| 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. If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! If you like it, please share about it on social networks! Share 💡JC's Newsletter
🔎 Some topics we will cover this week Designing Digital Economies The Future of Social Gaming Snapchat+ Passes 1 Million Subscribers. Here’s how it gets to 100 million Why Reddit is still betting on the blockchain And more …
👉 Gabriel Leydon (CEO of MZ) - Designing Digital Economies (Join Colossus) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? On the importance of understanding and liking business when you build product I love the idea of clans and communities and how they pushed it (we should not do the same). How would it apply to our product? To create engagement and fun? Build environments where people can excel and where spending money makes you feel good, and have also a positive impact on the community. I really love that idea. The importance of being able to defend the creative stuff that you're coming up with, with logical outcomes. This one is really important in our culture.
Liking business: When you interview game designers, they all know how to add pets. They all know how to make levels, but they don't know how to do the other side at all and they actually hate it. So that's why I ask the question because if you hate the business side of it, you're not going to be good at it. It's variable outcome, frequency, and sense of control. These are three things that create addiction.
Clans & communities: Creative incentives in the games: In the game you have a hero that you use to manage your empire. If your empire gets destroyed, the person who destroys your empire takes your hero from you. You don't have him anymore. And he goes to jail essentially. You actually can see it, your hero standing behind prison bars. It looks really funny, but he's there for like seven days basically. And then you get them back after seven days. Or if somebody destroys his city, all the heroes that are captured inside the city get released. So if I'm your friend and my hero gets destroyed, I'll call you and say, "Hey, help me. Help me, help me, help me get my hero back. And then you can get all your friends, go destroy that city and release my hero." But if you've captured my hero, you can pay money to force change the hero's name. If you've captured it, you can actually go in and pay. And then the name is changed. And in order to change it back, I have to pay to fix it. It becomes more real than real in a lot of ways because now someone used money to force change my hero's name. And then I have to use money. It makes it so much more intense. There's a lot of humiliation built into it. And it's like building humiliation in the software.
➡️ I don’t want us to humiliate our members, but I think it should trigger creative thoughts on how to create “crazy” mechanisms to drive engagement (on a more positive level). How to help people excel: We're in this hyper state of competition, that makes people feel like they don't matter. Because they don't. So you end up with these online communities, what you see are people...it's a seductive and simple way to belong to something, where these things actually reward time spent, rather than skill. So if I just spend more time, I'll be more important. There's just too much competition, and people need environments to excel in.
Selfish benefits + group benefits: The ideal scenario for spending money is something where you personally get tremendous selfish benefit from it. Like it's a completely selfish purchase. It's just for you, really. You really just want it for yourself, but it also comes with this group benefit that everybody else gets and you get to feel really good and they get to thank you and praise you and say, oh, that's really awesome. I bought this thing for myself and these other 20 people got to eat for free, but you just don't tell them that part. That's what I mean by heroic spending. It's like this combination of extreme, like selfishness and some kind of gift to the people around you.
Intuitions: Making a currency that serves the game's needs and making the currency that serves a player's needs. That's hard, actually. You have to have a really strong point of view, and you have to be able to defend it. That's probably the biggest problem with game design in general is that, people have cool ideas, but they can't really defend them. It's honestly like they don't even know why they like them. You have to be able to defend the stuff that you're coming up with, with logical outcomes. We may not be able to predict all the outcomes, but you should have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen after you do it.
Why do Chinese games work and not others? You often hear about Chinese apps that have a game design in them. You always hear this, "Everybody's got to go buy celery on the same day or whatever." And in America and the VCs are like, why can't that work here? The reason why it doesn't work here is because Americans, especially the developers, hate that stuff. They don't want to build it. They don't want to make it. They don't like it. They think it's manipulative. So when they see it, they see something going on in China and then they water it down until they feel good about it. And then it doesn't work.
➡️ How to be bold when trying things?
👉 Adobe Acquires Figma, Figma’s Disruption, The Figma OS (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? I love this investment in the long-term Figma has been able to do in order to really differentiate from the market. What are those bets from us? I’m really excited about the Alan mini-app platform as they did for the plugins for Figma, especially now that we are thinking a lot better about the experience blocks.
Figma, though, was something completely new: the company, which was founded in 2012, made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building v1 of the product. This included writing the editor in C++, cross-compiling it to JavaScript using the asm.js subset that let it achieve desktop like control of memory and performance, and building its own rendering engine from scratch using WebGL — which had only been released in 2011. It was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector, which in this case was collaboration. What is more threatening is Figma’s platform capabilities: 3rd-party developers can build plugins for Figma that make it possible to easily add the sort of editing capabilities that Figma itself lacks, for example.
👉 Shopify’s Evolution (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? I have always been inspired by the Shopify platform and how we could think about mini-apps. In the context of thinking about our super-app, and our ways to monetize, knowing in-depth this concept, can help us find new avenues to bring more value to members while increasing revenues.
The first platform was the Shopify App Store, launched in 2009, where developers could access the Shopify API and create new plugins to deliver specific functionality that merchants might need. For example, if you want to offer a product on a subscription basis you might install Recharge Subscriptions; if you want help managing your shipments you might install ShipStation. Shopify itself delivers additional functionality through the Shopify App Store, like its Facebook Channel plugin, which lets you easily sync your products to Facebook to easily manage your advertising.
A year later Shopify launched the Shopify Theme Store, where merchants could buy a professional theme to make their site their own; Amazon may commoditize suppliers, hiding their brand from website to box, but if its offering is truly superior, suppliers don’t have much choice.
👉 Justin Waldron (Zynga, Playco) - The Future of Social Gaming (Join Colossus) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Because I think it is interesting to be creative on how we talk about Alan on social media and how we empower our community to do it. I think it is a fun project to think about for our brand. For the no-code aspect, it is connected to the mini-app thinking: how we could make it very easy for people to build on our platform.
What I've seen work really well is if you can get the right group of people playing a game together, they can kind of create endless content for each other. Humans are, with the right design for a game, better at creating endless interesting content to the people they understand the best, the people they are close with, than any game designer could ever be. And it's also more scalable. A simple one is making it easy to create and share content. And if you think about what was one of the great things about Instagram that led to its success, they made everybody into a great photographer. But I think we're seeing it's really about how do you go and create this very interesting meme? And I think if there is any science behind creating a great meme, then there must be designs that we can do to help people make them. We're just really focused on what are the game designs that might produce interesting memes?
➡️ How to create more memes around our product? ➡️ The no code health & well-being platform. How anyone could build a health/well-being app on the Alan platform?
👉 Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013) (Internal Tech Emails) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Great strategic thinking, vision on how to remove friction, and the need of building high differentiation, and leverage your own assets. In our case, being an insurance company allows us to become a one-stop health partner.
But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people’s daily lives. Where this really gets interesting is with in-message games and apps. It feels a unreasonable today to expect people would play many games in messages instead of switching to the game itself, but as messaging becomes and increasingly central part of the mobile experience, this inversion seems quite possible to me. Keep in mind one key advantage this games platform has: you don’t need to install a game to play it. If someone sends you a sticker, you just get the stickers you need to play immediately. Games will spread extremely virally.
👉 Say nothing till it ships (Internal Tech Emails) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Feb 22, 2018, Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) wrote: I’m thinking Fortnite.com could have the same “Download” button on Android as on PC/Mac that downloads the installer, and the landing page for the download button could have instructions for turning on side-loading. This could get us to having a multiplatform (PC/Mac/Android) ecosystem much faster than other avenues. Fortnite provides nearly unlimited free UA sufficient to overcome the friction of installing it. Step 2, negotiate free bundling deals with all the major smartphone manufacturers. Step 3, turn the auto-updater into a full version of the launcher on Android, so that Diesel will launch across all 3 platforms. This is exactly the process Tencent followed to bypass Google Play with WeChat, which they soon opened up as a game distribution platform. The sooner we can free ourselves from the App Store distribution monopolies, the better, and the Fortnite launch on Android seems to me the one moment in time when we have sufficient gamer excitement to launch successfully and build up a huge gamer base.
👉 The Digital Markets Act, The DMA and Advertising, Messaging Interoperability (Stratechery) EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice.
➡️ If it becomes true, should we make our members able to chat with us from whatever tool?
👉 Thoughts on Flash (Memos) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
👉 Thin Platforms (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Alan OS: Alan mini-apps will do that for health At the end of the day, we want to build all the basics around health, and have developers build on top of it
Stripe OS: It’s never just about having the idea for a great product, it’s about being able to operate it, and that’s why we’re building a modern operating system for finance, and like any good OS, we’re focused on nailing the basics. Those basics included features like invoicing, billing, taxes, revenue recognition, and data pipelines, all of which sit on top of the various ways to gather, store, and distribute money that Stripe has abstracted away: We’re thrilled to launch today Stripe Apps and the Stripe App Marketplace, where you can find or build best-of-breed tools that work naturally with Stripe. “Working naturally with Stripe” doesn’t simply mean access to Stripe’s APIs; it means fitting in to the Stripe dashboard — Stripe is even including pre-made UI components so that 3rd-party apps look like they were designed by the fintech company.
👉 Niantic Lightship, An Interview with Niantic Founder John Hanke (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Our culture is to have walking 1on1s. I very much agree it is really powerful. How could our app push this more? It is interesting to see the comment on the platform and what level of investments it will require when we build our own.
Platform: We’re working a half-dozen games that we haven’t talked to the world about yet — so it’s been a platform internally since the beginning. But even to turn an internal platform into an external one, there’s just a lot in terms of hardening, documenting all that.
Walking: If you look at what actually drives human happiness, a walk around the block once a day, even if your environment isn’t great, is probably going to do more for your actual mental state
👉 CapCut: ByteDance’s surprise hit of 2022 (The Split) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? What we found most interesting was that ByteDance's CapCut was #5 after getting 169 million downloads in the first six months of 2022. Put another way, 53% of people who downloaded TikTok also grabbed CapCut. What is CapCut? It's a free, all-in-one editing app with many of the features you would expect in a desktop-based editor like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. CapCut's success proves TikTok's ability to cross-promote other ByteDance products. Videos exported from CapCut display in TikTok with a deeplink layered on top that downloads or opens CapCut. If you follow ByteDance closely in China, you know they also operate a Netflix-like movie / TV streaming service, a Spotify-like music streaming service, and a game studio, amongst many other products. CapCut may seem trivial in the context of ByteDance's global product portfolio, but it's the first proof we have of their multi-product strategy working well outside China. This high participation rate violates the 1% Rule of the Internet, which states only 1% of an internet community actually creates content, with 10% interacting or commenting, and 89% simply lurking. Is it time to re-visit the 1% Rule? Are younger consumers who make up the majority on these platforms more likely to create content online? Or maybe smartphones just made photo and video creation 100x easier and permanently reduced the barriers to create?
👉 Snapchat+ Passes 1 Million Subscribers. Here’s how it gets to 100 million. (The Split) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? I believe we could be a bit more playful with Alan and have a gold membership for B2C where you have cosmetic features (your own app icon, background, special mascot) Could be a good exercise for a hackathon
Snap announced its subscription product Snapchat+ hit 1 million subscribers. With the announcement, Snap also added new features: namely cosmetics that provide in-app status such as a custom app icon, Bitmoji background, elevated replies to celebrities' stories, and custom "message read" emoji's. This adds to features like seeing who re-watched your story more than once, pinning a top friend in the chat screen (I think these first two may have been the biggest drivers of conversion), and additional travel and location features for friends on its social Snap Map product. Trust me, I also think these seem trivial. But Fortnite did $9 billion via in-game cosmetic upgrade revenue in 2018 and 2019, so nothing surprises me anymore.
👉 Reddit launches a new developer portal to give third-party apps and bots a boost (Tech Crunch) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Reddit is announcing today that it will open up a waitlist for developers who want to build software for the platform using a new toolkit from the company. The company plans to pair the new toolkit with a directory of third-party software extensions that moderators and Redditors alike can browse from to craft a custom Reddit experience. The new portal will offer tools and other resources to empower devs to build software extensions to enhance the social network’s existing experience. Many well-loved tools by third-party developers are already ubiquitous on the platform, running unobtrusively in the background of subreddits and popping up to automatically paste the text of tweets, translate a post into a different language or send users timed reminders when prompted.
👉 Why Reddit is still betting on the blockchain (Platformer) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Reddit, the venerable social news aggregator and discussion site, had released its first “blockchain-backed collectible avatars” — what other companies call NFTs. Created by a handful of artists, the avatars riff on Reddit’s “Snoo” alien mascot and can be used as profile pictures on the site. Reddit takes a 5 percent cut of sales from the NFTs This month, the company went a step further: beginning on August 17, it began to give away collectible avatars for free to 10 million users. About 50,000 have been given away so far to long-time Redditors who have made popular contributions to their communities; the remainder will be given out over the next few weeks. The only catch is that users have to set up a crypto wallet to receive it — the first step, Reddit hopes, in encouraging millions of users to begin exploring the concept of “portable identity.” Reddit avatars are aliens meant to highlight aspects of a user’s personality without giving away their true identity. Launched about a year and a half ago, roughly one third of logged-in Reddit users have created avatars so far, he said. “You can reveal your hobby without revealing your race. You can reveal some of your style without revealing your age or your gender.”
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