Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / likes
“And so one that I love is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So it's basically one of the first direct marketers that came out and he innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you sell a product around can't make this product, can't sell the product, can you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals?”
book / recommends
“So one, I love to go back to marketers who wrote in the 1920s. And so one that I love is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So it's basically one of the first direct marketers that came out and he innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you sell a product around can't make this product, can't sell the product, can you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals? And so it's really fun. I find it really fun to go back in time, because there's a lot of really good first principles thinking that I think we've actually lost in more modern stuff where it's like personalization band, it's optimization, all this stuff. Where it's like how do you actually write and sell things really effectively? Scientific Advertising, it's a great book.”
Claim ledger
23 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“So one, I love to go back to marketers who wrote in the 1920s. And so one that I love is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So it's basically one of the first direct marketers that came out and he innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you sell a product around can't make this product, can't sell the product, can you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals? And so it's really fun. I find it really fun to go back in time, because there's a lot of really good first principles thinking that I think we've actually lost in more modern stuff where it's like personalization band, it's optimization, all this stuff. Where it's like how do you actually write and sell things really effectively? Scientific Advertising, it's a great book.”
02 / recommendation
“And so one that I love is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So it's basically one of the first direct marketers that came out and he innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you sell a product around can't make this product, can't sell the product, can you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals?”
03 / belief
“My dad a lot is a father, and he was an entrepreneur in technology. And I think one of the things that I so appreciate about his leadership style was the empathy, and curiosity, and kindness that he showed in everything.”
04 / belief
“Some way that basically has folks get set up by not using the actual product. And so we've always kind of danced around and we have very specific no wizard principle, but I think that sometimes the tension is wizards can serve a purpose in certain circumstances, but we've avoided doing that.”
05 / belief
“The place that we often come back to is, and this is with I think Tobi is great, Tobi and Glen, is on wizards.”
06 / belief
“I think if it's just subjective, let's just ship what we want without a couple people really holding that quality and that taste bar, that's where things go really sideways.”
07 / commitment
“I'm the least musical person in the world and it's been amazing. My kids and I will create songs together about our days, about what's going on.”
08 / disagreement
“Go through all the core projects, all the merge service projects, all the growth projects. And it's a great forum to say, "Hey, here's where we disagree," really on the how and the tactics of what's happening.”
09 / belief
“I think growth with other teams is like, there's no replacement for just the human trust and then following through on commitments of no, we are actually going to make this thing really good.”
10 / belief
“I think ideally what we want to get through is what we really care about is incrementality.”
11 / belief
“For growth in sales, I think the biggest learning from the the R&D side at least has been the scale is very different with sales, and so it's really hard to use as much quantitative data to make growth, to make some of those decisions.”
12 / belief
“I think there's probably two things that have been very common. And I would say in quite a few cases, you get a lift on a metric up front, a more short-term metric.”
13 / belief
“I would say on things that are maybe more practical and for everyone, there's an enormous amount, and we do see these with long-term effects.”
14 / belief
“The way we think about churn is really going back to Shopify as a kind of our mission and what we want to do, which is to increase the amount of entrepreneurship on the internet.”
15 / belief
“I think with Shopify, we very purposely set up different parts of the org to think on very different time horizons and with very different ways of thinking about how to build product and the like.”
16 / preference
“Each of those have a civic part of the funnel they play with. But because they're measured on absolutes and they really think about that absolute value, we don't get caught into, did your conversion rate over the course of this year go up or down?”
17 / evaluation
“Because there's really a little bit of a selection bias there that people who were letting that payment fail probably weren't actually that dedicated to this entrepreneurship craft.”
18 / preference
“How are we building this in a way that allows for Shopify to have optionality in the technical decisions that we are making? And I think for Tobi, one of the things I've learned and so is that how, the technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who we're building for.”
19 / evaluation
“Uh oh, we're going to make suboptimal investment decisions now by kind of moving things around even though it's the right thing to do. So a lot of it's in rebuilding all instrumentation, how we do LTV modeling, how we do attribution, how we do incrementality testing across each of those different types of outcomes, because it was not an intuitive thing for us originally because we had built all of these systems with a much more siloed view.”
20 / prediction
“If you think about in a business case, if I give you a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction, I can actually causally change your ability to become successful, because I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a little bit longer.”
21 / evaluation
“Could be some of that could be data, qualitative, just our own product sense of what's good or not. And so I think the upside of that is I think we tend to ship things in core and that are incredibly forward-facing and we take more risk.”
22 / evaluation
“I find it really fun to go back in time, because there's a lot of really good first principles thinking that I think we've actually lost in more modern stuff where it's like personalization band, it's optimization, all this stuff.”
23 / prediction
“If I make it harder to sign up, it's going to be very easy to increase sign up to activated rate, because I just have fewer people and the people who made it through our higher intent.”