Swipe📁 • Wisdom🧠 • Interesting🧐 • Picture🖼 • Essay📄 • Sketch✍🏼

Edition: Friday, September 15th, 2023
A fun email for Friday. I hope you enjoy!

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

Did you know there's a whole industry dedicated to re-doing restaurant menu's to sell more?

Especially if you go to a large chain restaurant, 100's of hours have been put into subliminally directing you which food & drinks to buy:

Here's a very plain menu:

...and here's one that's been optimized like crazy:

The photos actually direct people to the menu items they want you to choose.

You might see some copywriting and optimization next time you're at a restaurant!

Wisdom:

Having done this many times across many email lists, I can tell you it's healthy for the email list in the long run, but a massive hit to the ego in the short run!!

On one email list I removed 70,000 people.....it's a big blow to the ego for sure.

On a clients company we removed a whopping 350,000 emails in ONE GO 😳

Quality of Audience > Quantity of Audience.

Interesting:

Today this simple desk setup could be made for $100, and the video and audio you make at it could be distributed for free to the entire world.

In 1970’s that type of power and distribution was reserved for only a few dozen people on the whole planet:

Picture:

Me and a few friends took a quick trip to Boston this last week to go to Inbound 2023 hosted by HubSpot. Here's the story!

We headed to Boston earrrrlly in the morning. Here's @thesamparr passed the f out across the isle from me with some crazy eye mask 😂

We couldn't checkin to the hotel so we changed in the back of a van taxi and got to the convention center (yes Sam is tall):

The Inbound conf took up the entire Boston Convention Center. About 12,000 people. It was pretty huge.

This was a quick trip, so we tried to meetup with everyone we could. Bumped into all sorts of people we hadn't met in person before @jayclouse and @KAL79.

Soon after we arrived Sam hosted this Shark Tank style pitch competition where a million bucks (I think) was being awarded:

The two winners of the pitch competition were: @ArjunMahadevan for @doolaHQ and @qfav95 for Tavus ....also there was a unicorn presenting the award 😂

We wandered around the conference for a while. We tried to steal this cart to get around but were unsuccessful (probably for the best) 🤔@nickgraynews

Then we went to see @hubermanlab speak. I took this video to show the sheer scale of this room. It had ~10,000 seats 🤯

Walking from the back row to the front row took minutes.

The room was like an optical illusion with how big it was!

Walking from the back row to the front row took minutes. The room was like an optical illusion with how big it was.

The last talk wasn't a talk....but a comedy set from John Mulaney! I listen to a lot of comedy podcasts, and they usually say corporate gigs suck.....but John KILLED IT!! He did crowd work, roasted the conference, roasted the CEO's....it was awesome.

Then afterwards me + Sam + Nick had dinner with the HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh.

What a cool guy, and such a special way to end the first day!

The next morning was a talk with Sam about community and Hampton. I was moderator.

We went backstage and saw the crazy setup they had back there:

They had a fulllllll on professional production going on backstage.

They even did hair/makeup for us 😂

The whole production was so well run, and it's really neat to see behind the scenes. They had 5 green rooms with snakes and drinks. Me and Sam were going over some last minute prep. Also it was super helpful to have Nick there for this (First because he's our buddy and we love hanging, Second because he took some fun pics, and Third because he's so on top of his stuff)!

It was fun looking at the technical stuff behind the scenes, I love that stuff. There were so many video streams and switching equipment and A/V stations. It looked really neat.

Up on stage:

Up on stage with @thesamparr:

Then right before leaving Boston @nickgraynews managed to squeeze in a sweet JFK Museum tour for us!

That's a wrap on our quick fun trip to Boston!

Essay:

“Constraints Create Creativity.”

If you add a constraint to a task, you’ll likely think of a way to finish it by then.

One of my favorite questions to ask for a task is:

I had a to-do list the other day that needed completing....I didn't do most of it.

Then I had an event to attend so I only had 30 minutes left. I FINISHED ALL THE WORK IN 30 MINUTES 🤔

This is because there was a constraint.

So if you give yourself a constraint you can often finish stuff way faster!

Sketch:

Here's a cool chart from Lenny on how long it took each of these companies to:
▲ Launch a live product
◼ Get their first customer
⚫️ Get Product Market Fit

I’m not the biggest fan of the symbols they used (a little confusing IMO) but still cool!

I hope you enjoyed these Friday tid-bits!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora