It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
For a while I tried creating traffic-light-free bicycle routes from my home in the suburbs to my office in Amsterdam center (because intersections, especially with trams, can sometimes take a long time.
Unfortunately there was no API with data on which intersections have traffic lights and I had to build these routes manually in Strava using satellite images.
I did learn in the process that some traffic light data is actually available from the government, but only for selected partners. The Flitsmeister app for example has it and shows at some traffic lights how long it will take for the light to turn green (in a car, not on a bicycle)
Richard Branson, he goes against so much convention:
- everyone has so much process to "hire right", but in his books he hired kinda random it seems. And seems to delegate a lot rather than "founder mode"
- the original remote worker: bought a caribbean island for cheap and managed his businesses from there
- random collections of businesses under his brand: airline, telecom, music, ...
was he just like super lucky that everything worked out for him?
I don’t think that if you read as much as Marc that you can do it without introspection. Correct me if wrong but you always pick up learnings and ideas which apply to your own life.
I do understand where he’s coming from. One of my forms of procrastination is reading my old notes and pondering and pretending I’m self-improving. But it’s actually a way to avoid action.
And I did learn that if you want to get somewhere, action is what gets you there. Not endless introspection.
I think this is inevitable, and I'm trying to find ways to set up a controlled environment, in which we build a robust safe and isolated foundation, while clients can mess around and vibe-code their features on top of that. I'm still figuring it out so feel free to share ideas.
At the moment I'm pretty inclined to hang up if I feel I'm wasting my time with a robot.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
I see a lot of different opinions here, from very positive to very negative.
I think the answer is, it's both.
When I was an employee sometimes I was happy, like when a promotion was lurking, and sometimes I was unhappy and stressed, when getting fired, when facing deadlines, ....
But when I started working for myself the amplitude of emotions became way stronger, every week I would fluctuate between feeling doomed forever or feeling like a genius.
Life with and without kids is the same: The emotional highs of having kids are way higher than anything I experienced without kids, but sometimes the lows are very low.
“Show me the incentive and i’ll show you the outcome”
I’ve learned a long time ago that we’re not always aware of how incentives drive our own behavior, it just happens naturally. This is exactly what’s happening with housing.