The Melting Ice Cube, Airchat & Pieter Levels
Julio Froment
Hey friend,
Here’s the best content I found this week 😛 (plus my notes on a super interesting YouTube video)
📚 Best Book Passage (no context needed)
This passage is from "The Black Swan", by Nassim Taleb
(This passage can be understood on its own! No additional context is required for comprehension)The Melting Ice Cube
Consider the following thought experiment borrowed from my friends Aaron Brown and Paul Wilmott:
Operation 1 (the melting ice cube): Imagine an ice cube and consider how it may melt over the next two hours while you play a few rounds of poker with your friends. Try to envision the shape of the resulting puddle.
Operation 2 (where did the water come from?): Consider a puddle of water on the floor. Now try to reconstruct in your mind’s eye the shape of the ice cube it may once have been. Note that the puddle may not have necessarily originated from an ice cube.
The second operation is harder…
The difference between these two processes resides in the following. If you have the right models (and some time on your hands, and nothing better to do) you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will melt—this is a specific engineering problem devoid of complexity, easier than the one involving billiard balls. However, from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches.
In a way, the limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg also prevent us from reverse engineering history.
Now, let me increase the complexity of the forward-backward problem just a bit by assuming nonlinearity. Take what is generally called the “butterfly in India” paradigm from the discussion of Lorenz’s discovery in the previous chapter. As we have seen, a small input in a complex system can lead to nonrandom large results, depending on very special conditions. A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may take place a couple of years later. However, given the observation of a hurricane in North Carolina, it is dubious that you could figure out the causes with any precision: there are billions of billions of such small things as wing-flapping butterflies in Timbuktu or sneezing wild dogs in Australia that could have caused it. The process from the butterfly to the hurricane is greatly simpler than the reverse process from the hurricane to the potential butterfly.
Confusion between the two is disastrously widespread in common culture. This “butterfly in India” metaphor has fooled at least one filmmaker. For instance, Happenstance (a.k.a. The Beating of a Butterfly’s Wings), a Frenchlanguage film by one Laurent Firode, meant to encourage people to focus on small things that can change the course of their lives. Hey, since a small event (a petal falling on the ground and getting your attention) can lead to your choosing one person over another as a mate for life, you should focus on these very small details. Neither the filmmaker nor the critics realized that they were dealing with the backward process; there are trillions of such small things in the course of a simple day, and examining all of them lies outside of our reach.
Picking Nuggets Note:
I think this is a really good way to also understand intuitively the narrative fallacy. There might be a million reasons for something to happen the way it happens, and many times we are (erroneously) confident about one specific instance of the causal reason. Just because it "makes sense". What we fail to see is that a million stories can make sense and be super logic, but that doesn’t mean that it's the true!
🎉 Airchat
This is a new Social Media app founded by Naval Ravikant. I was lucky enough to get access to the app (thanks
) and it’s amazing! It’s like being on a perpetual party with super smart and interesting people. Here are some nuggets that I hunted and compiled together:
🎬 YouTube, Spotify (+ Notes)
✦ Learning from Pieter Levels.
A bit of context → I first heard of Pieter from Ali Abdaal’s podcast (hosting Ben Francis) and I started watching all of his stuff! He built many website projects and scaled them to tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per month! But what I find even more interesting, is that in many ways he embodies many of the teachings from Naval Ravikant and Nassim Taleb.
(Below are my raw notes on these 2 videos // When you see a “@” symbol, it means that the text following it is a thought of mine, rather than a note from the video)
- The Startup cycle for Pieter:
1) Identify the problem you want to solve (the idea)
• Characteristics of a Good Idea --> It focuses on a problem.
** I try to look at my own life... What does really annoy me on my daily life? What information is missing?
*** Cool thing --> You are an expert at your own problem!
** Do different things, so that you can see different problems to what most people see! If you do the same as the herd, you will have just the same problems -> which are very likely already solved by some company out there.
- You can make it ALL bootstrapped!
- Do it yourself. You don’t need to work with other people.
* You don’t need a technical co-founder if you are a business person. Just learn to code. Do it yourself. Learn to design...
* Benefits:
** Avoid Group Thinking --> That can be dangerous!
- Be happy with sharing your idea! Most important thing is the execution, so dont worry about people copying you!
2) Build it
- Lot of people will have to learn how to code.
* I do not recommend any bootcamp or academy! Takes too long, and is mostly a scam.
* I think that you should just go to Google and that’s it!
** Open Google and type “How to make a website”. That’s how I and many successful people learned!
* the most important skills -> To learn how to learn! (@ this is something that Charlie Munger and Naval Ravikant argue is the most important skill for getting rich)
- Do not spend too much time building it because you need to “validate” it thru launching. I would say you should not spend more than 1 month working on the startup before launching it!! (the more time you spend building without launching, the riskier it is!!).
- Also have already in mind which features you may wanna limit for premium members!!! Coz if you make everything for free and later you wanna charge for features (which were previously free) people will get super angry.
3) Launch it
- @ Market it
(if it "sticks", continue to next step...)
- Most important step! Because it tells if the actual product is useful or not! (and if can be monetized or not)
- Slogan startup is super important!
- Launch it in…
* ProductHunt
** Ship the product in SanFrancisco time!! So that you have a higher chance of going viral.
* HackerNews
* go to niche platforms!! (related to your target market)
- Have the server ready to handle it if many people visit your site at same time! (you don’t want the server to die just when you are going viral). Tip: make the web static.
4) Grow it
* @ Adding more features, polishing away...
* Start small. Start super Niche. Then go expanding concentrically!!
** e.g./ Start with Nomad travelers, and then target the whole Travelers market.
** @ as you already know... by starting super small you can differentiate WAY more!! Because people will think that there isn't any value in that super small market! So it frees it up from competition! (they don't see the big picture, that you start small but after some time you will grow it more valuable!).
- Forget about non-organic growth! → that is bots (non-ethical), ads (at least this is ethical, but people hate it!!)
* Organic growth is the best! It means that people really like your website. -> harder to get. But when you get it, it means you have validated your product! (people is using and loving it). And if you don’t get that traffic… Means your product is not good enough (tweak it, change it…).
- Build with your users.
* always ask for feedback -> to solve issues, to add new features,
** When you listen to feedback and make people feel involved, they become sort of ambassadors of your product (this is also mentioned in the book of Sahil Lavingia: The Minimalist Entrepreneur). It’s called “CO-CREATING”.
** Most beautiful feedback box (paid though) →
https://www.intercom.com/
- Make sure that you have a way to capture people’s emails!! So that you can always contact the people who showed interest!! This is super important to have all set up before launching!
* but don’t spam people!!
- Build your startup in PUBLIC
* you could stream your screen (on twitch)! So that everyone sees the development of the startup real time.
- Launch many times!!
* Don’t just launch the first time! Every time you build a new feature, get the word out there!! I do this every 2-3 months. → This helps you getting more press!
5) Monetize
- Very important to make money, because you need to pay your bills.
* Within 2-3 months, get your first dollar in.
* Ignore people who say you are evil for charging money!!
- Put a paywall on many features, and see what happens. Analyze which features make people pay the most!
- You can make your main site a FREEMIUM, and then have specific features or side things where you can charge money!
- Always better to get recurrent revenue instead of a one-off payment!! So best thing is to set up a subscription model! Sure there will be churn (and it might be annoying for users), but it is still worth it! (@ Peter doesn’t do this on his main biz Nomadlist. He charges a one-off fee! He does this because he says that Nomads don’t last very long in the nomadic lifestyle, so the churn is HUGE. So better to capture LTV ASAP)
- Ads are dead. Affiliate Marketing is dead. Just charge for premium features on your web! People will pay if they find value.
6) Automate it AMAP
* In case you get bored of the product, put as many robots to automate the startup!
- Get the robots to work for you! Don’t hire any people, just get the robots to do all the work.
* Only have 1 employee who can manage these robots. So that when the server crashes at 4am in the morning, there is someone who can get the server up and running again.
🪺 Twitter (no need to click links)
“When young founders build something that they don't want themselves but that they believe some group of other people want, 90% of the time they're building something no one wants.”
Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.
Wishing you a lovely weekend!!
Julio ❣️