Raffi's Round Up - w/c 10th March 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from a cold, jet-lagged morning in Yountville, California! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to a homage to the recently sunset-ed Skype, read this one)
“Long before Zoom, Skype became the verb to do video calls with another person. It’s equal parts sad and embarrassing that Skype fumbled such a lead. The service should be up there with “we became a verb” hall-of-famers including Google, Venmo, GoFundMe, Uber, Photoshop, DoorDash, Hoover, FedEx, Xerox”
It’s hard to argue with that… but it’s a good reminder that it’s sometimes the second or even third mouse who gets the cheese. Read more in An Ode to Skype by
here.
TWO (if you want the case study of serving a tight ICP then expanding, read this one)
Anecdotally Korean supermarkets are now popping up everywhere across the US and the UK, but it’s been a journey to get there… Just look at the journey of H-Mart now though per Bloomberg.
Korean supermarket H-Mart has been expanding at a steady clip from its humble origins in Queens, with outposts on the West Coast, Canada, and United Kingdom and something like $1 billion in annual sales. It’s got a number of tailwinds in its favor; when it first opened, Americans of Asian descent were 1.5 percent of the population, but today stand at 7 percent, and communities that can sustain an H-Mart have emerged in cities hardly synonymous with longstanding Asian communities, places like Atlanta and neighboring Gwinnett County, Georgia, which has gone so far as to brand itself as the Seoul of the South. It’s not just popular within Asian-American communities either, and has ridden the Korean wave into popularity across demographics, with something like 30 percent of shoppers now non-Asian.
That last stat was particularly impressive to me… Nearly a third of your customer base wasn’t your original base… That’s real land and expand!
THREE (if you want to play with the future, try this one)
Copy any UI in the world in a click. Same.dev (link here) is awesome to me, because this kind of playground underscores the importance of creativity and strategy…
The barriers to building are being reduced week on week.
FOUR (if you want to see the real-world impact of uncertainty, read this one)
Sometimes it’s hard to identify or pin-point the impact of policy — right now it’s more straightforward…
Per Fortune, the number of Americans planning a vacation in the next six months is at the lowest in 15 years.
Maybe that’s why White Lotus is doing so well? We’re all living vicariously!
FIVE (if you want the ultimate Netflix hack, read this one)
As the fine folks at Netflix Codes have put it, “you probably know that Netflix is using a really strange system to categorize its films and TV shows. Indeed, there isn't a categories tab... Until now.”
I love these kind of micro-projects which are borne out of personal frustration. It aligns well with the famous YCombinator mantra on “build something people want”; as a bonus, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, here was a good debate on Hacker News.
