WIP | Notion

Unfinished thoughts and open notes. Poorly thought out, unedited and almost certainly containing typos.

Index

July 2019

Two frameworks for thinking about building moats I found useful.

First, a taxonomic categorization of strategies.

Second, a framework looking at supplier differentiation and network effects.

Just listened to the fantastic Acquired episode featuring Rahul Vohra of Superhuman. Three themes stood out.

The ongoing unbundling of Google's G Suite. I was reminded of the oft-cited "unbundling of Craigslist". Google's sprawling G Suite offers a variety of productivity, collaboration, and combination tools. We are beginning to and will continue to see standalone products attack G Suite's offerings: Google Sheets —> Airtable and Coda; Docs —> Notion; Gmail —> Slack, Superhuman; Hangouts —> Zoom.
The viability of "plugin startups" as standalone companies. Grammarly is mentioned as one of the few "plugin startups" to achieve scale required to become a standalone company. Many productivity products remain just that — products — because they are entirely reliant on an existing ecosystem (e.g. Chrome, Gmail, etc).
The importance of user interviews at the early stage. During Superhuman's first year, Vohra's product landing page prompted users to sign up with an email address to get updated when the product launched. Upon signup, users on the waitlist received a personal email from Vohra asking (a) their current email provider and (b) their major email pain points. Vorha followed up on these two questions to conduct 1000+ conversations with potential users. These conversations were essential in collecting early feedback as well as generating interest in the product.