bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

I’m an avid Instacart user, why? Because it means I eat out less, it’s easy to do and who doesn’t like convenience. This simple app lets you order items from your local supermarket, then select when you’d like them delivered.

Yesterday whilst preparing an order, I realized a few things. Instacart because it isn’t a supermarket but has all the data a supermarket should be able (but doesn’t really) utilise, they could do some amazing things to innovate in bringing digital thinking to food shopping.

Here’s a few thoughts:

1) They can do specials.

Discounts off food, and like the supermarket these will be paid for by the brands.

2) They can target these offers

They know my address, general profile information by zip but also what I spend and categories of shopping.

3) They can optimize against performance

Imagine as a brand, optimizing per basket add. You only serve the offer up to people in a limited area, customize your offer and optimize against basket adds. You can then roll that out national or by zip code.

4) They know (and can affect) loyalty

Or going a step further, you could incentivize or pay for loyalty. Pay more for someone that adds your product to their basket four times in a row.

5) Drop off campaigns

Target people who used to buy your product but haven’t in the last three shops.

And that’s just the start, I look forward to seeing Instacart opening this up to brands, I imagine at the right time this will be massive for them.

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PS

This is also a potential Amazon Direct play. They already have the ad engine and recommendation engine just not targeted at this area.

I’ve been absorbed in product literature of recent, one thing that stuck out to me was this Drucker quote:

“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, of course, that nobody pays for a ‘product.’ What is paid for is satisfaction.” Companies think they are selling products and services, but in reality people hire those products and services to get jobs done in their lives. via FastCodeDesign

Products and services slot into these jobs, if you can:

1) Capture people naturally as they complete the wider jobs you assist with

2) Acknowledge & inform the steps before/after

3) Ensure successful & seamless completion of that job.

You become an essential tool.

This is something early on, we realised at Y&S, in those days people didn’t know what digital marketing was/is/how it could help. So we built a strategy around capturing the person who would be researching, to figure out how to solve their digital problem and make them look good. That then got us in front of more businesses… and in turn more business.

With Nudge, we’re optimising towards this a lot, how can we make our role in the campaign seamless. How can we tick the three boxes above. Lots to do.

If you’re like me, you like to do as much electronic transactions as possible, it means carrying less cash and also being able to study your behaviour.

Living in the US that’s not as easy as it was in NZ, the banking system is very outdated, for example when I pay my rent I log into TD Bank, hit bill pay, they then print a cheque and send it to my landlord. Nuts!

That aside, I’ve been playing with Acorns, which is a little app that pulls in your transaction data and rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar, then once it hits $5 it will scoop that up and put it in savings.

Now it is automatically invested, in a fund of your choice. I’ve been doing it for around 6 weeks give or take and saved about $66. Not the most amazing amount but it is an automatic behaviour which happens in the background. It’s like scooping up a small amount here and there which isn’t noticed and then over a year will add up.

Very cool.

My current strategy is to build that up, then at regular intervals I’ll scoop the money out and put into my other long term investments. As whilst it’s nice you earn interest on it the options aren’t that great.

Nonetheless a great little app and a way to build more automated savings into your life.

In a joint Q&A with Bill Gates at Washington University in the 90s – Warren shared some of his great wisdom to the students. Here are my top takeaways:

1) Developing great habits
He says  “the chains of habit are too light to be felt till they’re too heavy to be broken”. Re-iterating that it’s vitally important to develop productive habits when you’re young, as when you’re old they’re much harder to change.

2) Focus on moving forward

You should “never look back, don’t worry about anything”, you can’t change that, focus on where you’re going. Don’t be wed to the past – it’s already the past.

3) Play the hand you get

“You play the hand you get, play it as well as you can and be thankful enough”.

4) Turning horsepower into output

He talks about converting all your horsepower into output, that is spending your time meaningfully, on the things you’re good at, Bill Gates chimes in about how he gets Ballmer to look at his calendar and critique as to whether he’s doing that.

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I’ve included the full interview below.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPh0_zEykU

I enjoyed this article Bringing the dumb pipe metaphor to email: Why Google wants to replace Gmail, talking about how email is a blunt service. As in it is a delivery mechanism.

The term dumb pipe analogy comes from networking lingo, it’s where someone provides a connection from A to B but don’t layer any services on top. The telcos that power our iPhones make a great example, as Apple controls that device whereby the telcos are restricted to just providing the data & connectivity for it to work.

The problem is email’s over-used and misused everyday. From transactional data, to communication to collaboration, so Google is working on putting a layer on top to make it more actionable. A Facebook newsfeed for email.

It’s a good framework to think of, in any industry the first challenge is building the pipes, it’s what we’re doing with Nudge building out the measurement, the second challenge once the pipes are in and well used is layering the intelligence on top for heavy users.

The third layer? Opening up an eco-system so others can build on top of that.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, fingerprints as passwords.

The rise of the Apple Touch ID which uses your fingerprint to unlock your phone and now process transactions with Apple Pay. Which in the system of the phone and the user, verifies the owner is present but isn’t a password. But you would think it is.

The iPhone doesn’t store your actual fingerprint -> but you have to reasonably expect, that if you digitally store your fingerprint (and chances are if you’ve been through customs it is already sitting in multiple databases around the world) it’s going to be compromised at some point.

This post by Dustin Kirkland from 2013 digs into it a bit more, saying that yes fingerprints are great as an identifier but not as a password.

Makes a heck of a lot of sense.

This is often one of the first questions from kiwi entrepreneurs, and it’s an interesting one.

Firstly, of entrepreneurs as a class the ones we often look up to don’t have to deal with this challenge. The challenge of conquering a market other than the one you grew up in.

Elon Musk – smashed it, in America.

Richard Branson, dominated for 20 years in the UK (now global).

Kiwi entrepreneurs have to crack that from very early on and come from a smaller market. The american mindset is any market outside of the US is smaller than home base, kiwis are the opposite every market outside is bigger – it is highly unlikely going to another market will have less opportunity. The challenges of this process are numerous:

1) Everything is different.

2) Different taxation, business law.

3) Cultural differences (even in English speaking countries)

And underpinning that is building a new network, brand, reputation, all of which takes time, at least 4-5 years in my experience. Why that long? It just takes that long to establish any business.

Thus, as a kiwi entrepreneur you’re always conscious that you do have to get in to different markets which is an additional challenge. On top of carving a business out of nothing.

But back to, why not Australia?

It’s often the first port of call, the idea is to not stretch yourself too thin and closer to home. In reality what I find is that people take it less seriously. They think send over one guy, the thinking is ‘we can fly over if need be’ have a meeting or two, and then if they hit a rocky road they just stay in NZ more.

If you’re going to take it seriously, you need to commit, setting it up so it’s safe to return home is almost preparing it for failure before you’ve started.

I’m all for caution but if you’d done your diligence and know you can make it a success don’t dilly dally around!

Whilst setting up hasn’t been easy, if we were close to home I’m sure someone would have decided to call it quits by now. It is hard. It should be for all the reasons above. However if you want to commit, do it properly.

Going further afield makes the organisation take the change more seriously and treats it as such.

Having a co-founder step out of day to day is quite a process, we worked with the team to find out what intangibles I provided, then sought to cover those through a more balanced leadership team (and in turn balancing the personalities of the team).

All of which I’m not sure we would have done was I just popping across the ditch.

There has to be one right? This is it.

A few friends & readers have been prodding – where are the posts? What’s been happening.

So, lets get up to date.

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15 August 2013

My wife Esther & I shifted to New York, to help establish an offshoot of Young & Shand, our product division. Our long term focus has been to build a global business from New Zealand. To do that, you need to find scalable intellectual property. So as Y&S has grown, where we couldn’t find off the shelf products we’d build them.

Long story short, Nudge was our first that had momentum. So, that was my focus.

Arriving up here, the aim was to get meetings, get the product in front of it and sell it. Boom! Then golf.

Well not really – but so I did the first 100 or so meetings, we got mainly no, a few yes. Those that said yes we went into a few campaigns but they fell apart, for a number of reasons. The key thing was, in a more specialized highly scalable market our product was doing too much. We had too many features and then by consequence not enough impact.

So we had to slim down the product, so we did that, finding a feature which was innovative yet untapped in the US. So we built a very lite (and ugly version) to prove the case. Upon doing so, the pitches began again, rustling up meetings. We got our first case study.

This helped us validate the feature set, the use case, and off we begun iterating, since then we have narrowed the focus down further and further, whilst removing features increasing impact, focus and value.

So that’s what I’ve been doing – tearing down obstacles. It’s been a big adjustment, doing business in the US is as culturally different to New Zealand as doing business in Thailand, as an entrepreneur I’ve had to adapt; change focus, had to start from scratch – building a brand, a network, a new way of doing business. As well as uprooting my personal life, meaning new habits (new food), social life.

In short an incredible year of change.

And now it’s time to share some of those learnings, adjustments and what we’re up to now. So I’ll keep them coming through. And if you’re on Medium, here’s one long post [17 min read time], on my big goal this year.

Talk soon.

It won’t.

Change will keep going.

Like Marc Andreessen shares in this great post This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs … as long as our ability to change our horizons keeps up, so will our horizons.

Kevin Kelly talks about this in his book What Technology Wants – and that’s to keep evolving, it’s a very philosophical take on the growth of technology.

BusinessInsider touches on this too – The Next 20 Years Are Going To Make The Last 20 Look Like We Accomplished Nothing In Tech.

All good reads.

It’s an interesting thing to think about.  An exciting time to be alive.  An even more exciting time in the modern day to be able to influence and contribute to that change!

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And not management frameworks & structures.

Just tangible things you can do today to promote excellence.

The Little Big Things

I read it when it came out and just keep quoting it over and over.  We even use it to help people who are growing into management roles, to help show them things they should be doing, and it helps them get started.

That is, pressure forces change & innovation.  A time to rethink things.

I love this JP Morgan quote:

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.

Which is the same, go there, stretch yourself.  Then see what you can see.

When I have a problem that I’m chewing on, I’ll go for a walk.  Typically by the end of a walk I’ve cracked the problem or figured out what the next step to getting to the solution is.  Its simple and it works.  Stanfords recent study mirrors this by  showing that walking increases creativity.

A person walking indoors – on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall – or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down, one of the experiments found.

Crazy – even walking indoors in a room with a blank wall, aka no external stimulus other than walking did it.

I’m also reading Daily Rituals of Artists, one thing that stood out for me is how much time they dedicated to just going on a walk.  Often up to 90 minutes giving their mind time to roam, to relax and enjoy life.

Steve Jobs was noted to instead of having a meeting go on a walk with whoever he was meeting with.

Why? That’s yet to be fully established – and as to whether other physical activities increase or decrease the effect has yet to be proven.

But that’s enough for me.  Get some more walking into your daily rhythm.  I’m definitely going to.

Why not, a delayed tip, if you’re still happy in a couple of hours you will tip a bit more, or if you’re not happy you’ll tip a bit less.

For hairdressers – that makes sense.
For things like massages, not so much.
Car service – makes sense.

It’s something to think about.

It makes giving back a habit.

And that’s the best way to evoke change, is to make the things which are creating the change a habit (read Charles Duhigg).  You often can’t control the outcome but you can control the inputs that go in to doing it.

That’s why, things like Toms monthly coffee is interesting. you can support the cause and in an ongoing fashion.

Set it up. and it becomes a habit.

I like it.  If you do too, here’s some others I do:

• Kiva
• Soma
• LSTN Headphones

I was browsing the Vancouver Art Gallery last week, and saw a few kids running through.

They were reasonably bored. Not surprising.

I never got art growing up, we had an art class and I thought art was about drawing – reflecting on that I wonder how we get kids into art, so that they understand what it is and what it means.

Thus the idea for a children’s art gallery, a gallery aimed at getting kids interested… funnily enough LegoLand is kind of like that.

What else should / could we get the next generation into early enough?