Friday Fuel - July 24th, 2020
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Happy Friday! Here’s your weekly boost of Friday Fuel, a collection of things that I’ve been learning from and enjoying recently.
📕What I’ve Been Reading - Let’s face it…hype sells. It doesn’t matter how good your product is. If you can’t generate buzz around it, you’ll probably have a hard time pushing it to the masses. The same works for the inverse. You have a subpar product with great marketing and you can make a killing. A Supreme brick retailed for $30 and sold out in minutes. It’s now being resold for $185 on StockX. Yes, an actual brick. The fashion and music industries are known to be built off of hype, but so is the tech space.
The last few years have shown how important generating hype around tech product launches is. It’s also proven how thousands of people on a beta wait-list can get VCs salivating like a pitbull at a Brazilian steakhouse. Only a few weeks ago, VCs were putting together term sheets to invest in itiswhatitis, without a clue of what it actually was. In a recent article, Stanford student Gaby Goldberg and investor Jordan Odinsky break down the effect of hype and exclusivity on launch strategies in tech. Many of the tactics highlighted in this post can be applied to product launches across various industries.
🎧What I’ve Been Listening To - A few weeks ago, I shared a few of my favorite people I follow on Twitter. Ian Borthwick, Senior Director of Influencer Marketing at SeatGeek made it onto this list. Last week, he appeared on the Business Casual podcast to talk all things content and influencer marketing. There’s been a lot of skepticism about the success of influencer marketing as Instagram has run rampant with fake engagement. Yet, when done correctly it’s still one of the most lucrative marketing tactics for both brands and influencers alike. This week alone, both Charli Damelio and Addison Re signed endorsement deals with Hollister and American Eagle respectively. Nothing like some friendly competition.
🤯What’s Blown My Mind Part 1 - On Monday, Jeff Bezos’s net worth jumped by $13 billion. To put it into perspective how crazy this is:
This statistic alone is wild. Now think, Jeff Bezos personally gained in a day the value of five public companies combined: Casper, Purple, Yeti, Peloton, and Stitch Fix.
Must be a nice life. I certainly wouldn’t mind being Jeff’s intern for a day:
🤯What’s Blown My Mind Part 2 - In last week’s Friday Fuel, I shared some information about GPT-3, along with a couple of cool programs that developers had created using the model. A week later, the GPT-3 hype train is chugging along faster than ever. The internet is filled with examples of potential use cases and it’s truly amazing what this thing can do. Here’s an example of a program that is able to write SQL queries for you. Score another point for team no-code.
If this piqued your interest and you want to see more demos, check out this thread:
🎤A Quote I Enjoyed - "People don't have short attention spans. They have short interest spans. If they're interested, they'll give you their full attention.” - Jason Fried, Founder & CEO of Basecamp.
Hopefully this newsletter was able to capture your interest span!
That’s it for this week. Remember, it’s not too late to get involved in the $100 Bombas gift card giveaway.
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Have a good weekend and see you on Monday,
Randy