Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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💡Must-read

👉 Hopper: Building a super-app for travel (Youtube)

Use targeted discounts to incentivize conversion and retention:

• Think of discounts as just marketing spent.

• Would we want to spend our 11 million dollars on facebook ads, or would the incremental cash be lower if we just gave away a million dollars to our users every month? What kind of word of mouth impact would that have?

➡️ It was also the strategy of the cash app (Block / Square), and I think there is something to do here for us. How could we do “give-aways” and test the virality?

• What these apps have been able to do is that they always tie all their engagement and retention mechanisms back to actual purchasing in their marketplace. They achieve it by always rewarding users with discounts for that marketplace, so they always end up buying.

➡️ That is why having a marketplace of services owned by us or not (mini-apps), or a shop could make a lot of sense.

➡️ They have social first features that go way beyond the classic referral program and they think about referral much more on the session level than on the install levels.

• Every time someone opens an app, how can we get them to get their friend to also open the app?

Discovery driven merchandising:

• You don't actually need to search to find a product. 

• They're surfaced to you, and this is super important because it allows them to merchandise a long tail of products without having to wait for users to search for them.

• We took an app that was originally built for flights and then added hotels cars, homes. Now each of these categories have four or five fintech products.

• We have all these new growth features as well and we've been having trouble merchandising all of that. But these super apps have solved that at a much wider scale.

➡️ The more we’ll have services the more important discovery will be. 

The super apps are really good at big sales event:

• We've started to run these in-app super sales events where users get all kinds of discounts on travels or on fintech products.

• They can play mini games to get extra discounts.

• These create increases in launches and sales of over a hundred percent on the days that we launch them.

• So far the CAC on these sales is about 40% cheaper than what we can get on paid social. They're also our biggest source of referrals currently.

➡️ I’m very excited about those mini-games ideas. 

• The other thing we launched is that we wanted to introduce were these products that were lower priced, so that you don't need to make your first purchase of a couple hundred dollars to enter into the Hopper marketplace.

• We started selling these loot boxes.

• This one (the picture below) was on our cinco de Mayo cell: it was a piñata that you could open.

• We sell thousands and thousands of these on the days that we put them to sale and it's essentially a great way for you to put down five dollars to get a reward. But now you've added your payment information, you've created an account and you have credit that you want to use.

• This has been a really effective conversion mechanism for us to convert new users that are a little bit skeptical and might not be ready to make a multi-hundred dollar purchase but will make a five dollar purchase.

• On the frequency side of things they have very basic streak mechanisms where if you log in every day you get a certain discount. Pinduoduo though actually took it to a whole different level: they have a Farmville like game where you have to grow a tree by logging in every day, and if you water the tree every day it spreads fruits. And when I say fruits I mean actual fruits that they'll ship: they'll send you lychees to your door.

• (40m daily active users for Pinduoduo)

➡️ It is really a mechanism I’d like us to progressively adopt (when timing is right).

• Now we're building the multiplayer version: if you want to book with your friends, there's team buy so you both get a discount for booking together.

• If you want to watch flights or search flights with your friends it's just better. 

• If you participate in a sale together you get extra discounts.

• Basically everything is better when you use Hopper with friends. The point is to add a full organic virality loop to the marketplace.

➡️ What would it mean for us? For Mind?

🏯 Great articles about super-apps, gamification and product design

👉 ’Play-to-Earn’ Gaming and How Work is Evolving in Web3 Future (Future)

• We have framed Axie as a social network as well as a game since the early days.

• One of the key things in my mind is making sure that there continues to be different groups of players who are participating for different reasons and deriving different kinds of value. So, people might be there purely because they enjoy playing the game or because they get a lot of personal fulfillment out of coaching others. In many cases, it might be financial. There are a number of different reasons why people might want to be playing the game and engaging in the community. But as long as the players who are putting in additional capital derive other kinds of enjoyment from it, that’s fine.

• There’s just a stickiness that comes from people feeling like this community is theirs and they are benefiting from being members of it rather than having someone extracting value from them.

• We will be releasing an upgraded battle system. And one of the features of that will be kind of this demo tutorial where everyone will be able to download Axie, get a free team of starter Axies, learn about the game, figure out if they actually love the gameplay, love the community before they have to make any economic decisions. So, we think that that’s going to be a really important stage between awareness and activation.

👉 Starbucks, a Tech Company (The Generalist)

Rewards:

• Introduced in 2008, Starbucks Rewards “exploded” once available in the form of a mobile app the following year. Soon, millions of customers had joined the program, and hundreds of millions of dollars were being loaded onto Starbucks Rewards cards.

• This has been boosted by the “Stars for Everyone” initiative, which grants anyone who uses the app — even if they don’t preload money — “stars,” which can be redeemed for rewards.

➡️ Very smart reward mechanisms. 

• My starbucks idea (see image)

➡️ Empowering members.

• Starbucks rewards purchases with Stars. Though any payment method earns Stars, customers receive double if they load money onto their Starbucks account.

• It allows Starbucks to receive what is essentially an interest-free loan from its customer base. Starbucks reported holding $1.75 billion in stored value from its loyalty program in its most recent quarter.

• Second, because you might forget to spend it. You might add $100 to your account, and then...stop going to Starbucks. The company refers to this as “breakage,” and it’s essentially free money.

​➡️ Would be interesting to understand how it could apply to us. 

Use of Machine Learning:

• This level of personalization is managed by Deep Brew, a semi-omniscient AI platform.

• Unlike its predecessors, Deep Brew represents a unified system that drives decision-making across the entire organization. Not only does it nudge users to buy a particular type of latte, it influences employee staffing schedules, inventory levels, machine maintenance (thanks to IoT connections), and store expansion. Even more than many tech companies, Starbucks runs itself like a piece of software.

👉 How Shein beat Amazon at its own game – and reinvented fast fashion (Rest of World)

• It added anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 SKUs (stock-keeping units) to its app each day.

• The company offered more than 20 times as many new items as Zara and H&M.

 ​​➡️ Very impressive focus on selection.

• Shein grew by bringing traits of China’s gamified e-commerce market to the rest of the world. Online shopping in the country has evolved into a form of entertainment, featuring livestreamers, flash sales, and enticing pop-ups that compel consumers to scroll through the newest products.

• Shein has used similar components on its platform, including a points system that rewards shoppers for making purchases, leaving reviews, and playing minigames.

➡️ Another way to create gamification. 

• Operating a sprawling online marketplace that brings together around 6,000 Chinese clothing factories. It unites them with proprietary internal management software that collects near-instant feedback about which items are hits or misses, allowing Shein to order new inventory virtually on demand.

• The secret is Shein’s internal software, which connects its entire business from design to delivery. “Everything is optimized with big data,” Lin said. Each of Shein’s suppliers gets their own account on the platform, which spits out information about what styles are selling well and can also quickly identify which might become future hits. “You can see the current sales, and then it will tell you to stock up more if you sell well and what you need to do if you don’t sell well. It’s all there.”

➡️ Software for doctors telling them the trends of what is happening at similar doctor offices? If there are a lot of questions about a gastro, the doctors start to get a pop up about it?

👉 Kaspi Bank: The Shapeshifter (The Generalist)

Kaspi is the largest Payments, Marketplace and Fintech Ecosystem in Kazakhstan.

• After giving up 95% of the balance sheet to pivot from commercial loans to retail banking products, Lomtadze decided to shutter Kaspi’s credit card product — yup, the same one that had just hit 1 million users — after it received a negative net promoter score. Again, this meant forgoing real money: the division recorded $400 million, a third of total revenue. Lomtadze later recounted the decision dispassionately:

• People hated different fees attached to credit cards and that they could not repay the debt over time, due to its revolving nature. A negative NPS meant for us that credit cards did not fulfill our mission. We called it unhealthy earnings. It took us 48 hours to kill the product.

➡️ Very courageous.

• It began with Kaspi rolling out a free online bill payment service. In a country in which most bills had to be settled at local bank branches which took a fee, Kaspi’s solution represented significant innovation. Notably, it reflected the company’s new priorities, leveraging a banking backend not to earn a profit, but to please customers. The product proved a hit, attracting a large, engaged userbase.

➡️ Building software to make your customers happy. 

• With online bill payment in place, Kaspi laminated on new products. In 2014, the company opened up an e-commerce platform, followed by consumer financial products, car loans (via a partnership), and in-home delivery.

• After that customers saw a new wave of additions including maps, messaging, and P2P payments.

• Kaspi is best understood as a business in triptych, part payments, part marketplace, part fintech.

• This makes sense given Kaspi’s strategy — as we noted, it has prioritized capturing a large customer base and then layering new services on top.

➡️ What I believe we will be doing over time, adding more and more health & well-being services.

• In total, Kaspi recorded 3.4 million monthly active users (MAUs) for its governmental services, a 390% increase from the year prior.

➡️ They are managing some of the government services which is super interesting. What could it be for us on health? Feuilles de soins? 

👉Bill Gurley, Philip Rosedale (Second Life) - Back to the Future (Join Colossus)

• Minecraft in particular used simpler primitives, so everybody could build.

• The simpler the primitives are, the more appealing they are to kids and not grownups. You've got this interesting trade off.

• When you look at many games, even like Call of Duty, the first hour or two of gameplay in Call of Duty, you go to basic training, and you learn primitives and stuff. And I think there's some things that are in between that have to do with onboarding, that get people committed, and bought in, and learned.

➡️ How do we inspire ourselves from games for our onboarding? 

• If I made a list of 25 things that I think inhibited us from getting to a higher place, I don't think I'd put decentralization on that list. The creators were cashing out 100 million a year last time I had access to the number.

• The decentralization kind of has two parts, a technical component and a trust governance component. I think from a technical component because of everything you've talked about from a performance standpoint, putting more things on a blockchain versus a database would only make it more difficult to do.

• A blockchain is ridiculously expensive as a database.

➡️ You don’t need a blockchain for many things.

• We had these digital chickens and they got really, really popular. Our server ran the whole time. So your chickens would evolve even when you weren't there. It was really cool.

• Philip: Very much like crypto kitties. I mean, it was interesting. As Bill said, we had these pets that people would breed and they would grow. And actually that continues to be one of the big markets in Second Life.

​​➡️ Why I believe Alangotchi could be big :) 

👉 Signing up to Cash App (Built for Mars)

• The very first screen on Cash App asks you for your phone number or email address. This works for both new and existing users.

• In other words, there's only one button, but two possible outcomes: creating a new account, or logging into an existing one.

• But this kind of approach only works if the user understands that they'll be automatically directed to their required route. And they may not assume that they will be, because there's no context at all. 

• When Cash App looks at the data, this flow will convert very well, because there is only one input—so more or less everyone will press it.

• But the data won't have captured the anxiety of the decision-making process.

➡️ Interesting lesson about UX.

🗞In the news

👉 Amazon Prime members can now get a free year of Grubhub+, which offers free delivery from some restaurants and other perks (TechCrunch)

➡️ Amazon is bundling a lot of things in their membership.

👉 Digital Advertising Follow-up, Spotify-Rogan Follow-up (Stratechery)

• When Apple rolled out Apple Search Ads, it introduced an interesting dynamic to the App Store: devs had to either bid on keywords relevant to their apps (including their apps' names!) or surrender the installs generated by those keywords (previously, for free) to competitors.

• In essence, ASA imposed a cost to devs on organic installs and left them with a choice: either pay for the discovery the platform provides or a competitor will. ASA effectively front runs organic discovery, at least partially.

➡️ Is it something we witnessed for Mind?

🏥 Healthcare

👉 Scaling Chronic Care Management (Healthcare Insights)

• By 2030, chronic diseases are expected to account for 70% of total global deaths and 56% of the global burden of disease.

👉 Digital musculoskeletal care is booming. Where does the market go from here? (Mobi Health News)

• Musculoskeletal, in particular, deserves special mention within that, because musculoskeletal is an extremely large total addressable market. And the reality is that you can save quite a bit to employers and plans around surgery avoidance.

• Low back and neck pain led 154 conditions in healthcare spending in 2016, costing an estimated $134.5 billion.

• Hinge Health President Jim Pursley notes it can be hard for patients to get to an in-person appointment, particularly if they live in a rural area. Plus, cost can be prohibitive, especially for hourly workers who may need to take time off for physical therapy.

• Last month, Dario entered into an agreement to acquire Physimax, which offers AI-enabled movement assessment and injury prevention.

➡️ What are the best MSK start-ups you know?

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