Chapter 7: university of google | doomscrolling | yes, a recipe from P.F. Chang's
Entrepreneurship is…
...spending a large majority of my days googling “how do I <insert very basic task>“.
It’s been a very humbling experience in that it’s made me realize just how much I don’t know and am unable to do without looking it up on the internet. I thought that after 10+ years of being in the same field, doing more or less the same things, and slowly building up my knowledge base would make starting a business, if not easy, at least reasonably manageable. I was wrong. The skills required to go from 0 to 1 are completely different from 50 to 100. There are a lot of business podcasts out there (I’m looking at you Guy Raz) that condenses the entrepreneurship narrative into a tidy variation of this:
When in reality it looks more like this:
On to some recent updates:
I’m waiting on the second (and hopefully final) factory sample of the backpack, which should arrive by the end of this month. Assuming there are no more edits to design and materials, I’ll be able to place the first order some time in April. Here are a couple of test product shots of the first factory sample (not final colors), courtesy of James Tu Photography.
I’ve spent the bulk of my time focused on owned media/content. I think about Marketing in this basic framework:
Owned marketing should be the foundation, with earned media layered on top to amplify your messaging, and then finally paid media to reach broad markets once a small core of customers have been established. Having strong owned media is cost effective and will help paid both earned and paid media perform better. Also, the days of cheap user acquisition on social media are over. A lot of early ecommerce brands grew from what was essentially ad arbitrage on Facebook. You could acquire a customer for very little and it made sense to keep pouring money into Facebook ads because you could get extremely targeted and there appeared to be a seemingly unlimited number of people to reach.
The unusual dynamics of Facebook in the early 2010s incentivized brands to take an inverted pyramid approach to their marketing strategy, where they were spending the bulk of their resources on paid media because it was cost efficient and you got fast results. Now, with the decline of Facebook users, an increasingly junky platform with junky traffic, over-saturation of ad content and rising CPMs, this is no longer a sustainable strategy.
Here’s a screenshot of preliminary work-in-progress homepage wireframes (with placeholder content). If you are interested in taking an in-depth look and providing feedback on the next round of wireframe designs, please let me know!
I finally launched an Instagram page! Please follow along here. I will be posting content on a more regular basis.
ICYMI, I sent out the link in my last post with a quick & easy survey about ecomm packaging preferences. If you’ve got a minute to spare, please fill out the form here. Your feedback is much appreciated!
Social Media’s Newsfeed Format is Destroying our Brains
I don’t know about you, but I feel like the endless newsfeed scroll of social media is doing weird things to my brain. This is not a new news and has been the case for a long time, but particularly during the past few weeks, as we’ve all helplessly watched the horrific imagery of Russia invading and bombing Ukraine, it all feels deeply f*cked and unsettling. Facebook’s release of their Newsfeed product in 2006 was arguably the most consequential thing Facebook Meta has ever done and since then it’s shaped the way we all consume content. Some also say it’s the last original thing Meta has created, which is quite the burn.
Does anyone remember the quaint early days of The Facebook? When everyone had a neat and tidy profile page and the only way to get updates on any of your friends was to manually click on each individual person’s profile. Now, across every social media platform, we are fed an incessant stream of images, videos, verbal diarrhea, from brands, friends, people we’ve never heard of. The newsfeed format has this odd flattening effect that condenses everything into single units of content, all of which are given equal weight.
Writer Ryan Broderick said this: It seems clear that our feeds aren’t meant for content like this and are breaking. Bloated and broken capitalist social media platforms run by Silicon Valley monopolies, creaking with age at this point, now have to respond to what could be the first battles of a much bigger war. And, if the last 24 hours are any indication, they are simply not up to the task.
During the first few days of the war, I found Tik Tok to be the most disorienting platform out of the whole lot. Everything felt equally important and worthy of attention - between Ukrainians livestreaming from their bomb shelters, video montages of scenes of destruction throughout Ukraine set to trending music, people calling President Zelensky a ‘hot zaddy’, I also got served the standard parenting memes, people up in arms about Shake from Love is Blind 2, livestreams of women making custom acrylic cups (a story for another time.) Add to all of that was occasional fake news videos of unrelated Russian military exercises, journalists reporting real news from Ukraine, directions from the Washington Post on how to identify doctored content and spam accounts. New York Mag published an article on what it’s like watching WarTok.
My brain literally felt like it was sloshing around in my skull. I equate the feeling I had after scrolling through Tik Tok for 15 minutes to what it feels like to work a job without any prioritization of goals and tasks. Everything becomes equally important and requires the same amount of time and effort. And that is a quick ‘n easy recipe for panic, anxiety and burn out.
Chaotic and uncertain moments like the one we are living through right now reminds me of the value of curated content over unfettered user generated content. Content that is placed within a clear communication hierarchy helps us understand what is important and makes the processing of information more manageable. Unlike social media newsfeeds, when I consume information on a news site, while it’s still hard to take everything in, it’s at least displayed in order of importance, so it doesn’t feel like my brain is going to explode.
Here are a couple of organizations where you can donate to support Ukraine, both of which have been vetted by the State Department:
Chicken Lettuce Wraps
As a self-respecting Chinese person, I have only eaten at P.F. Chang’s once in my life. In my defense, I was forced into it under duress. We were shopping at a mall, everyone was hungry and cranky, and P.F. Changs was the closest restaurant we could find. And honestly, I didn’t hate it. The food was fine enough, but the kids’ menu was the highlight. The menu included the greatest hits of authentic Chinese cuisine like Honey Chicken, Sweet & Sour Chicken, and something called a ‘Buddha’s Feast’. My daughter gobbled up the Kids’ Chicken Lo Mein. P.F. Chang’s also provided crayons and coloring pages. We could be seated next to a dumpster in 90 degree weather, as long as our kids are willing to eat the food and can be kept entertained, it would be a top notch dining experience in my books.
Anyway, P.F. Chang’s Chicken Lettuce Wraps are one of the most popular items on their expansive menu. I decided to try making a version of the recipe at home after a discussion with our Pediatrician about our kids’ picky eating habits. She recommended trying to serve more ground meat as their protein intake, as she’s found that kids are more likely to accept that vs. hunks of meat. (Shout out to Dr. Lang at Berkeley Pediatrics, she was right!)
Below are the instructions for my slightly modified version of this recipe:
Ingredients:
1 lb ground chicken
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1/2 yellow onion, finely diced
1.5 cup of diced button mushrooms
1 8 oz can of water chestnuts, drained and diced
2 tablespoons of oyster sauce
1 tablespoon of light soy sauce
1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce (ok to use light soy sauce, it just won’t have that typical deep color)
1 tablespoon of rice vinegar
optional: 2 scallions, thinly sliced
Instructions:
heat olive oil in large sauté pan
add ground chicken to pan and cook for 5 minutes and crumble meat into small pieces
combine all of the sauces
add onions, garlic, ginger, sauce mixture and cook for another 5 minutes
add in mushrooms and water chestnuts, combine everything and cook on medium heat until everything cooks through and sauce mixture evaporates a bit, another 10 minutes or so
serve with optional scallions and lettuce or rice
note: if your kid(s) can’t handle crunchy texture, omit the water chestnuts.
Miscellaneous Links
If you like Ali Wong, here is a fascinating video/infographic about the storytelling structure of her stand-up shows.
Oh god no, there’s another ‘vibe shift’ happening. Some of us are too old to keep up. Is this why thin, overly plucked eyebrows are allegedly making a comeback?
Here’s an interesting infographic that shows how quickly Facebook is declining and losing relevancy compared to other platforms. While there’s no y-axis to understand relative numbers, it’s still useful to compare overall trend lines.
