Tag: tiktok

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Lessons from Season 1 of Superclusters

microphone, podcast

I’m in my fourth year of writing this blog and never once have I called myself or identified as a content creator. As many of you know, I write to think. I do so out of joy and intellectual stimulation. In many ways, I write for myself. Or better put, as a form of self-expression. Other than posting in the morning, as is thematically helpful for my blog, I don’t really have much cadence to posting. Nor have I looked too deeply on analytics. Nor have I really optimized for SEO. In other words, finding the top searched topics in my industry and writing a blogpost for each of those highly trafficked keywords. I haven’t done that, nor do I want to. I haven’t chased people down to subscribe. In fact, there are times I try to convince people to not subscribe (due to the scattered nature of my content).

To that end, I had not been a content creator.

But with the launch of Superclusters, for the first time, and still a work-in-progress, I am designing the content for someone other than my immediate self. Although, do I take opportunities to scratch my own itches? Yes… yes I do.

But in doing so, I am starting to think about creating content for others. And to do that, I need to look at what people like and tune in to.

Now at the end of Season 1, some quick learnings…

Note: The below gets a bit nerdy on numbers. Mostly as an accountability metric to myself to be paying attention to the below. This may not be for everyone, but in case you’re curious, and/or working on creating your own content, hopefully the below might be helpful.

  • Between all the platforms, YouTube seems to be the most popular channel. Followed by Apple Podcasts then Spotify. Where Apple Podcasts only has half or so the number of plays than YouTube does. And Spotify has three-quarters the listens compared to Apple.
    • May be helpful to note that YouTube and Apple Podcast count plays as just someone viewing the video for a split second (“greater than 0 seconds”), whereas Spotify counts a play as someone who’s played the episode for at least 60 seconds.
  • YouTube seems to be better for discovery than the other podcasting platforms, with over 4.5X the impressions compared to the next best, Spotify. 28K versus 6K. Tracked by last 30 days, not all time.
  • For short-form vertical content, TikTok continues to perform better than both YouTube and Instagram, especially for new audiences. Still perplexes me since I imagine the demographic on YouTube has more of my intended audience. Nevertheless, even on YouTube shorts, the shorts are consumed by a younger audience than the long-form videos on average.
  • Instagram, in general, performs poorly in terms of discovery among new audiences. But that might simply be, I haven’t learned the IG algorithms well enough yet. Moreover the new algorithm seems to prioritize completion percentage. And given that it’s hard to shorten even my short-form content to less five seconds or less, unless I just make people read while playing some kind of looped video in the background, Superclusters will likely continue to perform poorly on IG.
  • On YouTube, 90%+ of Shorts viewership comes from non-subscribers than subscribers. where 75-80% come from non-subscribers, the average for the full podcast episodes.
  • On YouTube, 41% of my audience comes from the US. TO break it down further, 50% comes from the US for long-form. 27% for short-form. Spotify, 67% comes from the US. Apple Podcasts, 87%.
  • Interestingly, by city, according to Apple Podcasts, New York City takes the cake on where my audience reside.
  • Across all platforms, most of my listeners/viewers are in the 35-44 age range. Accounting for almost 50% across all platforms. Followed by the 28-34 age group, then 45-59 age group. In general, Superclusters has a larger younger audience fan base on YouTube, compared to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The latter two with similar distributions.
  • Superclusters audience is also about 75% male, 25% female.
  • While less than 0.05%, fun fact, the only other subtitles used on YouTube to tune into my podcast was French (outside of English).

Popularity versus watch time

The most popular episode on YouTube is Chris Douvos’, followed by Ben Choi’s. Episode 1 and Episode 6 respectively. My suspicion was that while both were super fun to record, Chris’ episode came first but may by the end of Season 2 be surpassed in viewership by Ben’s.

On Apple Podcasts, it’s Samir Kaji’s. And on Spotify, it’s the post season episode with Jeff Rinvelt and Martin Tobias.

But what’s most fascinating to me is that among the nine episodes released for Season 1, on YouTube, the top four most popular episodes have shorter average watch times than the most bottom five. On average a two- to three-minute difference, where the least watched episodes happen to have 7-8 minutes of average watch time.

In closing

All in all, there’s a lot of work to do ahead. And as I’m recording Season 2 and my team is hard at work in editing those episodes, all of the above insights are helpful to keep my finger on the pulse. Do let me know if I’m missing any areas I should be paying attention to or measuring.

Otherwise, for Superclusters, I’ll see y’all again in early March for the launch of Season 2.

Keep staying awesome!

Cover photo by israel palacio on Unsplash

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

The views expressed on this blogpost are for informational purposes only. None of the views expressed herein constitute legal, investment, business, or tax advice. Any allusions or references to funds or companies are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be relied upon as investment recommendations. Consult a professional investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions.

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#unfiltered #46 Soon May the Investor Fund

Not long ago, there was this massive TikTok craze on sea shanties. And while I don’t have a TikTok account, the ripple effects have reached me as well. What started as a shower thought after a founder recommended I gamify my advice to founders fundraising, well… turned into this. To the tune of Soon May the Wellerman Come:

There once was a team that put to sea
The name of that team was Friends ‘N Me
The winds blew hard, but growth tipped up
O’, burn that midnight oil (huh)

Soon may the investor fund
To bring us money and help and some
One day, when the term sheet’s done
We’ll take the dough to grow

She had not been two years from start
When push became the pull we sought
The founder called all hands and wrought
The product to scale now (huh)

Soon may the investor fund
To bring us money and help and some
One day, when the term sheet’s done
We’ll take the dough to grow

The servers’ now a right real mess
We had to call the AWS
They had us pay for more bandwidth
But that’s okay with us (huh)

Soon may the investor fund
To bring us money and help and some
One day, when the term sheet’s done
We’ll take the dough to grow

We’ve tripled our growth last year, oh yus
With dollar retention as one cause
When we were asked what it was
We said ’twas one twenty (huh)

Soon may the investor fund
To bring us money and help and some
One day, when the term sheet’s done
We’ll take the dough to grow

We’ve ten cust’mers that five of which
Are referenceable you’ll find on pitch
That one of which is kinda rich
They’re paying hundy K (huh)

Soon may the investor fund
To bring us money and help and some
One day, when the term sheet’s done
We’ll take the dough to grow

Photo by Katherine McCormack on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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Don’t Drop the Ball After the First Shot – Following Up Cold Emails

If you’re a regular on this blog, you’re probably no stranger to my essays on cold emails – whether it’s my cold outreach mental model or lessons from replying to spam emails or how I write longer cold emails as opposed to shorter. Yet, I recently realized I’ve shared my thoughts on the pre-game and the game itself, but I’ve yet to write on the post-game. So this essay is dedicated to exactly that. What do you do after you send that initial cold email?

The short answer: If you want to stand out, always follow up. To quote my good friend, Christen on her TikTok, where she shares amazing soundbites of career advice and networking.

The longer answer

I met a founder once who emailed an executive at Disney every business day for almost one year, minus ten days. The caveat is at the top of every daily email he wrote, “If you want me to stop, I will.” Almost a year after he began, the executive took the meeting. And Disney is now one of this startup’s biggest customers.

I met another founder a few years ago, who retweeted tweets from a Forbes’ Midas 100 VC every week for three months, while including his own constructive commentary each time. So, when this founder began his fundraise three months later, this VC set up a meeting with that founder within two hours of the cold email, first thanking the founder for his thoughts over the past few months.

Garry Tan and Apoorva Mehta have both shared this story publicly. Apoorva, founder of Instacart, back in 2012, wanted to apply to Y Combinator. Unfortunately, he was applying two months late. So he reached out to all the YC alum he knew to get intros to the YC partners. He just needed one to be interested. But after every single one said no, Garry, then a partner at YC, wrote: “You could submit a late application, but it will be nearly impossible to get you in now.”

For Apoorva, that meant “it was possible.” He sent an application and a video in, but Garry responded with another “no” several days later. But instead of pushing with another email and another application, Apoorva decided to send Garry a 6-pack of beer delivered by Instacart. So that Garry could try out the product firsthand. 21st Amendment’s Back in Black, to be specific. In the end, without any precedent, Instacart was accepted. And the rest is history.

So, what is the common thread here?

As my friend once told me, “It’s not hard to be persistent. Most people can easily be. But most people aren’t persistent AND considerate.” Persistence is keeping your promises to yourself. Being considerate is respecting and keeping your promises to others – explicit and implicit. Explicitly, if you say you’re going to do something, do it. Implicitly, understand the social context, their schedule, their cognitive load. One of the lines I always add at the bottom (or sometimes at the top) of my cold outreaches:

“If you’re too busy, I completely understand.”

Or the variation I shared in my cold email “template”:

“I know you get a hundred emails a day, and if you don’t have any time to respond, I completely understand.”

To take that one step further, sometimes you’re reasonably confident they won’t have time to respond. Big life or career events may make it hard for them to respond, like:

  • New baby/paternity/maternity leave
  • New publication
  • Recently did a (podcast) interview
  • Released some version of viral content (i.e. YouTube video, TikTok, Clubhouse, Twitter, etc.)
  • Founder raising a new round
  • Upcoming product launch they’re a key player in
  • VC raising a new fund
  • Shit hit the fan
  • Anything else the press is actively writing about

If that is your assumption, I add in one more line:

“If you don’t have time to respond, I’ll follow up one week [or whatever other timeframe] from today.”

And once you’ve said it, do it. To save you the time to draft up a follow up email a week later, a hack I use is to just write that follow up email as soon as you send the first email. Then schedule it to send a week from the day you sent the first. Make sure that each follow-up email isn’t the exact same. Show updates on what you learned, found, or thought about, as well as additional value to the person you’re reaching out to. While this hack is the bare minimum of what you can do to follow up, this should never be the ceiling. 9 out of 10 times I find myself going back, cancelling the send, updating the email with my learnings, then re-scheduling it.

Follow up at least twice after you send the initial cold email. But be understanding of their circumstances. And of course, never overstay your welcome. Understand the difference between a soft “no” and a hard “no”. In the circumstances of a soft “no”, recognize the variables that led to it. And reach back out when those variables are not in play, or to your best guess.

In closing

I met a brilliant founder years ago who, at the time, scaled his business to 100 employees, and he told me something that resonates with me till this day. “You can only learn from experience, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be yours.” Though I learned of his saying a few years after, it summarizes why I started my 6-year at least once a week cold outreach streak. To learn vicariously through others’ experiences. And if that was and is the impetus, it’d be a shame if I didn’t see it through to the best of my ability. ‘Cause if I was gonna give up after just sending one email, why start?

As Ron Swanson once said, “Never half-ass two things; whole-ass one thing.” So if you’re gonna start with the first email, you might as well send the next two. If the first shot doesn’t swish, catch the rebound and shoot again. Persistence. And ideally rebound thoughtfully.

Photo by William Topa on Unsplash

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#unfiltered #30 Inspiration and Frustration – The Honest Answers From Some of the Most Resilient People Going through a World of Uncertainty

A few weeks ago, around the time I published Am I At My Best Right Now?, I started noticing more and more that my friends, colleagues, and people that I’ve met since were going through tough times. Two lost a family member. Some were laid off. Two were forced to leave this land I call home. Four broke up. Three burned out. Countless more told me they were stressed and/or depressed, and didn’t know how to escape this limbo. After I published that post, another handful of people also reached out and courageously shared the troubles they are going through now. How it’s been so hard to share with others. And yesterday, while editing this blog post, I found out that one of my high school friends had passed.

Inspiration and Frustration

During this time, I had a thought: Frustration is the absence of inspiration. There were many times in my own life when I was beating myself up because I couldn’t think of a solution. And a small percent of those times, I didn’t even bother to think of a solution since I was so engrossed in my frustration with myself.

In these unprecedented times and inspired by the conversations around me, I decided to show that we’re not alone. So, I asked people who I deeply respect and who could shed light as to what it means to be human. I asked just two questions, but they were only allowed to answer one of them:

  1. What is the one thing that inspires you so much that it makes everything else in life much easier to bear?
  2. What is stressing/frustrating you so much right now that it seems to invalidate everything else you’re doing?

In turn, they responded via email, text, or on a phone call. Of the 49 I asked, so far, 31 responded with their answers. 4 politely turned me down due to their busy schedules. Another one turned me down because she didn’t feel like she could offer value in her answer.

26 responded with what inspires them. 5 with what frustrates them. All of whom I know has been through adversity and back.

Admittedly, the hardest part about this study was how I was going to organize all these responses. Unlike the one about time allocation I did over a month ago, where I knew exactly how to organize the data before I even got all the responses, this one, I really didn’t know how to best illustrate the candor everyone shared. In fact, I would be doing a disservice to them, if reduced their honesty and courage to be vulnerable to mere numbers. So, in the end, below, I let everyone speak for themselves. Sometimes, simplicity is the best.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to making this blog post happen, including Brad Feld, Mars Aguirre, Shayan Mehdi, Thomas Owen, Chris Lyons, Mark Leon, Jamarr Lampart, Christen Nino De Guzman, Louis Q Tran, Sam Marelich, Dr. Kris Marsh, Quincy Huynh, DJ Welch, Jimmy Yue, and many, many more heroes who helped me and the world around us behind the curtains.

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