Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Welcome to the 582 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Thursday! If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, join 6,753 smart, curious folks by subscribing here!Already subscribed and want to climb up the Verified Not Boring leaderboard?Entropy Theory🎧 If you prefer listening, bring your ears over here: Entropy Theory (Audio Edition)Everything tends towards chaos and disorder.This isn’t a quarantine-induced panic thought, it’s an inexorable fact of the universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all closed systems tend to maximize entropy. The universe tends to get messier and more disordered all the time.Like the universe, the market also gets messier and more chaotic all the time. Every industry is on a parallel journey of increasing, accelerating entropy. New tools create more optionality. More choice, speed, and flexibility create more chaos, which in turn creates opportunities for companies to capture value by temporarily bringing order to the ever-increasing entropy. The companies and people that create order from the chaos are Entropy Wranglers. The upward-sloping push and pull between entropy and its opposite, negentropy, is responsible for humanity’s forward progress. Each new burst of entropy creates more surface area for innovation. This idea explains so much - from business theories to industry evolution to company success - that I’m giving it a name: Entropy Theory.Entropy Theory explains industry evolution as a story of ever-increasing chaos and suggests that the most successful businesses are those that use the latest technology to wrangle that chaos, until entropic forces unleash the next set of opportunities.Entropy Theory sits on top of and connects so many of the other theories that we talk about here: Aggregation Theory, Disruption Theory, Creative Destruction, Coase’s Theory of the Firm, The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits, and more. It adds a directional vector to Jim Barksdale’s oft-repeated quote: “There’s only two ways I know to make money: bundling and unbundling.” Bundling and unbundling is Sisyphean -- bundle, unbundle, start over again, repeat. Ever-increasing entropy gives work verve. We’re not just bundling and unbundling, but unleashing energy, organizing it, and then unleashing new energy on the next thing.Entropy Theory explains global progress, industry trends, and company success and failure. One example: last week I wrote about Twitter, and said that it captures less of the value it creates than any company in the world. Another way to say that is that by deciding to play whack-a-mole with trolls instead of better facilitating search, conversation, and creation, it has insufficiently wrangled the conversational entropy unleashed by the internet. There are a lot of ways to take this, and many posts to be written, but to flesh out the idea, we’ll cover how Entropy Theory explains Aggregation Theory, two long-term industry trends, one successful company, and one failure: * Aggregation. Aggregators like Google, Facebook, and Uber succeed by wrangling the supply entropy created by the internet for consumers.* Office Real Estate. The history of the office - from government-owned to remote work - is the history of increasing entropy. * Employment. The rise of One Person Businesses is the natural progression of increasing employment entropy.* Spotify. Spotify wrangled music industry entropy created by the internet and file-sharing, and is running the Entropy Wrangler playbook again on podcasts.* Quibi. Quibi’s failure can be explained by its inability to realize how entropic short-form, mobile entertainment creation has become. Increased chaos isn’t good or bad, it’s just a fact of the universe. Entropy creates more surface area for innovation. Understanding and applying Entropy Theory can help you see and seize opportunity in the chaos. Aggregation and Entropy TheoryAggregation Theory provides one answer to entropy in our internet-enabled world of abundance. In Thompson’s words: “Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way.” Here’s the first graphic Thompson drew to explain it, back in 2015.Aggregation Theory only applies to digital businesses and doesn’t try to explain the trends in something like office real estate. Entropy Theory can handle both. Here’s Aggregation Theory explained through Entropy Theory.Look what happens to supply. It becomes more entropic. Instead of your local newspaper, all the articles in the world. Instead of whatever books your local bookstore stocked, all the books in the world. Instead of a taxi dispatch, anyone with a car, a smart phone, and free time. That created the need for new ways of ordering, and the opportunity for Aggregators like Facebook, Google, and Uber to use technology to bring order to the chaos. Aggregators are Entropy Wranglers. Take Google for example. The internet changed the way that media is created and consumed. Instead of consuming content from a few, trusted sources, suddenly, there was content coming from everywhere. It was hard to find content, and even harder to tell what was good. Google became the powerhouse that it is today by bringing order to that mess. With Google, instead of flailing about the internet in the dark, consumers could search for the topic they’re interested in, and instantly receive an orderly, ranked list that uses entropy - millions of people creating and billions of people clicking links - as an input.So if entropy is always increasing, where is the disorder in the system being created to offset the new order? I have three hypotheses that work together.* Entropy Wranglers both wrangle pre-existing entropy and enable new entropy. Google wrangled the entropy of the early internet and more people and companies create more content and products because Google exists.* Entropy Wranglers capture such a large amount of the value in the ecosystem that they create new energy that can be used to spring new entropy. For example, the influencer economy is supported by companies’ search for cheaper ways to market their products than paying Facebook and Google 40¢ of every dollar they raise.* Competitors see the opportunity and counter-position themselves against the Entropy Wranglers, definitionally adding more entropy into the system. No one is seriously trying to compete with Google in search or intent marketing; they’re trying to move the battle for ad dollars to new playing fields. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention GPT-3 here - making sense of all of the internet’s information contextually might be a way to bypass Google altogether at some point.As these three things happen, entropy increases in new places, and new opportunities to wrangle entropy emerge. You can frame each one of the Aggregators that Thompson lists in his original post - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb - in a similar way. Each uses technology to bring order to a recently disordered industry. I think that Entropy Theory can also help explain and connect other theories and frameworks like Disruptive Innovation, Coase’s Theory of the Firm, Creative Destruction, the Bundling/Unbundling cycle, and more, and I’m excited to explore the connections in future posts.  Offices, Employment, and Entropy TheoryOne of the things about Entropy Theory that tickles my brain is that it’s more broadly applicable than Aggregation Theory, albeit potentially at a lower resolution. The same theory that explains Google’s success can also explain trends in two slower-moving areas: office real estate and employment.Office Real EstateIt’s hard to imagine something less entropic than office real estate. Office buildings are large, heavy, and expensive, and once built, stand for decades or even centuries. But the history of the office follows the same forces that gave rise to Google. Before I became a full-time thinkboi, I worked at Breather, a real estate startup that allows people to book office space for as little as an hour and as long as two years. From the perspective of someone 250, or even 50, years ago, the idea of thousands of people renting offices for an hour seems inconceivable. Through the lens of Entropy Theory, though, it seems inevitable. The first modern office was built in 1726 in the UK to house the Royal Navy. Three years later, the East India Company built the East India House, the first non-governmental office. The first office leases - which allowed tenants to rent space from the building’s owner - appeared in the late 18th century. Leases dramatically increased entropy by introducing a lower-commitment way to use an office.Since their inception, leases keep getting shorter -- a necessity in a world in which corporate lifespans are dramatically shrinking (another example of increasing entropy). In 1958, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was 61 years. Today, it’s under 18. The typical office lease dropped from 30 years in the 1950s to 5 years in the 2010s.Over the past decade, co-working and flexible office gave companies the option to sign leases as short as a month. Breather, which makes one-hour bookings possible, is the natural continuation of the increasing office entropy trend, and even shorter options emerged after Breather.With each major increase in entropy, new players sprung up to bring order to the new reality. Brokerages, for example, helped tenants make sense of the various options available to them. JLL, one of the world’s largest brokerages, began its life in London in 1783, around the time of the first office leases. WeWork attempted to spend and grow its way into being the lowest-entropy way for companies to access high-entropy office space -- co-working -- but may have just increased entropy in the market.Today, COVID has created massive entropy, and correspondingly huge opportunities for Entropy Wranglers. Remote work is a thing now, and even though it’s imperfect, anti-social, and lossy, major shifts don’t generally reverse. Companies aren’t rushing to buy their office building, or even going back to thirty-year leases; similarly, remote work, once out of the bottle, is here to stay. It’s the highest-entropy state for office yet, and the prize for wrangling that entropy will be massive. It’s why Zoom has so dramatically outperformed the market, why I’m so bullish on Slack, and why there will be multiple multi-billion dollar companies created that take advantage of the new remote-first office paradigm. Entropy has shifted the definition of office.EmploymentEmployment has come a long way since The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. We no longer spend our entire career with one company, working 9-5, five days a week for forty years until we can retire with the pension and the gold watch. In fact, many people don’t work for just one company, and an increasing number don’t work for a company at all. Viewed from one angle, Uber ushered in the era of the Gig Economy in the 2010s, forcing disruption on an established, corrupt taxi industry through sheer force of will and determination.Viewed through the lens of Entropy Theory, though, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Postmates, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies captured value by wrangling natural employment entropy. In that view, people were always going to go from one job for their whole career to working for multiple companies, temporarily, at-once. The intersection of the technological entropy trendline, from mainframes to mobile, enabled the Gig Economy leaders to wrangle and capture value from the employment entropy trendline. An even more recent trend, the Passion Economy is one current expression of increasing employment entropy. Instead of working for one company forever, or one company at a time for shorter amounts of time, many talented, creative people have decided to strike out on their own to pursue their passions. It was inevitable. The Passion Economy-enabling companies that Li Jin writes about, like Substack, Discord, and Teachable, are attempting to capture value from increased talent entropy. Similarly, Nikhil Basu Trivedi’s The Rise of the Solo Capitalists speaks to increasing entropy in venture investing, and as Brett Bivens points out in One Person Companies: The next L’Oreal started as a blog, the next ESPN as an Instagram page in a dorm room. The next McKinsey, Harvard, or Benchmark might start on Substack, with a Teachable course, or as a podcast.So what type of Entropy Wranglers might form around this higher-entropy form of employment? In Will Joe Rogan IPO?, Mario Gabriele and Aashay Sanghvi point to the new tools, financing methods, and mediums available to individual creators. They even suggest that GPT-3 and its successors might enable creators to reproduce themselves, providing scale and an answer to key man risk where none existed before. Entropy Theory suggests that the tools they list are just the beginning.A keen observer might notice that the trend towards self-employment feels like a return to the way that humans worked for centuries, and suggest that maybe entropy is cyclical. I think the big difference between being a blacksmith in the 15th century and an Instagram influencer today, though, is the global scale and optionality afforded to one person businesses today. Working in one job from your teenage years to your grave and serving a captive audience in a non-competitive environment, even if you work for yourself, is a much lower-entropy career.Word limits prevent me, but we could analyze the history of so many industries through the same framework. Media. Food. Transportation. Finance. Rest Stops. Energy. Hospitality. Even before the internet, each of these industries has been defined by the inexorable march of entropy and valiant attempts to harness it using the latest technology of the day. Company Success and Failure Through Entropy TheoryEntropy Theory is useful in explaining why certain companies have been successful where others have failed. Often, it comes down to whether the company is victimized by increasing entropy (worst), creating entropy (better but too early), or wrangling entropy (best). Spotify, one of my favorite companies, is a perfect example of the latter. SpotifyThe music industry exhibits the same increasing entropy as real estate and employment. Musicians throughout most of history made a living from performing live concerts. Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph paved the way for Emile Berliner’s 1894 7-inch gramophone records, and in the 1920s, the earliest record labels sprung up to wrangle the increased entropy created by the ability to distribute the same track to many people. The music labels went on an uninterrupted tear from records to tapes to 8-tracks to CDs right up until 1999, when Napster dramatically increased entropy in the music industry by allowing people to illegally share and download music, for free. Napster increased the entropy of the music industry (creating entropy) and was shut down in 2001 under legal pressure. The music industry (victimized by entropy), wielding lawsuits in an attempt to go back to the way things were, fared no better. Whether via Napster, Limewire, or any other number of online music file sharing services, the genie was out of the bottle and the entropy had increased: people wanted to listen to what they wanted, when they wanted, online. Two companies wrangled the entropy and captured the value. In 2001, Apple launched iTunes, and sold individual songs for $0.99 each. Spotify, launched in 2006, wrangled musical entropy further, into the form in which it’s still consumed today: one monthly subscription for access to all of the songs. Spotify is the music industry’s Entropy Wrangler.Today, Spotify boasts 286 million Monthly Active Users, 130 million of whom pay for a subscription, good for $6.8 billion in 2019 revenue. Spotify’s stock has nearly doubled since March as it continues to make strides towards harnessing the high-entropy podcast industry, bringing its market cap to $50 billion. Why has Spotify been able to adapt and wrangle entropy multiple times? One theory is that its organizational structure - organized into squads, tribes, and guilds - is appropriately entropic to move quickly and nimbly.Entropy Theory also explains why competing attempts at subscription music services, like Deezer and Tidal, haven’t worked. Spotify wrangled the Napster-induced entropy, and hasn’t created enough entropy to create opportunities to attack it. Spotify has very little entropy leak. The threat to Spotify won’t be another subscription music streaming service. It will be a company that takes advantage of the next big increase in entropy to deliver audio content from a new set of creators in a new way. The Counterexample: QuibiWill you allow me a brief moment to shit on Quibi again? It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t realize what entropy level your industry has reached. Entropy Theory actually perfectly explains why Quibi failed where TikTok has succeeded. Quibi tried to apply a paradigm from entertainments’s previous entropy level, but entertainment entropy has increased past the point at which Quibi’s model makes sense. It’s not enough to get the mobile trend right by itself. To succeed, you need to ride an industry-specific entropy wave. Quibi realized that because of mobile’s ubiquity, anyone can consume content on their phone at any time. They didn’t realize that that same technology means that anyone can also create high-quality short-form content at any time. That makes the video content creation more chaotic, and leaves anyone trying to apply the old paradigm, like Quibi, in the dust. Short-form mobile video content is past the point where a central studio can play tastemaker without the help of an algorithm. Netflix still works in this world for three reasons: * Not everyone can create high-quality, longform, big screen content… yet. * Netflix has years of data that helps it make smart decisions about which content to create and which content to serve to each user. * Its huge user base means that it spends much less per user to create content (compare that to Quibi’s $100k per minute content budget!).But TikTok might be best-suited of all. TikTok is built for the current level of video entropy. People everywhere are creating better and better content, all the time. TikTok’s algorithm wrangles that entropy to surface the signal from all of the noise and reward creators for their creativity in the form of virality, fame, and ultimately, influencer money. Applying Entropy TheoryI’ve been on a brain-high for the past three days as I’ve thought of examples, tested whether they fit into Entropy Theory, and realized that they did. Again, I’m a nerd. This is my idea of a fun weekend. Part of me thinks: of course they fit; increasing entropy is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a natural law of the universe. The other part of me thinks: this is actually a really useful way to make sense of business and industry trends, and we’re going to be revisiting it often in Not Boring. Nailing a backtest is an important start, but for this thing to really get legs, it needs to be actionable and predictive. So how might we apply Entropy Theory to our careers and investments? If you’re a founder or operator, you should be looking for pockets in your industry where entropy has increased, and look for ways to wrangle that entropy without trying to go back to the way things were. Be wary of timing, and of not trying to increase entropy yourself: companies that try to force it too early take all the arrows; companies that hold on too long at the end throw away money trying to go back to the way things were; companies that bring new tools to industries in which entropy has naturally increased stand to capture enormous value. If you’re an investor, it’s helpful to understand broad trends and where the companies you’re looking at fit in. One practical implication: worry less about TAM when looking for Entropy Wranglers. Uber rode increasing entropy to a larger-than-anticipated ride-sharing market. Stripe is doing the same with online payments - its mission is to “Increase the GDP of the Internet.” Entropy Wranglers see that something has changed before others do; in a way, they’re Worldbuilders.What kind of predictions can we make with Entropy Theory? We should be able to predict that more entropic outcomes are more likely than less entropic ones over time, and that valuable companies will be created that bring order to the chaos. * Instead of going back to one office for one company post-COVID, employees are likely to work remotely and even for more than one company at the same time. Short office / long tools that facilitate remote collaboration and multi-company employment. * Education will become more a la carte. The best students won’t get a degree from one school. Instead, they’ll study with the best professors from across the world and combine the disparate credits into one degree. This presents opportunities for new forms of credentialing and ways of matching the right students with the right teachers. I think Entropy Theory is going to be foundational to the way that I think about and analyze businesses, and I hope you feel the same. But it’s still messy, and I’m looking forward to wrangling it with all of you. A few questions I’m looking forward to digging into in the coming weeks and months ahead:* How does Entropy Theory play with Network Effects, and with Hamilton Hemler’s Seven Powers more broadly? h/t Nikhil Basu Trivedi* What are the implications of Entropy Theory for Disruption Theory and incumbents? h/t Sari Azout* Are businesses with decentralized org structures like Amazon, Spotify, Stripe, and Uber better positioned to evolve and capture value as entropy increases? h/t Brett Bivens* Is there a velocity component to Entropy Theory? i.e. Does a faster entropy release lead to more innovation than a slower one? As Aggregation Theory turns 5, Entropy Theory turns 0. It takes a village to raise a theory. I’d love to hear your feedback, confirming examples, counterexamples, challenges, and questions in the comments.  Thanks to Dan, Mike, Sari, Brett, Brett, Leon, Puja, and Nikhil for their input and edits.Thanks for listening, Packy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

Welcome to the 583 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Thursday! If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, join 6,483 smart, curious folks by subscribing here!Already subscribed and want to climb up the Verified Not Boring leaderboard?Remember Ringtones?The lo-fi pocket songs that sparked the mobile revolutionby Gil KazimirovBefore the iPhone, Venmo, or Spotify, there were ringtones. You might remember them fondly as those lo-fidelity sounds we used to communicate our highly refined music taste every time someone called our cell. But ringtones were so much more than that. A billion dollar industry silenced seemingly overnight, ringtones laid the foundations of modern mobile consumer technology and set the stage for the App Store and mobile commerce as we know it today. And they are proof that even silly-seeming products can have an impact long after their meme fades away.    The Rise of the RingtoneThe first mobile phone call was made not by a silk-shirted Miami cocaine dealer in the 80s, but by a driver in St. Louis in 1946 from a heavyweight wireless system installed in an automobile. It took another 40 years to make it portable, reliable, and affordable enough (relatively speaking) to offer to the mainstream consumer. Literally the size of a carEven then, it didn’t quite go “mainstream”. A common reaction was: wow, that’s slick (it being the 80s and all), quickly followed up with but, like, who really needs a portable phone? The President... maybe? At the time, it was hard for ordinary people to imagine having to be reachable at any minute of the day. Lol.Anyways, it wasn’t until the 90s that owning a cell phone became relatively commonplace in the West. But then another problem reared its head. In the early part of the decade, phones came with preset, annoying, monophonic ringtones. Never ones to miss an opportunity to spend R&D dollars on minor inconveniences, humans manufactured a feature that allowed users to input custom ringtones. The Digital Minimo D319, released in 1996, was a Japanese-made device on which users could program custom ringtones by entering combinations of boops and beeps associated with keys on the number pad.Pictured: groundbreaking innovation.And people LOVED that shit. A book that taught users to recreate popular songs sold 3.5 million copies in its first year. Then, in 1998, a Finnish dude tired of Nokia’s preset monotone interfering with his weekday hangovers (no joke) found a way to transfer audio files directly to his phone through text message and the ringtone revolution began in earnest. By 2002, 30% of all SMS traffic was requests for downloadable ringtones.The rise of the custom ringtone, like many things, happened gradually, then all at once.The ingredients were mostly in place by the mid-90s. You had network operators hungry to make back their deep infrastructure capex investments and diversify their revenue streams. You had a device literally manufactured to make sound with the capacity to send and receive digitized data. And you had MVPs -- customizable ringtones enabled by number pads in Asia and text messaging in Europe -- that proved demand.Consumers jumped on custom ringtones because they represented the first, mainstream way of getting portable music, on-demand. No store, no CDs, no desktops. That was revolutionary -- imagine the possibilities! People could make an identity statement in a unique way, becoming an audio fashion accessory that users, young ones in particular, loved.The only problem was, selling custom ringtones constituted explicit copyright infringement which, as they probably say in the South, strangled the turkey before it hatched (maybe?). But two things happened in the late 90s: 1) the rise of music piracy and 2) the development of digital micropayment technology. The former sank music publishing revenues as CD sales plummeted; the latter created centralized micropayments platforms that could effectively collect royalties to be paid to music publishers in a way the web could not.When music publishers and labels saw the potential for ringtones to reverse declining sales, they entered into royalty agreements with telecoms and ringtone providers. And so the stage was set. We blasted into the new millennium frantically searching our pockets for the 8bit renditions of Smash Mouth and Shaggy that emanated from them. By the early 2000s, all the major record labels partnered with mobile operators to distribute and monetize the ringtone. At the time, observers proclaimed the ringtone to be the new single, and hailed the trend as “an industry shift no less important than the shift from the radio to the internet”. Haha.Although that view didn’t age well, you can’t blame industry analysts for espousing it. The custom ringtone industry in the US grew from $68m in 2003 to $600m in 2006. So many ringtones were sold  -- an estimated 520 million ringtones between 2001 and 2007 -- that the Recording Industry Association of America instituted ringtone charts and awards associated with them (Lil Wayne’s Lollipop went platinum 5 times). And how could it not with lyrics like these?Ringtones seeped deep into culture. Instead of music influencing ringtones, ringtones began to influence music. A wave of chart-topping rappers, including Soulja Boy, T-Pain and J-Kwon made music designed to sound good as polyphonic ringtones. Ringtones became a popular way to promote music as teasers, and served as cultural currency, offered as marketing incentives tied to a variety of promotional campaigns.The world’s needle fit snugly with the ringtone’s polyphonic groove. But as quickly as they jingled into our pockets, consumers hung up on them. Bye, Bye, ByeAs humans, we are really, really bad at predicting things, so few of us saw the fall of the custom ringtone industry coming. From a 2007 peak of $1.1 billion in global ringtone sales, the industry shrunk by 97% in the following decade. “Admittedly, it was a little sad,” recalled an executive with BMI, a music publisher. “In BMI’s early digital days, we made more money from ringtones than anything else; it accounted for more than half of our income stream. And now when you think about it, it’s basically zero.”There are a few likely reasons for its decline:* People stopped calling in favor of texting each other. Between 2008 and 2010, ringtone revenue declined 25% just as the average voice minutes used by 18-34 year olds, the ringtone’s main customers, declined by roughly the same amount.* The novelty of being able to customize phones wore off. As our phones evolved to offer web access, videos, games and social networking (especially with the rise of the smartphone) downloading and configuring ringtones no longer appeared particularly novel.* The ubiquity of ringing devices forced us to develop cultural mores around our phones.With cell phones going fully mainstream, our culture evolved to solve for the cacophony of sounds they blasted in social settings -- conference rooms, dinner tables, movie theatres -- with a simple switch of the phone to vibrate.* And my favorite theory: Crazy Frog killed it. In more eloquent words than my own: The eventual ubiquity of a Swedish teenager’s imitation of a two-stroke moped engine applied to an ambiguously genitalled cartoon frog may finally have exhausted what little patience the consuming public had for overpriced novelty call alerts.The “ambiguously genitalled” bane of quiet afternoons the world overGiven the rapid pace of innovation in mobile technology, it’s not surprising that a pop culture meme like the ringtone fell prey to the digital world’s inexorable thirst for innovation. But that we almost completely erased its role in our digital evolution from our collective memory -- that is less excusable.How Ringtones Shaped the Modern WorldThe custom ringtone made today’s digital age possible in a way that few other technologies can veritably claim to: * Ringtones were the precursor to the App Store.* They introduced people to the idea of on-demand anything. * Ringtone pioneers were the first to capitalize on the internet’s economics of abundance, a primitive version of the formula that TikTok employs today. * Ringtones connected our phones to the rest of our electronics for the first time. * They contributed to the failure of the Motorola/Apple partnership that brought Apple software to mobile phones for the first time. First, ringtones introduced the concept of a digital store… for digital things. Today we call it an App Store, a concept that didn’t really exist 20 years ago but that has since become a fundamental building block of the digital world. When NPP, Japan’s pioneering telco, made ringtones available for their customers to purchase, they realized that a) there’s very little marginal cost to “storing” digital products on their platform, b) that it’s therefore in their interest to have as much content as humanly possible and that c) relying on ringtone providers alone constrains the amount of content they can offer. With this in mind, NPP developed the world’s first App Store as we conceive of it today: a platform that provided tools for developers to develop content, a system for micropayments and digital services, and an application environment that users valued and trusted enough to open their wallets. By opening the platform to developers, a whole ecosystem of digital products sprung up around the ringtone app stores, including pre-recorded, humorous voicemail greetings (humorous being generously defined), custom wallpapers, ringback tones (remember when some people had songs play when you called them?), custom alarm sounds, and more.The technological breakthroughs needed to bring a mobile app store to life, combined with ringtones’ popularity, cemented the app store’s role as critical infrastructure for the coming Digital Age. Particularly prescient here was the introduction of micropayments and frictionless e-payment mechanisms. The effectiveness of that combination is hard to overstate: the offerings were both cheap and easy to buy without pulling out your wallet -- it was simply tacked on to your monthly bill -- amounting to a frequent and frictionless purchase experience. Custom ringtones showed technologists the power of frictionless payment; frictionless payment enabled software to eat the world. It incentivized creators and developers to create, while building consumer habits around digital purchasing that underpin today’s digital economy.Custom ringtones were also most people’s first exposure to the magic of on-demand anything. Never before could the average consumer order something with the press of a button and get it immediately, regardless of where they were. This facilitated impulsive buying behavior, and stoked the public’s imagination with the possibilities of the new digital frontier.With the establishment of on-demand digital stores and the trivial marginal costs of adding more content, consumers suddenly got mobile access to the long tail. Musicians without record deals could make their content available to a wide audience, on-demand, and make money off of it. For the first time, creators were able to skip pay-to-play channels like record stores or the radio to market their content. Disintermediation is a peach of a narrative and Spotify, Soundcloud, TikTok and others gobbled it whole, without realizing that the custom ringtone germinated its seeds years earlier. The founder of Jamster, a German ringtone provider, said it clearly in 2006:[Jamster] gives incentives for generating new content every day. The more content there is and the better I can sell it, the more the whole industry - and particularly the artists - will profit. I live from the long tail.There was another conceptual role that ringtones played: connecting our phones to the rest of our electronics. When phones came out, they were perceived as a standalone piece of consumer hardware, much like a dishwasher or a radio might be. There wasn’t much linking the cellphone to other parts of the consumer electronic ecosystem, like the personal computer. You used one to make calls and the other to draw portraits of your turtle on Microsoft Paint (I think?). But a defining feature of the digital world is the intricate link between all of our smart devices. It seems standard today to think of our phones as an extension of our computers or tablets: our data syncs automatically, we bookmark content on the phone to finish watching or reading on our computers, we share music libraries, respond to iMessages on our laptops and so on. That was hard to imagine back when Gorbachev showed off his Nokia.That’s not a metaphor.The custom ringtone showed both consumers and innovators the potential of redefining the phone as an extension of the computer, which was foundational for the development of the smartphone. First, one popular way to get ringtones (especially if you wanted them for free) was to download them onto your computer and then transfer them over to your phone, usually via bluetooth. Second, to set up or change a ringtone, one had to dive into the phone’s operating system, a snorkeling adventure that, while not particularly complicated, involved the concept of nested folders, settings menus, and choice architecture. It exposed consumers to the shared operating principles common to both computers and phones.There was another subplot that, inadvertently, drew a causal link between the ringtone and popularization of the smartphone which has become the cornerstone of the Digital Age. In the early 2000s, Apple had a plan to grow iTunes, their music app. On the heels of the global success of the iPod, they would partner with Motorola, then the industry leading manufacturer of the RAZR, to develop a cellphone with iTunes built-in. It got people very excited. But the result of that now unfathomable tryst was the Rokr E790 Candy Bar:Now only imagine, ladies and gentlemen... our terrible music library, on an even worse phoneThe phone turned out to be an abject user experience failure. It had a 100 song limit regardless of how much space you actually had left, and it was painfully slow at uploading songs from iTunes. Crucially, you couldn’t use it to buy ringtones or music remotely. Distributors had to slash its price within 2 months of launch. For Jobs this was an eye-opening reminder: own your damn hardware. He took his intended strategy -- develop a phone that had the iPod’s music playing capabilities as a way to capture a piece of the mobile segment while building a moat around Apple’s music business -- and built the iPhone, the vanguard of the smartphone revolution to come.Ringtones’ Everlasting LegacyRingtones remind me of childhood. Of the time I showed my mom how her device could bleat a monophonic rendition of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, of how incredulous she seemed, how her eyes glimmered with wonder and curiosity. Of how she kept it as her ringtone for years to come.Of how I learned to download ringtones for free onto my parents’ phones, of how proud I felt. I would scroll through the recent downloads in waiting rooms, in bank lines, in backseats, my mom nearby worrying about whatever grown ups worried about. I’d play my new acquisitions on her phone -- Backstreet Boys, System of a Down, Black Eyed Peas -- just loud enough for others to hear but quiet enough to avoid her scolding.Yes, it’s great we aren’t living in an endless menagerie of electronic sounds competing with each other for attention. But in some ways it’s sad they’ve all but disappeared from our lives: little packages of sound like parcels of identity sent from pockets and handbags, announcing someone else needing you, or thinking of you, or inviting you to something.So I guess it is some consolation that we chose to walk through the doors that the world of ringtones opened for us and live today in the possibilities it presented.If you enjoyed learning from Gil as much as I did, subscribe to That Damn Optimist.Thanks for listening, and see you on Monday! Packy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

Welcome to the 486 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! If you’re listening to this but haven’t subscribed, join 6,171 smart, curious folks by subscribing here!I’m trying something new today and including the full post with the audio edition. Let’s get to it.If I Ruled the TweetsOn April 7th, just weeks into the Coronavirus pandemic, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was giving away $1 billion to fund global COVID-19 relief. The world applauded Dorsey like this level of generosity was something new for him. Anyone who’s been following Twitter, though, knows that Jack Dorsey has been giving away value for years. Twitter is the most undermonetized product in the world, because it doesn’t know what it is. For someone so into meditation, @jack’s lack of self-awareness is a surprising error with major implications. * Twitter’s ads business struggles to support the entire company.* Twitter doesn’t know who its customers are, or what its Job To Be Done is for them.* Twitter captures almost none of the value that it creates. * Creators are left without features they would happily pay for.* Twitter Profiles are the most underdeveloped real estate on the internet.But Twitter still has a shot. One decision in 2015, and the company’s soporific product cadence since, was a blessing in disguise that gives Twitter a blank slate to build the product that it was meant to be all along.Sliding VinesIn her recent book on Instagram, No Filter, Sarah Frier includes one paragraph about the 2015 battle between Vine, Twitter’s six-second video app, and its biggest stars: Twenty of the top Viners banded together to negotiate with Twitter, saying that for about $1 million each, they could post every day for the next six months. If Twitter rejected the deal, they would instead start posting Vines to tell followers to find them on Instagram, YouTube, or Snapchat instead. Twitter refused, the stars abandoned the app, and eventually, Vine shut down entirely. That short paragraph represents one of the major Sliding Doors moments in recent tech history. What does the app world - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, and more - look like if Twitter had given into its biggest stars’ demands? Sliding Doors moments are what-ifs based on small tweaks to the timeline, popularized by the 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow banger, … Sliding Doors.The movie runs two timelines in parallel, split by one moment in which Paltrow’s character, Helen Quilly, either misses or catches her train home. In Timeline 1, Helen misses the train, gets mugged, hits her head, and finally gets home just as her fiancé’s ex drives off, none the wiser that the two had just slept together.In Timeline 2, Helen jams her shoulder between the “sliding doors,” catches her train, and makes it home to catch her fiancé in bed with another woman. As the short-form video app TikTok sweeps the world - it is expected to generate $500 million this year in the US alone - Twitter’s critics are running the sliding doors scenario on the company’s 2015 decision to effectively kill its own short-form video app. In Timeline 1, Twitter plays ball with the Viners. It pays them what they want, listens to their product feedback, and turns Vine into what TikTok is today. Twitter is an engagement powerhouse. We’re living in Timeline 2. Twitter says no to the Viners and ultimately shutters the app. Its main product stagnates and its stock price follows suit. TikTok fills the void and its parent company, ByteDance, is worth 4x as much as Twitter, with a valuation rumored to be between $105-110 billion on 2019 net profits of $3 billion - nearly as much as Twitter’s total 2019 revenue!But there’s a twist in Sliding Doors, and it applies to Twitter, too. In Timeline 1, the one in which she stays with her fiancé, Helen is miserable. In Timeline 2, after a couple of days of deep sadness and lots of drinks, Helen cuts her hair, starts her own PR firm, and falls in love with a much better guy. Timeline 2, the one that seems like it would be worse for Helen, allows her to rediscover who she is. Her new path ends up being so much better than the one she was originally on, because Timeline 1 Helen wasn’t her best self after all. (Let’s ignore the part where Helen gets hit by a van and dies. Life is unpredictable!) Twitter’s Timeline 2 has the potential to be so much better than Timeline 1, but the company is still in the midst of a five-year post-breakup funk. Since it hasn’t rediscovered itself yet, I’m going to play the role of “concerned best friend” and help Twitter snap out of it. If Twitter had kept Vine alive, it would have set a bad precedent, giving into creators’ demands and paying them off while failing to capture value itself. Even worse, it would have allowed Twitter to continue to delude itself into thinking that it’s a social network. Here’s the thing: Twitter thinks it’s Facebook, but it’s LinkedIn. Twitter thinks it’s an ad product, but it’s a subscription product. It thinks it’s an Aggregator, but it’s a Platform. It thinks it’s a social network, but it’s a professional network: one built for the Passion Economy, based on the strength of ideas instead of past experience.That realization should be liberating for Twitter and Jack Dorsey. Instead of being the world’s least innovative social network, it can be its most innovative professional network. Twitter should be the beating heart of the Passion Economy, and begin capturing some of the tremendous value it creates. Today, we’re going to give Twitter a makeover with its new identity in mind. * What’s wrong with Twitter and why?* Who is Twitter’s customer and what is its Job to Be Done (JTBD)?* What would Twitter look like if I ruled the tweets? Twitter is the most undermonetized product in the world. IT’S TIME TO MONETIZE!What’s Wrong with Twitter?Twitter is simultaneously my favorite product and the company that most frustrates me. As a Twitter user, I love the product. According to my Weekly Screen Time Report, I spend 5x more time on Twitter than I do on any other app. Not Boring would not grow the way it does without Twitter. I meet and talk to people I would otherwise just read about and admire from afar. If anything, I want to be able to do more on Twitter.As a Twitter shareholder, I can’t stand the company. Twitter’s stock has underperformed all of its peers… significantly. Twitter is down 14% since its 2013 IPO. Its next closest competitor, Google, is up 186% over the same period. Facebook, lacking scruples in its pursuit of Rubles, has more than quadrupled. So I have a lot of thoughts about what Twitter should do. I’m not alone. On Friday, I asked this question (on Twitter of course): I’ve never gotten more engagement on a tweet. Twitter users love talking about what they would do to fix Twitter. Responses ranged from “Sell the company” to “Ban the Nazis,” from “Remove the bots” to “Fix search.” Nikhil begged: “fix DMs holy shit nothing else matters please jack i beg you why are they so bad.” People asked for a podcast app, the ability to write longer-form content, and verification.  Even Y Combinator founder Paul Graham got involved: Reading through all of the responses, a pattern emerged: Twitter is terrible at being an ad-based social network, and isn’t giving Creators a pro subscription product they would happily pay for.Social versus Professional NetworksIncentives shape behavior, both on the company and individual level. Social networks - like Facebook, Instagram, and Snap - work by getting you and all of your friends in one place, keeping all of you engaged, and selling your attention to its real customers - advertisers. Facebook generates 98.5% of its revenue from ads. To PG’s point, engagement-chasing leads to toxicity. Social networks are incentivized to show user growth (which disincentivizes, say, removing bots from the platform) and to keep users in the app (and outrage is a great way to keep people glued to their screens).  Professional networks - like LinkedIn - like engagement and ad revenue, too. Who doesn’t? But ads are not their main source of income. Before Microsoft bought it for $27 billion in 2016, LinkedIn made money in three ways: Talent Solutions (recruiting and learning tools, 65%), Marketing Solutions (ads, 18%), and Premium Subscriptions (want to see who viewed your profile? 17%). Only 18% of LinkedIn’s revenue comes from ads; 82% comes from subscriptions.Professional networks aim to deliver measurable value to as many of the best companies and top people as possible, and get them to pay directly for that value. Bots and outrage are harmful to professional networks, because they make it less likely that users achieve the things they are willing to pay for to achieve - hiring, partnering, and selling.Twitter makes money like a social network: Advertising Services (ads, 86.5%) and Data Licensing (selling companies a firehose of Twitter data, 13.5%). It generates revenue by keeping people engaged, generating data on them, and either using that data to sell ads or selling the data itself.But Twitter isn’t very good at the business of being a social network. Twitter has long struggled to grow or monetize its user base. In 2019, Twitter made $3.4 billion from 330 million users. Facebook made $70.7 billion off of 2.5 billion users. Facebook is for everyone who has friends, family and an internet connection, which is pretty much everyone. Twitter is not for everyone. It’s for knowledge workers who rely on Twitter to exchange ideas, promote their work, and take place in the global, real-time conversation. That is definitionally a smaller target market than Facebook’s, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter needs to be a smaller business. Twitter’s audience is more targeted and professional; it should be able to generate more revenue per user than Facebook does. Arguably, Twitter actually does create more value than Facebook. Its lack of self-awareness, though, prevents it from capturing that value. The Informal Bill Gates LineTwitter is a charity masquerading as a for-profit business. It’s nearly impossible to calculate the total value that Twitter has created for its power users - both individuals and companies - by giving them a place to build an audience, connect directly with fans, and promote their work. And Twitter keeps almost none of that value for itself. Let’s take Substack as an example. Substack would not exist, at least not in its current venture-backed form, without Twitter. I surveyed a group of newsletter writers about how they grow their audiences, and 95% of them use Twitter. For Substack, that’s incredible. Its customers - writers - write on Substack, share what they write on Twitter, and take advantage of Twitter’s graph to find new subscribers. Some percentage of those subscribers pay the writer and Substack takes a cut. Other writers see Substack on Twitter and decide to start their own Substack, and the cycle starts again. Who’s capturing the value here? The writer captures value in the form of a new free or paid subscriber.Substack captures value in the form of new paid subscribers and new writers. Twitter captures almost zero value. You could argue that it captures a little in the form of increased engagement that it can sell ads against, but when one of its users sees a Substack post and clicks the link, she leaves Twitter and gives her attention to Substack. This happens millions of times each day, for thousands of non-Twitter products - YouTube, Medium, The New York Times, Spotify, podcasts. Don’t get me started on podcasts. In-app podcast discovery is notoriously awful. You know where people discover podcasts? Twitter. Countless media and tech companies and personalities amplify themselves on Twitter, for free, and then bring users off of Twitter and into their product. This is how Aggregators work. They aggregate demand, and collect a tax for sending that demand to its final destination. Every time I search on Google, for example, if I find what I want, I leave Google. But Google collects money from the company to whom I divert my attention. Twitter is terrible at collecting that tax. Its Promoted Tweets are a hard-to-use joke. Twitter is a very bad Aggregator.The other way of looking at Twitter is as the Platform that is further above the Bill Gates Line than any other platform on earth. The Bill Gates Line is a phrase coined by Ben Thompson based on a Bill Gates quote about Facebook Platform: This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.By that measure, Twitter is definitely a platform, but it’s an informal one. Whereas developers build directly on top of traditional platforms, like Windows, the businesses built “on top of” Twitter, like Substack, do so informally and without Twitter capturing any value. Twitter is so far above the Bill Gates Line that it’s much closer to another Bill Gates Line - the world-record $35 billion that Gates has given away through the Gates Foundation.It is time for Twitter to start capturing the value that it creates, improve its experience for its customers, and get its stock moving. For that, it needs to understand who its customer is, and what the Job to be Done is for those customers.Who is Twitter’s Customer?There’s a phrase that goes back to the pre-internet era that people apply to social media: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” It means that ad-supported businesses sell your attention (the product) to advertisers (the customer). On social networks, users are the product, and advertisers are the customers. In non-ad supported businesses - from subscriptions to hardware to food - the product is the product, and the buyer is the customer. On professional networks, like LinkedIn, most users are the product, but power users are the customers. Anyone can use LinkedIn for free, but users who need more capabilities - who want to recruit beyond their own network, see who’s viewing their profiles, or reach out to qualified leads - can pay for additional functionality. Like a social network, everyone on LinkedIn benefits from more people being on LinkedIn, but certain people and companies can pay to benefit more. For Twitter, Creators, the 10% of users who generate 80% of the tweets, are its customers. Twitter should adopt LinkedIn’s model - keeping the current Twitter product free and open for casual users, and charging its customers - the Creators who rely on Twitter to build and grow their businesses.What is Twitter’s Customers’ Job To Be Done?The "Jobs to be done" (JTBD) framework, developed by Clayton Christensen, says that customers hire products to do a certain job for them. For Netflix, the JBTD is “I need to be entertained.” For Facebook, it’s “I need to connect with friends and family.” For Google, it’s “I need to find something on the internet.”What is Twitter’s JTBD for Creators? “I need to get my ideas in front of people.” Twitter is the Platform for Ideas. Its customers are the Creators who create and share ideas. It should diversify its revenue stream away from ads-only by adding a subscription product and monetization options for those Creators.  I’m not the first to suggest that Twitter should launch a subscription. Last week, a Twitter job posting suggesting that the company is hiring for a subscription product shot around the internet. Its stock popped 7%. Professor Scott Galloway previously wrote that Twitter should buy up dying media companies and also charge verified users a monthly fee based on their follower count, or something. But the Prof is just as confused as Jack. A half-baked subscription product that extorts Twitter’s top users based on the follower counts they’ve spent years building up doesn’t make any damn sense.  Thanks to the 300+ replies with suggestions for improving Twitter, though, we’re ready to Play Fantasy Jack. If I Ruled the TweetsAs @Post_Market said, “Twitter is the town hall.” That’s a wonderful thing, but real business doesn’t get done in the town halls. It gets done in the back rooms. Currently, those back rooms are off of Twitter. Jack needs to take them back. The Fantasy Jack Twitter Roadmap is all about making it easier to create, share, and monetize great ideas, build communities, and capture value:* Table Stakes: Verify identity to clean up the conversation. * Twitter+ Subscription: Paid tools for Creators to find, create, and share ideas. * Twitter Create: Twitter should be the place to build subscription businesses.* Profiles as Creators’ Home: Develop the most underdeveloped real estate online.This roadmap seems like a bold departure from the Twitter we know and love, but it really just represents Twitter getting out of its own way and building better versions of the things that happen outside of its control today. 1. Verify Identity and Allow Filtering by VerifiedThis is table stakes. A social Aggregator might not want to verify users, creating two classes, one of which is far less valuable to advertisers, and exposing that its user base is smaller than it looks. A professional Platform for Ideas absolutely should. Twitter used to verify its users - giving them a blue check on their profile - until it caused an uproar in 2017 by verifying a white supremacist. Now it only verifies some people, occasionally, through a non-public process that involves getting in touch with someone at Twitter. It’s messy.Dror suggests that Twitter should “give people a chance to verify their identity, even for a small fee” and “allow filtering of posts, comments, and notifications by verified.” The ability to filter by verified solves the bot problem, squashes trolls, and raises the level of discourse on Twitter. To PG’s point, when you’re not optimizing for Daily Active Users (DAUs) and engagement alone, you can lower toxicity.2. Build Twitter+, a Subscription Product for Creators Charging the most popular Twitter accounts a monthly fee based on their follower count is a progressive tax that could lead to a mass exodus. That’s not the move. But Twitter should absolutely build a Pro subscription offering for its Creators. The subscription product should enable creators to do the JTBD better - generate, create, and share ideas - spark conversations around those ideas, and get paid for them. As a Twitter Creator, I would pay for:* Bookmarking → Note-taking and Networked Thought. Marc Geffen’s idea is my dream. My Twitter Bookmarks is where things that I really want to read go to die - there’s no structure, no way to annotate or add notes, no way to connect ideas. Twitter should buy mymind or Roam, and integrate it into the product, making it easier to collect, organize, remix, and share ideas.* Better Search. Twitter search is terrible. Chris Muscarella wants search that works across messages, DMs, and bookmarks, with cached links in all of those sources. It can also greatly improve tweet search - it knows, for example, how many times a tweet on a given topic was liked and retweeted, and by whom. It can assign weight to certain people’s engagement, and build its own TweetRank.  * DMs That Work. Please, Jack. Help Nikhil here. Currently, you can only search by name in DMs, not by any of the content in the messages. So many good conversations happen out of the main feed and in DMs, and Twitter should make it easier to spin up (and then search) group DMs, conversations around certain topics, and ongoing 1-1 chats. The fact that I’m in Telegram chats with people who are so active on Twitter is a fail. * Comment CRM. Twitter Creators receive a lot of comments and questions. Twitter should build an easier way to track and manage them.* Who Viewed Your Profile. I recently canceled my LinkedIn Premium (being unemployed and not looking for a job, and all). “Want to see who viewed your profile?” is LinkedIn’s #1 reactivation tactic, and it almost gets me every time. * Early Access to New Features. In this new world, Twitter is a product company again. Early access to new features would be enough to get some power users to pay on its own.* Monetization Options. See next point. Twitter is in a position to create the ultimate Creator bundle, and add to it over time. Live presentations, Superpeer functionality, free promoted tweets - the bundle would only get more valuable over time.    At $20/month (Roam alone is $15/month), Twitter+ is a $1 billion annual opportunity, without assuming that the improved offering attracts new users. 3. Build, Buy, or Partner on Products for Creating, Sharing, and Monetizing IdeasThis is where Twitter takes back the value that it creates for so many other companies. It needs to get a little mean to make that happen.Twitter is the place that Creators go to grow subscription businesses. Twitter Create should be the place that they go to build subscription businesses. To start, Twitter should build a monetization product for Creators to easily collect subscription or one-time payments, from which Twitter takes a small cut. Instead of a Memberful plug-in on a Squarespace website, Creators should just build it all on Twitter.Some people have suggested that Substack, which makes it easy to create a subscription newsletter, is the paywall for Twitter, and that Twitter should buy Substack. That’s crazy. Substack has raised $17 million dollars, which means that it would cost Twitter well over $100 million to acquire the company. Twitter can recreate Substack for much less than $100 million, with better functionality. Twitter should build its own blogging and newsletter product, with a text editor, email send, analytics, referrals, custom domains, an ad-network, and easy ways for writers to grow their lists by selling promoted tweets based on follower and subscriber lookalikes, and the interest graph. Additionally, Alex Carter suggested that Twitter should build a standalone podcasting app. That’s one approach, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to share clips, notes, or anything other than an entire podcast, and Twitter could improve that. Another approach would be to team up with Spotify. Spotify has spent a lot of money to acquire valuable IP like Gimlet, The Ringer, Joe Rogan, Kim Kardashian, and The Obamas, and is working on building out a podcast ad network. Spotify would expand its reach and improve targeting, and Twitter would earn some of the revenue it helps Spotify generate. Why would Spotify do that? Remember, Twitter’s mean in this scenario 😈. Spotify links don’t preview anymore? Oops. Podcast discovery happens on Twitter, and Twitter should capitalize on that. Beyond newsletters and podcasts, Twitter can give Creators myriad ways to monetize: storefronts, an expert network, paid communities, access to audio-only rooms, online events, and more. Creators might even sell bundles of their own offerings to superfans, and automatically give discounts based on retweets and referrals. Twitter is in the strongest position to integrate payments and growth, and let Creators do the rest.Based on very rough math, this could be a $2 billion opportunity for Twitter almost immediately. Nothing would expand the Creator TAM more quickly than Twitter getting this right. 4. Make Profiles Incredible Places to HangoutTwitter Profiles are the most underdeveloped real estate on the internet. Right now, when you click on someone’s profile, you see 160 characters on them and their most recent tweets. It’s such a huge miss. Because it’s not in the main feed, Twitter should be a lot more experimental with Profiles. Someone’s Twitter profile should be a glimpse into their world, and Twitter should both create its own features and open up its API to make that happen. Imagine clicking on my Profile and popping into a Roadtrip experience. I’m DJ’ing my favorite songs and we’re having a conversation about the day’s tech news. People that I follow can join for free, non-follows could pay me a small fee. I could highlight what I’m reading (assuming someone finally makes a better Goodreads), my NewsletterStack, my favorite Spotify podcasts, and the products I recently hunted on ProductHunt. I could invite accredited investors to join the Not Boring Syndicate, and show off the performance of the Not Boring Portfolio. My Twitter Profile would be what a LinkedIn Profile would be if it were a living, breathing thing, created in and for 2020, based on what I’m currently creating and consuming.Of course, since I’d host my newsletter on Twitter Create, there would be a subscribe button front and center, with links to the three most recent posts. If you enjoy your experience in my little corner of Twitter, you could hit a button to tip me so that I can keep creating. Oh yeah, and with all of that engagement, maybe Twitter could even build an ad network to let relevant companies sponsor my profile, finally creating an ad product that makes sense 😉Hit the Road(map), Jack!Twitter dodged a bullet five years ago when it refused to pay Vine’s stars. It’s not a social network, and it’s not a product for passive entertainment. By not building in that direction for the past five years, Twitter left itself a clean slate on which to build a product for its real customers.Twitter is a professional network for the Creators whose ideas and products shape the conversation and the world. It should be proud of that. Twitter needs to get its swagger back, and a full reset on priorities and a bold new vision would do just that. The path that I laid out has the potential to double revenue in short order, and we didn’t even have time to cover how companies might engage with all of the new functionality that Twitter builds for its creators. Company profiles with Shopify integrations would be so clean. I’m bullish on Twitter if for no other reason than how much I and so many others still love and rely on it, despite all of its shortcomings. Twitter creates so much value, and it’s time that it captures it. @jack - if you have any questions, you can find me @packym, on Twitter.Thanks as always to Dan and Puja for reading and editing! If you liked what you read, I’d really appreciate if you hit the heart button, leave a comment, or share the post!Reminder: Join me on July 14th (tomorrow) for a conversation with Compound Writing on how to write and grow a newsletter by not being boring. The event is available to Compound members and Not Boring subscribers. Signup here:Thanks for reading, and see you Thursday,Packy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

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If you’re listening to this and haven’t subscribed to Not Boring, join 5,200+ smart, curious, business-savvy readers by entering your e-mail address below:Hi friends 👋🏻,I hope you enjoy the audio edition of The Will Ferrell Effect!✍️ If you’d like to read or share the original essay, you can find it here: The Will Ferrell EffectBelow, I’ve included the graphics from the episode so that you can follow along. I’ll point out in the audio when there’s something to look at.And if you enjoy what you’re hearing, please share Not Boring with your smartest friends!You can help grow Not Boring, climb up the leaderboard, and win fame and Not Boring swag by sharing your referral link. Just enter your email in the box at the bottom of the referral page to get your unique code, and share away! Thanks for listening, Packy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

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If you’re listening to this and haven’t subscribed to Not Boring, join 4,300+ smart, curious, business-savvy readers by entering your e-mail address below:Hi friends 👋🏻,I hope you enjoy the audio edition of Zillbnb!✍️ If you’d like to read or share the original essay, you can find it here: ZillbnbBelow, I’ve included the graphics from the episode so that you can follow along. I’ll point out in the audio when there’s something to look at.And if you enjoy what you’re hearing, please share Not Boring with your smartest friends! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

If you’re listening to this and haven’t subscribed to Not Boring, join 4,000+ smart, curious, business-savvy readers by entering your e-mail address below:Hi friends 👋🏻,I hope you enjoy the audio edition of Streaming Succession!✍️ If you’d like to read or share the original essay, you can find it here: Streaming SuccessionBelow, I’ve included the graphics from the episode so that you can follow along. I’ll point out in the audio when there’s something to look at. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co

If you’re listening to this and haven’t subscribed to Not Boring, join 3,500+ smart, curious, business-savvy readers by entering your e-mail address below:Hi friends 👋🏻,I hope you enjoy the audio edition of Oh Snap!✍️ If you’d like to read or share the original essay, you can find it here: [Link to Come]👻 You can also find a Snap Story of this post by adding me here: packymccBelow, I’ve included the graphics from the episode so that you can follow along. I’ll point out in the audio when there’s something to look at. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.notboring.co