We help companies achieve Hockeystick growth using data

Hockeystick

hockeystick

Get ready for an AI earthquake! A team of UCLA researchers ( n, , , ) have dropped some major keys to AGI. It's not only the code to seriously human-sounding AI, but they've also gone and open-sourced the whole thing. @zxche @Yihe__Deng @HuizhuoY @Kaixuan_Ji_19, @QuanquanGu Now you can develop better LLMs without needing to feed it tons of new, human-annotated data. First, let's focus on the game-changer here: a self-teaching language model. This method lets a language model becoming better and better without massive amounts of new, externally curated data. teach itself, Introducing SPIN: Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models I went full deep-dive mode – read their paper (" "),  scoured the insights on forums like , , and with Google Gemini Ultra and GPT-4 Turbo – and the core concept of SPIN knocked my tech-loving metaphorical socks off: Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models HackerNews X Reddit The 'Conversation Partner' Trick Imagine starting with a language model that has mastered basic skills (let's say conversational etiquette). With SPIN, the model building a dataset from what it already knows. generates internal 'conversations,' Instant knowledge expansion! Step two involves unleashing a new model and giving it one task: spot the difference between and genuine human communication. This forces the original model to up its game, getting more and more with every response to avoid detection. machine-generated chats human-like Here's where things get interesting. They started with (already fine-tuned with ). SPIN unleashed an iterative training system with this base model, improving it exponentially without relying on tons of new externally created data. zephyr-7b-sft-full UltraChat corpus SPIN vs. Traditional AI Training (DPO): A New Champion? We usually think machine learning, particularly for these huge language models, requires boatloads of carefully curated and labeled data. methods involve humans painstakingly rating AI responses against each other for training. Not only is this labor-intensive, but it also balloons costs as a dataset grows. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) Direct Preference Optimization (DTO) is a training method where a model is fine-tuned using a dataset of preferences, often involving human judgments that decide which of the model-generated responses are preferred. This method requires collecting new data where each piece is labeled based on these preferences, which can be resource-intensive. In contrast, SPIN utilizes , significantly reducing the need for new data. iterative self-play By the first iteration, , highlighting its efficiency and effectiveness in leveraging existing data to enhance model performance. SPIN's performance already exceeds that of DPO in most cases SPIN showcases its strength by achieving . The process of , methodically enhances the model's performance across multiple iterations, , especially on challenging benchmarks like TruthfulQA and GSM8k. on-par performance with models trained on more extensive datasets iterative training showcasing substantial improvements So, SPIN outperforms conventional training methods, including DPO, by efficiently leveraging synthetic datasets generated through self-play, without the need for additional human-annotated data. What are SPIN's Strengths and Costs? SPIN throws a curveball with its self-play dynamic. Think of it like a language model sparring with itself in a linguistic boxing ring, with each round teaching it new tricks. SPIN's data efficiency bypasses the need for new human-annotated datasets. But more importantly, it , . accelerates the improvement loop making the model increasingly adept at generating human-like text Not only does SPIN seem to match models trained on larger external datasets, but its iterative power means consistent gains as it essentially studies its own output. Mindblowing, right? Okay, Let's Talk the Elephant in the Room – COST Nous Research co-founder has a point. These big ol' language models don't get smarter for free. Iteratively re-training with SPIN involves the expensive process of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) each time. @Teknium1 However, he also mentions that "I think its worth it!". Also, the long-term benefits of quicker evolution and potentially less dependency on human-annotated data outweigh the initial investment? That's the exciting question! BOOM! It's Open-Source AI Time Just yesterday, , associate professor of computer science at UCLA and director of AI research at ByteDance, announced that . This doesn't just mean code and datasets, but pre-trained models to kickstart your own AI journeys. Quanquan Gu anyone can now use the SPIN model and dataset SPIN mirrors human thought processes. By generating text that feels human, SPIN hints at the foundational elements of reasoning that future AI could do. You know how some LLM outputs feel robotic right? Well, SPIN is different. It actually mirrors the way humans think. The way it writes feels so natural, it's like a peek into how future AI might be able to reason for themselves. This isn't just about making chatbots sound nicer. It's about creating a kind of digital thinking that works like ours. That kind of AI would be so much more flexible and capable of real understanding. While SPIN is a big leap forward in making language models sound more natural, . it's easy to get excited and overestimate what it means The text it produces is impressive (you can take a look to the database), but it's important to remember that AI doesn't yet have the capacity for true independent reasoning. While SPIN isn't true , the way it mimics human-like writing demonstrates impressive advances in how AI could process and use language in the future. AGI Even so, it does suggest amazing possibilities for how AI and language might develop in the future (if you remember that we are at the beginning of the hockey stick, the future is not far from today...) The ripple effects will be huge and here's your access pass: Code: Available on : GitHub https://github.com/uclaml/SPIN Data: Hosted on , the dataset is readily accessible for those eager to apply SPIN methodologies: Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/collections/UCLA-AGI/datasets-spin-65c3624e98d4b589bbc76f3a… Models: Pre-trained models are also available, offering a head start for experimenting with SPIN-enhanced language models: https://huggingface.co/collections/UCLA-AGI/zephyr-7b-sft-full-spin-65c361dfca65637272a02c40… Project Page: For comprehensive insights and further information, the project page is an invaluable resource: https://uclaml.github.io/SPIN/ To sum up, its iterative, self-improving methodology is a significant advancement towards creating LLM that can engage in genuinely human-like communication. Originally shared on my . X account

AGI Blueprint? UCLA Researchers Open-Source SPIN—A Self-Improving Language Model

এজিআই ব্লুপ্রিন্ট? UCLA গবেষকরা ওপেন-সোর্স স্পিন—একটি স্ব-উন্নতিশীল ভাষা মডেল

AGI-Blaupause? UCLA-Forscher Open-Source-SPIN – ein sich selbst verbesserndes Sprachmodell

¿Plan AGI? SPIN de código abierto de investigadores de UCLA: un modelo de lenguaje que se mejora a sí mismo

Plan AGI ? SPIN open source des chercheurs de l'UCLA : un modèle linguistique auto-améliorable

एजीआई ब्लूप्रिंट? यूसीएलए शोधकर्ता ओपन-सोर्स स्पिन-एक स्व-सुधार भाषा मॉडल

AGIブループリント? UCLA の研究者がオープンソースの SPIN — 自己改善型言語モデルを公開

AGI 청사진? UCLA 연구원 오픈 소스 SPIN - 자체 개선 언어 모델

Projeto AGI? SPIN de código aberto para pesquisadores da UCLA - um modelo de linguagem que se aprimora automaticamente

Проект AGI? Исследователи Калифорнийского университета в Лос-Анджелесе SPIN с открытым исходным кодом — самоусовершенствующаяся языковая модель

AGI Planı? UCLA Araştırmacıları Açık Kaynak SPIN—Kendini Geliştiren Bir Dil Modeli

Bản thiết kế AGI? Các nhà nghiên cứu của UCLA SPIN mã nguồn mở—Mô hình ngôn ngữ tự cải thiện

AGI 蓝图？加州大学洛杉矶分校研究人员开源 SPIN——一种自我改进的语言模型

Massa

পাস্তা

Pasta

Pâtes

पास्ता

パスタ

파스타

Makarna

Mỳ ống

意大利面

The AI startup landscape has been dynamic, with numerous emerging players and innovative solutions in various industries, including healthcare, finance, transportation, e-commerce, and more, making it highly attractive for investors. From autonomous vehicles to virtual assistants, and the seemingly godlike ChatGPT, AI is transforming industries and disrupting traditional business models. Fueling the AI fire and investor interest is the sheer size and growth the sector has and will continue to enjoy. According to Precedence Research, the global artificial intelligence (AI) market size was estimated at $119.78 billion in 2022 and is . That's a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.1% from 2022 to 2030. expected to hit almost $1.6 trillion by 2030 However, not all AI startups are created equal, and investors need to exercise caution when deciding where to allocate their capital. To mitigate risk and make informed investment decisions, it's crucial to ask the right questions and thoroughly evaluate the potential of an AI startup. The fast-paced nature of AI development, regulatory uncertainties, ethical concerns, and the competitive landscape can impact the success and viability of AI startups. Therefore, it becomes crucial for investors to thoroughly assess and evaluate the risks and opportunities associated with investing in AI startups. I spoke with Daniil Kirikov, managing partner at , about some of the not-so-common questions, investors should be asking before they commit. Orbita VC Expand your understanding of the age-old "Is there a problem" qualifier One of the first questions all investors consider is whether any startup, AI or otherwise, is addressing a real problem that people are willing to pay for. "AI hype can sometimes overshadow the actual value proposition of a startup," Kirikov said. "Investors need to expand their understanding of whether there's a problem with better questions to critically assess if the startup is solving an old issue that people were already paying to solve, but to someone else. A good litmus test for this is to ask, 'Who were people paying to solve this problem 10 years ago?' If the answer is unclear or non-existent, it could be a sign that the problem being addressed is not significant or sustainable in the long run." Assuming the startup is addressing a genuine problem, the next question to ask is whether AI enables a significant increase in efficiency in terms of cost, speed, or quality. "AI should provide a clear competitive advantage over traditional methods, and the startup should have a compelling value proposition in this regard," Kirikov said. "If the startup's solution merely provides marginal improvements or does not result in a substantial increase in efficiency, it may not be a compelling investment opportunity. Investors should seek startups that have a clear edge over the competition and can deliver a step-change improvement through the use of AI." Problem defined, but does this need solving, and why now? Another critical factor to consider is the timing of the solution and whether it could have already been solved before the hockey-stick growth and interest in AI. After all, it's 2023 - at this point in history, it is nigh on impossible to come up with an idea that hasn't already been solved 700 times or find a gap in the market. "Investors should assess whether the same solution could have been implemented two, three, or five years ago," Kirikov said. "If the answer is yes, it may indicate that the startup is not leveraging new technologies or ideas and that others may have already attempted similar approaches without success. Learning from the failures of others is crucial in making investment decisions. If a solution has been attempted before without significant success, the likelihood of multiple increases in efficiency may be low. Investors should look for startups that are genuinely innovative and are leveraging cutting-edge technologies or ideas that are not readily available in the market." Dig deep on security risk, not just financials Security is also a vital consideration in the AI startup space. As AI technologies become more prevalent and powerful, the potential risks and ethical concerns associated with them increase. "Governments and regulatory bodies are paying close attention to the development and deployment of AI, and startups that do not prioritize security and ethical considerations may face regulatory hurdles and legal challenges," Kirikov said. "Investors should carefully evaluate the startup's approach to security and compliance with relevant regulations to mitigate potential risks and liabilities." Asking deeper and more nuanced questions is now critical given the sheer volume of AI startups being created daily. It is now not enough to understand at a surface level the problem the startup solves, its business model, traction and growth potential, team expertise, financials, risk mitigation, exit strategy, competitive advantage, funding requirements, and the timeline for achieving milestones when evaluating where to commit funds. Kirikov's approach and level of questioning in the assessment phase are now crucial for the industry and can help all investors make more informed decisions.

Assessing the Risk of Funding AI Startups: Deeper Questions Every Investor Should Ask

Raising money is one of the most challenging aspects of being a startup founder. After all, you're asking people to believe in your vision, invest money into your company and stay with you through ups and downs. Now more than ever, it’s -- which it makes it all the more impressive when it happens. extremely difficult to move from a seed round to a Series A One company that recently made the jump is , an all-in-one SaaS buying and management solution. They announced their Series A led by Prosus Ventures and Accel and comes only ten months after its seed round. Spendflo The company experienced a hockey-stick growth trajectory since its inception and has grown 30% month on month since the start of 2022, multiplying its revenue 15 times, growing its customer count by 5X, and expanding the team size fourfold. Talking to Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-founder, let’d dig in more on their recent accomplishments. SE: Congratulations on your Series A. It’s never been more difficult for startups to move from the seed to Series A stage. What do you think sets you apart during this time? SS: Spendflo is an all-in-one solution that solves challenges at every stage of the SaaS procurement lifecycle including buying, management, and security. Every other alternative in the market remains a point solution focusing on just one of the three major challenges, resulting in three times the cost, effort, and resources involved for a business to tackle one problem. Moreover, juggling between three different systems to solve one problem is counterintuitive to the goal of saving time and money for fast-growing businesses. Spendflo remains the truly complete solution that helps modern businesses buy, manage and secure SaaS on autopilot. Seamless sharing of data between its SaaS buying, management, and security hubs streamlines SaaS buying, automates workflows, accelerates buying cycles, and saves up to 30% of a company’s annual SaaS expenses. As companies grapple with mounting SaaS expenses and try to be more efficient and productive, Spendflo addresses the need of the hour perfectly. : Saas spends are typically one of the top 5 expenses of any company. How did you identify this as an issue and recognize you could make an impact? SE SS: Spendflo was founded in 2021 while I was running business operations at the Californian electric vehicle charging company, Volta Charging. Every quarter, my CFO would complain to me that we were spending too much on SaaS solutions, but I didn’t know who owned the contracts or how they were using them. I got so fed up and realized I couldn’t be the only one with this problem. So I teamed up with co-founders Ajay Vardhan and Rajiv Ramanan to commercialize a solution. Spendflo essentially solves three problems: 1. The lack of visibility 2. The sheer chaos caused by multiple stakeholders involved in the buying, negotiation, and renewal processes 3. Price and usage opacity of their SaaS stack With Spendflo, companies can now track all of their SaaS tools and subscriptions in a single location. The solution provides crucial data on how much the business is spending on each subscription, as well as when contracts are due to be renewed; and more importantly, it provides usage data, so the business can see whether it’s getting the maximum possible ROI. SE: Tell me more about how Spendflo works, especially for audiences who could benefit, like: finance, procurement and IT, and security. SS: Spendflo helps companies save hundreds of hours on negotiating SaaS contracts and offers complete visibility while helping them evaluate, right-size and optimize their stack. This leads to faster approvals, easier onboarding, and more informed decision-making for a company's SaaS needs. For each audience, this translates into direct and impactful advantages, such as: CFOs and their finance teams now gain more visibility, get guaranteed savings (Spendflo provides 3x ROI consistently), and have streamlined approvals for their SaaS stack. Benchmark vendor data also helps them know areas where they can save or cut back. Procurement and IT departments receive benchmarked vendor data, enabling them to identify opportunities for cost savings and reduce procurement cycles. With Spendflo’s granular usage data and SaaS sentiment analysis, procurement and IT teams can make data-backed renewal/replacement decisions. Moreover, Spendflo provides access to skilled negotiation experts who are equipped to handle these tasks with proficiency. Security teams can now expect guaranteed better compliance with vendor questionnaires, streamlined onboarding processes, and seamless license renewals. SE: It looks like you’ve experienced tremendous growth in a relatively short amount of time. Tell me about that and what you think is impacting this. SS: Yes, we’ve experienced incredible growth at Spendflo, and we believe that it's due to a combination of factors. In today's economic climate, businesses are seeking innovative ways to optimize their operations, and Spendflo offers a streamlined, and efficient solution to SaaS buying and management. Additionally, our best-in-class, 24x7 multi-channel support, along with industry-leading service level agreements, have helped us gain the trust of leading global brands across industries. \ All of these efforts have helped us reach a wider audience and happier customers, which explains our growth trajectory. SE: How are you going to use the new funds? What are your most immediate and future plans? SS: The funds raised will be deployed towards strengthening the team, rapidly evolving the product offering, and expanding GTM efforts in the North American region. SE: Any tips, advice or best practices  for other founders and startups currently looking to raise a Series A? SS: These are the three things that I learned from Spendflo’s journey so far: Having loyal customers that truly believe in you, and would recommend you anywhere, anytime, can create a huge impact. Having reliable and proficient sales and marketing leaders within the organization makes the journey to Series A much smoother, and probable. Keeping past and potential investors in the loop about developments in the company and product is crucial—I highly recommend sending monthly investor updates.

The future of SaaS is savings, Spendflo raises Series A

Heyo Growth Marketers - The round 5 results of the by and HackerNoon are now LIVE! Growth Marketing Writing Contest mParticle Here’s a quick reminder on how the contest works - You can win from $12,000 prize pool by writing a story on . Here are a few topic suggestions shared by mParticle: #growth-marketing Product Management Customer Data Platforms (CDP) Growth Marketing Data Engineering Data Management ! Submit your #growth-marketing story today The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: Round 5 Nominations & Winners For selecting the top 10 nominations, we picked all the stories with the #growth-marketingtag on HackerNoon, published in January 2022. Then we chose the top stories using 60:30:10 weightage respectively to: Number of hours read The number of people reached The freshness of the content Here are the top 10 nominations: by 6 More Growth Marketing Strategies to 10x Your Startup in 2023 @mrkrystallis by Press Mentions For Your Brand: A Growth Marketer's How-To @darragh by 10 Reasons Why I Sucked At Growth Marketing @nebojsa.todorovic by How to Use No-Code Machine Learning to Optimize your HackerNoon Articles @giorgiob by How to Unlock Product Market Fit and Rapid Growth for Startups @loringuyen by 7 Tips for Product Managers in Web3 @hunais by Behavioral Economics: Growth Hackers' Secret Weapon @aghafasih by How to Achieve 'Product of the Day' on Product Hunt Using a Trello Board @artkulakov by If Growth Marketing Is So Terrible, Why Don't Statistics Show It? @requiredcrx by Why Web3 and NFT Gaming Can Be the Biggest Trend of 2023 @sergey-baloyan In the first place, we have: https://hackernoon.com/press-mentions-for-your-brand-a-growth-marketers-how-to?embedable=true Quick Tips Building Relationships With Journalists: Don’t be self-promotional about ideas for a story; they hate that. Add-value: Follow them on socials and share and interact with content you like and can add value to. It’ll help you stand out. Engage online: Find out what they need for their story or story ideas; be helpful and add-value. Listen more than you talk. Listen: Congratulations, . You have won $1,000! @darragh In the second place, we have: https://hackernoon.com/6-more-growth-marketing-strategies-to-10x-your-startup-in-2023?embedable=true Lastly, here's an extra Growth Marketing Strategy you should never forget… Never stop testing! Constant testing is the backbone of any successful growth marketing strategy. Just make sure that your analytics are set up right so that you can analyze both your successes & failures equally and it won't be long till you discover a strategy with hockey stick growth potential that's worth doubling down on. Congratulations, . You have won $600!!! @mrkrystallis The story scoring the third position is: https://hackernoon.com/10-reasons-why-i-sucked-at-growth-marketing?embedable=true I used to be a humble and happy writer who one day had the Gordon Gekko “moment." You know what I'm talking about, don't you? I thought it was my revelation, but it turned out it was my damnation. I wanted more, plain and simple. It wasn't enough for me to be just a writer. Oh no, how about a writer-marketer?! More shiny titles, more clients. Sounds like a solid business growth plan. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it didn't take me too long to realize one simple growth marketing truth: Every marketer can be a writer; but not every writer can be a marketer. Marketing takes and asks so much more than just writing. So, I didn't get a dime for my rhyme. Well-deserved ! You have won $400. @nebojsa.todorovic Congratulations again to all the nominations and winners. Visit today to view all the current and upcoming contests! These contests are for everyone! Share your stories and win $$$! contests.hackernoon.com

The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: Round 5 Results Announced!

গ্রোথ মার্কেটিং রাইটিং কনটেস্ট: রাউন্ড 5 এর ফলাফল ঘোষণা করা হয়েছে!

Der Wachstumsmarketing-Schreibwettbewerb: Ergebnisse der fünften Runde bekannt gegeben!

Concurso de redacción sobre marketing de crecimiento: ¡se anuncian los resultados de la ronda 5!

Concours d'écriture sur le marketing de croissance : les résultats de la 5e ronde sont annoncés !

ग्रोथ मार्केटिंग राइटिंग कॉन्टेस्ट: राउंड 5 के परिणाम घोषित!

The Growth Marketing Writing Contest: 第 5 ラウンドの結果が発表されました!

그로스 마케팅 글쓰기 콘테스트: 5차 결과 발표!

O Concurso de Redação de Growth Marketing: Resultados da 5ª Rodada Anunciados!

Büyüme Pazarlaması Yazma Yarışması: 5. Tur Sonuçları Açıklandı!

Cuộc thi Viết về Tiếp thị Tăng trưởng: Đã công bố Kết quả Vòng 5!

增长营销写作比赛：第 5 轮结果公布！

Apple's Tim Cook is one of many metaverse detractors, but it is no surprise that he favors augmented reality (AR) as the next significant technological shift. "I always think it's important that people understand what something is," the Apple CEO told on Friday. "And I'm really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is." Dutch publication Bright Other big names calling out the metaverse and promoting AR all have the same thing in common: their companies are expected to launch AR solutions soon, and they compete with the loudest kid in the metaverse playground, Meta. "In true technical style, there is no single universally accepted definition of the metaverse," Olga Vorobyeva, founder at Vox Consulting, wrote in . "Simply put, the metaverse is a vast network of 3D worlds and simulations rendered in real-time for cooperation and participation. This is not a virtual reality experience or a virtual economy with avatars sticking out, but a way to maintain identity, objects, payments, history, and ownership continuity." VentureBeat You don't have to be a budding Sherlock Holmes to see those speaking publicly about AR versus the metaverse tend to side with whichever horse their company decided to back. And the point made about people understanding a technology seems illogical at best. I don't need to understand Kotlin, Javascript, or AI algorithms to rent an e-scooter, order food, or watch an endless stream of people lip-syncing in front of a ring light. I simply You don't have to be a budding Sherlock Holmes to see those speaking publicly about AR versus the metaverse tend to side with whichever horse their company decided to back. And the point made about people understanding a technology seems illogical at best. I don't need to understand Kotlin, Javascript, or AI algorithms to rent an e-scooter, order food, or watch an endless stream of people lip-syncing in front of a ring light. I simply need to hear about a cool app that makes my life better, download it, and use it. Put a different way, Pokemon Go was the app that made AR a mainstream topic, and I don't need to understand AR to catch 'em all. But not only is AR versus the metaverse yet another example of binary thinking, causing polarization and division, but it's also missing the point. AR and the metaverse are best served together, like macaroni and cheese. While many analysts separate the two when preparing their market size reports and forecasts, Grand View Research understands that when looking at the future of the metaverse, it should include AR, VR, MR, and all associated technologies. , the global metaverse market size was estimated at $38.85 billion in 2021. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39.4% from 2022 to 2030. According to Grand View But all of this is moot unless we, the users, get apps that can make a positive difference in our daily lives. I looked at what the post-Pokemon AR world had to offer. There are some exciting and engaging offerings, including real-time , measuring body size and shape for , , and even . navigation in airports custom clothing designing and engineering buildings detecting and battling wildfires However, one new app combines AR with the metaverse/Web3 and is backed by some heavy firepower. is a street sports app designed for those who love skateboarding, rollerblading, BMX, parkour, snowboarding, and other similar activities. ShredSpots Founded by former pro skater Lev Filimonov and with an executive team that includes former YouTube, Snap, and Google execs, the app consists of features such as a community-driven street sports map and the ability to upload your tricks so others can see your skills in action. ShredSpots differs from other street sports map apps because it is soon to include AR features, and by building the app with Web3 in mind, the future possibilities go way beyond what you could offer by adding AR alone. The upcoming AR addition will allow users to see other users' tricks where they were performed, using your smartphone as the viewing device (and, one would assume, in AR smart glasses at some point). That's cool, but by combining AR and Web3, ShredSpots can offer users a whole raft of additional benefits. Imagine being able to monetize your skills and earn for sick tricks, or being able to immerse yourself in a world of street culture, with original street art and more presented to you as you look at the world through ShredSpots and your smartphone camera. I imagine the team has several ideas that combine all the latest technologies, including NFTs. ShredSpots is an excellent example of a team that understands there is no AR vs. metaverse - the two are complimentary, help both sides to gain mainstream acceptance and adoption, and - most importantly - should not even be highlighted in the first place. The most important thing is not the technology we build these experiences on but the experience itself. So if you want to take advantage of the hockey-stick growth analysts expect in Web3, AR, the metaverse, and other related technologies, be like ShredSpots. Design a fantastic app that works, appeal to a broad audience, and make it easy for them to use and understand. Tim Cook is right about that part. He's just wrong about making this a them vs. us thing.

Why Tim Cook has got it wrong on augmented reality vs. the metaverse

During an economic downturn, everything is impacted, from the cost of food and fuel to consumers' discretionary spending budgets. As discretionary spending patterns shift, app monetization will be affected. The apps that can succeed during an economic downturn differ from those that thrive in upswings. As frivolous spending from users and investors dries up, . cockroaches become valuable, not unicorns Subscription apps that provide high value to a committed user base are hard to kill. Adjusting your app's mobile monetization to match the economic conditions will help you and your users weather the storm. While there is talk of subscription fatigue, data shows a continued evolution towards use-based subscriptions. Venture capitalists are now looking for revenue and coveted hockey stick growth. A solid and elegant mobile monetization strategy is key to providing the required payment to continue to woo investors while you seek long-term growth. Mobile Monetization Strategies Mobile monetization strategies need to shift to account for economic conditions. Think like your users as you calculate the impact of inflation. Can you be generous with your offering and promotions to drive a higher sales volume? Consider how hiring freezes and the most recent jobs report will impact your user base. Will this decrease their budget? Could it increase their session time? Can you offer a steeper discount on volume purchases? Is it possible to provide an introductory rate for your subscription offering? Answers to these questions will vary based on the unique user bases of individual apps. Additionally, unique cohorts within a single app's user base can answer these questions differently. Verticals Expected to Perform Well Subscriptions in verticals that help people navigate tough times will have staying power and perform better than verticals with other focuses. Apps with subscriptions focused on education, the gig economy, FinTech, HealthTech, and entertainment will experience better performance in this market. Let's examine each vertical and why it's expected to perform well. Education becomes a more significant focus as people are trying to level up or change the role or industry they work in. Subscription apps help people find new positions or grow their networks, like , , and . There will also be a higher demand for online education apps that help children K-12 to learn core STEM and college prep skills as parents look for cheaper alternatives to offline tutoring centers. Apps like , and are well positioned in this market. LinkedIn Learning Coursera BumbleBizz Tynker, Quizlet Elite While budgets are tight, more people are looking to increase money coming in via gigs and community-based monetization. Gig apps with subscriptions that provide work like DoorDash's , , and will be positioned well as desired by consumers and people looking to make extra money. DashPass Lyft Pink Instacart+ Community-based apps that help creators monetize, like and , help users create their revenue streams. As more and more people become content creators, community-based are becoming a widespread monetization strategy. Twitch recently increased the generosity of its offering by Patreon Twitch business models allowing multi-platform streaming. We will also see the increased popularity of fintech apps. These apps help people save money with deals and discounts and budget better. Apps that can ensure users better control their income and expenses, such as , will see growing success in this market. You Need A Budget (YNAB) Healthtech apps help people get more access to content and services that help them with mental health and wellness. Businesses that aim to help reduce stress and anxiety during uncertain times will see an influx of users. Apps that help connect patients with medical providers, such as and , will see more downloads. Meditation apps like and offering subscriptions to on-demand guided meditations will see an increase in demand as people look to navigate uncertain times. Lyra One Medical Calm Headspace Finally, we will see success for apps and services that help people escape and forget about inflation, such as Nintendo Online or Apple Arcade. The still holds in gaming. As seen by Netflix's first global subscriber loss in over ten years, there is room for new and scrappy video streaming services to enter the video entertainment space. power of subscription models Netflix's recent dip in earnings shows that users in the market are hungry for new content, and there is space for scrappy competitors to take subscribers away from the established streaming giants. Streaming services are attempting to step into this space with . various strategies Strategies for All Verticals The first cut made by many consumers when faced with budgetary constraints is their subscriptions. The subscription services most likely to survive this climate are the ones with low price points and high-value offerings. Adding a lower price point to your subscription can help retain users who would have otherwise churned. Increasing your app's value will incentivize users to stick around. When adjusting pricing, use the from First Round. What was optimal at 10,000 users won't be optimal at 100,000. Identifying a key user segment and applicable levers will help you make sustainable changes as you scale. Be generous when your unit economics allow for it. 4-Step Pricing Framework Subscription-based businesses that have additional monetization through microtransactions are a strong bet as it's easier for users to justify smaller purchases. Digiday reports that podcasters provide alongside subscriptions to help boost subscriber retention and joins. Offering microtransactions or exclusive content alongside your subscription will help capture more revenue. This is a best practice for mobile app monetization, no matter the economic conditions. exclusive and early access content Freemium business models that include a free version and paid upgrades will perform well. As users have more time, they will test out free apps and eventually convert to paying users as they become immersed in the app. Securing users will set your app up for success as the economy recovers and discretionary budgets return. Apps should lean on advertising options to keep entry price points low. Advertising will allow you to provide value to your users at a low cost while bringing in that much-needed revenue. is exploring at the $7 per month price point. Keep in mind that the mobile advertising landscape has changed in recent years. Be sure to . Netflix ad-supported subscriptions Update Your Subscription Monetization Strategy to Account for IDFA Changes Adjusting the mobile monetization strategy for your app during an economic downturn will help you retain payers and increase your staying power. Think like your users and work with your internal teams to make swift adjustments to match your monetization strategy to the economic conditions. Be ready to make adjustments again when the economic conditions improve. This article was co-authored by Lomit Patel and . Jenny Pollock

Monetization Strategies to Help Your App Weather the Economic Downturn

As I listened to the latest Tesla shareholders' meeting, with Musk on the stage. A few things left me blown away. And I wanted to share them with you. To be sure, first, I'm not a Tesla investor. Second, this is not investment advice. Third, independently of whether you like or not Musk, there are a few incredible facts here. And I, as well, have a conflicting relationship with Musk's public figure. On the one hand, I respect him as an entrepreneur, and I believe he's one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. On the flip side, I do not agree with many things he says. And as he is one of the most powerful people in the world today, I think it's critical to have him in check, more than anyone else. Having premised that, let me dive into a few interesting findings from Tesla's latest shareholders' meeting. Tipping points! (it takes years to fully roll out a business strategy, and when it does roll out, it looks like the tip of an iceberg!) Three years ago (pre-pandemic), Tesla was worth $41.8 billion. Today Tesla is worth over $900 billion; Ford is valued at $61.5 billion. It took 14 years for Tesla to pass Ford's market cap. In the next five years since then, Tesla's valuation 20xed. In 2017, when Tesla passed Ford, it made $11.8 million in revenues, losing over $2.2 million. In 2018, Tesla went through what Musk dubbed "production hell" (the attempt of the company to ramp up manufacturing), which brought it very close to bankruptcy (a few days away). Analysts all called up Tesla for that (I was among them). Yet when things turn around, those same analysts disappear. I want instead to give you a deep dive into the current state! Production Hell! (one thing is to prototype, another thing is to scale) For this quarter, Lucid motor delivered just 679 vehicles on 37000+ reservations. For some context, in the same period, Tesla delivered 254,695 vehicles. This reminds us that one thing is prototyping, and another thing is scaling. For Tesla to be where it is today, it took years of going through what Elon Musk has dubbed “production hell.” That flirt with the production hell made Tesla very close to bankruptcy, not once but at least three times. The latest - a few days away from it - was 2018. Just ten years before, in August 2012, Tesla had barely made three thousand cars. Thus, the most difficult part (as Musk confirmed over and over) was not to make a viable EV but to go from production to mass production! The profitability paradox (a single year makes up for all the lost years) Above are Tesla’s cumulative losses over the years. After losing money pretty much for all its history. Suddenly, profits in 2021 made up for the losses throughout the years. For new developing industries. Once the new industry becomes viable. And if you’re taking advantage of economies of scale. In a single year, you make up for all the losses produced over the company's history. This is the best way to measure scalability. And perhaps an index that the company dominating that industry has reached/or is reaching economies of scale. That’s a powerful combination. Indeed, it doesn’t matter whether you create a new industry. What matters is that you dominate it. A new paradigm (what we call EV will have a different name and a clear set of features in the consumer's mind) Each new industry comes with its paradigm. In the EV case, we’ll learn to call it in a way that comprises these primary components: self-driving for consumers to make demand scale robotics in manufacturing to make supply scale energy storage and distribution to solve the “range anxiety.” Like today, the iPhone wouldn’t make sense without touch, apps, and cameras. EVs won’t make sense without self-driving on the consumer side and robotics on the manufacturing side. And, of course, the energy infrastructure that solves the “range anxiety” of people owning EVs. On the robotics side, it’s interesting to notice that robots make other robots obsolete. In the picture, you find the “body shop robot count” per unit produced at Tesla’s factories. In other words, at Tesla, the same Model Y takes much fewer robots to build in Berlin than in Fremont. Non-linear growth (slowly, then suddenly - the snowball effect) When new industries develop, they initially move painfully slow. And to be fair, in many cases, they collapse on themselves. That is why it’s so risky to develop a whole new market. And that is why it’s so hard to predict what new industries will be able to pass the embryonic development. Indeed, there is a threshold before which growth seems painfully slow, and no matter how much you push, things don’t move faster. Yet, as you pass through that threshold, things start to move so quickly that growth becomes exponential! That is what a hockey stick's growth trajectory looks like! This is a dream for those surfing that trajectory and a nightmare for competitors that have to deal with a rising tsunami coming against. And that’s what the EV industry, headed by Tesla, looks like, as of now. And Elon Musk explained it well; when commenting on the chart above, he said: This is one of the cleanest exponentials…it looks like one of those fake projections you see in VC meetings, but it's actually true! The quote above explains the snowball effect of creating a new industry while dominating it! Also published . here

Tesla's Snowball Effect 

I've worked at various startups for seven years, and some of them have made it to unicorn status. Therefore, I am familiar with the evolution and lifecycle of startups. DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) has been on my radar this year. I would like to share how DAOs will impact the future of startups from my perspective. Understanding startups Startups are new companies founded to develop a unique product or service, bring it to market and prove that it has a product-market fit to attract customers and earn revenue. Most startup companies are innovative and tech-driven. Their existence is to solve one or multiple problems and become disruptors in their respective industries. How does a startup work? A startup company needs to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), prove product-market fit, and attract customers at the angel or seed stage to get future funding for Series A. Typically, the seed or angel stage funding is from friends & family or small investors who believe in the product and the company's mission. After companies raise series A, they aim for speed and growth to prove to the venture capital investors that they can scale efficiently and quickly. The company wants "hockey stick growth" because, if they reach that level of sustainable growth, they'll be able to attract more funding for future series to generate even more rapid growth until they become public or are acquired. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google are the most famous startups that have succeeded. The structure, governance, and management of a startup The structure of a startup typically starts as a flat structure when the company is still young and small. As the company grows, the structure becomes hierarchical. CEO and C-level executives are the core decision-makers and managers. Core shareholders control the governance of the company. The funding source is primarily from venture capital. Understanding DAOs According to , "One of the most incredible concepts to be successfully implemented through blockchain technology is the DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. Decentralized autonomous organizations are entities that operate through smart contracts. Its financial transactions and rules are encoded on a blockchain, effectively removing the need for a central governing authority — hence the descriptors - decentralized and autonomous." The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (known as The DAO) was meant to operate as a venture capital fund for the crypto and decentralized space." Samuel Falkon's medium post How does a DAO work? The core members of the community establish the rules and principles of a DAO. They can often be found in the whitepapers of DAOs. Each DAO is usually created for a particular mission. A DAO's funding source is from community members interested in being part of the DAO. They can participate by purchasing the token issued by the DAO. Members of the DAO can propose projects tied to the mission, and members who own the voting right can vote for or against the projects. For example, is created for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and it’s known for offering crypto lending solutions. Compound DAO The structure, governance, and management of a DAO The structure of a DAO is flat. There are no executives. All the members hold power based on their membership status. It levels the playing field in that all members can participate. Tasks are discussed, created, and executed by the community. Decisions about projects are made by the community. The funding source is provided by the community. This table might help explain and provide a clear comparison of the differences between startups and DAOs: Startups DAOs Organization structure Hierarchical structure Flat structure Management C-level executives Community driven Governance Shareholders Community votes Decision Making Board and executives Community Funding Venture Capital DAO members I can confidently predict that in the future, many startups will start as projects within DAOs as DAOs seem to be able to pass and fund projects quicker than the regular startup process. You can imagine that it's Kickstarter on the blockchain. Once the projects become products, mature, and prove product-market fit, the project owners can create corporations or LLCs and take the companies to VC and get more substantial funding to grow the company efficiently at scale. Unlike traditional startups which are usually limited by their geolocation at the start, DAOs are accessible to the global community. Ultimately, DAOs will be the evolution of early-stage startups.

How Will DAOs Impact the Future of Startups?

To kick off this year’s “12 startups in 12 months” challenge that I’m building in public as an indie hacker, I started working on my first startup, but my startup failed. Some important lessons were learned. What is the percentage of startups that fail? The failure rate of startups is more than 80%. It is extremely difficult to land a winning idea on the first attempt. Someone has to be really lucky. In this article, I will summarize my story and point out five reasons why my first startup of the year failed. The First Startup — Mixio (No Code Landing Page Builder) To find the idea for my first startup of the year, initially, I wanted to build a generic no-code tool that could be used to build any web application. But the scope of this project would be too much for one month, and also it’s always better to focus on a narrower target audience when starting a project. In the end, I decided that indie hackers were my target audience and chose to build a tool that validates startup ideas faster. Eventually, my product became a tool that entrepreneurs or startup founders can use to validate as many ideas as quickly as possible. I wanted to make the experience less time-consuming and to the point where it would be easy for someone new to start building landing pages. I used David’s six criteria for selecting my startup ideas for this challenge. And it did tick all the checkboxes. ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ Has product-market-fit been proven by something similar? Is it B2B? Can the MVP be developed within ≤ 3 Months (max)? Can it be managed without employees? Can it work without making active sales? Can I identify myself with the product? My “Market Research” I pitched my startup idea to some fellow community members of and also created to see which of my ideas are the most popular. Wannabe Entrepreneur Virtual Co-working Space a poll on indiehakers.com IndieHackers.com Poll Result In the indiehackers.com poll, it was the second favorite idea. If it had been logical, I should have started with the most favorite idea for my startup. Since I’ve decided on my target audience already, I chose the second-best idea anyway. Landing Page of my Landing Page Builder I quickly created a landing page for Mixio using the bare minimum of information necessary. I needed user feedback, so I created the page as quickly as possible. The initial landing page of Mixio.net The signup link was just a Google form. The users had to fill out the information about their product in order to generate the landing page. It was a manual process. I only managed to get one user to sign up for my Google form. This is the landing page of my first user that is created by Mixio — . nuxo.org Launched Improved MVP The current version of the landing page is not converting, which means that the MVP needs to be more convincing in order to get people to convert. I started building a minimal working version of my landing page builder so that the users would be able to see the generated landing page right away. I launched my MVP with the bare minimum features needed for my users to get started. You can start using right away, without having to sign up. my landing page builder Building your landing page is a breeze This is an easy-to-use tool that does not require any coding or design skills to build a landing page. The other notable landing pages generated by Mixio are and . CollabClub.co LabSocial.com Traction Photo by Slidebean on Unsplash I have not seen the classic hockey stick growth in my data, unfortunately. I’m using an analytics tool called to track my user behavior. It’s not looking good — the engagement and conversion rate is really low. Even though I didn’t do much marketing, the conversion rate tells, and the number never lies. Heap As of today, only a small number of people have signed up for the service. And around 36 landing pages are being created by both registered and non-registered users. Status — “Startup Failed” Even though I think this startup is a failure, I won’t give up on it. My goal isn’t to give up after one month of a project — I want to see what happens in the long run. Also, I may have a better idea to pivot to something else in the future. You never know. And my goal for taking this challenge was to try out many ideas that could become a profitable SaaS startup. At least, I will be able to quickly build landing pages for my next 11 startups in this challenge. 😉 Lessons Learned So why did my startup fail? I will outline some reasons why my first startup of the year-long 12-startup challenge failed. The lessons are based on the feedback I have received from my target audience so far. These may not be the only factors at play. Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash 1. I didn’t choose the most popular idea This one is obvious. It would’ve been better to go with the most popular idea from the market research poll that I did on indiehackers.com. I see a lot of potential in the idea that the audience chose. 2. I asked the wrong questions I wasn’t able to read my customers’ minds because I didn’t ask the right questions. The key to finding out the truth about your potential customers is to ask the right questions. To find the truth it’s important to ask questions that will get you accurate information. 3. The market is saturated There are many landing page creators available on the market, which makes it difficult for new businesses to compete in this market. I don’t think I could compete with the big players who are already offering free services, and new tools are coming out every day. 4. Entrepreneurs are emotional about their landing pages Some entrepreneurs or indie hackers find building landing pages to be an emotional process. They want to design it themselves and make it perfect. 5. Technical entrepreneurs are comfortable with HTML templates If the founder is a developer or designer, they may be more comfortable hosting their own landing pages with HTML5 templates. I learned this lesson the hard way. 😞 What’s Next to My Journey as an Indie Hacker? I don’t consider this a failure at a personal level, as most startups are supposed to fail! And I may still have plans for Mixio in the future, as the no-code movement is growing rapidly. I just want to try as many ideas as possible before one really sticks. The first startup I attended taught me a few important lessons and helped me improve myself so that I could execute any startup idea better. That’s the whole point of this 12-month long fun experiment. My next idea is obviously the most voted one — a Twitter growth tool. It’s called . Feel free to sign up if you are curious about this tool. 🤗 LabSocial Follow My Journey of Building in Public Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash If you want to see how my story unfolds and want to support me or just want to come along for the ride with me, please and . It means a lot to me. subscribe to my newsletter follow me on Twitter If you are a maker yourself or want to dive into the journey of , please feel free to . building in public shout out to me on Twitter Also published . here

Why My First Startup Failed: 5 Lessons Learned

If you are on the way to your own startup I want to share with you some lessons learned. There are many ways to startup. Unfortunately, the Unicorn is the model that is most known in popular culture. It is the one you read about in the press, is what everyone tells you to aim for. Except that, last I checked, unicorns don’t exist… unicorn [ˈjuːnɪkɔːn] *noun something that is highly desirable but difficult to find or obtain. The thing is, many business ideas are good enough without having to be a unicorn If you are working on your startup and polishing your pitch to go get seed investment you are playing the unicorn game. You have to know that everyone from the Angel to the VC investors is trying to figure out if your idea is the next unicorn. Accelerators are nothing but unicorn hunting grounds. You will be shown how to perfect your pitch so that your embryonic idea can be seen in all its “Hockey stick” potential. And this is the right game to play for investors, for they know that 9 out of 10 ideas they invest in will not take off as they plan. Don’t be blinded I had a couple of friends that were importing organic coffee from somewhere in Africa. I met them at one accelerator. They were so enthusiastic about their coffee, and their coffee was really special. They did play the game of preparing the pitch until they were asked about scalability. Fast forward a few years, they own a nice coffee shop that sells specialty coffee and has a quite nice atmosphere. They were never looking to be the next Starbucks, they only wanted to share their love for good coffee. We were blinded We were part of an accelerator that tried to groom us for the next investors. We declined two sensible offers to create a normal business from two very interesting partners because of this. The first one was an old contact that had just sold his company and was looking at something new to do. We were resonating on the same wavelength when it came to technology and team. But when we started the financial discussions, our contact walked away. He saw through our Angel investors, we did not, and worst of all, our hands were tied. The second one was a sensible offer to buy or license our technology from a potential customer. It was again a good technological fit, they even had some office space ready for us. Here again, the expected valuation from our Angel investor got in the way. Happy ending with a twist In the end, we found an agreement with a technology partner, but this made it necessary for us to do a deal using debt and removing the shackles that our Angel investor had placed on us. In short, we had to place the company in receivership so that we could transfer our IP to our debtors and business partners. Lessons learned I have been quite successful with my next company, weathering Corona and building up a profitable business in my area of specialty. From the beginning, I knew I did not want any investors muddling the waters. By focusing on sales instead of investors the business was cash-flow positive quite early and has stayed that way since. I learned the following: and grooming our old startup for the Unicorn game. We would have been better off growing our customer and partner base. I wasted lots of time perfecting the pitch Accelerators are fun to be in, and it is cool to get to know the folks working on other ideas. But that is about the only value you will get from them. . Just like cattle growers, they will treat you nicely as soon as you are gaining weight and muscle where they want you to. You are the product for the accelerators , and people out there truly trying to help you without seeing you for which return you can bring to them. It is better to work with them than with an institutional accelerator. There are better options to grow your network Photo by on Birger Strahl Unsplash Join the Zebras By Zebras I mean the normal entrepreneurs that are looking to grab a market and create sales instead of going around chasing investors. Focus on customer acquisition and sales. Ensure your products or services are solving a need in the market. Grow based on your own financial muscle. If you decide to work with investors make sure not only that you keep your majority, but also that you keep the freedom to associate/sell or license your IP. Good luck with your endeavors! Featured image by on . Paul Bill Unsplash Also published behind a paywall . here

Startup Advice: Zebra, not Unicorn. 

Many people believe (incorrectly) that Cryptopunks were the first NFTs on Ethereum [Etheria was, but that's another article]. They were the first 10k generative profile pictures to be created, having been released in 2017 as a free collectible to anyone who cared enough about NFTs at that time to acquire one. Not long after the launch of Cryptopunks, another 10k generative project was released, in 2019, and up until 1.10.2022, the cryptoskulls did very little in the way of sales. At the time, the tech enabling NFTs was far less advanced than what we have today, and the 10,000 pixel-art skulls got very little traction. All 10,000 were manually minted by the developer and sold directly to collectors.  In fact, many of the OG NFT community members considered them to be a sub-par project, or an attempted "copycat" of the now-famous cryptopunks. To a few people, albeit mostly those of us who still refer to ourselves as 'trash artists', the skulls were an improvement to the cryptopunks. [bear in mind, that during the summer of 2020, a cryptopunk cost less than 1 eth, which at the time was around $400. Not only are skulls a pop-culture staple, the devs authorized the use of the IP of any individual's owned skulls, which had never been done prior. In addition to the IP rights, the cryptoskulls creators implemented a bespoke rarity determination system, which they called the "uniqueness index" (there were no rarity explorers for NFTs yet) and were among the first NFTs from which the funds were planned to develop a play-to-earn game. The depth of the project is actually quite incredible once explored, which we'll circle back to shortly, as to not derail the purpose of this article. Namely, I want to highlight the parabolic rise of the cryptoskulls in the second half of Jan 2022. As has been seen in recent months with a number of historic NFT projects; a once "forgotten" project can become a hidden gem at a moment's notice, should the right social media "influencer" make a point to discuss it. For nearly 2 years, the cryptoskulls averaged 0-2 sales per day, at prices less than the cost of the transaction fee required to complete the sale.  Then, as if rising from the proverbial dead, the CryptoSkulls got their day in the sun... or rather, their day on the moon. On Jan.10, 2022 , CryptoSkulls demolished the previous record for daily sales on OpenSea, with over 10,200 individual transactions occuring. 10,200+ sales, in a collection of 10,000 items; without considering the ~2000 still held by the project founder (which are planned to be committed to the CryptoSkulls DAO). Over the course of the next several days, the floor price of CryptoSkulls rose to nearly 5 eth; before a significant correction followed by a market-wide price dip which led many people to take profits on the skulls they'd collected for around $30 a year before. At the time of writing, the floor price of a cryptoskull is around 2 eth, depending on which platform you're browsing. The highest sale to date has been hit twice, with 2 of the Skull Lords, 10 hand-drawn NFTs that share the #1 rarity rank on platforms that quantify the rarities, being sold for 100 ETH each (approximately 250,000 US dollars). One such purchase was made by acclaimed entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuck; who is incredibly passionate about, and bullish on the future of the NFT industry. While the rarity explorers we're all familiar with at this point are seen as the authority on ranking NFT collections, the CryptoSkulls will forever hold their own exclusive rarity scale, calculated by the NFT index and other lesser known aspects of the project. At the risk of seemingly pumping my own bags (disclosure - I own approximately 25 cryptoskulls, most of which I'd acquired sporadically over the past 2 years), it seems that very few people have taken the time to DYOR on this OG NFT project. For example, 10% of the collection, or 1000 total skulls are classified as "game tokens", with the original intent being that these NFTs would be sold at a premium, with the revenue being utilized to develop the cryptoskulls game. In return, these items would be more powerful or have exclusive benefits within the completed game. There is also minor awareness of the fact that the project founder is not only still actively maintaining the community, but has been consistently working on the game's development since the project launched. With the recent hockey-stick pattern of sales, the royalties alone have produced millions of dollars in capital, and the game is well on its way to an initial public release. As a part of the game, Gold of Skulls, there will apparently be a play-to-earn mechanic, revolving around the $GSK ERC-20 token. If you hodl cryptoskulls, you may be able to claim a stipend of the token from the game's website. But that isn't the only under-realized benefit of cryptoskulls. In fact, it's likely that this will, for most people, be the first time hearing of this feature. And potentially it might be the first time hearing about the innovative token-mining system implemented by Chain Guardians; another blockchain gaming project; which extends through a wide ecosystem of projects and partnerships. Cryptoskulls, as well as assets from a number of additional NFT projects, can be utilized to mine the Chain Guardians governance token, $CGG. Each skull has an assigned hash rate when used to mine, and users can either join a mining pool, or mine on their own, all without the active assets leaving their own wallet. Overall, it's the author's personal opinion that the CryptoSkulls NFT collection is undoubtedly one of the most innovative projects in the space. Even moreso when considering the state of the NFT market in 2019, when the project was first launched. This opinion is supported by the fact that on more than one occasion, NFT collectors have sold CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and Mutant Apes solely in the interest of having liquidity to accumulate more skulls. Keep an eye out for an upcoming NFThub child-project leveraging the right to utilize the cryptoskulls IP for any skulls owned by an individual or entity. All in all, it's safe to say that the CryptoSkulls are long overdue for blue-chip status... ahem. DANK RARES status, and that the general community sentiment seems to be that we're all quite skullish. Also published here.

An Analysis of the Cryptoskulls NFT Project in 2022

All about Startup Growth with Lomit Patel on the HackerNoon Podcast

The little-known company powering knowledge entrepreneurs When discussing the biggest passion economy platforms, a few names are frequently mentioned: Shopify, Patreon, Teachable, and Cameo, among others. But there are a few giants that are under-the-radar but have silently grown into behemoths. One of them is . Founded in 2010, the Irvine, CA-based online course platform is one of the most established companies in the passion economy, aiding people that are looking to package and sell their knowledge. It calls its customers “knowledge entrepreneurs”—individuals who have an area of expertise that can be offered scalably and monetized online through knowledge products. Kajabi In online reviews, it has been referred to as “the Cadillac of online course platforms,” given its all-in-one platform functionality and premium price points of $149, $199, and $399 per month, versus competitors priced around $49 to $99 per month. The platform has reached impressive scale: Since its founding 10 years ago, Kajabi—which is bootstrapped—has empowered over 50,000 users in 120 countries to serve 60 million students and make over $1.5 billion in sales. (To put that into perspective, Patreon, which was founded in 2013, has raised $255 million to-date and just in total payouts to creators). surpassed $2 billion Kajabi is on pace to reach a $1 billion annualized GMV—that’s $1 billion paid out to creators annually! Given Kajabi’s decade-plus experience supporting online micro-entrepreneurs, I sat down with Jeremy Saenz, the Chief Product Officer of Kajabi, to learn more about the platform, who their customers are, and his predictions on the future of the passion economy. Interview with Jeremy Saenz, CPO of Kajabi How did Kajabi get started? In 2009, our founder was building a children's outdoor toy that would connect to a hose and spray water in different ways. He got a lot of neighbors’ attention for this toy and wondered, “Maybe this is something I could turn into a business.” At that time, the options for selling things online were less developed. Kenny wanted to be able to teach people how to actually build this product themselves, and couldn’t find any way to do it. Kenny Rueter He was a web developer himself, but found that it was really difficult to string together all the different technologies to create an online storefront, take payments, and serve videos. He talked to more people doing similar things online and found the opportunity to build a platform for people who are building large audiences that wanted to learn something. What functionalities does Kajabi offer to users? We split the platform into 3 core jobs to be done. We want all of our customers to be able to build a business, manage a business, and grow their business. For (1), we make all of the online business-building tools, like website creation, digital products, online courses, digital downloads, and community tools. For (2), managing a business, we offer a CRM database and analytics. For (3), the growth side of the business, we provide the marketing toolset to grow your business, like sales funnel builders, landing pages, and email marketing tools, all hosted inside of Kajabi. All of these things are intertwined and connected together so that customers have one destination when it comes to building an online business. The Kajabi platform includes all of the following features. Its tagline: “Why pay more for 10 separate tools when you can do the job better with one?” How has the company evolved since its founding? The first iteration of the platform hosted video content and did a little bit of funnel conversion. Then, we worked with some of the bigger knowledge entrepreneurs who were selling video courses, like tennis lessons, marketing training, and coaching and consulting. Kajabi helped them run their launches and to sell online. That's how we got the first roughly 2,000 customers. Between 2010-2014, Kajabi was very much a lifestyle business and was growing well, but wasn’t on a hockey stick path. In 2014, we decided to completely rebuild the platform from the ground up. We decided we were going to do a complete rewrite because the old platform was just insufficient. We also felt like we had learned a lot more about the online creator industry and had a better sense of where it was headed. And so in 2015, we launched what Kajabi is today: an all-in-one platform for knowledge entrepreneurs who want to build a business out of their knowledge. There was a turning point in 2017 where we decided this was not a lifestyle business anymore, and we started to build and invest for scale and for growth. Fast forward to 2020, with COVID, and we’ve seen tremendous growth, not only in people subscribing to the platform, but also their level of success on the platform. What is Kajabi’s traction today? In the next couple of months or so, our customers are going to be on pace to earn one billion dollars per year through the platform (GMV). We’re growing like crazy, and we're seeing so many more stories of our customers transforming their lives by building businesses by leveraging what they know. In terms of our largest customers, we have multiple people who are making tens of millions of dollars each year on the platform. Here is a list of some successful entrepreneurs using Kajabi: Brendon Burchard - Life Coach Chalene Johnson - Health + Business Coach Alex Becker - Marketing Coach John Maxwell - Life Coach Eric Worre - Marketing Coach How has COVID impacted the business? Our growth rate has always been healthy, but COVID has definitely accelerated it. Initially, we were worried that folks were going to panic buy software to build businesses online because they're desperate for another source of income. What we didn't anticipate is that their desperation to make something work, actually works in their favor as an entrepreneur—they’re going to find an opportunity and make it work. So we haven't seen any dip in activation or time to first dollar [the time between someone signing up for Kajabi and making their first dollar on the platform]. And a lot of the qualitative feedback we get from customers is along the lines of: “This was something I’d been wanting to do for a while, and COVID helped solidify my decision to jump in and get started.’” This period of time has catalyzed a lot of entrepreneurship. Describe your internal concepts of knowledge entrepreneurs and knowledge products. When we first started, we went after all entrepreneurs and online businesses in general, but realized that it was way too broad of a category to compete in. So we wanted to focus on knowledge because that was fundamentally what our customers were doing: they're taking what they know and turning it into a business, whether that’s through video training, podcasts, blogs, online courses, or digital downloads. The “knowledge” part is obvious; we saw the trend that people realized there’s value in what they know and that they could turn it into products. Then we have the “entrepreneur” part. We have issues with the term “creators,” because we're not just necessarily looking for people who just want to create something. There's a lot of platforms going after content creation. We specifically choose to play in the space of entrepreneurship. One of my favorite quotes is from Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who first coined the word “entrepreneur” in 1800: “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” That's exactly what we support: we see knowledge as something that one may already be utilizing, then shifting to an entrepreneurial mindset. It could be somebody who's already teaching a subject locally, or maybe they were flying 40 weeks out of the year offering seminars across the world, and they can get more leverage by offering it online. How does Kajabi think about building vertically vs. horizontally for creators? We think our customers are always growing. They have softer edges than the vertically-focused platforms imply. A lot of our customers would have problems with vertically-focused platforms because those platforms typically align to their own brand rather than highlighting the customer's brand. We are a horizontal platform by design: entrepreneurs are coming in and serving all sorts of different niches. We’re not prescriptive on one magic formula of how to succeed. It’s all dependent on what the customer is charging and what value they’re offering. There’s not a single checklist for how customers can be successful. We need to give them a set of flexible tools and make resources available for them to understand where the opportunity is in the market and how they can capitalize on it. We are starting to see a lot more competition and new platforms pop up, especially vertically-focused ones offering a particular type of knowledge product. For instance, email newsletter platforms: I can easily see those companies cannibalize each other, trying to compete for more and more market share in that specific vertical. A knowledge entrepreneur also wants to evolve over time as their audience matures and their needs change. Maybe somebody who's offering a newsletter today chooses to offer an online course or community tomorrow. That’s what we see happening among our customer base. Who is the end customer and what are they motivated by? The best knowledge entrepreneurs focus on addressing the end goal that the user wants to attain. That might be health and fitness, which has always been a huge category in transformation, or career coaching on how to nail an interview. Knowledge entrepreneurs are tapping into this in different ways: some people are doing evergreen courses. There’s group coaching, where people check in with each other and hold each other accountable. If you ask me about any vertical, I'll probably be able to pull out a customer. We have a customer who is a hairstylist and her network of other hairstylists really wanted to learn how to up their Instagram game. So she published a course and made $17,000 in a single weekend. And now she's made multiple millions of dollars on Kajabi and has expanded her course. She has an audience of people who trust her on how to run a hair salon and how to build an Instagram following and generate leads. She is so hyper-focused on making sure her customers are successful. It's a trickle-down of we empower our customers to empower their customers. What are some new formats that we’ll see in the coming years from knowledge entrepreneurs? There’s another term we use internally: knowledge product. For us, knowledge products are an expression of your knowledge, and it's packaged in a certain way. It's online courses, digital downloads, Cameo video messages, podcasts, or newsletters. Some of these products are free; they’re front doors to your business. Other products are very high-priced, like 1:1 coaching sessions. Formats change all the time. We're dedicated to discovering what those new formats are and how to introduce them to our customers’ ecosystem. We started with video courses, but there are so many more mediums that have emerged, that are cycling in and out and being invented. There have been some trends that we are on top of, but our customers are innovators too. We keep an eye on our early adopters and what they’re offering, even in a hacky way—we watch that really closely. Right now, one of the exciting formats is live video. Our customers are already doing live video over Zoom. It's one of the easiest ways to make content right now. So we ask ourselves, do we need more accessible video editors, or do we just need more accessible ways to record a video? We need to make sure that our platform can evolve and be flexible so that our customers can be relevant and competitive. What are examples of knowledge entrepreneurs who aren’t necessarily creating content themselves? We’re seeing entrepreneurs who are able to curate the right content or point people to the right place. We'll specifically see curators who find prominent experts in a particular industry and bring them in on a venture. People are doing revenue share models inside of Kajabi, where perhaps they're creating a marketplace for a very specific vertical, and they're bringing in experts and teaching them how to create content. We have a customer, , who is making multiple millions of dollars a year doing live virtual summits for the online knitting community. And they got all these people in the knitting community to participate in these virtual summits, and they're just selling like hotcakes. Knit Stars What advice would you offer to aspiring knowledge entrepreneurs who are looking to get started? I always ask people to start with: what does success look like for you? And then, start formulating who your audience is even before building your product. Don’t just create a course and hope that people will pay for it. Instead, understand the customer and their problems and needs. This goes not just for knowledge entrepreneurs, it goes for all entrepreneurs. We have , which is a resource for paying customers with courses on best practices on how to build their business online. And we also have a growing Customer Success team that strategizes with our customers on what success looks like. We're positioning our Customer Success team to help consult on goals and inform next steps. Kajabi University Do you have any predictions for the future of the passion economy? Firstly, people will increasingly identify with and trust other people rather than starting with a specific type of product or impersonal brand. We're putting the individual’s brand and their company’s brand forward. We compare Shopify and Etsy—there’s a difference in how overwhelming it is to go to somebody's Shopify store that you trust, vs. going to Etsy and seeing a million things and not being sure which ones are actually trustworthy. Etsy’s brand is very customer-facing, and subsumes all of the individual merchants’ brands, whereas the Shopify brand is invisible to the end consumer. The moment that the end customer no longer resonates with Etsy as a brand, they'll stop going and shopping with any of their merchants. We’d much rather be Shopify than Etsy. Secondly, specific content formats will cannibalize each other, and they will come in and out of relevance. What is scalable is empowering individuals to build their business, to carve out a niche, and build their audience, rather than focusing on a specific content medium. Get in touch: Learn more about Kajabi at or follow Jeremy on Twitter @productgangsta kajabi.com This story was first seen at: https://li.substack.com/p/interview-with-kajabis-cpo-the-secret

On Passion Economy and Knowledge Entrepreneurs, with Jeremy Saenz, CPO of Kajabi

Blockchain Gaming: The Most Definitive Guide To The Hype Behind It

If you’re running a subscription or SaaS business, you know that at the end of the day your chief metric is monthly recurring revenue (MRR). And you’d be right to spend your time and resources tracking it. MRR gives your company that forward looking measurement and predictive revenue to actually grow your business. Arguably the biggest factor standing in the way of consistent monthly revenue is your customer churn rate. occurs when an existing subscription is canceled, downgraded, paused, or becomes delinquent. When talking about churn, most people would think to focus on voluntary churn (a customer cancelling a subscription). Churn However, there’s another often forgotten form. That’s and if your company doesn’t zero in on it, it can cause a lot of problems. involuntary churn You may be thinking, “How bad can it be?” According to our data, SaaS and subscriptions businesses lose around 9% of their MRR due to failed payments on average. Think about that. Nine percent of your revenue is potentially just being left on the table month after month. Thankfully, there’s a way to not only drastically reduce involuntary churn, but grow your business while you’re at it. Introducing: a successful dunning process. In this guide, I’ll be taking you through what a dunning process looks like, the importance of dunning, why credit cards actually fail, and the keys to successful dunning campaigns. What is a dunning process? A dunning process is the manner you go about recovering your customers’ failed payments. What makes the one of the fastest growing markets out there is the convenience of recurring payments and subscription based billing. Yet you and I both know that credit cards are bound to fail eventually. SaaS business model The very thing that makes SaaS great can also be its kryptonite. Which is why having a dunning process in place is necessary to not miss out on revenue or lose a customer. Let’s be real. When a payment fails, only two things typically happen: The payment fails and nobody from your team follows up to the point the customer churns. Your team follows up and payment is recovered. In my experience, most companies are going the option #1 route. How’s that old adage go? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Well, I think something is broke and it’s time your company does something about it. Before you go and spam 50 customers with emails demanding payments, let’s first talk about why dunning is important. The importance of dunning If you know anything about the rep that dunning has, you know that typically it isn’t something that most business owners or customers like. This isn’t because the process itself is useless. In the past, it’s been associated with companies’ approach to dunning overall and not their process. Dunning can easily bring the ‘cold-hearted debt collector’ approach out of anyone who doesn’t watch out. Despite how companies have carried out dunning in the past, it can be a huge boost to your business if done right. It’s essential to understand just what your company gains from having a successful dunning process. Avoid a loss in MRR As stated before, growing your monthly recurring revenue is the name of the game. In this case, it’s avoiding a loss in revenue to begin with. Not only is losing revenue every month disheartening in and of itself, but when it comes to SaaS, isn’t an easy task to begin with. growing your MRR That ever glamorized “hockey stick growth” you see all over Twitter and elsewhere tends to be a long shot for you and the majority of businesses (no offense). With that being the case, retaining the revenue you do have by avoiding losses isn’t necessarily sexy, but it does keep you afloat. More customer touch points Before coming to the SaaS world, I spent years in non-profits fundraising for organizations. Funny enough, what’s important to any SaaS business is important to all nonprofits as well: happy donors. Happy donors equals consistent donations. Same in business, happy customers equals loyalty to your product. In any company, consistent revenue can be tied to one very important factor: . customer satisfaction The reality is that once someone buys your product or service, it shouldn’t take a failed payment to be the thing that sparks the first touchpoint…ever. Yet a lot of times that might be the case (no shame). Investing time into a dunning process means more customer touch points for you, and the beginning of a relationship as well. Don’t leave money on the table The final key benefit of dunning is the fact that you’re actively leaving no money on the table. What do I mean? When a customer’s payment fails and you don’t do something to recover it, you’re essentially letting a sale that you’ve already closed go by the wayside. Why? It’s time to think differently about dunning all together. Rather, start looking at it as you would selling something — it’s a chance to create (well actually recover) revenue for your company. 3 common reasons why credit cards fail Now that you understand the what and the why of having a dunning process, it’s important to understand one critical element first before getting to the how and that's why credit cards fail in the first place. Here are the three most common reasons: Incorrect card details Card issuer declines happen very frequently. The first reason is the card information is incorrect. That can be anything from the address associated with the card, card number, or expiration date aren’t accurate or filled out in the first place. Due to fraud being common, a card issuer will manage this activity by having customers provide details like CVC and postal codes. These details do drastically decrease the declines your company may be experiencing. The best means to handle these kinds of card failures is to guide your customer to the error or simply use a different card or payment method. Status of the card A second reason (the most common) for cards failing is the status of the card. Simply put, it’s either expired or cancelled all together. Additionally, some cards may also have restrictions on the type of purchases that can be made. For example, FSA/HSA cards are often limited to certain types of businesses (e.g., healthcare providers), so any other type of purchase would be declined. In these instances, your customer must contact their card issuer to check for any restrictions that may be in place or have a new card issued. Geographic location The third and final reason a credit card may fail is due to the geographic location of a cardholder in contrast to your company. If your customers are using a card issued in a different country, your company may experience an increased rate of declines. The quickest way to resolve this is for your customers to contact their issuing bank to authorize the charge. Having an understanding as to why a customer’s credit card is failing to begin with will only inform you on the best course of action. Now the only missing piece to the puzzle is putting a successful dunning process in place to recover delinquent payments. The keys to a successful dunning process Hopefully you’ve come to the conclusion that your company needs a dunning process, like yesterday. If that’s you, let’s get to it! Although being successful at dunning may seem pretty straight forward, there are definitely best practices to put into place. In order to maximize MRR recovered from your campaigns, here are a few things that will ensure success: Utilize a dunning management tool Most of us have enough individual emails to send every day to begin with. So if you’re not looking for dozens more, I’d consider investing in a to handle all your dunning needs. dunning management software Let’s be real, I couldn’t sit here and mention dunning tools without mentioning our very own here at Baremetrics, . Recover Recover is a one-stop-shop dunning software developed by us. From customized email campaigns, to in-depth analytics on recovery rates, to in-app customer reminders, Recover provides you with the most in-depth dunning tool experience. Don’t just take our word for it. See what others have to say about Recover: And here’s one more for good measure: Just in case you’re interested, here are some other dunning software options: Recurly dunning Chargebee dunning Stripe dunning Seriously though, coming from someone who has run dunning campaigns without a dunning tool, save yourself the time and stress. In the end you’ll recover more with a fraction of the time spent (no pun intended). Get your email templates right The goal of any email should be to get the recipient to at the very least read it. Considering has found that the average email coming from a software company gets a 2.45% click-rate, you’ll need to be very particular about the content of your dunning emails. Mailchimp The goal of a great dunning email isn’t just to get read, it’s to get billing information updated. To do so, there are key principles to follow: get your customer to open your email Subject line: be concise and to the point. Tell them what they did & how to fix it. Email body: sometimes this doesn’t always work. Plan for the worse by providing another option like calling a support team member to talk about their subscription. Closing the email: If you want a more in depth look & examples, check out our blog on . writing effective dunning emails Be sure to follow up Up to this point, you’ve set up a dunning software and nailed a great dunning email, what now? Arguably the most important step is simply being consistent. Emails are easily missed, it happens. Companies begin to lose out on recovering payments when they simply don’t follow up with customers. At the outset, I’d commit to a certain number of emails you’ll send throughout with a certain amount of time between each. My recommendation would be to send at most 6 emails with a 4-6 day window between each (if no reply). Be empathetic and understanding throughout, but don’t be afraid to be forward either as you get later in the campaign. Simplify updating billing information How horrible is it when you receive an update that a payment of yours failed, you go to fix it, and the process to do so is more complicated than the original sign up? When it comes to updating billing information, you want to make it as simple of a process as possible. If it takes more than two clicks for your customers to update their billing information, that’s too many. There are two ways to make this happen: Create a link to be sent via email that takes someone directly to a credit card form Create an in-app reminder that allows the customer to update their information directly in the form that pops up Moral of the story? & kill two birds with one stone. Sign up for Recover Your dunning process is about the customer I can sit here and talk until I’m blue in the face (which I will) but the fact still remains: not having a dunning process in your business is a recipe for disaster. This doesn’t have to be a mind-numbing experience either. Going with a tool like or the others mentioned gives you a competitive advantage that most businesses choose to ignore. Recover At the end of the day, the goal of your dunning process should be to help your customer. By avoiding any disturbance in service or creating a great customer experience, your business wins. Not to mention, you get to keep more of that hard earned cash in your company’s pocket with a successful dunning process. Previously published at https://baremetrics.com/blog/dunning-process

Avoid a Loss in MRR and Make Your Dunning Campaign Really Powerful: Know How

It’s obvious that AI offers the potential to radically reshape the business landscape, helping organizations of all sizes and industries find more efficiencies and make smarter data-driven decisions. We also know that there have been problems getting AI implemented, but what you might not know is that these bottlenecks are being unblocked. Now, innovators, developers and CTOs can all plan and easily execute AI strategies with confidence, creating big opportunities. There’s a huge digital transformation just starting to take place. IDC projects that in 2023, worldwide spending on AI systems will reach —more than twice as much as the $37.5 billion spent in 2019. That’s almost triple in four years. It’s not going to stop growing for the foreseeable future either, because only a small percentage of companies are able to take advantage of the technology - because we had some bottlenecks to unblock. $97.9 billion Four Bottlenecks with AI Deployments 1. Time-consuming Building, testing, and deploying an that’s production-ready can be highly time-consuming. According to a 2019 survey, take between 7 and 18 months to go from brainstorming AI models to production. This includes companies who are new to the field of AI, and therefore likely to take longer than AI-mature organizations—but it nevertheless illustrates how AI is far from being a “quick fix.” AI model 64 percent of companies 2. Inconsistent AI models can be highly complex and opaque, making them hard or impossible to understand—even to the people who build them for a living. Many people have written about the , where researchers struggle to explain why a new method performs better than the alternatives. This means that training an AI model to the desired level of accuracy is not only difficult to achieve in itself, ﻿﻿but also difficult to achieve consistently. “reproducibility crisis” in AI and machine learning 3. Monolithic Most AI models are monolithic: they were designed and built for only a single purpose. If you want to expand the model’s scope or make a change, building and deploying the new model often requires another full cycle of development—and as we’ve discussed above, that can take months. 4. Inflexible While AI models can be monolithic in and of themselves, the actual deployment of the model can be equally inflexible. For example, how can you access an AI model running in the cloud? What if you want to install the model on an located close to hundreds of cameras streaming video 24/7, instead of on a remote server? edge AI devices Unblocking AI in 2021? AI Platforms Time consuming, inconsistent, monolithic and inflexible, AI deployments have traditionally suffered from one or more of these bottlenecks, but this is about to change. Now, you can create complete, functioning AI with one system. With AI platforms, we can deploy AI models to the cloud or to the edge. The model  detects a single object like a mask or a suite of actions like everything that goes on in an operating room. An AI platform allows AI models to be rapidly trained and deployed. The performance of the AI is easily monitored  so that it can be improved over time. And finally, any functions that need to be added or changed takes days on an AI platform, not months or years. Full disclosure, Chooch AI is an . AI Platform With the emergence of AI platforms, these impediments are becoming a thing of the past, and adoption of AI is becoming more and more widespread. That’s why we believe that the number of organizations implementing AI is about to hockey stick. AI Platform Unblockers 1. Speed Creating a production-ready AI model is “simply” a matter of collecting data, annotation, AI training, then deploying the resulting model to the edge or the cloud. Building such a process in-house is now pointless, although some companies are still trying to build CMS’s 17 years after Wordpress was created. Today, an AI platform can speed the process of training and deployment of production ready AI processes at an organization with a clear AI strategy. 2. Transparency The accuracy of and data generated by AI should be an open book. In computer vision, when we can understand that an AI model is mistakenly detecting, for example, a car approaching a remote site which is actually a sunset, we can fix that. We simply train the model to detect a sunset. That’s the power of transparency. If the accuracy is measurable, then an organization can export the data to, say, a dashboard and rely on the results to make process improvements, which is the whole point of adopting AI. 3. Horizontal AI solutions that focus on solving a single problem are a fast track to a bottleneck. Conversely, an AI platform that focuses  on solving many AI problems with a process can be an unblocker, so long as the processes are fast and transparent. Training an AI to recognize that a person is wearing a hardhat should be exactly the same as training it to recognize a dripping pipe or a torn piece of paper currency. It’s simply a matter of training the AI to recognize something accurately and quickly. 4. Flexibility If a company wants  AI to recognize whether people are wearing hardhats, surely they will soon want to recognize vests, gloves, goggles, boots, forklifts, palettes, steel beams, and so on. Once a company has an AI strategy and a successful deployment and they see the results in lower risks or higher accuracy, they will want more. It should not take weeks or months to level up. So, You Want to Deploy AI in 2021? AI platforms give developers and program managers the tools they need to build usable AI that actually produces results. Want to create a service to check that store shelves are stocked just from security cameras? to detect empty spaces in shelves and stream security to edge devices with the AI model running. It would be equally easy to keep track and map all the empty parking spaces in your parking lots and streets. Train the AI No more excuses. The bottlenecks are unblocked by AI platforms and you’ve got the tools to take part in the next massive digital transformation: AI.

AI Bottlenecks You Can Clear in 2021

is a Canadian clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Toronto who became a controversial figure in late-2016 for his critiques of political correctness. Peterson’s most recent book, 12 Rules for Life, has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. Most recently, Peterson has suffered from health issues that necessitated a year-long reprieve from the public eye. Jordan B. Peterson 1. Success compounds, meaning those that win tend to continue to win Lobsters are interesting animals, but most people don’t think about them too often. , they never stop growing and can regenerate lost limbs. Unfortunately for them, they taste good with butter - but let’s circle back to lobsters here in a minute. While they may not be immortal as many like to think In the early 1900s, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher (but he was probably no fun at parties, so you got him there) named became fascinated by the ideas of wealth and power - namely, how is wealth distributed across society? (Interestingly, he did not start this work until his forties, .) Vilfredo Pareto so it is never too late to make a difference Ever diligent, he pulled data from the 1400s through his modern times and found the same pattern everywhere. Whereas people had previously assumed that wealth would be distributed in a flat, upward-sloping line from poor to rich, what Pareto found was in fact a hockey stick - a small percentage of the population holds a majority of the wealth. This kind of distribution - the most successful / most productive / largest “winners” continuously having a greater chunk of the pie - can be seen across many different fields. That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work merely to hand-copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is commonly performed... It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” This idea was further expanded in the mid-1900s when British physicist noticed that certain of his colleague were prolific publishers and others - well, not so much. In fact, Price could fit most domains of publication to a “law” stating that half of all papers are written by the square root of the number of all writers - if you had 100 papers written by 25 people, 50 papers would have been written by only 5 individuals. If it was 1,000 papers and 250 people, 500 papers were written by only 16 people. Thus, there was always an active minority generating the majority of the work. Derek Price These results can be understood as it relates to the compounding effects of resources - those that have previously “won” generally have access to the greatest resources and can more easily utilize those resources to achieve additional success. Those without resources cannot. Thus, resources beget additional resources while losing resources restricts your ability to gain resources in the future - . winners are more likely to win again, and losers more likely to lose However, there is also something going on in the brain that makes those that win more likely to pursue meaningful, productive activities again in the future. 2. Your brain is aware of where you are within the winner-loser continuum and makes plans based on where it thinks you sit Back to the lobsters. Lobsters live in a cold, brutal world where things such as ideal lobster nests (think “safe hiding places”) and access to food are both paramount and scarce. This scarcity can result in conflict. So how do you determine which lobsters lay claim to the best nests? As you might have guessed, they fight for them - and Peterson goes into detail on lobster confrontation rituals in his book. Important to this conversation is what happens in the brains of lobsters that win and lobsters that lose. A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter. A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western… High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. The lobster’s brain knows whether it just lost or won a fight. The victor confidently holds himself up high and the loser shirks from potential conflict. And this makes sense - it is advantageous to your survival to avoid conflict if you tend to lose because 1) you tend to lose and 2) having lost, you now have access to less advantageous resources (food and shelter). The winner is confident in his access to resources and knows, based on experience, that he can win future fights. These changes in how the lobster orients itself to the world start deep within its brain, with levels of serotonin driving physical changes in the external lobster. This brain infrastructure is very similar to what sits inside humans, who also take into account where they are in the “tend to win and have resources / tend to lose and don’t have resources” continuum. The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore . It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions… exceptionally ancient and fundamental The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. If you are lower on the totem pole, being constantly prepared for emergencies eventually takes its toll on you given your orientation towards short-term survival at the expense of long-term success. It impacts everything, from the way your body allocates resources to its immune system (long-term investment) to your fight-or-flight response sensitivity (expensive short-term preparedness). But this all makes sense for the competitive world our ancestors grew up in. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources. This response is really what everyone calls stress, and it is by no means only or even primarily psychological. It’s a reflection of the genuine constraints of unfortunate circumstances. When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful friends are rare indeed, on society’s fringes. You will therefore continually sacrifice what you could otherwise physically store for the future, using it up on heightened readiness and the possibility of immediate panicked action in the present… The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way. If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster. The serotonin flows plentifully. This renders you confident and calm, standing tall and straight, and much less on constant alert. Because your position is secure, the future is likely to be good for you. It’s worthwhile to think in the long term and plan for a better tomorrow. 3. Feedback loops can both hurt you and help you This whole process is an example of an - a chemical reaction where one of the reaction products (in this case “losing”) acts as a catalyst for the reaction to start again (resets the brain chemistry with lower serotonin levels), which results in more reaction products (“more losing”) until the feed for the reaction is completely exhausted (in this case “you”). autocatalytic reaction This process can send you spiraling downward in an ever self-reinforcing loop of short-term focus and lack of belief in yourself. It is also the source of many mental illnesses and addiction behaviors. People that are spiraling downward are also less likely to have a strong social support group, and not having access to friends who can aid you in times of need results in your brain using resources to be prepared to face the world alone. Most people have been subject to the deafening howling of feedback at a concert, when the sound system squeals painfully. The microphone sends a signal to the speakers. The speakers emit the signal. The signal can be picked up by the microphone and sent through the system again, if it’s too loud or too close to the speakers. The sound rapidly amplifies to unbearable levels, sufficient to destroy the speakers, if it continues. The same destructive loop happens within people’s lives. Much of the time, when it happens, we label it mental illness, even though it’s not only or even at all occurring inside people’s psyches… The drinker wakes up, badly hungover. So far, this is just unfortunate. The real trouble starts when he discovers that his hangover can be “cured” with a few more drinks the morning after. Such a cure is, of course, temporary. It merely pushes the withdrawal symptoms a bit further into the future. But that might be what is required, in the short term, if the misery is sufficiently acute. So now he has learned to drink to cure his hangover. When the medication causes the disease, a positive feedback loop has been established. Alcoholism can quickly emerge under such conditions. But this kind of autocatalytic reaction is also what propels an individual to greater and greater success over time - a feedback loop can be positive. For the winners, winning (the reaction product) grants them a brain with additional serotonin and additional resources in the world, and both of these things increase the likelihood that they will win again in the future. And this ties back into Price’s law as discussed above - those that start to move ahead slightly have a higher likelihood of moving ahead even further given the way they are oriented towards the world and the way that the world (resources) is oriented towards them. 4. Stand up straight with your shoulders back Knowing all of this, it is important to make sure you are . This reinforces the negative feedback loop that will ensure you can be nothing but a loser or victim without access to resources or social connections. never acting like someone who has lost everything or is a victim However, if you act in a way that suggests to yourself and others that you are someone who can win, others will notice the confidence and start to treat you differently. Your brain will notice the changes in how others are orientated towards you, increasing the serotonin levels flowing through it. This starts off a reaction, where you are now ever-so-slightly more likely to make progress and receive access to resources. You are moving up the slope of Price’s law. So, keep your head high and or belittle you (especially in your own eyes). Eventually, your brain will kick itself into overdrive - it will get easier to hold your head up high as these will start to happen naturally. don’t do the things that you know lead to meaningless outcomes positive habits But first, you must make a little bit of effort yourself to start moving in a positive direction. So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating. Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you—it will also make those good things feel better when they do happen. Also published here.

Stories, News & Mentions about HOCKEYSTICK

Hockeystick’s Stories on HackerNoon