> Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”
There is or was a midwestern brewer called Wiedeman or maybe Wiedemann. But no doubt they were more discriminating drinkers at Harvard than we were out in the sticks.
Related reading - 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
Blurb: Explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.
Maybe the best move forward for Samsung is to come out as followers of the surrealism art movement, they could use Magritte's famous 1929 painting to accommodate this press release - [The Treachery of Images - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images)
While the suspicious cases are now almost common knowledge, I'd be interested to read about cases of the opposite - shell companies being used to facilitate transactions and not doing anything remotely shady.
Letterbox companies aren't shady just because they're letterbox companies. It's extremely common, for a variety of reason: like two founders, both married, with neither of them wanting to domiciliate the company at their place. Another reason might be incorporating the company in one city, where one language is spoken officially, while living in another region, where another language is the official administrative language.
You can find things like tennis table clubs using a letterbox company or bikers club.
Or simply people who have no office, especially in this day and age of Internet, and who are renting a place and know they'll move out. They prefer a stable address for their business.
The problem when "everything is a red flag" is that you end up in a world where everybody is flagged as suspicious. In Belgium there's been an incredible statistic that came out: something insane like one out of every four citizen had already been flagged at least once. This doesn't work.
For when everybody is suspicious, nobody is.
Also companies offering letterbox services are extremely controlled. They're the first line in the KYC/AML verification and they're liable if they let obvious scams in.
Companies offering letterbox services are often recommended by accountants to their clients.
I know these very well and used one personally in 2023 (because I opened a company in a country before moving to that country).
Many online business have a website, a payment processor and a "letterbox" address.
I'm not the target audience but have the following doubt
App icons are a high-stakes one-off expenses for application developers, there are fewer* use cases for needing to continously create new icons. Hence, a plan-based payment seems a worse offer for both you and the clients.
Perhaps not canary in the coal mine so much as it's reflective of many startups being overvalued with overhyped revenue projections at the Series A/B stage a couple years back.
Add to that weird regulatory stuff dampening acquisition prospects, high interest rate environment, and the ability to cheaply accomplish more and more with AI, and I think we'll see meaningful changes to the nature of venture funding and expectations over the next couple years. Will also mean down rounds and cutbacks for companies that don't weather this stuff well.
I'm not dismissive of businesses like Lemlist, but would propose another angle.
I find that businesses that are spin out from agency models are particular, inherit a strong characteristic and outlook similar to agencies. This is not a critique of their model per say, but an observation that leads me to be hesitant to take advice from agency-born models and apply to more typical product-focused B2B or B2C settings.
This leads me also to note that that the nature of content exposes us to a lot of people who believe in posting content. I'm not against it, but would like to fight the common urge towards content as the best strategy to go to market. However, given that the medium is message, we don't hear from people who don't need to post to do business.
True, most agency companies may make money but their products definitely have quite a lot of room for improvement, since the founders are not engineers by trade and thus there is no permeation of engineering culture as in other tech companies. However, I will say that it would be good for tech people to learn the marketing side if only by doing it semi-professionally for a client, just to see what goes into it. Then, they can choose to bootstrap or go the VC route, not necessarily create a whole new agency from scratch and continuously work on that. It's simply a learning method, one where you conveniently get paid to do so.
Yes, I don't think content is the only way, and I don't believe most of their growth was from content, anyway. It seems like it was just sending out lots of messages to people and hoping they're interested. Content marketing is a secondary mechanism, it is inefficient to get you your first customers, and it is definitely not the best go to market strategy as you say.
Can you please expand on the topic of "learn the marketing side if only by doing it semi-professionally for a client"?
I mean, one side of this spectrum is doing affiliate marketing or direct-sales/MLM. Other point on this spectrum might be for an engineer to go get hired as a social media "manager" (lots of "jobs" like this on Upwork).
This is a great addition to your search engine, thank you for sharing and continous development!
Years ago I was interested in the same area - visual exploration of websites, but from a different angle. I created an addon that created a timeline-based visual index of all websites exchanged in a chat channel. This was pre-Slack, the goal was to create an archive of all the relevant materials and attachments that teams exchange at work.
Technically, it was a plugin for Hipchat, a scraper, and index in Elasticsearch. Relevant things of note:
- Besides lexical similarity, I had visual similarity of website screenshots
- Chronology was useful when finding "the thing you shared with me after I sent you that starflower thread"
- I think I had a color filter for "finding that purple website"
