Opinion Archives - Page 4 of 6

Our Number 1 Winning Strategy: Test Everything

Some people make it seem like that creating viral content is a science. I think there’s some data analytics to it but it’s not entirely science.

In my opinion creating viral content means putting a ton of content out for your audience, studying consumption based on user behavior, and trying to replicate that again in the next piece of content.

It may sound like bit of a science, but the root of all viral content comes down to just pure testing.

These days I spend a lot of time and money running ads for our e-commerce store. The key to running ads right is to test everything; creatives, targeting, copywriting and all permutations of all variants.

In the end, I keep the ones that work, and stop the ones that don’t.

Product video ads aren’t much different either. I believe that before the consumers have received and used the product first hand, the product is only as good as it’s creative.

Sometimes we take segments of what works within multiple creatives and stitch together to make what now works as a whole.

In the end, for me, it’s just testing, looking at results, and improving based on the data.

The Right Way to Talk to AI Support to Lift Limitations

A few days ago, I spoke about the visa restrictions on the internet. I also wrote a bit about how you can circumvent those. Today, I’m going to write about a certain kind of visa restriction that I often face.

Large platforms treat users from different countries differently. They do that to apparently keep their platform “safe”. To keep the platform safe, they look at the data they have on each country, the amount of spam/scam etc happening from each country or region and then develop rules to treat each user accordingly. In theory, this means it’s harder to use these platforms from Pakistan than it is from US even if all you’re trying to do is use the platform the right way.

One such restriction that I’ve always seen happen is completely losing access to account. For example in the past, I’ve lost access to my Facebook personal account and Facebook ad accounts. Google Adsense is also more likely to get disabled in Pakistan than in US. There’s always the option to appeal for both these platforms but appeal often results in nothing.

A friend of mine devised a strategy to deal with these appeals. His theory is that all account closures happen with no human intervention. The decisions are completely taken by the machines. He also believes, and I agree, that in most cases the appeal process also happens without any human intervention. So how can you convince a machine into accepting your appeal?

My friend uses emotional signals to deal with this. If you’re apologetic or regretful in your tone of appeal, your appeal is never going to get accepted. You’re guilty and you’re showing it in your tone. Instead, my friend is angry, distressed and disappointed when he’s appealing; and I’ve seen it first hand that the appeal is much more likely to work.

Turkey, Again

I’m travelling to Turkey, again. I first visited Turkey when I was 6 months old. My parents took me there. They have a lot of footage from our trip which I also recently got to watch again.

My father, who is retired now, spent a lot of time in the past few weeks trying to digitize all the VHS content that he had. He has found some success and restored a lot of that content.

My second visit to Turkey was when I was 25. Since then I’ve been there every year, at least once.

Turkey is what Pakistan could have been. It is also one of the potential countries suited best for digital nomadism.

The quality of life is miles ahead of what it is here in Pakistan. The cost of living is incredibly cheaper than most of the developed countries. In my opinion, cost of living is only 33% higher in the metropolis of Turkey compared to the metropolis of Pakistan. So, if you need $1000 to live in Pakistan, you only need $1300-$1400 to live in Turkey.

This slightly higher cost for a much better lifestyle makes it my favorite spot to spend some quality time.

Here’s my favorite video about Turkey.

What to Work On?

A few days ago, I wrote a bit about doing the right thing. The emphasis was that you shouldn’t just do things right, you should also do the right thing. It’s certainly important to do your work well, but it’s even more important to work on what’s more worthy of your time. That was a financial advice so you can identify the work that’s going to pay you off better in the long run. And I’d follow this advice if I’m looking for financial rewards.

But not always are we just looking for financial rewards. Sometimes we need gratification of other kinds. Like emotional gratification. And since the eventual goal is actually to seek happiness, sometimes this is even more important than simply achieving financial gratification.

As of lately, I only work on things that I like to work on and I never work on things that I don’t like to work on. I do this regardless of the financial rewards associated with either of the options. At some point in your life, you’re going to want to make that decision too. But when you do so, make sure your basics are covered.

The Fast Moving World of Digital Marketing

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, our first e-commerce store was launched in 2016. Our primary customer acquisition strategy since then has been through Facebook ads.

While I had run Facebook ads a long time before, it wasn’t until 2016 that I spent a major budget. Since then, almost everything about the ads has changed. Many new strategies have been introduced and a lot of strategies that I learnt in 2016 are irrelevant.

Case in point, tech moves really really fast. Digital marketing moves even faster. And I’m curious what value could business schools add in your marketing career in this day and age.

It’s likely that my perspective is limited too, since I’ve never been to a business school. But help me understand, do business schools, including international, teach anything about this kind of marketing? If they do, how do the teachings stay relevant since the minimum length of a masters business degree is 1 year. Let’s not even talk about the bachelors degree here. In my opinion 1 year is a long enough time in digital marketing to unlearn everything and learn new things.

In my 15 years of career as digital marketer, I’ve changed my job roles 15 times. If I hadn’t, I would have found myself with no work. My primary source of revenue came from selling ads and our publishing company Socialoholic mastered that area. Only a few years later, we found ourselves buying ads instead. Now all of our revenue comes from buying ads.

In digital marketing, if you’re not pivoting every few months or even weeks, you’re being left behind.

So if you’re looking for a marketing school, let me tell you one. It’s where I went to. It’s called YouTube. The course length varies from 4 days to 4 weeks. And after that, you can get shit done.

How To Get Luckier

I hear a lot of people say that successful people got lucky. I think everyone needs a bit of a luck on their side to accomplish something great no matter how worthy they are of their success. So in a way, I don’t disagree with those who believe it was luck. Except that, many people believe that it was only luck, which of course I completely disagree with.

Luck is a game of chance. Getting lucky is having favorable conditions on your side. However, I think there’s a simple way to increase your chances of getting luckier.

Since luck becomes favorable out of randomness, if you worked everyday to improve your business or yourself, the randomness will eventually be in your favor. Since you’re missing no chance of trying to be lucky, the luck will eventually find you.

I can look back at hundreds of good things that happened to me, where I got extremely lucky, but only because I was trying.

And so if you want to be more lucky, you have to stay consistent and work everyday.

Visa Restrictions On The Internet

While I acknowledge that internet is the biggest game changer of the human history, it is still not what it was supposed to be or what it can be.

In the offline world, all humans aren’t born equal. They are born in certain conditions where their lives are driven by their socioeconomic circumstances. Their lives are dictated by their place of birth and half of what they can and can’t do is written in the stone. Sure they can break the chains and the barriers to come out stronger but that happens very seldom.

On the internet, everyone has the same opportunities. In theory, though. You could get on YouTube and make a living regardless of where you live. Hundred of millions of people have benefited from such global opportunities that didn’t exist 30 years ago. But these global opportunities are still not provided equally to everyone, although they are marketed as such always.

For example, YouTube first launched their monetization partner program in 2006 for select countries but it wasn’t until 2016 that this program was launched in Pakistan.

Facebook restricts fresh Pakistani ad accounts at Rs 1000/day spend ($6.46 on today’s exchange rate) while a fresh US account is restricted at $50/day spend. Restrictions are lifted more quickly for the developed world, and less quickly for the emerging world. The scrutiny of AI is much harsher for us than it is for the developed world.

In summary, AI is no different than the visa issuing officers that judge us more than our counterparts elsewhere in the world.

On the bright side, in the offline world, if you try hard enough, you can sometimes circumvent these restrictions. You can sometimes emigrate or obtain a better travel document by meeting certain criteria or just by wanting to have it bad enough.

Since internet is almost always better than the offline world in every regard, you can also circumvent a lot of these restrictions if you try hard enough. In fact, on the internet, like everything else, this circumvention is often not as hard as in the offline world.

Perhaps, we’ll talk more of this circumvention in another blog.

Leaving Your Own Business

There was an occasion when I had to move on and leave a large amount of money behind. I had to leave a business that I co-founded. I can’t say it makes me happy about it. But I will say staying back would have made me unhappier.

It’s a challenge where you choose an option that makes you as little unhappy as possible. And certainly, it isn’t an easy challenge. But I believe with all my head and heart, despite feeling otherwise sometimes, that moving on was the right decision.

I made my decision with the following in my mind

“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.”
Naval Ravikant

Yesterday, I spoke to another founder who made a similar decision a few years ago. He left 7-figures on the table to move on for personal happiness. In the end life is a pursuit of happiness. Money is nice, but it’s not always the answer, especially after you have enough of it.

How VC Funding Can Kill Innovation

A few days ago, I published a blog post about my views on the future of the open internet. The post mostly focused around Twitter which went from being a very open platform to becoming a very centralized platform completely killing 3rd party apps that it stole innovation from. I believe all these decisions were financial and were driven by pressure from the investors.

Twitter & 3rd Party Apps

A lot of features that we see today on Twitter were actually originally developed and created by 3rd party apps. In fact, the first twitter client for both Mac & iPhone were developed by 3rd parties. Some of the clients got acquired by Twitter including TweetDeck & Tweetie. TweetDeck’s support was killed from all platforms except for Mac. Thousands of other apps were ruthlessly killed by discontinuing API supports.

Financial Decisions

Twitter said the decisions were made to discontinue support for “legacy APIs” at the same time acknowledging that no new APIs will be created. In my opinion, the decision was a financial one, and largely driven by what the investors wanted off Twitter.

Fred Wilson, a VC who invested early-stage in Twitter said in a blog post he wrote in 2016

In the early days of Twitter, there were third party applications (Summize for Search, Tweetie for iOS client, etc). These were all built on Twitter’s API. If Twitter had imagined itself as a protocol instead of an application, these third party applications would not have had to compete with (or get bought by) Twitter. But at the time, there wasn’t an obvious way for Twitter’s founders and management team to benefit from a protocol-based business model.
Fred Wilson

Posterous & Twitter

But the damage wasn’t limited to Twitter clients. Twitter acquired and closed other services too.

Posterous was an ultra-simple blogging platform with focus on social media integration and ultra-easy mobile blogging using emails with support for many forms of media.

Posterous grew at a very fast rate and had over 15 million users by 2012. They ran a wide-spread campaign asking users from smaller or dying platforms to import their blogs to this new dead-simple platform. Anyone who did that most likely regretted that decision as Twitter acquired Posterous in May 2012 only to shutdown the blogging platform, and all blogs hosted on it in the next 6 weeks.

All for financial reasons.

It’s Not Twitter

I don’t hate Twitter. I love it. But everything that Twitter has done was done in the financial interest. And somehow I don’t think it is what Jack wanted off Twitter. If he did, he would have had built Twitter like this from ground-up. But he didn’t. Because he had different plans for Twitter. Plans that obviously changed as financial concerns got in to the picture.

And it isn’t Twitter alone. I only expressed my thoughts with reference to Twitter in continuity of my original post about the open internet, which was also written with Twitter in mind.

All large tech companies have killed platforms and services, acquiring only to shutdown, for financial gains.

And while it looks sexy to say that we’re trying to change the world, with decisions like these we’re actually just trying to change our own lives and those of our investors’. As killing innovation isn’t how you change the world.