Work Products

The Times of India created a property called Start Your Day With TOI+, which had one Chart of the Day.

Footnotes:

• Bringing the newspaper’s funny page to TOI Plus | by Ritvvij Parrikh | What’s next at TOI (timesofindia.com)

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail

restofworld.org is a news publication that runs a property called Stat of the Day. Below are some screenshots:

Footnotes:

• Stat of the day – Rest of World

A clear Work Products that you can provide to your audience is a collection of clean, standardized, and up-to-date database of datasets that is relevant for your Niche.

Why it matters: This is an unsolved problem.

• It is a hard problem. It is likely to be outsourced because building and maintaining datasets is a full-time activity that requires domain knowledge and dedicated bandwidth.
• Most suppliers provide this data as Charts-as-a-Service or dashboards instead of programmatic access.
• There is a market for this within each Niche industry.

Example:

• CMI, Dataful.in, and How India Lives provides socio-economic government data.
• Sports Interactive provides granular cricket match data.
• Neilson provides live election counting day data.
• The Bloomberg Terminal also provides financial data.

Insights are similar to Charts-as-a-Service but requires much more research, analysis, and possibly even data science.

Examples:

• Your next business idea, delivered weekly | Trends by the Hustle is a Subscription content product that provides ideas with product-market fit.

This is a quote from Brian Chesky of Airbnb. His quote is especially true for work products.

Recruit early adopters who strongly feel about the problem you are solving but can’t solve it for themselves.

Why it matters: Don’t build in a vacuum.

• Instead build with real people who can help you spot blindspots.
• Eventually, they will feel a sense of ownership over the product and automatically provide word-of-mouth marketing.

Whom not to recruit: Don’t recruit people like you because you already have your insights. Don’t recruit family or friends. Avoid finding too many people of the same persona else your solution will over index for their specific problems

Instead: Recruit people who are invested in the creation and growth of your product and hence will contribute time and Judgment.

• They are deeply passionate about the problem space
• They find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of how you are solving the problem
• They are a visionary and hence want to gain insights from the product development
• They believe your product will give them competitive edge in their daily work
• They tend to have a higher tolerance for mistakes

Because they are adopting an immature, under-developed product, you’ve to provide a personal service, such as face-to-face meetings, demos, etc. To sustain their interest, speed of adoption of their feedback is key.

**Have a clear purpose of employing NFTs: ** NFTs are by uber-nerds for uber-nerds within a specific subculture. Others can participate if they want, but the products were not built for them. Here are some examples:

Pre-NFT: In the late 1990s, many bought Apple products to signal the Think Different aspiration. Likewise, people own Royal Enfield to be part of the Indian biking community.

In the NFT era: The National Basketball Association knows that people come to live sporting events less for the sports but more for the experience — to feel that moment with others. Hence, their NFT initiative NBA Top Shots allows you to convert those moments into collectible videos and trade them with others. As a result, demand for these videos surged, with 100,000 users owning at least one highlight.

A common Formats of content products is Q&A. It can take the form of:

• Quora and Stackoverflow where the community answers the questions raised from within the community
• ChatGPT and Bing’s Chat where AI answers the questions
• Or ‘Ask the Expert’ columns in newspapers where designated experts answer questions

Example: Many years ago, Google piloted a Q&A product called Neighbourly. It solved for:

• Strong value proposition: Solve problems in people’s lives with news
• Identification: Collecting user identification and First Party Data so we give them value
• Intent-based notifications instead of Spray-and-pray: Getting users to subscribe to emails and Push Notifications
• Personalization without AI: Users choose what they want

Insight Density is the number of Aha moments for every 100 words. A good example is the series Two minutes with Seth Godin that Blinkist ran. Each 2-minute episode in this 50-episode series forced one to think.

One can employ Artificial Intelligence to detect which sentences are insight-dense. For example, TextRank finds how similar each sentence is to all other sentences in the text. The most important sentence is the one that is most similar to all the others, with this in mind the similarity function should be oriented to the semantic of the sentence, cosine similarity based on a bag of words approach can work well and BM25/BM25+ work really nicely for TextRank.

References:

• https://medium.com/p/b8efc7e70b4

All Work Products empower users to effect changes in their lives:

• Change Information: They add new data to the user’s existing knowledge pool. Higher insight density amplifies their value. Bloomberg Terminals and Q&A sites like Quora fit this category.
• Change Ability: These products equip users with new skills or abilities. MOOC platforms and most SaaS internet products are from this category.
• Change Action: They encourage users to act, use, try, or buy something new, often converting raw data into actionable truth. E-commerce sites are a classic example.
• Change Beliefs: Inspiring and perspective-shifting, these products prompt users to rethink their beliefs or worldview. TED talks are a prime example.

I love the the New York Times’ ‘Op-Eds From the Future’ series, where writers are asked to craft fictional opinion pieces to situations that could happen 10-100 years from now. Removing the mind from today’s moral, ethical, social, and technological context frees up the writer to new possibilities.

Footnotes

• Op-Eds From the Future – The New York Times (nytimes.com)