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5-Bit Friday’s (#11): Snack-able insights, frameworks, and ideas from the best in tech

On copying well, creativity, observations on product management, finding your zone of genius, and some hilarious comedy on building what customers want

January 27, 2023

Hi, I’m Jaryd. 👋 I write in-depth analyses on the growth of popular companies, including their early strategies, current tactics, and actionable business-building lessons we can learn from them.

Plus, every Friday I bring you summarized insights, frameworks, and ideas from the best entrepreneurs, writers, investors, product/growth experts, and operators.

Happy Friday, friends! 🍻

Welcome to the 214 new folks who’ve joined HTG this week, and a huge thanks to , , , and for adding me to your recommendations. It means so much — I really appreciate it. 🙏

Okay, two quick notes before we get into things today.

First up, if you missed this weeks deep dive on OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), I definitely suggest catching up when you have some time. No bias here 👀. But seriously, I found learning about this absolutely fascinating, and I think you will too. It covers the need-to-know primer on the AI industry + a deep dive on OpenAI, their big picture strategy, and their tactics with ChatGPT and Microsoft.

Second, and this one is for the founders and CEOs. I know from experience that finding and hiring great software engineers takes time, and it’s expensive. But we all know engineers are absolutely essential, and everyday with an open role is a day the product is being built slower, and a day of opportunity gone. So, how can you close that gap (1) faster, (2) reliably, and (3) at a good price? Well, just go check out Lemon.io. They’re a Ukrainian-based startup with a pre-vetted pool of top-notch devs from around the world, and they can help you get back to focusing on growth and shipping more product within a week. 🧑‍💻

Note: If it looks like an ad and sounds like an ad, it usually is. But, this is actually just a shoutout (not paid here in anyway). Their founder Aleksandr reached out, but since I don’t do ads, and since I just really like what they’re doing by democratizing access to global talent, I decided to just share Lemon with you today incase you’re in the market for devs (now, or later).👉 Check them out.

Great, let’s get started.

Here’s what we’ve got this week.

  • The audacity of copying well

  • Creating in the era of creative confidence

  • 12 observations on product management

  • Looking for a new job? First find your zone of genius

  • Should you always build what the customer wants?

And to kick things off for us…🥾

The audacity of copying well

Ben Thompson just writes gold. And one of the recent nuggets of his I came across (although an older piece) is all about the value of copying over differentiation.

Hot take, right.

Indeed, so let’s take a look at this idea more.

The first mistake most incumbents make when building new products in response to threatening new competitors is to attempt to win on features. [As an example] Nokia and Microsoft tried to build something distinctly different from the iPhone [when it came out], with a completely different user interface, features like Live Tiles, and various content hubs. The effort earned plenty of plaudits from the press and pundits eager for something new, but in practice made it far more difficult to secure the apps that actually mattered for becoming a viable platform.

A more pertinent example for this article is Google+. When Google launched their Facebook competitor in 2011 they touted features like Circles to organize your friends, Sparks to find content to share, and Hangouts to video chat. These made Google+ “better” and “differentiated”, which is another way of saying more complicated; meanwhile the most important feature — your friends — was nowhere to be found.

The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.

— Ben Thompson

In short — don’t reinvent the wheel everybody has gotten used to. As a simple example, if you’re designing a new landing page, put elements and CTAs in places people expect them to be. Sure, you can try create a new design paradigm, but habit is a terribly hard thing to break.

But, copying alone isn’t enough. To copy well, you still have to lean into something you have an edge on.

The fact [that] features don’t offer useful differentiation does not remove the need for differentiation: the key is figuring out what else can be leveraged. Google, for example, may have largely copied the iPhone’s UI, but the key to Android’s success was the search company’s ability to leverage their advertising-based business model to offer it for free. On the hardware side Samsung leveraged their manufacturing might and long-established distribution channels to dominate the otherwise undifferentiated Android market, at least for a time. And, in perhaps the most famous example of this strategy, Microsoft embraced web standards with Internet Explorer, extended their browser’s capabilities with features like ActiveX, eventually extinguishing the threat when Netscape couldn’t keep up.

The takeaway? If a great product has already gone through years of testing, iterations and establishing a certain type of user behavior (i.e product familiarity) — why would you go and build something different?

Focus on building something better based on your advantage, like distribution.

A case in point here is Meta. Notorious copycats. After two attempts at creating feature-differentiated versions of Snapchat that failed (Poke and Slingshot, both standalone apps), they eventually just said fuck it and copied them straight-up, threw it into Instagram, and the rest is history.

As fast as Snapchat was growing, Instagram was much bigger with far more penetration across multiple demographics and international users. Instead of going with a new app, they just added “Stories” right inside their most important asset — their network.

Don’t worry about copying if you’re going to copy well.

And the total opposite of copying? Creating…

Creating in the era of creative confidence

It’s remarkable to watch a five-year-old draw, void of any anxiety about what the world will think. We all start our lives creatively confident, happy to create and share our work with pride. And then, as we age, our comfort with creative expression declines. We’re discouraged by the learning curve of creative skills and tools, by our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and by the harsh opinions of critics. As Picasso famously quipped, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” It is a sad irony: As we age, our creative capabilities (and opportunities!) grow as we collect life experiences that inspire us — but our creative confidence shrinks. We are more creatively confident in kindergarten than we are as adults. Correcting this is among the greatest opportunities for the next generation of humankind.

— Scott Belsky (Founder of Behance & CPO at Adobe)

So how do we become more creatively confident again?

For starters — we lean into the things that help us get over that proverbial fear of the blank page. We leverage things like friendly web tools with easy to use templates, and we embrace the potential that generative AI has in breaking down “creativity’s notoriously steep learning curve.”

In a super engaging essay by Scott Belsky, he talks about how he believes that our culture is going to see a seismic shift from “the insatiable pursuit of productivity to individual differentiation through creativity.”

This is largely because creative expression is being democratized. Friction between an idea you have, and the ability to creatively express that idea, is being removed. From images/videos, to essays, web designs, and even creating code — we’re getting to a place where you can simply talk about what you’re imagining and get immediate visual output.

Just because you struggled with the Adobe suite, or find painting difficult, does not mean you are not creative. “Creativity is about far more than the outcome.” And thinking back to my high-school art days — I definitely recall times when what I ended up producing fell far short of what I imagined. Abysmally so.

But, what should be the true measure of my creative expression? My idea, or my poor execution?

Like most good debates, the answer isn’t clear cut. But food for thought as you think of an opinion…

The Sistine Chapel, often considered Michelangelo's masterpiece, had 13 other painters helping him out. Any less creative?

In his essay, Scott Belskey lays out some drivers around this. Here they are, with my favorite excerpts:

The Death of Creativity’s Learning Curve

Until now, “creativity” has conflated both the generation of ideas and the process involved to express those ideas. Is the process of intricately chiseling a beautiful sculpture creative, or is the idea of the sculpture — the image conjured up in the mind’s eye — the truly creative part of an otherwise laborious and tedious process? It’s an age-old argument. Michelangelo, for instance, believed that each stone has a statue inside it and the sculptor discovers it by chipping away. At the same time, the great master employed as many as 13 assistants to help him paint the Sistine Chapel. So, it’s complicated.

Most artists today can’t afford 13 human assistants, but they use other tools to reduce the laborious parts of creativity, including AI-powered shortcuts, component libraries for product designers, templates, and now generative AI. […]

Of course, behind the scenes, the machine learning engines that drive AI creation were trained using millions of pieces of content from real artists, many of whom never consented to having their work used in that way. To correct this, I anticipate a series of regulations, evolutions in copyright law, new walled gardens and token-gated portfolio experiences, and new compensation models for artists that opt-in and/or allow use of their style for GenerativeAI purposes.

The Opportunity for Creative Pros in the Era of Creative Confidence

There is a common sentiment — and often times anxiety — among creative professionals that these tools threaten their livelihoods.

Humans have always been frenemies with new technology. We relish the efficiencies and welcome having more brain power for higher order tasks. And yet we fret the interim disruptions as we adjust. That was the case with the advent of photography, automobiles, and desktop publishing, and I don’t think this is an exception. As more human jobs become assisted, automated, or replaced by artificial intelligence, we must spend our hours where we have a competitive advantage over machines: developing new ideas, expressing old things in new ways, innovating process, and crafting the story that infuses our creations with meaning. […]

It is the innovation in the creative process itself that distinguishes the outcome. As the process part of creativity — chipping away at the stone or mixing the colors or iterating the pixels — becomes less of an obstacle, the other parts of creativity — the original idea, the judgment, the innovations in process, and the story — become more important than ever.

Takeaway: The expression of ideas is becoming exponentially easier, and it’s going to be the ideas themselves that are the differentiator and signal of creativity.

And a quote I came across while researching OpenAI that caps this off perfectly:

What will always matter is the quality of ideas and the understanding of what you want.

— Sam Altman

For more on the above, as well as the implications for creative careers, culture, and beyond…

12 observations on product management

Dan Hill, former Head of Growth at Brex and Director of Product at Airbnb, has spent many years building products. In his essay, “Observations on Product Management”, he took the time to consolidate some of his biggest lessons. He dubs them “mostly things that are either obvious but no-one ever says them, or non-obvious but important.”

Had me hooked with that line.

So, here’s Dan telling you what they are:

You can learn more about Dan here.

Looking for a new job? First find your zone of genius.

Whether you’re in the job market due to layoffs, trying to get out of a bad gig, looking for your next thing, or even if you’re cruising happily along at work…knowing your zone of genius is an extremely helpful framework.

This image does an excellent job at summing it up:

This doesn’t need to be said, but ideally you want to be working somewhere/doing something where you’re regularly in your zone of genius. Be careful settling for things that you’re good at but hate doing. This is where it’s easy to get comfortable and hit autopilot for a few years.

Okay, so how do you find your zone of genius?

The answer to most questions like that in life is to ask the right questions. Here are some examples:

  1. What do you love doing the most? Something you enjoy so much that time flies by when you’re doing it.

  2. What work do you do that doesn’t seem like work?

  3. At work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? Thing something you do (even for just few minutes), that might lead to an idea or something else of value.

  4. What are you great at? What’s your unique ability/skill?

Armed with knowing what your zone of genius is — you can use that to help define a specific, long-term goal that ties back to it. With this, you’ve created a good lens for looking at companies and job opportunities.

And how do you find these companies and job opportunities? Peter Yang from The Creator Cconomy wrote a great piece, here’s an excerpt I really liked.

To state the obvious:

Getting a warm lead through your network is 10x as effective as applying online.

This is especially true in this recession where every job will have hundreds of applications. Here’s how you can network:

If you’ve been laid off, post publicly on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media about what you’re looking for next.

People need to know your situation to help.

Reconnect with your old managers, coworkers, and friends. Ask them if they know anyone hiring for roles you may be a fit for.

Your goal is to connect to a hiring manager at a company you’re interested in.

You’ll be surprised at how many strangers are willing to help in this economy. Here are some tactical tips:

To drastically improve your response rate, briefly explain your credentials, provide value, and have a low-effort CTA. Here’s a hypothetical cold email:

And if you’re looking for a job right now, LinkedIn is just one path. Some other non-traditional avenues to consider:

And some other helpful resources:

Should you always build what the customer wants?

Short answer. Nope.

And this hilarious 1 minute video by Sanjeev NC (my new favorite tech comedian) is a perfect example of why:

It’s very easy to get distracted and drown in product features because a customer asked about it. Common belief is build something people want. Of course that’s true, but an important caveat there is that during customer discovery/research — it’s about finding what the right people (your High Expectation Customers) really want/need, and are willing to pay enough for.

When filtering, the key is to actively listen, get to the why, and to translate what they’re directly/indirectly asking for into a real JTDB.

Hats off to Sanjeev for hitting tech culture so perfectly in his comedy. Here are a few of my favorites for the PMs. They’re short, each about ~1 minute. Please, enjoy.🤣

And that’s it for this week! Thanks so much for reading and being a subscriber. It’s been amazing watching this newsletter grow. So, thank you.

On that note, if you learned at least one new thing, consider giving this post a like/share and all of that good stuff. 🫠

See you next week.— Jaryd ✌️

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