Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism - Astukari Newsletter #88

🔨What I’ve Been Making

New writing: Boys & Girls Part I editing is going well — think I’m at about page 60 of 380. I feel as though there are some issues with the pacing but I actually am quite pleased with character progression, dialog, etc. I’m also in the process of writing a new short story which will be included in the upcoming collection, These Little Things.

New video/audio: New podcast: Five Ways To Get Others To Agree With You. I’ve actually considered as of late to bring streams back in some capacity, though I’m still figuring out how to fit it into my schedule.

Other projects: New fun stuff planned for JBR, including additional Twitter lists (I’ve seen how popular the Featured Creators list has gotten recently). This includes one for artists under 1k followers as well as a separate list for NSFW artists. More stuff, like curated print collections, will be coming soon.

📚What I’ve Been Reading

Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism - For the past few newsletters, I’ve been talking about one of the main benefits of the blockchain is how it makes freelancing practical. Well, Braintrust is the closest company I have seen to hitting on that use case exactly. It’s not perfect, but it’s a really good first step.

How Nike turned its brand into a $35B “cognitive shortcut” - There’s a simple (and rather counterintuitive) fact in marketing: brands that make more stances — political, cultural, and otherwise — actually get more sales. We’ve talked about this, in a way, during the Customer Takes Care of Itself. Nike is perhaps the biggest and most successful company in which this principle has been applied.

Willingness to Pay - Pricing strategy is something that’s always difficult for startups, but fortunately there’s a lot of good theory that can cover the details. I think, out of all the theory out there, Willingness to Pay (WTP) is a pretty good start. Rather than looking at the numbers and trying to deduce some econometrical argument out of it, WTP gets down to why people buy the stuff they buy in the first place.

Signaling as a Service - We’ve talked about signaling before — the idea of “buying credibility” for yourself by producing signals which make people think you’re cool, smart, rich, etc. But we’ve never really dived into the industry side of this argument before — that is, what does it look like if the product you’re selling is just defined as signals?

My Approach to Automatic Music Composition - In the world of cool, machine-assisted creative endeavors, we have this blog post that goes over how to define music into small “blocks” which can then be crafted into melodies (and even full songs!) by an AI algorithm.