Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me!

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This week, I'm trying to share a nuance that's quite challenging when you're building a business that serves multiple stakeholders and you want to serve them very well. 

How to encourage the team to think about this and not always optimize towards a single metric, which is sometimes advised to startups. Instead, try to understand how to bring nuance to manage the company for the various stakeholders we serve. It's really interesting and sparks significant debates.

Member-led & customer-led 

We are a Member and Customer Led Company. 

What does that mean? 

It means we have two main stakeholders: the members and the companies, and we cannot optimize solely for one or the other. The world is more nuanced. 

The nuance for us is that we actually need to spend “half” of our time ensuring our members are very satisfied and the other half making sure our customers are very satisfied. 

Sometimes, there will be a conflict between the two, and it will be up to us to have the right discussions to determine how to optimize. We avoid making it at the expense of one or the other. 

Our job is to find elegant solutions that always optimize for both. It's not easy, but that's what innovation is, and that's what it means to navigate a complex world.

Some good articles I have read this week

👉 The Road to Self-Renewal: a speech by John Gardner delivered in 1990 to McKinsey & Company (Medium)

• Great lessons about life:

  • Learn all your life (from your successes and when you hit trouble)

  • Learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. 

  • Most people are neither for you nor against you,  they are thinking about themselves

  • Be a tough-minded optimist (I repeat it often): “The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future.”

👉 How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets – Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer (First Round Review)

• Data can help solve easy problems, but it doesn’t actually solve the hard problems.” For hard problems, you have to build intuition.

• A lot of decisions should be taste-driven. 

👉 8 Forecasts & Implications for the Years Ahead: 2024+ (Implications)

• Software will increasingly be developed using prompts as opposed to software development as we know it. 

  • Will all internal apps be made without engineers?

  • When any screenshot can be turned into code, and any application conjured up with a text prompt, software becomes as accessible as electricity. 

• “Imagine history “taught” through a chat interface that allows students to interview historical figures. Imagine a philosophy major dueling with past philosophers - or even a group of philosophers with opposing viewpoints.”

  • Imagine the same for your health

• The efficiencies of AI reduce the cost of content creation so we can TAKE MORE CREATIVE RISK. → I agree!

• With technology moving really fast, we need to be really flexible on our plans

👉 Victor Lazarte, Peter Fenton - Purpose and Partnership (Join Colossus)

• Building product is like games: part creativity, part understanding members, part business. 

• Study the most successful products (and games) and see the patterns that emerge

  • “finding a great IP, making it more accessible, but the core mechanic is the same because the reality is humans like the same game mechanics for a very long time.”

• How to copy smartly mechanics from other apps & bundle them

• How to find ways to acquire customers in a cheaper way. What new things are emerging?

👉 CVS Health's Investor Day highlights the breadth of its model and upside it has in integrating retail, pharmacy, insurance, and care delivery (CVS)

• The strategy of CVS is very similar to what we are doing down-the-line except we will be digital-enabled and AI-enabled. 

• For them, bundling increases customer LTV by 3-4x

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!