🧐 Freshen up after a long weekend with these reflective stories.
Essential things to learn from dependence, counterintuition, and ignorance.
Like a car that’s been parked for a while, your brain too needs a warm up before getting back full-speed to face another week.
For this week’s Monday Mavens edition, we’ve compiled a handful of easily-digested Twitter threads for you to scroll through as you wrap up your long weekend.
This startup lost $100M due to dependency
Joe Speiser is a renowned New York-based entrepreneur, who has started businesses in fields such as AdTech, e-commerce, media, and SaaS. In early 2018, he was thriving with his media startup called LittleThings, and was pushing $75m+ a year in revenue.
A major shift in Facebook’s algorithm, where LittleThings primarily posted their content and gained revenue, then took away 90% of their organic traffic. This was the start of the downfall for the up-and-coming startup.
Click the Thread above to see what went wrong + Joe’s takeaways from this expensive lesson.
Going against instinct for profits
Those who are passionate in the Marketing sphere are most probably already familiar with a set of basic principals. These principals are instilled and believed to be the keys on how successful marketing works. In reality, some strategies are actually better implemented when we let go of what we think would work, and go the opposite way.
Here are 8 counterintuitive marketing strategies that you might doubt at first, but actually bring in higher margins:
Adding friction to boost sales.
Instilled theory: Longer process → decreases conversion to buy.
Counterintuition: IKEA's store layout → inspires impulse buys.
Get transparent with valuable info.
Instilled theory: Tease value to increase curiosity → people buy products.Counterintuition: Freely give away values (guides, calculators, templates, etc) → people build trust and refer your business to others.
Delete subscribers to improve email programs.
Instilled theory: Maintain existing subscribers → bigger reach.
Counterintuition: Remove inactive subscribers → higher open rate.
Check out the full Thread here and find other worth-to-try reverse psychology practices in marketing.
Ignorance, your old best friend
Have you been seeing and hearing a lot about this new Netflix series called “Inventing Anna”? Or maybe, you’ve binge-watched the entire series over the weekend?
For those who are not yet in the loop, this series reveals the story of an alleged heiress who tricked her way into the life of New York elites.
In a psychological point-of-view, Anna utilized a phenomenon called ‘pluralistic ignorance’. It’s a situation where "no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes”. This helped her secure a huge loan and turn her dream business plan into reality.
This Twitter thread by author Tim Urban gives a thorough visual explanation of how pluralistic ignorance works.
Are you ready to hit the pedal and speed through the rest of the week?
If you find this week’s Monday Mavens edition interesting, share the good news with your peers and let them in on the valuable insights.
We’ll see you next week for more.
Cheers!