Episode #94. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼

This last Sunday of 2022, The Timestamp comes again with your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture.

You are part of 2000 subscribers reading this (free) newsletter! The only currency of this work is clicking on the button ‘like’ or ‘share’! You can do it for the last time thank you 🙏 I hope you enjoyed The Timestamp as it will not continue in 2023. It was a pleasure to share takeaways for 94 weeks in a row 📝.

Jardins du Luxembourg, Paris Dec 2022 / Credit @gilles_chetelat

#1. Argentina 🇦🇷 = winner ⚽️?

My takeaways from this article published on Dec 16th 2022 in The Morning Brew “In Argentina, soccer glory overshadows economic woes”.

Argentina won the 2022 World Cup last Sunday while... the country is in an economic situation that very few other nations would envy:

"Nearly 40% of Argentines live below the poverty line, and annual inflation is expected to reach more than 100% in December."
And some more bad news is hitting Argentina: "a drought that’s hammering crops, unsustainable debt loads, and political unrest after Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was convicted of corruption."

New research shows that winning the world cup brings an extra 0.25% in economic growth for the next 2 following quarters; this would be due to the boost in exports which would create by elevating the brand image of the winning country.

Like many French citizens, I wish we won a third star on the jersey but I still hope that Argentines can take advantage of this historic victory to rebound as a nation.

#2. Raising the bar in 2023 🪜

As I am almost finished reading the book Raise the bar. Zero to 1 billion: combining lean and digital for people-centric, sustainable growth published in 2022 (Ed. Keenly Press), I would like to share a couple of lessons from the method that the Aramis (Auto) Group applied to develop from a startup organization to a problem-solving company. I hope this will give you the motivation to buy and read the full book 👇.

A. Know the difference between a product and a service.

A product is an object (or solution) that helps you do something without needing anyone’s help. This means that the goal of a good product is to be easier to use, making sure it will have a long lifetime with a minimum need for maintenance.
Service is the help of someone you purchase to get something done. Service involves human assistance.

For sophisticated products, there will always be a structural trade-off between a simple product that drives adoption and the added features that give it flexibility but also create complexity, hence creating the need for service (ie. think of simple CRM like Hubspot vs sophisticated Salesforce).

B. Keeping an entrepreneurial mindset while scaling

To grow the asset base of satisfied customers, everyone in the company must retain the spirit that each new customer is the first customer.
Entrepreneurial spirit = get things done + take risks + learn lessons. A growth mindset will encourage people in the company to try new things on their own to solve problems they are facing. That is not an easy thing as “people tend to come to work to do a job not to solve problems”.

Toyota embraces a « bad news first » culture to welcome problems in the workplace. « No problem is a problem. If there are only good news, there is nothing to learn”.

#3. The blank page

Writing The Timestamp every week taught me how to confront (with excitement) the famous ‘blank page’ syndrome. Some of you regular readers are also writers on the side, I found this post from Packy McCormick (Blank page published on Dec 19th), the pro newsletter writer of Not Boring > worth sharing here in a brief summary:

Packy shares his 30-step method to confront the blank page with success. I just took 4 steps that make the most of writing a regular newsletter:

Scroll. Twitter, TikTok, Substack, Reader. Wherever you find ideas, head there.
Read. You found some interesting stuff. Read it. Save it. Highlight it. Take notes.
Sit/Walk/Run. Let the ideas simmer in a clear head, free from distraction.
Listen. OK, maybe throw on a podcast related to your vague idea and half-listen.

Everyone’s process is a little different.

The blank page is a chance to start fresh, to really write the best or most important or most interesting thing you possibly can.

In a way, every new year is also a blank page. 2022 has reached a kind of climax after the past few preceding years that have been so chaotic and weird for the least. We can now think of 2023 as a year of experimentation and invention. For example, some will think about reinventing the way we relate online:

It is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram haven’t been invented yet … except, it’s also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise and ruin.

The optimistic take on 2022 is maybe that we needed the market to crash, and needed the last era to end, in order to redirect attention and resources to new good guests. When B2B SaaS traded at 100x revenues in the private markets, when it was easy to launch a token on top of vaporware or a copycat NFT project and raise millions, the incentives pushed people to do those things.

Maybe in 2023, “the selfish thing to do is to make the world a better place.”

This last post of The Timestamp is an opportunity for me to thank each and every reader of this newsletter over the past 94 weekly episodes. The Timestamp generated close to 100,000 reads in total!

All this started with an idea to create a method for helping you (and me) learn a few new things every week. It is now time to end The Timestamp as I have some new ideas I want to dedicate my spare time on. You can still like or share this episode for the last time.

94 will be the final post. Moving on to exciting new projects. Writing will always belong to my personal routine as it creates compound benefits to my learning. Take care.

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