Here’s what I learned this week

Distribution will be the future of B2B business and sales.

Although LinkedIn is a good platform, someone will crack the code similar to what Beehiiv is doing for boosts in newsletters for calls for meetings.

There is a market out there for people that:

1. Want to stay up to date on new businesses and technologies

2. Businesses and technologies that need feedback

3. Feedback will be the new warm-lead to product adoption

I don’t know what this looks like right now, but a curated marketplace of solutions that gives benefits for real feedback from real professionals in an industry is something that would really do well.

I think it will start with something that is a directory and that uses an LLM across all product feature updates.

Reddit is full of posts of “How to get your first 10 customers” and “How to collect product feedback” etc.

I like this space long term.

I got into a debate about SMS opt-in with PostScript’s lead legal counsel

This one was interesting, might have been a few weeks back, but we were having a debate about the need to double opt-in people.

Is it a good practice? 100%

Is it technically and legally required? No.

When you have SMS opt-in you SHOULD have a checkbox though that someone has to check to agree to the disclaimer language with terms and privacy LINKED.

(I see a lot of these without these linked)

The act of checking the box is enough to send someone an SMS. From there you should also have the explicit opt-out language in that text, as you should in all the texts that you send.

This stemmed from recent announcements from both postscript and Klaviyo about using 2 factor authentication essentially to confirm phone numbers without leaving the page.

You know how at checkout, there’s that box, that allows someone to check it to sign up for text messages, yeah it’s the same thing.

This brings me to my real thoughts on this.

Emails and phone numbers don’t make you money.

The people that provide you with those emails and phone numbers make you money, the goal shouldn’t be collecting those data points but instead helping those people purchase stuff.

The goal isn’t a bit list, it’s a big list of people that will purchase stuff.

This system has been broken for a while since Attentive came out with that two step opt-in stuff.

The whole concept of it is broken when it comes to the customer journey and yet we keep creating things that are only really beneficial to the company.

This changes soon….

More on this to come, time to fight back and use technology for the customer journey!

I met Yiqi Wu in person, CEO of Aimerce.ai

I think I learned more in 3 hours that I have in the last two years.

Wicked smart with a decent size war chest to figure stuff out.

What I learned was exciting and also a terrifying glimpse of what’s to come.

When I keep talking about how much distribution matters and building audiences, this conversation solidified it for me.

I’ve talked to a lot of people at similar companies with the same kind of software, but I really like where they are headed and their vision on simplicity.

Tackling one single problem is better than trying to tackle multiple.

I need to give her credit, she explained to me how technological changes necessitated a different approach to a simple problem.

What I took from our conversation is that technology companies have business models that rely on them to act and produce features in a way that allow them to show value to their core businesses.

As companies who’s core businesses don’t depend on features aimed at these things we’re free to run counter to these features in the interests of what’s good for other parties.

This is vague, but it will all make sense in a few weeks, trust me.

The A/B/C etc test that I shared last week, was just meant to challenge the perception of how and why we do things a certain way, when you couple the those learnings with what’s about to come, these muddy waters will turn into high altitude lake crystal clear.

There is a balance to be struck between the customer journey and the company journey and it shouldn’t be one or the other.

The Decline of LinkedIn

I don’t think I like LinkedIn anymore.

For the past 4+ years I’ve been writing regularly on LinkedIn, but I’m now slowing down my efforts. I still like a lot of the people I’ve met on LinkedIn but I’ve always used it as a place to just share my thoughts on industry.

The deeper level connections just aren’t there anymore for me, a lot of it is just posturing at this point and I don’t do well with that.

So I’m going to slow down my efforts over there and go back to actually building strategies and less just sharing the basics.

Seems like the posts people react to the most are the ones that are low effort, restating the basics ones.

That’s not the people I want to be talking to.

Weekly Classes

I posted about teaching weekly classes last week too.

The answer was yes, so I’m working on plans to do this, working on a day I can do this consistently every week.

I’m already having these conversations, but the series of classes is going to be a bit meaty from experience, usually 45-60 mins of teaching than 30-45 of Q&A.

My prediction is that this weekly class which will morph more into Q&A and eventually a subscription based thing seems like the likely solution over the long term.

I’ve been on this kick for a while to see how I could create a subscription product leveraging my experience and knowledge and I think this is a good practical first step.

I’ve just had priorities pulled in a lot of different ways.

The current state of ecommerce

In my meetings last week I learned a bit more about the behind the scenes of the shifting world of manufacturing on the luxury end of materials.

United Arab Emirates is the new market everyone is targeting.

Lots of money, not really looking for deals, massive profits to be made.

Contrast that to the USA where spend is decreasing, spending power is being squeezed, and demand is slowing for most items.

There is no shortage of materials and production capabilities, but for most factories they are looking to the deeper pockets and a few large deals to be the smarter play when selling their goods.

Shein and Temu are essentially buying overstock at rates that do not make the factories any money, but with declining demand it’s become their only option.

This is putting pressure on existing businesses that are buying from manufacturers and paying between 10-15% per piece and these marketplaces that are essentially arbitraging the market and paying 2-5% per piece over.

The difference in budget is going straight to the consumer and advertising.

It’s a beautiful model.

But let’s talk about the morality of what it is we all participate in for a second.

Should a business be in business if it’s only path to profit is to exploit lower wage areas under the guise of paying higher wages than their location?

Now I know there’s going to be people on all sides of this and it’s not lost on me that quality and craftsmanship is superior in certain parts of the world.

But I think this is a valid consideration when we look at what the current status of globalization looks like.

A virtual assistant in the Philippines is $4-$6 per hour.

Minimum wage in California is $16 per hour.

This is varied by county as well, San Francisco is $18.07 per hour.

But if you follow US news you’ll also know that Gavin Newsom (soon to eventually be president of the US) passed a law for fast food workers to make a minimum of $20 per hour.

So at the low end it’s 4-5 employees for the price of 1.

Is someone that is doing fast food the same as someone doing administrative tasks?

Are we not training people well enough to take over these tasks and deliver locally?

Is the name of the game of capitalism just to exploit loopholes in how we pay people?

These are all questions I find myself asking myself on the regular.

Should a business like Google, Microsoft, or Apple exist (combined market caps of $7.6 trillion) have certain restrictions on outsourcing work to save on labor costs?

They are “US” companies though most use tax loopholes to assign their IP to somewhere in the camen islands and make their location Ireland to pay a flat 15% tax.

Now I get it, taxes are a game, much the same way that the US has a prison industrial system that systematically incarcerates people based on their race and socioeconomic status, because those minimum wages are $0.25 per hour.

Modern day slavery actually.

You could get 12-16 prisoners for the price of 1 VA in the Philippines.

And that’s one of the problems I have with the way we currently act as a planet.

We exploit people in order to chase profits.

Now the knee jerk reaction to this is quality work is quality work no matter who does it and where. We’re a global economy, we all have a right to survive.

It’s why a lot of agencies target US based companies in ecommerce, they are conditioned to pay $3,000-$10,000+ a month no matter who’s providing the services as long as the work is quality.

This is much like the earlier example of luxury manufacturers targeting Dubai and UAE.

But it creates something that is really a bit of a paradox.

The very foundation of a lot of these businesses rely on the outsourcing of labor and that same labor is actively looking to not service their local communities but instead looking for the deepest pockets to make the most profit.

I don’t have an answer to the above mind you, it’s just something that I’ve struggled more and more with as I’ve gotten older. Skills aren’t compensated the same even if they have the same positive impact on society.

A lot of skills that have an inherently negative impact on society are actually compensated at rates far in excess of those that have a positive impact.

See teachers.

Can ethical business exist and still be profitable?

I think the answer to this is yes, but it requires a rewiring and reconditioning of market expectations. The idea of regional brands could become a thing again and I honestly think they probably should become a thing.

This is kind of how it used to be, where people bought into the brand because of it’s ties with the region.

The internet has changed this quite a bit and we’ve done our darndest to outsource as much manufacturing as possible and stopped building upgrading manufacturing facilities locally and instead deciding to outsource.

But what it’s created is entire economies based on increasing consumption and the need to consume in excess.

Long term there simply isn’t enough wealth creation to allow this path to continue indefinitely.

We already produce too much trash and byproducts from our needless creation.

What I’m learning this month: Reddit Ads

Having been a Redditor for a very very very long time, the ads have always sucked.

I see an opportunity.

I’m going to be building a strategy on how to hopefully effectively advertise on reddit, embrace the craziness, and turn it into the unsung hero of where a ton of people spend a lot of time.

Plus they have threaded conversations.

This one is going to be interesting for a variety of reasons, some of it is grassroots some of it is arbitrage, some of it is brand building.

The Takeaway

Spend some time this week to think about all the features that software companies are building and ask yourself one question:

“Does this feature benefit me as the business or the underlying business of the software company that is pitching it as a justification to eventually raise prices?”

You’re going to find that a lot of features are built to improve current behaviors, not reimagine or tackle the underlying issues that caused them.

Have a great week!

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com