Jakob Greenfeld writes about indie businesses, product ideas, ads, and metrics, drawing on his own experiments.
HN links it for posts on product ideation and management by metrics. One commenter finds his examples weak and calls him contrarian for its own sake.
Here is my setup. It is always in progress, and I keep tinkering. I treat most of my approaches as an Onion Layer of abstraction, from security to privacy to contacts. My final decision factor is to answer YES to my question, “Can I walk out of this?”
Let’s do contacts for this discussion thread.
I’m still in the Apple ecosystem, so I let the OSes (macOS, iOS, etc.) handle that. The sync is almost seamless, or rather, this is the best of all the devils. My personal and work are intertwined; thus, it is more of a tag-ish layer of friends, acquaintances, etc. Yes, sometimes I mix the joke of friend Archetype-A with friend Archetype-B and vice versa. ;-)
Last time I checked, my Contacts had almost 5,000 entries in there and I don’t mind this part growing. I’ve tried Dex[1] for about a year+ but found it slow. Their work seems to have slowed and stalled, while you expect them to “move beyond a tool that seems to be still in beta.” This was a few years ago, and hence I’ve no idea about their current situation.
I also tried Monica,[2] but she do not know how to keep things in sync. The developer/team also seems to be focussing on an office suite that has been “Coming Soon in 2002” since 2021.[3] If you want to try out Monica and see if this fits, I suggest spinning one quickly with PikaPods[4] for less than $2 a month.
Now, I’m trying out Clay[5] for broader outreach and staying in touch with people with whom I’ve interacted or connected via the networks that I was and am…
nope, not only this guys examples are bad but he just tries too hard to be a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. i called him that & he blocked me [1] for some reason. probably there's some truth in it that he got hurt.
his examples are so bad. i've read paul graham's essays, naval's thread & alex hormozi's $100m offers book & all are quite good & easy to understand. naval's thread is a big hard but he has whole bunch of podcasts (4 hours) [2] explaining them in detail & articles [3] to accompany them.
the op's entire schtick is to sell his courses by writing articles. first he wrote an article on build a business, not an audience [4] & then did a complete 180 turn & has been building an audience ever since. then he started selling courses. it's like his schtick is to go against the popular ideas & attack them to garner following.
although, he does have some good insights in a few of his articles like when he summarized a book (nathan latka) or a video (sam parr)... rest of his posts are purely trying to hard to be a contrarian. tries to hard to be like peter thiel except he doesn't have any real arguments.
you don't have to believe me. just read $100m offers & apply it. that book could've saved me many years of trying to figure out the framework myself & has every single technique mentioned on how to make a good offer. if you actually follow the advice to the t, you will actually be on the pathway to your 1st million. not to say, the author himself is worth…
Management by metrics is what leads companies astray. [1]
Right now it’s happening on Twitter and the process has just started on Substack.
[1] https://jakobgreenfeld.com/metrics
A post (not my own) I find worth revisiting in this very subject from time to time, on the various approaches to product ideation:
https://jakobgreenfeld.com/gut
Related:
Jakob Greenfeld
https://jakobgreenfeld.com/