All of these companies are what would traditionally be considered as “fringe” or “niche” markets, with a total user base of <10% of the American population, which is 330,000,000 as of 2022 <ref: census.gov>, a financial valuation #defd between $10 million and $1 billion, however but not having # any theoretical limit in adoption among the broader American population, and therefore a potential growth of at least 10x in the year 2022.
H2S9 H3S3: Piecing together the dino-statue from 50 archeological sites:
Here’s an interesting stat: The 2022 World Chess Open has a prize fund of $225,000 and the USCF only has 93,000 members, whereas Halo has 81 million total sales and the Majors have a prize fund of $250,000.== This suggests that Halo Infinite prize funds are sub-optimized. The game costs about the same as an annual USCF membership, and with 1,000x more players the prize fund should be 250,000,000. In Depth: “Just pick up the phone and make the call” – a Steve Jobs story. Every company in this list is employing a unique marketing strategy simply to reach fringe status and reaching a $10 MM + overall valuation in the process. However, many of these marketing strategies overlap in applicability #defd, and an increase in knowledge transfer and the mutual development of knowledge bases can help multiple companies multiply their valuations. Moreover, since these companies are unified in this document by valuation and not by sector, and in fact I selected a range of companies that are each in different sectors, there is very little downside to collaboration. 10 Problems That Have Been Solved By A Fringe Peer But Serves As A Blockade For Another Company: This list will thematically identify 10 problems that are unsolved for one company and thereby blockading its current success, but has already been solved in an analogous form by a different company in the same valuation range but in a different sector. Companies simply need to “pick up the phone” and call each other, using the art of negotiation taught in my textbook, which you can read by clicking here. Navigate to Ch. 19 H3S7 H4S1: Negotiations for more information.*
H4S1: Halo Infinite pro circuit prize funds Are disproportionate negatively to player count:
Halo has an exponentially equivalent # number of players to the NHL, but the absolute dollar amount of their tournament prize funds (1) is the same as the absolute dollar amount of the United States Chess Federation Prize Fund (2), and yet the game has approximately 1000x the number of players. == This stat is absolutely eye popping, because it suggests that the are sub-optimized inefficiencies in the professional Halo market, causing a devaluation of the prize fund, and subsequently this will have negative downhill effects on the level of professional involvement in the game, which includes the number of weekly hours a professional can spend on the game, as well as the number of players who can be professional, and beyond the population of professional players, the prize fund devaluation will cause a decrease in overall skill level, since professionals are responsible for most of the theoretical advancements in the game #defd, <fbno>, and subsequently less sales and spectators for the game as a whole. == These negative consequences of the devalued Halo Infinite prize fund will have further downhill negative effects on at least two adjacent markets directly as the next step, Twitch streamers <grid d2 in the table at the top> benefit from Halo Infinite’s status as a “weed in” game, a highly accessible version of other games, along with Hollywood level production value, an accompanying TV series (3), and super HD graphics that can attract fans from the mainstream as the top of a broader sector-wide sales funnel. == Unraveling a core problem such as “why is the Halo Infinite prize fund devalued” requires us to conduct more rigorous research, improve our understanding of mathematical statistics, but also shift our entire philosophy with respect to what a company is, the differential boundaries of a company, a sector, and a valuation range, and the degree to which negotiations can facilitate marketing #np. This will be the core example used in my 10 page whitepaper; as an act of writing alone, this is a point of differentiation over the current generation of broad entry-based Medium and Buzzfeed style articles that treats every example with equal depth and as a result only dances around in a circle without making a concrete point, whereas in this whitepaper, we will follow a single line of reasoning to the end, and then find extrapolations that broadens the grounds of coverage. In this sense, this whitepaper will read more like a scientific paper than a Buzzfeed article. == First, we need to get our numbers right and establish a table (D) that places the anomalous statistic in the context of a trend line or a coordinate table, in which the surrounding context not only fully exposes the degree to which it is an anomaly, but also provides the necessary conditions to ameliorate # the problem of its deviation. A key statistic such as this one, which may be hyper connected to a variety of other statistics an issues, could serve as a “critical heal”, in which addressing solely the problem of a single metric can cause a reversal, a tactical concept borrowed from #Halo itself, in which an upstream cascade of positive effects will uplift the entire valuation of the game, as well as the prize fund. == Defining this membership statistic requires us to be granular in our understanding of statistics, and make sure we are comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges. All the numbers that will be listed in this column will be relatively large, >10,000, but that alone is not enough to establish their accuracy. We are concerned primarily with, moreover, the order of magnitude of the figures rather than the value of the leading number, and therefore counting the 0s, or integer places, from the right is the core metric of concern. Finally, it’s important that we are comparing the annual membership of each company, NOT the total number of people who have ever heard of the game, nor the number of people who played it TODAY. Using an analogously equivalent form of data is vital to establishing a direct comparison, and the problem of miscomparing statistical units is part of the reason Halo prize funds are deflated, and therefore we do not purport to perpetuate this problem in the article that we are writing itself, rather addressing it head on and releasing this pain point for the entire industry. == The problem is that Halo does not have a straightforward membership model that runs on an annual basis, rather they sell individual game units that can be played for perpetuity, and separately from this, Xbox sells memberships that are independent of the Halo franchise for the right to use the Xbox Live Servers, as well as other benefits, like the recently launched program Xbox Game Pass (5), and therefore quantifying the number of “paid annual members” in Halo is more difficult than chess, and yet, it’s necessary to apply some statistical modeling, applying calculations from raw data to reach a workable conclusion statistic #defd, to generate a conclusion statistic that can then be used as a direct point of comparison with an analogous statistic from the other sector. == Without me having done this here for you, in just the previous paragraph alone, it would never have been possible to compare the scale of the Halo audience and chess audience, and furthermore, the discrepancy in proportionality between the prize funds of Halo tournaments and chess tournaments would never have been appreciated. This fact highlights the impact magnitude established by this whitepaper, and you have not even paid for anything yet.
Ref: Polygon https://www.trustedreviews.com /news/halo-franchise-sales-hit-65-million-units-2925202.
The above external party provided data table serves as the most utile set of raw data that we can use to model a figure for annual memberships in Halo, and selecting this data set requires a deep knowledge of the game and gaming culture in general, which I have accumulated over the past 15 years since I first purchased Halo 3 for XBOX 360. Gaming franchises like Halo release games on an annual or once-per-two-years basis, as well as rotationally shut down servers for past games, so in order to remain involved in the game on a regular basis, it becomes necessary to purchase the new titles as stand-alone games. In contrast, the chess federations sell a single game board that can be used for a lifetime and charge the subscription for only the opportunity to use the tournament halls and be paired to play an opponent, collectively “matchmaking”, “servers”, and “matchmaking servers”. This is the direction that Halo wants to go in as well, but unlike chess, they are working with a bloated, tragically unscalable codebase that needs to be rewritten from scratch. The past 600 years of evolution of the game of chess, as well as durability, demonstrate that this is a bug and not a feature. == Calculating the NHL membership figure is about equally convoluted #defd to calculating that of Halo Infinite, but as long as we can reach an approximate figure by order of magnitude, as established earlier, then we should have a utile figure to move forward. The Buffalo Sabres sold 6,327 season ticket packages in the 2021-2 season, from a cap of 16,000 (6) , so let’s assume approximately 12,000 season ticket packages are sold for each NHL team, and there are 32 teams, each located in a different city, so we can assume 0 overlap across cities in season ticket sales, and 12,000 * 32 = 384,000 is the number that we arrive at. Fin.
H4S2: Freelancer platforms like Upwork take the side of clients in even disputes, rather than protecting clients, and this suppresses wages.
Upwork treats its freelancers unfairly in situations of disputes and generally does not understand the status of independent contractors as employees. An independent contractor is not a disposable object, and ultimately, there is a finite pool of talent available. The entire independent contract industry up to the year 2022 has run on the back of low cost freelancers from East, South Asia, and the Middle East, on a rotational basis, with an “onto the next” attitude if any of the freelancers attempt to exert their own authority or bill more than $5 per hour. == Despite these issues, the simplest possible solution for Upwork is to provide insurance coverage for freelancers in the case of disputes, as well as additional training in the event of discrepancies to help freelancers avoid these issues in the future. Upwork does not understand that independent contractorship is simply a form of legal agreement, but they use the form of the contract in the employee relationship to justify the denial of training as well as insurance to its entire employee basis, unfairly, as well as illegally. This problem has already been solved by standard employment in white collar companies, but not blue collar companies, where abuses of the employee relationship, this time under a regular employment contract, are as rampant as on Upwork; a restaurant worker can be fired as easily and with the same degree of crass as on Upwork, and this also corresponds with the lack of barriers to entry in both fields, but there’s no reason for this. == In contrast, white collar jobs that have successfully navigated the employment relationship tend to have high barriers to entry, and accordingly provide a high degree of coverage, never taking out of the employee’s salary, in return for any client dissatisfaction with clients. This is related to the fact that companies generally have an independent customer service department that handles disputes, independently from the departments that handle engineering, design, and marketing. == Upwork is a company that advertises itself to white collar freelancers, but treats them like blue collar employees tend to be treated in 2022, but in reality, no one should be treated this way, and all companies should handle employee relations, regardless of whether the contract is independent contractorship or employment in form, with the same procedure as companies that have already solved employee relations, and increase their employee | retention rates as a metric. This means: 1) Provide adequate training for free, or paid to the employee, prior to the beginning of the working period. a) Presently, Upwork provides 0 mandatory training besides free videos in a loosely organized knowledge base. 2) Take the side of employees in disputes and look within the company for a long-term solution, generally a combination of employee | discipline and further training. Handle each dispute as a “bug” and seek for a fix in the system, rather than ditch the feature, leading to an entropic inevitable | collapse # a) Presently, Upwork drops freelancers, each of whom has a unique skillset, and in effect shadowbans them from the entire contractual work industry in each client dispute, and this also breeds unearned entitlement among clients, knowing they can recycle work from one freelancer to the next while riding the broken refund system for a sequence of free work projects. This leads to a gradual “brain drain” of talent, and the problem is, the rest of the valuation peers depend on the independent contractor industry to handle ½ of their engineering, design, and marketing needs. The online freelance industry, to this valuation range, is like the hands and feet of the entire mission to elevate to the 3rd ring, and without it our hands are collectively tied. I speak from experience here, as a CEO within this space that not only hires freelancers to do a significant portion of my company’s work, but also takes on a number of freelance contracts to supplement core revenues. == As an industry, we need to hold companies like Upwork accountable for treating freelancers fairly. As much as games like Halo are the “top of the marketing funnel” for Twitch streamers and games like chess, Upwork is our “recruiting arm” and funnels many qualified contractors not only to itself, but to the other sectors listed such as cryptocurrency industry, Twitch streamers, and the venture-backed startup community. == In general, the industry needs to form a “board of directors” at the top that oversees the entire “fringe economy market” #defd and this board needs to calculate the implications of the actions of one sector on all the other sectors, analogous to the management of an economy, but only for this valuation range. Fin.
H4S3) Many organizations in this valuation range have complex, technical and jargon-filled, sometimes poorly organized and poorly prioritized knowledge bases that unnecessarily increase difficulty to adopt for first time users, and are missing key connections to the “popular consciousness” (defined earlier here), defined as what a reasonable person would expect a random other encountered in a public setting to know without knowing anything else about them ref: Ch. 19: Str H2S2: Companies and Organizations [Ex. 0, ip].
Certain organizations in this valuation range, such as the Latter Day Saints Church, to some extent the Chess Community, and the K-pop community have been siloed for such an extended period of time that they have lost contact with the popular consciousness and therefore miss important connections that allow the layman to quickly be onboarded to their product, with onboarding being defined as the period of time required to begin first using the product in a way that is to one’s net benefit. == Every product has a “pedagogical stage” in which users need to learn and be educated on how it’s used, as well as how it’s valuable, but companies that are missing these connections to the popular consciousness will have a poor first user experience, manifesting ultimately as a long period of time for the product to become useful. In truth, these companies are simply at an earlier stage of development in marketing, and they are making careful observations of their current customers undergoing onboarding to see the steps in which optimizations can be introduced. == In general, companies with this problem tend to overestimate the knowledgeability of the layman, and repeatedly run into barriers when they assume understanding in the client when there is none. This problem is perpetuated by mainstream media, which, despite its moniker, does not represent the mind of the “mainstream person”, not that one exists, which is why we prefer the vocabulary word layman. == This problem, however, has already been solved by a number of sectors in the valuation range, such as the Starbucks sector, the Gluten Free community, and Ultimate Frisbee, in that order. The sequence, which can be simply added to the front as an addendum to the funnel, is as follows:
- Identify an aspect of the popular consciousness that is already understood to the degree of complexity that is required to understand the rest of the company’s knowledgebase, generally defined as being within the 3rd ring itself, such as the food pyramid. Popular understanding of the food pyramid, itself a complex structure, as well as associated skill of reading a nutrition label, was established as an arbitrary artifact of history in primary school, and the Gluten-free sector latched on well to this as their initial entry point.
- Make it fun. Companies in our valuation range that have successful connected to the mainstream consciousness and successfully entered people’s minds as “oh yeah, I’ve heard of…” in a bright tone, although this does not guarantee retention, position themselves generally as a game, in which involvement is voluntary, with no ulterior motives, and no guarantee of depth, and, very importantly, entertaining as a spectator mode in itself.
- The companies that have made it in the first UX department have a physical product that boils down their initial contact with users from a convoluted, “20 step process” that is verbal or written instead to a well-designed, simply, affordable product: a gluten-free snack that is tasty and nutritious, an ultimate frisbee disc that’s about the size of a plate and costs $15, or a tasty, caffeine-infused Frappuccino that’s well-advertised with chic buzzwords and celebrity endorsements. In contrast, companies that are not successful in quickly onboarding users to making that initial purchase quickly, regardless of the price, lack a physical product, or the product, such as the LDS original scripture Book of Mormon, does not fit the criteria of simple and easy to use, as it make take multiple extended lectures and contact with Missionaries to understand; that’s not to say the Book of Mormon is not a physical product, or even a great one, but it’s not an ideal first product that can pull in new users quickly, rather a 3rd, 5th, or even 10th product that they may encounter down the line.
H4S4) There is a lack of a centralized media sector that is facilitating a 100x rate of information exchange among companies in this valuation range, at a speed that is standard in South Korea, Japan, and China.
I recently read the press release that JYP entertainment is planning to launch an office in Los Angeles to fuel expansion in America.
Link: https://www.nme.com/news/music/twice-agency-jyp-entertainment-announces-full-scale-us-expansion-3182579
I have written an article that details the struggles of 10 other industries in America with approximately the same valuation as JYP entertainment and all of them, like JYP entertainment in the representation of Korean pop music, are attempting to break into the American mainstream. Each company in this valuation range deals with a unique set of problems while other companies may have already solved these problems and what we need is a centralized media company, which JYP entertainment can provide, and therefore what I am doing is giving JYP entertainment in American business a broader context with which to fill itself in order to very quickly reach $1 billion valuation with its American subsidiary alone, and I have plenty of contacts in the American venture capital industry as well, if you are able to execute on these early directives, to whom I can introduce you to for series B, C, D funding.== The rule the JYP entertainment needs to fulfill is as the centralized media hub that has connections with all of the other 10 industries listed here and facilitate a high rate of information exchange among these companies such that the marketing secrets of each one can be shared, thereby elevating the entire evaluation range into the mainstream as one independent economy in which each part supplies a different part of the economies needs like the branches of a company. == Again, the key task here is ramping up the rate of information exchange among these American companies and industries to match the level of the rate of exchange that is prevalent in South Korea. I call this the “One Industry, 10 Sectors” micro economy.
H4S5) There is a significant knowledge gap in popular understanding of economics, as well as the role that a business plays within an economy.
Companies in this valuation range, being young, tend to have narcissistic “world dominance” ambitions – this phrase is specifically celebrated in the venture backed startup industry. Ultimately, it’s not the drive for world dominance that is at fault, but rather the delusional notion that one believes that it can be done alone as an individual company in an individual sector. In Depth: Twitch: Twitch is not the only industry that is on the “fringe” of mainstream, where most of the people you can run into at random will have heard of the website but would not be able to name three different streamers or games that are played on Twitch. Many of the problems that twitch faces in achieving widespread adoption have already been solved by other companies in this “fringe” category and therefore to avoid wasting time, we should increase the rate of information exchange among companies in this valuation range and uplift ourselves as an entire cohesive economy together with the mainstream. == Prior to my publishing of this article, companies have always been categorized by industry but NEVER by a range of valuation and common purpose in marketing themselves. Consider an economy or a nation: an economy does not survive by having only a single industry. Various industries work together to form an economy, and it takes an entire economy to serve the needs of an individual citizen. The individual citizen that we are serving could be a member of our own generation, a 20s something, living at home, minimum incoming, but has an internet connection, access to Amazon, and a credit card. To think that this person can survive solely on Twitch is absurd. Twitch needs to be part of an ecosystem of other companies, listed in the document, forming an economy in which the person can now find sustenance. The core metric of the vitality of a healthy economy is a high rate of exchange, and transactions, whether these transactions be financial or via information. Currently, there are TONS of blockades among this economy, as well as the critical fact that NO ONE in the economy recognizes it as an economy, they only see themselves as independent companies, and in competition with each other, despite occupying different sectors within that economy.
H4S6) Companies are not oriented coherently from the front end to the backend, where the front end is the part of the company that “faces” or interfaces with the end customer and provides the experience of the company to that customer, such that the complex processes going on in the backend need to efficiently funnel outputs to the customers.
a) Presently, many companies are backend oriented in which they are attempting with an undue degree of focus to work out the inefficiencies in their own backend, however at the cost of detracting from the human experience on the front end. == This point is not a matter of debate, as in the venture backed startup industry, the source for this insight, we have experienced the concept of human-centered design as the superior paradigm for building a company that maintains not only a functional suite of products, but one that is easily marketable and accessible to human users, such that the process of marketing and educating users can be built-in to the process of design itself, a form of process-based efficiency. Ref: <hl>.
H4S7) Certain companies are closer than they think to delivering an accessible, mainstream product, and the bottleneck for them is in delivery.
Getting people to be open to talking with you about your business can be surprisingly difficult. Entrepreneurs and organizations are confident about the value of the product they have to offer, because they have personally experienced it along with their associates, but this is only the first step. == In order to be successful in packaging and delivering a product, one has to assume that other people are operating from a paradigm of abundance rather than scarcity. We will examine how this difference frames a potential sale differently: 1) If we assume our potential customer is in scarcity, then we will have a negative evaluation of the things they are currently doing to be successful, and over-positioning #defd ourselves to be an “end all be all” solution that replaces everything in their current life. The problem is that this puts us on an extraordinarily high pedestal to deliver value, leading customers to quickly become suspect and put us into inquisition rather than a warmer welcome. Moreover, it may be invalidating to the customer to find out that their current life setup is perceived as futile. 2) If we assume our potential customer is in abundance, then we will have a positive evaluation of what they are currently doing, and we will seek to tailor our product to support those things. It is impossible to support someone without understanding them, and all the things they are currently doing to be successful, and this requires time investment from the company in order to make every sale. It is almost always going to be the case, therefore, that sales is actually a form of investment into the customer, especially early on in the company’s lifecycle. While the company will technically make a profit on a cost of goods sold basis, <ref: ch. 19: h2s2 companies and organizations>, the undocumented hours getting to know the customers, as well as the design equity, a fixed cost, invested into the first UX aspects of the product, will generally outweigh the revenue amount of initial sales. Therefore, no company can be profitable if it sells only once to each customer. Companies must view sales as investments and expect to take losses on the first, second, and third sales, but as the customer’s own bottom line increases, the company can expect to participate in that gain by selling deeper products at higher price points later on in the product lifecycle. Quick business | thought: I’ve always wondered why people who have regular jobs that pay well get into streaming; unless one has 100k+ followers, the revenue from Twitch does not necessarily add meaningfully to one’s overall bottom line relative to the time that is put in. I think it’s generally known among streamers that the time spent on streaming is only a fraction of the true time, energy, and mental resources that are poured over every detail of building a community online. == In truth, people who get into streaming do so because they believe that the Twitch chess community is actually valuable, not only as “feel good”, or entertainment, but actually to one’s financial well-being, as it models a lot of positive social behaviors, chess is a game that trains concentration, and many existing streamers that we look up to are financially savvy and good at converting sales. == Everything that I just wrote previously is not controversial and is known among streamers. What is not known is the general philosophy within business that you cannot be profitable selling one time, $5 products. If what you are doing is truly valuable to the customer, then the people who are paying $5 for the first few months should ultimately be more successful in some way, let’s say their rating goes up and that saves them money on chess books, or maybe they get a promotion because they have better social skills, or they improve their relationship with their friend and that has some value to them. This brings us to the next point.
H4S8) Certain sectors like Twitch, the AUDL, and the online K-pop community have strong first order and in the case of K-pop, second order sales <$30 – $100 price point>, but at present lack lifeline products, career opportunities, and equity investment opportunities that loop customers in for life.
Adjusting oneself from a “receiving sponsorships” frame to a “supporting customers” frame requires a change in verbiage. The culture that is built by our organizations ultimately stems directly from the language that we use to refer to ourselves and our customers. What I notice is common verbiage on Twitch, for example, is captured in the following 3-part mini-list, as well as my proposal for a new verbiage to adopt. 1) “My fans are here to support me in everything that I do.” a) The problem with this verbiage is that the person relegated to the status of “fan” as primary identity always has to be subservient to the streamer, and this limits the extent to which a streamer can help deliver to that person’s bottom line. Alternative: “My customers return value to me when I contribute to the aspect of their life that they want help with when they come to my stream.” 2) “We are looking for sponsorships for our upcoming tournament.” a) Alternative: “We are looking for tournament directors, registered and paid players, as well as corporate sponsors who have goods to sell to the players we expect, who are going to be in demographic ranges X, Y, and Z, and are therefore likely to purchase company A, B, and C’s products. We are going to put together a sales primer for these companies and explain to them why they should expect to generate sales by marketing products at our event.” 3) “Sorry, but I don’t have the bandwidth right now to deal with this. Stop writing long messages in my chat!” a)“Thank you for the investment into my community and I can see by your lengthy message that this indicates interest in further investment. I understand that in order for us to cross over to this next step together, we need to get to know each other better and this will take time.”
9) Companies do not have a well-calibrated system of incentives to generate ideal and necessary behaviors from either their employees or the customer bases.
Each company has an ideal way to act by their employees or customer bases in order to optimize their customer engagement and bottom line. A concrete example is in the process of community building in sports leagues like Halo Infinite, the AUDL, and the online Twitch and Discord communities. == Community is a fine balance between selfish desires of individuals and behaviors that objectively lead to increased congeniality and collaboration among the community members to generate a higher rate of social productivity, ultimately leading to a concrete output that can increase the company’s bottom line like more users engaged per day, hours spent on the app, which can lead to more ads displayed and revenue via CPM, and micro-purchases on digital goods such as emotes and Discord Nitro Subscriptions <ref: https://discord.com/nitro> Behaviors can be concretely divided into three categories: 1) Benefiting the self, but not the group 2) Neither benefiting the self nor the group 3) Benefiting the self, and the group: Strong, pro-social communities should design incentive structures to maximally promote the 3rd class of behavior, as this leads to both increased customer success and output toward the company’s bottom line. However, a closer examination of this point reveals that there is no differentiation | between increased customer success on a selfish level | and success for the company. The company must first align its own incentives with that of the customer, and all other incentives for its employees and customers will fall in line. Simply put, companies should position themselves to make more money | when their customers make more money. == The structure of incentives, without getting too granular into the details, should roughly be mapped onto the 3 categories of behaviors as follows: 1) REWARD behaviors that benefit the self AND the group. 2) PUNISH behaviors that benefit neither the self nor the group. 3) NEITHER REWARD NOR PUNISH “commensalism” behaviors that benefit the self, but do not affect the group. Organizations with an inverted | incentive structure that punishes behaviors that are beneficial to the group, while rewarding behaviors that are detrimental will quickly a) drive out pro-social actors, who seek environments in which prosocial behaviors are rewarded; incidentally, these individuals are also disproportionately the greatest value contributors to a community b) devolve into a state of anarchy, “free-for-all”-ism, and a decrease in motivation to contribute value. == Presently, most social organizations like the AUDL, Halo Infinite community, and Twitch are in a scarcity of usership, despite their advertisement for high user and engagement numbers, and therefore their rudimentary incentive systems simply attempt to drive up the total # of messages sent, with no additional sophistication beyond this point. Demonstrating 0 social calibration in the design of a social system will certainly lead to at least some proportion of sub-optimal outcomes, and granularly speaking the effect of such a system on the first 8 years of Twitch existence has been a state of comatose spam in which there is very little incentive to write longer messages, apply more brain power to generate novel logical operators, and even read and build on top of what other users have written previously. == The state of devolution of Twitch chat culture is actually an incredible demonstration of the pervasive effect that a company’s flawed internal philosophy can have on the entire product design. Looking at the chat in the screen capture below, there is no verbal indication that messages should be one way or another, and yet a uniform culture of “meme”-type, with little understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the word “meme”, messages, with an intentional lack of punctuation of “point”, leading to 0 capacity for retention or productivity-generating collaboration, has developed and is even enforced on the level of moderation. [D]: A stark contrast between the production value of WFM Alex Botez’s stream display and the state of devolution in chat, https://www.twitch.tv/botezlive 3/27/22. The reason for this is because the human mind is lazy, and is programmed to always seek the lowest effort way of attaining the highest possible reward in the environment #. When the highest possible reward is very low, competitive drive absent, and there is no enforcement on a minimal level of effort, this is exactly the behavior that we can expect, and can actually be programmed as predictably as high-quality behaviors. The solution to this problem, straightforwardly, is thus: 1) Increase the maximal reward that is possible from long-term engagement with the community, keeping in mind that the PDE of every individual in society is ultimately reliable, stable long-term income. 2) Increase the minimum effort allowed in participation, or establish multiple tiers of contribution and enforce differential amounts of minimal effort at each level, and make certain server channels read only to progressively larger and larger proportions of users in order to model behaviors that are displayed by the top percentile of users. 3) Increase competition among users, which will have downhill positive impacts in terms of self-policing in the community, more pro-social signaling, by optimizing the rate | of microtransactions . Post-script: Humans are incredible biological organisms who are capable of a very broad range of behaviors, from the worst forms of absolute evil to the most incredible forms of value-creating contribution. The hinge in this variance is the incentive structure of the environment of society in which they operate, and this incentive structure is reprogrammable at the hand of the designers and policy makers. These policy makers need to, a priori to the design itself, define using valuation analysis, at a maximally granular level, the types of social behaviors that is of highest value to their community, and subsequently tailor the design of the incentive system to promote that behavior, and finally test that incentive system to see if the resulting behavior matches the behavior that was initially conceived prior to the design of the system. Any behavior that is not coherent with that initial definition, even if it’s exhibited by an entity that is not a paid employee of the company, should be handled as a bug no different from an unintentional behavior on the part of the company’s computers; engineering and customer support teams at tech companies are already well-equipped to handle such software bugs, by first addressing the user’s needs via a workaround, and then submitting the issue as a ticket into the engineering team’s workflow hierarchy in order to find a permanent fix.
H4S10) Products are serendipitous but no more so than demand, in fact equally.
The process of product development has an inherent quality of egocentrism, in which we as product developers seek disproportionately to be in the position of the pleaser, burying ourselves for hours to psychoanalyze the customer without the knowledge in order to “surprise” them with a moment of delight. == While about half of the serendipity # in a company : customer relationship is sourced from the company, not all delight needs to be a surprise. Customers are equally delighted to a pleasant surprise when a direct demand of theirs is satisfied, and it makes no difference whether the direct demand was made on their fruition or whether it was solicited by the company. == Great customer service companies not only respond to customer feedback when it comes up, but actively Ping customers on a regular basis with requests for feedback, and the best kind is a merger of both: a simple question to ask if a feature is needed before the feature is built. In depth: a brief story of customer engagement. Hi all, I mentioned to <@AlessiaSanteramo> that I’d be willing to compose some puzzles that she can use for the stream, and can solicit of other people I’ve chatted with <@!796341045017313282> as the lead composer / curator if we can a) define a tactical category such as deflection, capture the defender, x-ray contention, etc. and also an elo category, and I can spin up up to 30 puzzles, half of which will be composed, half will be searched from LiChess’s mega database which I can peruse using Microsoft Excel. Ref: https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles Here’s an example of an elementary deflection, remove the defender tactic that I composed, maybe 800 level: Fin. The reason that most companies become scared off from soliciting customer feedback and have limited themselves to responding to customer demands only when it is at the level of a severe complaint is because they’ve had a negative experience of asking customers what they want, building it to the best of their imagination #, delivering it to the customer, and having it fall flat. == The conclusion that a novice product designer reaches from this phenomenon is that customers do not know what they want and it’s up to the product developer to impose that upon them. == The reality is a lot more complex than this: customers do know what they want, but the product designer is also right in that they may not know the specifics of how it should be built or delivered. The solution to this conundrum is very simple, and in line with what has been consistently recommended throughout this chapter, which is an opening of avenues of communication as well as a formalization in the delineation of communication channels. Complex communication that matches the level of complexity of the problem that needs to be solved needs to have an equally complex hierarchical structure of channels in which the total transfer of information is delineated into categories and filtered through each individual channel, which is moderated by a curator who understands the categories of separation. == For example, a channel that is a one-way communication board from the customer to the company for suggestions is not the channel for prioritizing features to the product development team. The company needs to have an internal algorithm for processing these suggestions, curating them #, and converting them into a form that is workable by the product development team, most likely after some business analysis has been done on the suggestions to determine their business value to the customer and the company. == The suggestions can also benefit # from being tagged with the credibility of the customer and making it, a novel concept, but for instance customers who are known to not be experts in financial evaluation should have their suggestions undergo a separate process of financial evaluation by the company, whereas customers who are business savvy can have their suggestions be directly taken more seriously in that respect. == These implementations require a significant amount of organization as well as the willingness to categorize and denote people as well as their suggestions with various forms of categories and tags. This means that the company as a whole as well as its individual employees need to have an expanded attention capacity, differentiation ability, memory, among other brain power factors which are covered in #MIC: <ref: ch. 49 MA: The 8 Parameters of MA>
