One of the better investment books around is exactly about that.
A personal favourite was when Stanley Druckenmiller got himself involved in Tech stocks at the top of the dot-com bubble.
“Druckenmiller knew exactly what he was doing – he just couldn’t stop himself. ‘I bought $6 billion worth of tech stocks, and in six weeks I had lost $3 billion in that one play. You asked me what I learned. I didn’t learn anything. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basketcase and couldn’t help myself. So maybe I learned not to do it again, but I already knew that.‘”
This is an inspiring post on how some of the biggest consumer apps acquired their earliest users.
Pinterest’s strategy was eye catching and shows real hustle – “We did all kinds of pretty desperate things, honestly. I used to walk by the Apple store on the way home. I’d go in and change all the computers to say Pinterest. Then just kind of stand in the back and be like, “Wow, this Pinterest thing, it’s really blowing up.”
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A survey in 2019 of nearly 5000 people showed that 49% of product searches start on Amazon. For Prime members who are frequent users this figure is closer to 80%.
Google is notching up the competition.
Shopify, which Ben points out is a key member of this anti-amazon alliance, is also launching an app of their own to showcase the nearly 1m merchants using the platform.
Many things are forced to change and it creates lots of opportunities especially in the way people work together.
“tens of thousands of software engineers are cooped up at home getting frustrated with their current tools and wondering if they can spot some pain point, or mechanic, or small difference to the flow, and solve some opportunity that no-one ever quite realised was there.”
Success can happen even if things look entrenched. The anecdote about Dropbox is telling – everyone told Drew Houston ‘there are dozens of these already’ and he kept replying ‘yes, but which ones do you use?’
There are already some interesting new ideas in the chat app market.
We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.
We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams’ calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced.
That is a big difference.
They also put out press saying video calling on Teams was +1000% in March – yet without an absolute figure or comparison this isn’t that meaningful.
There is no doubt Teams is growing – now up to 44m daily average users (DAU) from 20m in November 2019.
On 11th of March Amazon put a halt to almost all of its spending on Google Ads.
“Amazon seems to have completely removed itself from the competition for essential goods, effectively leaving one million daily visits on the table for other competitors to take.”
Paid search traffic to the site fell 90% almost immediately costing 11.2m visits.
Ebay has capitalised to a certain extent on this by bidding on high volume keywords – you guessed it – “toilet paper”, “n95 mask” and “hand sanitizer”.
