I’ve a proven history time and again that when I go through an extremely negative experience which is negative enough to push me down for weeks, I bounce back the hardest and put out my best self at work.
While this may not work every time or with all kinds of setbacks, I believe negative energy isn’t bad in most cases.
When we go through a bad relationship or a breakup, financial setbacks, fraud, partnership dissolution etc, it can be overwhelming. Some setbacks would make you incredibly sad, while others may leave you angry or disappointed. While all of these energies could be used to make serious progress at work, anger, in my opinion has worked out the best for me.
With all that aggression that cooks under you, all it takes is the right approach to hit a home run. You’re already aggressive, all you have to do is channel that and use it against your competition, or for your growth. Let your anger flow into driving sales and results for you. Let your success be the answer to the people who made you angry or sad.
While this may sound a load of BS from a self-help textbook, I can’t stress enough how real this is. I can remember at least 2 memories when I used serious setbacks in life and accumulated a large amount of wealth and success in the coming weeks or months.
You could use all that negative energy to hurt yourself and the people who hurt you or you could just aggressively make progress. It’s a simple decision for me. What about you?
As you may have seen that worldwide stocks are falling as the COVID-19 fears have completely taken over the markets. The S&P500 index has fallen nearly 20% from it’s ATH. Asian and European stocks are also following suit.
When markets crash like that, Governments step in and offer certain incentives to businesses like tax-cuts and cheap credit / lower interest rates etc. The governments say that cheap credit will enable businesses to fuel growth with lower borrowing costs. However, there’s an interesting theory on why the Fed really offers cheap credit and what the businesses really do with that credit, read below.
TL;DR: Companies use cheap credit (e.g 0.5% interest rate) to buy back their own stocks which post 5-10% profits per year.
The evolution of the US stock market- A mini thread:
We are in uncharted territory. It has not even been fifty years that we have been off of the gold standard.
I believe that what happens next in the stock market will reshape our economy for decades, if not centuries.
This subject probably deserves a lot of supporting research and a deeper dive. For now, I wanted to point out some things I have noticed and hear what others think.
Pretty much everybody in the investing world is familiar with the feds go to play for boosting the market.
Buying your own stock with debt was not even legal until the mid 1980s. We barely have 30 years of data on what this type of risk-layering might do. And 2000 and 2008 were pretty bad! Again, uncharted territory.
Companies loved 2018 so much that they kept buying their stock in 2019 to inflate it.
However, the tax cuts were a one time thing. Back to going into debt as a strategy to increase your stock price! All this while making no changes to business operations themselves.
So in a time of economic turmoil, here's how it should happen.
The Fed lowers rates. Companies borrow cheaply to weather the storm during periods of decreased revenue. They pay it back easily because it was low interest. We bottom and resume growth.
After 2008, strict lending and credit rules were implemented to ensure we stopped giving bad loans. Even created a whole new agency, the CFPB, to protect consumers.
A banning of open-market share repurchases, at least those financed by debt, will be 2020/2021's CFPB.
In the last 2 years, much of which has been a bear market for crypto-assets, there’s one crypto project that has been invincible. Compared to market peak value in 2017, it has lost only about 15% value through the bear market in USD terms while it has gained 30% value in BTC terms. I can say with certainty, that it is one of the few, if not only, crypto-assets to gain value in BTC terms during the bear cycle.
In the last 10 quarters, the parent company behind the project has posted nearly a billion dollar in profits. While the founder of the company is worth over $2 billion. I’m talking about Binance, and the crypto token is $BNB.
The thing about Binance is that it is a market leader crypto exchange with more trading volume than any other exchange. $BNB, which is Binance’s native token has a maximum supply of 200 million tokens. Of this, 100 million tokens are meant to be burnt or destroyed every quarter based on the revenue generated by Binance. This causes the supply to constantly decrease therefore increasing the price per token. In my opinion, this is the dividend equivalent of stocks in crypto-sphere.
So far Binance has burnt ~17 million tokens in 10 quarters. As mentioned earlier, they plan to continue burning tokens until 100 million tokens are destroyed. At this pace, it would take 58 quarters or 14.5 years before Binance is able to burn all 100 million tokens. And as more and more tokens are burnt, the price per token will constantly be rising.
Moreover, crypto trading has continued to happen as usual despite the bearish sentiment. As the time keeps passing by, trade volume flows between different coins and different pairs, but the trading goes on as usual. This is evident and can be seen in Binance’s case where trade volume and coin burn continued happening and Binance kept posting profits month over month despite the bear market.
While there’s uncertainly surrounding every other crypto project regarding price, speed, reliability, tech, SEC, FinCEN, FATF etc, the fate of most crypto projects is unclear. But as investors continue to bet on and trade one of these projects, Binance wins. And regardless of whichever project(s) come out to be the winners, Binance still wins.
Disclaimer: The information provided is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal or financial advice. To the maximum extent permitted by law, I disclaim any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or result in any investment or other losses.
What’s happening right now due to coronavirus is a supply-chain crisis. Businesses have buyers but are running out of goods to sell. Once the business profitability is affected due to decline in sales, they will let go some of their employees. This could affect purchasing power of some of the people creating a demand-side crisis.
The pandemic could also affect demand as more and more people stay at home to avoid the disease, they would be spending lesser money on certain products. In addition, their purchasing power could also be affected by additional health related bills. If COVID-19 lasts long enough, which at the moment it is showing signs of, there will be both supply-side and demand-side disruptions.
To improve the situation, Fed has cut down the interest rates. The goal is to sustain the economy by offering cheaper credit to businesses. But I’m wondering how can a supply-side disruption be fixed with cheaper credit. Moreover, cheaper credit could help larger businesses but small and medium sized businesses are likely to suffer the most.
While it is obvious that trade and e-commerce are largely affected, are software companies safe? Some of them might be but I do not believe that they will not have a cascading affect on them. After all, many software businesses are intended to solve real-world problems.
In my industry for example, many software businesses are Shopify apps or WordPress plugins. Shopify store owners use those apps to improve their selling experience. But if there are no sales, or no revenue, the store owners will obviously stop using those apps until situation changes.
Softwares that have nothing to do with commerce, may be relying on advertising as a source of revenue, or may be assisting industries that depend on advertising revenue. They aren’t safe either. Once the commerce is disrupted, the advertising is meant to be disturbed too. In my own case, my e-commerce stores are affected due to supply-chain crisis, but I’m also not spending on Facebook and Instagram ads to drive sales which means the advertising industry is taking the hit too.
As a publisher, I also have data to support this argument as CPMs are going down across the board. So any software business which is dependent on advertising or support customers who drive revenue from advertising will see disruption too.
All other kind of softwares may be safe from this cascading affect, but will still be dealing with users with lower purchasing power.
While pure software businesses are much better off than other businesses, I wouldn’t say that they will not be affected. However, it is still a better time to be running a software business than any kind of traditional business.
It is often statistically reported that women are paid lesser than men in most lines of work. In tech, specifically, it is said that women are paid 5-40% lesser than their male counterparts.
Another striking statistic that is often highlighted is that women make up only about 25% of the tech workers. This particular statistic doesn’t bother me because in comparison, healthcare industry employees 77% women. One gender could be more inclined towards working in a particular industry than the other and there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that.
Coming back to salaries, Fiverr, a freelance platform reported that on their platform women at average earn $96 against their male counterparts who earn $100. This represents a 4% difference and is by far one of the best reported figures I’ve read regarding the gender equality.
I’ve often written on this blog that freelancing, remote jobs or distributed companies have many advantages. I’ve often highlighted the location and time independence as the most major advantages. You could be anywhere at any time living the millionaire lifestyle.
But the data published by Fiverr has given me new reasons to celebrate the digital nomad lifestyle. You could be a man or a women. You could be a Muslim or Jew. You could be in Syria or Romania. You’ll get the equal opportunities and wages as everyone else on the platform.
Distributed companies, remote employment and freelancing is the answer to gender inequality. Not just gender inequality, it is also the answer to racial inequality or any other kind of inequality. Obviously in addition to granting you freedom and wealth.
In the summers of 2016, I saw an advertisement for Dewan motors. They are the authorized sellers of BMW CBUs in Pakistan since BMW is not assembled in Pakistan. The 4 million Rs price tag for their 3-series caught my instant attention.
This was cheaper than any other German car brands available in Pakistan for similar compact sedans. Audi A4 prices began from 6 million Rs while Mercedes C-class started from 8 million Rs. BMW obviously caught my attention. So I visited their dealership in Islamabad.
After discussing the car further with the dealership, I realized that my attention has been captured by a cheap price but the dealership has no intention of selling it cheap to me. The 4 million Rs 3-series came with absolutely no features. It was a manual transmission, without climate control, sunroof, or even a cigarette lighter/power outlet. There wasn’t even a paint selection option and the car was offered to be shipped as “Alpine White”. It was a Corolla XLI equivalent of BMW.
The automatic transmission alone was for 1 million Rs. Adding other basics to the car, raised the price up by another million. At this point, I realized that the 4 million price point was advertised only to get me to the dealership. I didn’t buy the car, but I learnt a bit about sales.
In e-commerce, some sellers advertise “Free + Just Pay Shipping” offers. The obvious intention is to sell $1-2 goods for for $0 + $10 for shipping. The same product can also be advertised as $10 with free shipping. However, a split test will prove that the Free+Shipping offers convert better. Because we’ve never been interested in $10 price-point, we’ve never advertised F+S offers, but we do play with this particular area of human psychology in order to get the best value. Let’s explore this further.
If you want to sell something for $25, you could offer it as $25 with free shipping, or for $19.95 with $5 shipping. You’d still get the same $25, but your conversion rates will vary. While there’s no rule of thumb here, but we’ve often seen that it’s better to offer $25 + free shipping to customers in US as they feel entitled to free shipping, and one can advertise $19.95 + $5 shipping to customers outside of US without hampering conversion rates since they are conditioned to pay for shipping from a store that’s not operated in their country.
However, my favorite example is the “Dollar Shave Club”. It was advertised as such that no one should ever need to spend more than a dollar to buy a razor. Except that their cheapest offering which is $1 razor called “humble twin” shipped for $3 including the shipping while they offered free shipping on their other, more expensive blades.
They also called their cheapest blade as “humble”, and others fancier names terming their mid option also members’ favorite. But all of this was only when they had just launched. In the present state, you’re bound to spend 10s of dollars, and that too on an on-going subscription basis. Let’s have a look at what they’re doing today
What is advertised as Dollar Shave Club, now creates a “personalized” basket of goods for you after taking you through a “quiz”. Instead of $1, they attempt to upsell to $42, and bill that every 2 months.
My long time friend and Socialoholic’s co-founder, Saad, has decided to relocate outside of Pakistan. He calls this A/B testing. While he does quite well in Pakistan and enjoys the financial and location freedom, he feels that in order to grow further in life, a change like that may be necessary.
I feel that our company could see growth if one of the founders is to going to go through personal and professional growth. At the same time, there would be associated challenges with this move.
It is why, it is both; end of an era, and start of a new one.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been head over heels in love with this new indie song called “Rung” by Shamoon Ismail.
After listening to this on loop for a few weeks, since yesterday I’ve been listening to it on 0.75X playback speed. It’s mellowing the feels down even further.
But I also found an interesting thing that Shamoon is doing to make it easier for his fans to subscribe to his YouTube channel. He has created a subscribe link that you can use especially externally to create a 1-step subscribe funnel for your fans. So you could use this link on your other social media presences such as Instagram or Twitter. The link looks like the one below
You could simply replace shamoonismail with your channel vanity url and create your own subscribe link. Once someone clicks on that link, he’ll be presented with a subscribe pop up
Thanks Shamoon for your awesome music, and a cool social media hack
Two days ago, I wrote about the reason why I got introduced to PHPMailer. I finished my blog saying that I ended up using PHPMailer for a completely different reason. This blog is a continuation of that.
The Rocketship
In 2011, my music blog Koolmuzone was seeing growth faster than it had seen before. It was burning all the rocket fuel, breaking all its previous records. The kind of growth that made certain people uncomfortable.
One late February night became one of the most miserable nights for me. Days became weeks, and weeks became months, but the misery didn’t end. Someone clearly didn’t like me and so he found a way to take Koolmuzone’s Facebook page down.
The Crash
My page was taken down by a fake DMCA report. It took me many weeks to understand what happened, and I’m going to explain that below as clearly as I possibly can.
Most of the times when you get a DMCA report, it is for copyright infringement. But this one was different. It wasn’t a copyright report. You can see the copy of the claim below
Hello,
We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third party that the content infringes or otherwise violates their rights:
[Page: www.koolmuzone.com]
We strongly encourage you to review the content you have posted to Facebook to make sure that you have not posted any other infringing content, as it is our policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers when appropriate.
If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1108 for more information.
The Facebook Team
The fine line here was that the person who sent this report to Facebook didn’t say I was violating anyone’s copyrights. That there wasn’t any particular piece of content on my page that infringed someone else’s right. The report rather claimed that the ‘page name’ itself is infringing someone’s rights; a trademark claim.
I read that email everyday for many weeks until I found out what happened when I read the following line
[Page: www.koolmuzone.com]
This line made me realize that the content that infringes someone’s rights is the page name itself.
After I realized this is a bogus TM claim, I started seeking for the legal ways to acquire trademark for my brand which wasn’t trademarked at that time, neither by me nor by someone else. The TM didn’t exist in any country or jurisdiction. It was a bogus TM claim that Facebook asked me to resolve directly with the other party by providing his (fake) email address that no one responded to.
First Attempt of Recovery
So I went ahead and locally registered my company, acquired the relevant tax number for my business and obtained the relevant trademark. However, in the end I was still asked by Facebook that it doesn’t resolve any DMCA claims, instead I should directly resolve the matter with the claiming party or in a court of law. A party with a pseudonym and a fake email. I was stuck, and I was still devastated.
Second Attempt
After spending a few more weeks, sometime in April, I thought of something. I thought if Facebook can be as stupid as this with a fake trademark claim, it could be even more stupid than that.
I realized that there could be a potential solution to this problem and the solution could be PHPMailer. The thing about PHPMailer, or any mailer for that matter, is that you can send email “from” anyone’s email address “to” anyone’s email address. This might be difficult for some people to understand but the way the email protocol works is that you can send an email from an email address that you don’t own or have no access to.
The only thing different about such emails are the “email headers” that are commonly used to verify the real origin of such an email. The email headers mention the real domain name / server IP from where the email originated from and can be helpful in detecting spoof emails.
Because Facebook took a page down on a fake TM claim, I wondered if it would restore the page if the fake email address took the fake TM claim back, without verifying the email headers. And so I sent out that email.
The next morning, my page was restored.
I was hurt, very very hurt. I buckled up and got back to work. I had wasted over 2 months because someone wasn’t happy with the progress we were making.
Looking Back
Over the years, I’ve tried to understand the psychology of people who do that. They think there are two ways to win the race. The first way is to run faster, so you can really get ahead. This, in my opinion, is the only way to actually win and make progress. The second way, however, is to hurt your competition, so you can get ahead of him.
The problem with the second approach is that although you get ahead of your competition, you don’t really move farther in the true sense. You’re still standing right there, only with weapons. And if you think about it; what good does it do to you? If you win a race by eliminating your competition, how does that benefit you?
Sure, you’ll get the winner’s medal but without actually moving forward. You’re not going to have any more visitors coming in or you won’t be generating any more revenue. Why would you do all of this for a fucking medal. If, the person who hurt me, is reading this; think about it.
Since then, in the past 7 years, I’ve never worked in the Pakistani industry. It was toxic and I wonder if anything has changed so far. Even if things have changed, I’ve never really mustered courage to ever work here again.
To all the people who have stood by me during this tough time, I owe everything to all of you. To everyone who were the reason for my pain, I forgive you, although I’ll be surprised if you were seeking forgiveness at all.
In the past week, Covid-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume it will be until we know otherwise.
I recommend that you read the full article written by Bill Gates to get in depth insight on the epidemic. In the meanwhile, just like Bill Gates, I hope it’s not that bad, but for now there’s no reason for me to believe that it isn’t. So I’ve done some reading on the subject myself, and want to present some facts below.
Please note that I’ve no intention of driving panic, and all intentions of initiating correct preparation for the Covid-19 epidemic by sharing my thoughts below.
1) Stock Market
The American stock market is down 15% in last 1 week. Companies will publish their Q1 2020 earning reports between 15th April and 15th May. I expect the stocks to be in downtrend until April/May timeframe, and if earning reports are quite bad, they may trigger a potential recession. Apple has issued an early warning for investors. Actions to take: Sit tight and wait until April/May for more clarity on investment strategy.
2) Vaccination
According to Bill Gates, June could be the earliest time-frame for large-scale vaccination “trials” meaning we are unlikely to have vaccination available at scale and approved by FDA before Q4.
3) China
There’s a unified opinion that China is under-reporting cases. There’s complete lock-down in China and I wouldn’t expect China to cause such damage to their economy for something that’s not very serious.
Most researchers believe the actual number of cases to be 10x more, and hence 800,000 people could be infected in China.
4) Death rates
Death rates are 2-3% in Wuhan and 10% in Iran. The death rate is 1% in rest of China. This makes me believe death rates are obviously dependent on the conditions of health-care available as well as the capacity of number of patients that can be treated simultaneously. Assuming China has the ability to provide better healthcare than global average quality, the death rate could be more on global level.
5) Death numbers
Researchers believe that up-to 20% of the global population could get affected. Assuming 20% of global population and 1% death rate, there will be 14 million deaths. Assuming 0.5% death rate there will be 7 million deaths. And assuming 3% death rate, there could be 42 million deaths.
6) Virality
The virality rate is 3 which means every individual will at average infect 3 other people. This is much higher than common flu where the virality rate is 1.5.
7) What to do
In addition to all the advice that you’ve heard/read so far about washing hands, not shaking hands, avoiding gathering, etc, I recommend that everyone should stock minimum 1 month of grocery and 2 months of medication if someone uses regular medication at home such as for heart or diabetes etc. 60% of all medicine is manufactured in China which is on complete shutdown right now. There will be delays and shortage in medication.
