diversify the portfolio of user acquisition channels its merchants can use. This is why I find Shopify’s Pinterest and Google Shopping partnership announcements from the last few weeks way more interesting than the launch of Shop.

Shop has been touted as Shopify’s own product discovery channel – which would be another way to tackle its current dependence on other platforms. Instead of relying on Instagram traffic, Shopify could simply start aggregating the demand side itself and become more of a marketplace like Amazon.

But if you install and open Shop, you’ll notice that that’s not really what the app does. Instead of a feed with product recommendations, Shop connects you with merchants you have purchased from in the past.

Here is why:

Another option to defend Shopify merchants against ever increasing customer acquisition costs (read Instagram ads) is to simultaneously increase customer lifetime value. This is exactly what Shop is supposed to do.

By connecting you with merchants you have bought from before, Shop will recommend you additional products that you might be interested in from the same sellers. The result is higher post-purchase loyalty and thus higher LTV which makes it easier to justify high initial acquisition costs via Instagram.

That being said, it’s not difficult to imagine a future where Shopify also starts recommending products from other merchants. What exactly this should look like is the topic of part two of this essay, which you can read here.

Do you have feedback or thoughts on this post?
If so, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks to Jan König for reading drafts of this post.

One of the favorite activities of tech analysts, VCs and similar Twitter armchair experts is to predict what the next big technology platform might be.

The usual suspects that come up in these conversations are VR/AR, crypto, smart speakers and similar IoT devices. A new contestant that I’ve seen come up more frequently in these debates recently are Apple’s AirPods.

Calling AirPods “the next big platform” is interesting because at the moment, they are not even a small platform. They are no platform at all. They are just a piece of hardware.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t become platform.

Let’s first take a look at what a platform actually is.

At its core, a platform is something that others can build on top of. A classic example would be an operating system like iOS: By providing a set of APIs, Apple created a playground for developers to build and run applications on. In fact, new input capabilities such as the touch interface, gyroscope sensor and camera allowed developers to create unique applications that weren’t possible before.

Platforms are subject to network effects: More applications attract more users to the platform, while more users in turn attract more developers who build more apps.

It’s a classic flywheel effect that creates powerful winner-takes-all dynamics. This explains why there are only two (meaningful) mobile operating systems – iOS and Android.

It also explains why everyone is so interested in upcoming platforms – and why Apple might be interested in making AirPods a platform.

In their current form, AirPods are not a platform. They don’t provide any unique input or output functionalities that developers could leverage. Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency Mode are neat but not new or Airpods-exclusive features – other headphones offer exactly the same. In either case, developers don’t have any control over them and thus can’t build applications that use these functionalities.

Some say that AirPods will give rise to more audio apps because they are “always in” which in turn will lead to more (and perhaps new forms of) audio content. That might be true – content providers are always looking for alternative routes to get consumers’ attention – but, again, it does not make AirPods a platform. You can use any other pair of headphones to use these audio apps as well.

If Apple wants to make AirPods a platform, it needs to open up some part of the AirPods experience to developers so that they can build new things on top of it.

The most obvious choice here is Siri, which is already integrated into every pair of AirPods.

In contrast to other voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, Apple has never really opened up Siri for 3rd-party developers. If they did, it would create a new platform that could have its own ecosystem of apps and developers.

But I’m not convinced that this is Apple’s best option.
Let me explain why.

Opening up Siri wouldn’t make AirPods a platform, it would make Siri a platform. This might sound like a technicality, but I think it’s an important difference. As Jan König brilliantly summarized in this article, voice isn’t an interface for one device – it’s an interface across devices. It’s more of a meta-layer that should tie different products together to enable multi-device experiences.

This means Apple has little interest in making Siri an AirPods-exclusive. Voice-based computing works best when it’s everywhere. It’s about reach, not exclusivity. This is part of the reason why Google and Amazon excel at it.

At the moment, Siri’s capabilities are considerably behind those of Google Assistant and Alexa. Again, this isn’t overly surprising: Google’s and Amazon’s main job is finding the right answers to users’ questions. The required ML capabilities for a smart assistant are among the core competencies of these two companies.

But even Amazon and Google haven’t really figured out the platform part yet, as indicated by the lack of breakout 3rd-party voice applications. It seems like the two platforms are still looking for their product-market-fit beyond being just cheap speakers that you can also control with your voice.

This is partly because the above-mentioned use case of voice as a cross-device layer isn’t something developers can build with the current set of APIs.

The other big reason I see is that people are mistaking voice as a replacement for other interfaces. Movies like Her paint a future where human-computer-interaction primarily occurs via voice-powered smart assistants, but in reality, voice isn’t great as a primary or stand-alone interface. It works best as an *additional* input/output channel that augments whatever else you are doing.

Let me give you an example: Saying “Hey Google, turn up the volume” takes 10x longer than simply pressing the volume-up button on your phone. It only makes sense when your hands are busy doing other things (kitchen work, for example).

The most convincing voice app I have seen to date was at a hackathon where a team used the StarCraft API to build voice-enabled game commands. Not to replace your mouse and keyboard but to give you an additional input mechanism. Actual multitasking.

I’m not against Apple opening Siri for developers. On the contrary, given that AirPods are meant to be worn all the time, a voice interface for situations that require multitasking is actually a very good idea. But voice input should remain the exceptional case. And it shouldn’t be what makes AirPods a platform.

Instead of voice, I’d love to see other input mechanisms that allow developers to build new ways for users to interact with the audio content they consume.

Most headsets currently on the market offer the following actions with one (or multiple) clicks of a physical button:

These inputs were invented a long time ago and there has been almost zero innovation since. Why has no one thought about additional buttons or click mechanisms that allow users to interact with the actual content?

For example, when listening to podcasts I often find myself wanting to bookmark things that are being talked about. It would be amazing if I could simply tap a button on my headphones which would add a timestamp to a bookmarks section of my podcast app. (Or better even, a transcript of the ~15 seconds of content before I pressed the button, which are then also automatically added to my notes app via an Apple Shortcut.)

Yes, you could build the same with voice as the input mechanism, but as we discussed earlier, saying “Hey Siri, please bookmark this!” just doesn’t seem very convenient.

While podcast apps might use the additional button as a bookmarking feature, Spotify could make it a Like button to quickly add songs to your Favorites playlist. Other developers could build completely new applications: Think about interactive audiobooks or similar two-way audio experiences, for example.

This is the beauty of platforms: You just provide developers with a set of tools and they will come up with use cases you hadn’t even thought about. Crowdsourced value creation.

(1) The input mechanism I describe doesn’t have to be a physical button. In fact, gesture-based inputs might be even more convenient. If AirPods had built-in accelerometers, users could interact with audio content by nodding or shaking their heads. Radar-based sensors like Google’s Motion Sense could also create an interesting new interaction language for audio content.

(2) You could also think about the Apple Watch as the main input device. In contrast to the AirPods, Apple opened the Watch for developers from the start, but it hasn’t really seen much success as a platform. Perhaps a combination of Watch and AirPods has a better chance of creating an ecosystem with its own unique applications?

(3) One thing to keep in mind is that Apple doesn’t really have an interest in making AirPods a standalone platform. The iPhone (or rather iOS) will always be the core platform that Apple cares about. Instead of separate iPhone, Watch and AirPods ecosystems, think about Apple’s strategy as more of a multi-platform bundle. Even as a platform, AirPods will remain more of an accessory that adds stickiness to the existing iPhone ecosystem.

Do you have thoughts or feedback on this post?
If so, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks to Jan König for reading drafts of this post.

One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler.

The book makes two main arguments:

a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking

b) Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self deception)

So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.

You may have heard about a similar concept before called conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption describes the practice of purchasing luxury goods (or services) for the sake of signaling the buyer’s wealth in order to attain or maintain a certain social status.

A classic example of this would be a luxury watch: A Rolex isn’t better at telling the time than a cheap Casio – but a Rolex signals something about its owner’s economic power and thus their social standing.

This is not a new theory, but Simler and Hanson argue that a lot more human behavior can be explained by signaling. Here are a few examples from the book:

• Consumption
  Signaling does not only explain luxury purchases but also consumption of all sorts of other goods: “Green products” are more about signaling a prosocial attitude than actually helping the environment. Other consumption signals include loyalty to a specific subculture (e.g. band t-shirts), athleticism & health consciousness (athleisure clothing) or intelligence (e.g. Rubik’s Cube).
  
  
• Charity
  There are several indicators that suggest that giving to charity isn’t really about improving the well-being of others: The lack of effective altruism demonstrates that we don’t care much about the actual outcome of our donations and studies show that our charitable behavior is heavily driven by visibility (hardly any donations are anonymous), peer pressure (95% of donations are solicited) and mating motives (donations are higher and more likely when observed by a member of the opposite sex). Charity is about appearing generous rather than actually doing good.
  
  
• Education
  You would think that going to school is about learning and acquiring skills, but then why do students pay tens of thousands of dollars for Ivy League schools when all of the learning material is effectively available online for free? Why do we use grading systems when we know that students learn worse when being graded? The answer, again, is signaling: Education helps with credentialing and signaling to potential employers.

There are many more examples in the book (and I recommend reading the whole thing), the point the authors are trying to make is clear: Almost everything has a signaling component – we are just not aware of it. In fact, Hanson believes that “well over 90 percent” of human behavior can be explained by signaling.

Whether or not you agree with that exact number, I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to look at a specific behavior and think about what the hidden signaling subtext of that behavior might be.

Ever since finishing the book, the signaling behavior I’ve been thinking about the most is the adoption – and more importantly the monetization – of software products and services.

This is what this blog post is about.

Let’s take a closer look at signaling first.

The way I see it, signaling can be broken down into different components:

• Signal Message
• Signal Distribution
• Signal Amplification

To better illustrate what I mean let’s take a pair of sneakers as an example.

The first component is what I call the signal message. This is whatever (hidden) subtext you are trying to convey. In the case of our sneakers this is probably something along the lines of “I can afford to spend $100 on a pair of shoes” and “I live an active, healthy lifestyle”.

In order to get your signal message across to other people you need some form of signal distribution. This is the second component of my signaling taxonomy.

So how are you going to distribute the signal message of your sneakers? You simply wear them where other people can see them. The obvious constraint here is that your signal distribution is limited to things you can display in public. This is why people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on shoes but not on socks.

The third component is signal amplification: If everyone is wearing cool sneakers .. how do you make sure yours stand out? You could buy the pair with the most noticeable design or the one with the flashiest colors, for example. These signal amplifiers help you to better compete against status rivals.

Let’s recap: Signaling can be broken down into signal message, distribution and amplification. “Real world” products are great at visualising a signal message due to their physical nature. However, as a consequence there are also physical boundaries to distribution because there are only so many people you can signal to at once.

But what about software?

Digital products have one crucial disadvantage over atom-based products and services: Intangibility. Apps live on your phone or computer. No one can see them except for you.

The signal message of a fitness app is the same as that of a gym membership or athletic wear (strength & fitness display), but the signal is much weaker because you can’t distribute it to anyone.

I believe that this is the main reason why consumer software companies have a harder time monetizing than their physical counterparts.

Here’s another example: eBooks have never caught up with paper books despite being more convenient. On the contrary, physical book sales have remained stable (and in some markets even increased) in recent years. Interestingly though, people spend less time reading them. Their value seems to stem from lying around the house to impress visitors (see also coffee table books) – a benefit digital books simply can’t offer.

Another point of evidence is the lack of luxury software products. People spend absurd amounts of money on jewellery, handbags and cars, but I can’t think of a piece of software with an even remotely similar price tag. Sure, people have tried to sell $999 apps but those never took off.

The app that comes closest to a luxury service that I can think of is Superhuman, which charges its users $30 a month for an email client (which you could also get for free by just using Gmail).

But there’s a difference to other software products: Superhuman has signal distribution built in. Every time you send an email via Superhuman, your recipient will notice a little “Sent via Superhuman” in your signature.

In a similar fashion, apps like Strava use their built in social networks as a signal distribution channel for their premium subscriptions. Users who have upgraded get a little premium badge and appear in exclusive premium leaderboards.

Another interesting way to solve the signal distribution problem is to add a physical product to a software’s premium offering, which allows signaling via casual contact (like fashion products).

Neobanks such as N26 or Revolut reward their premium users with a fancy metal card which doesn’t just look nice but is also noticeably heavier than normal credit cards. There aren’t a lot of other benefits that justify the hefty €17/month price tag these banks charge for their premium tiers – clear evidence that the primary monetization driver is in fact signaling.

While many digital products struggle to monetize as well as their real-word counterparts, the Internet has created a whole new kind of signaling utility: Distribution as a service.

Physical products are limited to the amount of people you see in public – but the Internet allows you to reach a virtually infinite number of people at once.

This is the primary value that social networks like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram provide. These services don’t contain a hidden signal message. All they do is provide signal distribution at scale. Want to increase the number of people who can see your sneakers? Just take a photo and post it on Instagram.

A positive feedback loop of views, likes and comments helps you to quantify how successful your signal distribution has been.

Eugene Wei calls this Status as a Service:

Social networks are subject to network effects: The more users join a network, the more valuable the network becomes. Your incentive to use Facebook increases with the number of people you can distribute your signal message to. This is why social networks are free to use – in order to maximize their signaling potential they need to acquire as many users as possible.

While Path did indeed fail as a distribution provider, I would argue that keeping the network’s size small can still have benefits in line with my signaling theory: Deliberately limiting the number of people who can join a network (e.g. by charging a membership fee) creates scarcity which in turns makes the network more interesting. Network membership becomes the signal message. Users pay a membership fee to signal to other members that they are part of the tribe.

Some examples:

• Elite Singles is a dating app for “educated and successful, single professionals”. The $400 membership fee is your proof that you belong to that group.
• Facebook originally limited its membership to Harvard students (and subsequently to other Ivy League schools).
• Paid membership communities have seen a lot of traction in the last few years.

These social networks still rely on some critical mass and network effects, but need to set an artificial limit to the amount of people who can join. If membership isn’t scarce, the membership loses its signal message. The same applies to physical products: Apple will never offer a cheap iPhone to compete with low-end Android devices – it would destroy the company’s signal message that the iPhone is a luxury product.

In contrast to iPhones, there is another limitation that social networks with this strategy face: Like in the before mentioned software examples, signal distribution is limited to the in-group. Signaling however is strongest when you can signal tribe affiliation to both in-group members as well as outsiders. This is also the reason why luxury car manufacturers don’t limit their advertising campaigns to potential buyers but deliberately extend it to people who will never be able to afford the car.

But as we’ve discussed earlier, the intangibility of software makes signaling to the out-group difficult: You would instagram a photo from your Equinox gym, but would you share a screenshot of your MyFitnessPal Premium subscription?

Instead of monetizing network membership, the software products that monetize most successfully have chosen another strategy: Make memberships free and monetize signal amplification instead.

Earlier, we defined signal amplification as product features that help users to increase the strength of the signals they want to convey to stand out of the crowd. In the example of our aforementioned sneakers, flashy colors help to amplify our signal message.

Similar amplifiers exist in the software world, but they often come in the form of a set of tools. Take the Instagram photo editor for example: Applying filters to your photos makes them look nicer and hopefully more noticeable in the app’s status arena – aka the newsfeed.

Eugene Wei calls these amplifiers Proof of Work:

While Instagram, Twitter and the other above-mentioned social networks are free to use, other companies have figured out a clever way to monetize their signal amplifiers. The two companies who have done this most successfully are Tinder and Fortnite.

Let’s start with Tinder.

Tinder is a social network for dating – or in other words, a signal distribution network to display your mating worthiness. Like other social networks, Tinder is subject to network effects: The value of the network increases with its size. The obvious strategy therefore is to make memberships free so that as many people as possible can join. (Technically, dating apps are two-sided networks. The value for female members increases with the number of male members and vice versa.)

Tinder’s primary proof-of-work mechanism is to optimize one’s profile picture for a maximum number of swipe rights. But with millions of rivals on the same platform, competing for status with just a few pixels of profile picture real estate becomes a really hard task.

Luckily, Tinder offers a variety of additional signal amplifiers that help you to stand out. The sole purpose of features like Tinder Boost and Super Likes is to outcompete status rivals by giving you preferential signaling treatment. And guess what – they come with a price tag.

Tinder’s entire business model is built on the assumption that people are willing to spend money on signaling. That assumption seems to be correct: Tinder made a staggering $1.2 billion in revenue last year making it one of the most successful apps world wide.

Fortnite has seen even greater levels of financial success: In the last two years combined, the game has brought in more than $4 billion in revenue – and like Tinder, it too monetizes primarily with signal amplification.

For the longest time, the monetization model of games used to be – and for many still is – one-time upfront payments which then allowed you to play the game for as long as you wanted to.

That business model changed with the emergence of mobile games on iOS and Android. Instead of charging players upfront for access, mobile games are typically free to play. However, in order to progress faster and win the game, users will eventually have to pay for small upgrades with in-app purchases.

Similar to these traditional mobile games, Fortnite is also free to play. As a multiplayer game that many play with their real-life friends, this strategy makes a lot of sense – the network becomes more valuable the more people join.

In contrast to mobile games however, Fortnite is also free to win. None of the in-app purchases available impact the core gameplay. You can’t buy more powerful weapons or stronger armor that give you an advantage over other players.

That’s because the core gameplay isn’t the core signaling layer – and thus also doesn’t offer the greatest monetization potential.

Fortnite is more than just a game. It’s more like a giant virtual theme park, or the closest thing we have to a metaverse even. People don’t just come for the battle royale game – they come to meet and hangout with friends.

But if The Elephant in the Brain has taught us anything it’s that you don’t just meet people for fun. You are engaging in a constant battle for attention and status. Signaling is the meta game that Fortnite provides – and monetizes.

Fortnite’s monetization model is based on cosmetics: The skin your character wears; the looks of your glider and the tools you use; the way your character dances (emotes) – all of these are signaling amplifiers with different signal messages to uniquely express yourself in the game. And you have to purchase them.

Fortnite has pulled off what so many other software products have been struggling with – monetizing a purely digital product whose value is not based on utility or entertainment but solely on the one thing we all secretly care so much about: Signaling.

While the physical nature of material goods and services is perfect to visualize hidden signaling messages, there are natural limitations to distribution and amplification.

Software perfectly complements physical goods by distributing their signal messages at scale. Maximizing scale, however, prevents it from monetizing said distribution. This is why social media services are free to use. The added signaling value is solely captured by the physical products that are being shared.

The intangibility and fungibility of software also makes it difficult to create and share (and monetize) software products that contain hidden signal messages of their own. This explains why there are no software equivalents of luxury products such as Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags.

The financially most lucrative strategy for software companies is to provide distribution for free and instead monetize users who want to stand out of the crowd with paid signal amplification.

A closing thought: I tell myself that I write these blog posts “just for fun”, but let’s be honest … all I really want is to signal how smart I am. So if you could head over to Twitter and give me a Like or a Follow, that’d be great. Thanks!

Thanks to Gonz Sanchez, Jan König, Max Cutler and Robin Dechant for reading drafts of this post.

This is a quarterly update and review of new tools and products that I recently added to my personal productivity stack.

Spoonbill
I’ve been looking for a product like this for a while: Spoonbill connects with your Twitter (and GitHub) account and sends you diff-updates on the bios of the people you follow. You can receive updates via email and RSS. Someone should build this for LinkedIn.

Noto
Noto is an app to send email notes to yourself. The app opens directly to the input screen – a simple swipe then sends the note to a pre-defined email address. This is ideal for people like me who use their inbox as their primary productivity control center and to-do list. You can add up to six different email addresses which becomes pretty powerful in combination with Superhuman’s split inbox feature. I wish a note functionality like this was built directly into the iOS lock screen.

Zenly
This is one of the most interesting apps I’ve played around with lately. Zenly is essentially the Gen Z version of Foursquare: A location-first social network, but instead of manually checking into places, users constantly share their live location (as well as other data such as your current battery status). What I find most interesting though, is the app’s fog of war-like map that shows you exactly which areas you’ve already explored (plus the exact discovery percentage number per city). This is a great way to quantify my movement patterns and set monthly or yearly discovery goals (I currently do this with Swarm).

Newsletters are growing like mushrooms these days.

It feels like there’s not a single day without someone in my Twitter or LinkedIn network announcing the start of his or her new personal newsletter (or podcast, for that matter).

Newsletters have been called “the future” and “the next generation” of media, “a more attractive medium than the newsfeed” and people’s “favorite new social network”.

To me, newsletters feel more like a rebirth of blogs and RSS: Both typically have long-form, high quality content and they are distributed via an open standard.

Substack and Revue are essentially trying to become the WordPress of newsletters, while Stoop is trying to build a Google Reader equivalent to capture the demand side.

What’s interesting about newsletters is that consumers are willing to pay for them. While blogs have never really figured out monetization (apart from ads), Substack alone claims more than 50,000 paying subscribers.

This might partly be a timing thing (blogs were popular during a time when people weren’t used to the concept of paying for digital content yet), but I wonder if it’s also driven by the nature of how newsletters work: You have to wait to receive them – like an Amazon package. Maybe that makes the medium feel more tangible and thus worth paying for?

Some have argued that newsletters create a more intimate relationship between writers and readers and that it’s this intimacy that consumers are willing to pay for. I don’t disagree with that theory but would argue that blogs are even more intimate than newsletters. If a newsletter is a personal message from a writer, a blog is the writer’s personal home the reader gets invited to.

What’s special about personal blogs is not just the actual writing, it’s also the design the content is presented in. Newsletters lack the unique design aspect that blogs have.

Side Note: I firmly believe that the lack of design customization options is one of the main reasons Medium has never lived up to its potential.

It also seems like newsletters are less discoverable than blogs. Blog posts would often reference other blogs (remember blog rolls and trackbacks?), which is how readers would discover new content. Newsletters feel more isolated. (Someone should start a newsletter-recommendation-newsletter)

So what then explains the newsletter hype?
Simple: Distribution.

Every medium is essentially a two-sided market that needs to solve a chicken-and-egg-problem in order to take off. You need content suppliers to attract consumers and vice-versa.

While blogs could in theory be read by anyone with a browser, the technology that really mattered on the consumer side were RSS readers – and those were never adopted en masse.

Social networks on the other hand have become a victim of their own success: The amount of consumers has attracted so many players on the supply side that platforms needed to introduce algorithmic feeds to handle the abundance of content.

This is why writers like newsletters so much. As other distribution channels are becoming increasingly crowded, email provides an alternative trade route.

That problem is that the nature of cross-side network effects will ultimately lead to newsletters facing the same dilemma: As long as the number of subscribers increases, so will the number of newsletter publishers. Users’ email inboxes – already full with non-newsletter-emails – will get as crowded as social media newsfeeds. Just wait until Gmail introduces an algorithmic feed for your newsletter inbox.

Perhaps a more interesting question, then, is to ask what’s the alternative trade route to email?

I’ve been fascinated by the rise of Telegram blogs in recent months.

Tucked between personal messages from friends, Telegram blogs are read in an even more intimate setting than email. In contrast to newsletters, readers can see the entire history at once (less ephemeral) and engage with the author and/or other readers via built-in community features.

Here are a few channels I enjoy:

• naveen/README
• Pieter Levels
• @tzhongg 🧠 (+ community)
• OmSays
• dwr Updates

At the moment, most of these are just link lists and RSS-like notification channels, but I wonder if they’ll evolve into a unique Telegram blog format over time.

Do you have any other Telegram recommendations?
I’d love to hear about them!

(1) Some argue that email (like blogs) are better for content creators than social networks because the medium’s open standard means that they “own their audience”. What people seem to fail to see is that an open standard doesn’t matter much when the demand side is controlled by an aggregator. Bloggers lost thousands of subscribers when Google Reader shut down. Gmail has more than a billion users.

(2) This post might sound like I dislike newsletters. That’s not the case – I just really miss personal blogs 🙂 Here are a few newsletters I love (and which you should subscribe to): Monday Musings, Alex Danco (+ Scarcity in the Software Century), Stratechery, Matt’s Thoughts In Between, Super Organizers, Johannes Klingebiel’s Zine, Seedtable.

Kevin Kwok posted an excellent article a while back about The Arc of Collaboration. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the main argument is that productivity and collaboration have always been handled as two separate workflows:

1. We started with individual files that we sent back and forth via email
2. Then Dropbox came along and enabled collaboration within documents, but communication about these docs remained a separate channel
3. Slack wants to become the central communication channel for all productivity apps

The problem, Kevin argues, is that productivity and collaboration shouldn’t be treated separately. Instead, they should go hand in hand and that’s exactly what a lot of the latest productivity tools do: Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc all have messaging natively built in to their apps.

While these functional workflows work great on their own, they are still separate silos between which you have to switch back and forth. The solution might be a meta layer on top of the productivity stack that works horizontally across all function workflows.

It’s not clear yet what exactly this meta layer would look like but it might be something similar to what Discord is to gaming.

I mostly agree with the points Kevin makes, but I see the role of Slack slightly different. While I don’t think that Slack will become the meta layer, I do think it came closer to that idea than people give it credit for.

Instead of Slack, I believe that email – and more importantly Superhuman – will return to become the center of gravity for productivity.

With more and more productivity apps creating their own messaging systems, users suddenly face a new problem: Multiple inboxes. You now have to check notifications in Github, Trello, Google Docs and half a dozen (if not more) other tools in your productivity stack.

Slack basically wants to be the unified notification center that captures all those incoming alerts from your productivity tools – a high frequency communications layer that ties everything together.

The way I see it notifications serve three important functions:

• Being notified about (relevant) new developments
• Taking actions on these developments (if necessary)
• Building a (personalized) history of company records

As Kevin points out in his article, Slack only really handles the “being notified” part. Whenever you want to take action on notifications you have to switch to whatever app you’ve received the notification from. Productivity and collaboration remain separate.

There are a few exceptions though: Slack does integrate pretty well with a couple of tools and allows you to manage certain tasks straight from within the app. You can close and reopen issues and pull requests from GitHub, for example. Or create Asana tasks. Or instantly reply to Intercom messages.

But Slack isn’t the perfect tool to manage notifications. Incoming alerts aren’t really bundled in one place but appear across different channels and between different messages. This makes it really hard to keep track of which notifications you have seen and which you have taken action on.

You need a single notification stream that allows you to treat notifications like tasks. Slack isn’t that. But you know what is? Email!

Back in 2013, the Mailbox team built an email client that looked more like a to-do list than an inbox. With a simple swipe users could simply mark an email as done, add to it to a list or snooze it to deal with it later. Emails became tasks.

While Mailbox eventually got deprecated (after Dropbox acquired it), the emails-as-tasks concept lives on. Snoozing emails and Inbox Zero are now standard features in most email apps.

I’ve always wondered why no one ever developed the idea further: Why stop at snoozing emails? Why not add other actions to your email inbox? Inspired by these questions, I briefly worked on an idea a while back that can be summarized as an inbox that only lets you reply with pre-defined actions.

Sounds confusing?
Let’s look at a few examples.

Example A: Your colleague Lisa invites you to a meeting

→ A right swipe accepts the meeting and adds the event to your calendar
← A left swipe declines the meeting and lets you propose a different time

You never have to open the message or write a lengthy response – you can only react with a swipe.

Google Calendar notifications in Gmail are actually already pretty close to this, so let’s look at a more sophisticated example.

Example B: The New York Times notifies you about a new article they just published

○  A simple tap just opens the article
⇥ A short right swipe adds the article to Pocket
→ A long right swipe saves in Evernote
← A right swipe sends the article to your Kindle

The problem with this idea is that you are limited to just a handful of actions (because you can’t fit more on the screen) and that it’s difficult to predict which actions are most relevant for each message you receive.

This is where Superhuman comes in.

Superhuman, for those unfamiliar with it, is an email client that – among other features – lets you manage your inbox by just using your keyboard.

There are keyboard shortcuts for literally every single command you can think of: Compose a new email? Hit c. Discard a draft? Press ⌘, Shift and b. Reply to an introduction email with a Thank You note and move the original sender to bcc? Press ⌘, Shift and i (yes, this actually exists).

Most importantly though, users can trigger a command line interface so you can just write down the action you want to take without having to remember the exact keyboard shortcut. The NLP engine behind this thing works remarkably well and understands what you want to do no matter how you phrase it (this might be Superhuman’s most underrated feature).

At the moment, Superhuman commands are limited to typical email actions (snooze, send later, etc), but the obvious next step, in my opinion, is to add commands that work across different apps.

That meeting request your colleague Lisa sent you?
Instead of just sending a reply why that time she proposed doesn’t work for you, you should just be able to also send an updated calendar event without having to leave the Superhuman app.

But you should also be able to block 30 minutes in your calendar before the meeting so you can prepare – without having to switch over to your calendar app and add the events there. Hit ⌘K and type “Add 30 min buffer before event“. Done.

I suspect that Superhuman will build their own calendar features (as well as to-do list functionalities) and then start integrating third-party applications to become an actual platform.

With a strong enough NLP engine behind the command line interface, the possibilities become endless:

• Add that New York Times article to your Pocket queue or send it directly to your Kindle to read it later
• Re-assign Jira tickets directly from Superhuman or send them to your to-do list
• Pay invoices or send money to a friend

You never have to leave the Superhuman app – the command line becomes your personal assistant that takes care of all your productivity tasks.

Side note: Opening up to 3rd-party developers and thus becoming a platform is also how you build a moat on top of an open standard like email and make the business more defensible.

Once you can react to email notifications right from your inbox, you can forward all your 3rd-party notifications to your email inbox and manage them from one place. This is how you solve the multiple inbox problem we discussed earlier.

Having all notifications in one place sounds scary: People are already struggling to stay on top of their inbox today and risk missing important messages. This is where Superhuman’s Split Inbox feature comes in handy. Your main inbox is still reserved for only the most important emails you receive. For everything else you set up dedicated split inboxes.

You could set up an inbox for all your newsletters, a dedicated inbox for just your Github notifications (or any other tool) or group your emails by teams or projects.

Superhuman’s founder and CEO Rahul Vohra actually uses Superhuman in this way already (video starts at 21:46):

Collecting all notifications in one place has another benefit: Building a (personalized) history of company records. In the current world of multiple inboxes your information is dispersed across a dozen different services and whenever you try looking for something you never know where to find it.

This aspect feels like a very underrated benefit of a unified notifications inbox.

I’m aware that this idea isn’t really the meta-layer that Kevin outlined in his article. Email and productivity would still remain separate workflows, but Superhuman would become the center of gravity from which all other tools are being managed.

An actual meta-layer might look closer to something like Tandem, but I could also imagine a Superhuman Command Line that lives outside of the Superhuman app – similar to what Command E are building.

If you have thoughts on this, please let me know.

I switched back to an iPhone a few ago after several years being on Android. Here are a few first impressions and thoughts:

• Battery life on the iPhone 11 Pro is insane. I get almost two days on a single charge compared to less than a day on my Pixel 3. This has been the most noticeable difference so far.

• The iPhone camera is great but doesn’t feel like an upgrade from the Pixel. In fact, when it comes to the software part of the camera the iPhone is clearly a step back. Portrait mode looks like a poor Photoshop job in 9 out of 10 cases. I’m surprised this isn’t highlighted more in iPhone vs Pixel reviews.

• Notifications on iOS are a hot mess. It’s wild that Apple still hasn’t solved this. I don’t get why they don’t simply copy Android’s notification center design?

• I miss having a Google search bar on my homescreen.
  

• I haven’t used Siri even once – but I never used the Google Assistant much either. This still feels like a solution looking for a problem.
  

• Similarly, I was looking forward to the Shortcuts feature on iOS but have barely used it so far. Any recommendations for useful shortcuts?
  

• The quality of (third party) iOS apps is noticeably higher than that of their Android counterparts: Less bugs, nicer animations, even features I wasn’t aware existed.

• I keep on accidentally turning on the flashlight (apparently I’m not the only one). Why can’t I remove this from the lock screen or – better even – replace it with something useful (e.g. notes)? The lack of customizability on iOS is frustrating.
  

• Another example of this: Why can’t I freely arrange icons on my home screen the way I want to? (some on top of the screen, some on the bottom, for example)
  
  Thinking about it, it’s pretty crazy that the design of home screens (or desktops) hasn’t really changed since the 90s. This is an area where Windows Phone was really onto something.

• I was happy to see that pre-installed apps on iOS are finally deletable … until I realized that deleting apps doesn’t actually mean you get rid of them. You are permanently locked into a variety of Apple services that are vastly inferior to 3rd-party apps.
  
  
  • Why can’t I replace Apple Maps with Google Maps in 3rd party apps?
  • Why is it not possible to use another assistant but Siri?
  • Why am I not able to make back ups with Drive instead of iCloud?

• Why do iPhones still have physical mute buttons? Feels unnecessary.

• The Screen Time statistics feel better designed than Google’s Digital Wellbeing app. I wish Apple would make it harder to keep using apps which have reached their daily time limit though.
  
  (Also: My name number one feature request for both Screen Time & Digital Wellbeing is an API so I can export data and set up more sophisticated IFTTT-type rules)

• Face Unlock works better than I expected but isn’t as convenient as a finger pint sensor:
  
  
  • Face Unlock requires two actions: Holding the device in front of my face plus swiping up. Unlocking with fingerprint on the other hand is just one action (You simultaneously tell the device that you want to unlock it and authenticate yourself).
  • Face Unlock doesn’t seem to work as reliably as the fingerprint sensor on my Pixel (I’d guess 90% success rate for Face Unlock, compared to 95%+ for fingerprint)
  • As I’ve written before, the fingerprint sensor is underrated as a secondary interface. Android only used it to pull down the notification center, but I think you could do so much more with it.

• The Apple Wallet app is great, especially at the airport. Surprising that Google has never built something similar.

• While I think that the keynote presentations were better than in the last few years, the overall narrative still felt incredibly unexciting. It’s fascinating to see how clearly marketing isn’t baked into the Google’s DNA and how much it struggles with products that don’t sell organically like Search (Cloud is another good example of this).

• Related: It’s telling that the most exciting announcement of the event wasn’t new hardware but the new recorder app. I can’t wait for this to roll out beyond Pixel phones (Side note: I’m still confused by Pixel-exclusive software features .. I doubt that they have an actual impact on Pixel sales and Google’s strategy has always been fundamentally about reach)

• I’ll be switching back to an iPhone this year after being an Android user for the last five years. In those years I’ve owned about five Nexus and Pixel phones of which every single one broke after at most six months (stuck in boot loop, display stopped working, camera bugs, etc). I still prefer Android over iOS, but I just can’t justify spending another 700 bucks on a phone I constantly have to worry about dying on me. (Request for product: An iPhone that runs Android)

• I was a little disappointed to see that Google ditched the fingerprint sensor in favor of face-unlock. The backside fingerprint sensor is not just more convenient but also way underrated as a secondary interface in my opinion (see: swipe for notifications).

• Speaking of secondary interfaces: I love that Google is experimenting with Motion sense – even though this will face the same dilemma as the recorder app: If you keep this a Pixel exclusive, no app developer will seriously build features based on it. Why didn’t Google build this into its Nest speakers instead?

• Great to hear that there finally a more serious competitor to Apple’s Airpods. I wonder why it took Google so long to start competing in this space given how much effort they put into smart speaker adoption.

• Related to the previous point: I’m surprised that there’s still no Pixel watch. Feels like a necessary addition not just to the Pixel Buds but the entire ambient computing narrative.

There have been a few reports recently about Apple rejecting apps which make use of Apple’s emoji set outside of the keyboard.

I find this very surprising. Emojis are a completely underrated platform moat, in my opinion.

Android and iOS have become more and more similar and there are hardly any switching costs left for consumers:

• Both operating systems offer pretty much the same features
• You have high-end devices for both platforms (most importantly equal camera quality)
• All major apps are available for both iOS and Android
• Switching from iOS to Android literally doesn’t take more than a few minutes

This leaves Apple with only handful advantages over Android:

• New apps are usually released on iOS first (temporary exclusivity)
• Apps which are only available on iOS, most importantly iMessage
• And: Emojis

Android has several emoji-problems:

• Some emojis look vastly different than their iOS counterpart leading to miscommunication
• Due to Android’s openness some OEMs use custom emoji sets
• The emoji redesign that comes with Oreo looks horrible
• Fragmentation means that lots of emojis aren’t available at all

I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m pretty sure there are psychological switching costs because you feel partly excluded from the conversations you are having with your iOS-friends (especially in group chats).

So Apple should embrace the use of its emoji set as much as possible, but prohibit developers from using them in their Android apps (which I assume has happened in the case of WhatsApp and Slack).

It’d be great if someone would come up with an open-source set of great looking emoji that become the standard across all platforms.

Excited to finally give Revolut a try. I’ve been an N26 customer for more than two years and am pretty happy with it, but I guess it can’t hurt to test some alternatives.