Studio Ghibli

happy friday!

I will improve the quality of these newsletters over time. For now they will be haphazard. I apologize.

• first client project in motion hopefully soon and MRR also soon above 0!

• other two projects taking up weekend mindshare slowly making progress; ETA late-April likely on both? the year is going by so fast! so much to do. need to be more efficient.

• spent some time learning about tt shop/affiliate

  • I think if you can nail the product market founder fit with one intangible thing you bring that no other creator can really do or easily replicate then you can capture some of the gold mine.

  • Although I’m definitely long TT shop and all-in-one commerce (discover product with social proof and buy in one-click).

  • If I was Instagram PM at Meta I’d tell leadership please pay the lawyers more so that we can fight more lawsuits in the pursuit of making our Reels just like TT.

  • I’ve also said like 12 months ago (maybe even older) that a top priority at Meta should be improving Reels search!

  • Mot to mention always prioritize Reels search over photos…it is ok to pivot! Short-form is too much of a gold mine and sort of the terminal entertainment option just because AR/VR I think has a ceiling, but I’m not saying we are done yet on Vision Pro or Meta VR Goggles/Oculus.

• Side note: Martin Shkreli talked in a podcast on Iced Coffee Hour about how Palmer Luckey said that post-Oculus he “didn’t want people to think he was a one trick pony” and then started Anduril. I think that is fire.

• started Snowball this week. rather dense book! but so far reads nicely. do need to read more as well.

• this week was the explosion of studio ghibli photos on X after OpenAI improved their image generation. it works pretty well but I do like Midjourney for a few specific use cases. The image generation from Gemini isn’t bad either, nor is Mistal’s. You even had a studio ghibli-esque SREF that you could use for Midjourney. Though I never got the whole Discord use case.

  • Make two product decisions.

  • 1) Am I going to offer a somewhat robust free plan and bear the costs, or no. Midjourney doesn’t really run the VC game, which is fine…pros and cons.

  • 2) Am I going to offer two UI modes for new users: an easy mode for easy generation and pre-built SREF selection (just to get users creating as fast as possible to a point where they are satisfied) AND THEN either allow for more features to be shown over time, or allow a user to select for more specific features.

    • What does this enable? Fast onramp, low friction, boost MAUs. Yes VC’s are greedy as hell so if you want to say screw you and keep your equity, 100% fine, but there are drawbacks.

‘Til next time,

Vishal