Tips and tools: SaaS pricing models, Poor Charlie’s Almanac, and the lose-lose battle facing social media

Published: January 2024

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

(We don’t profit from recommending things. We just love sharing things we think you’ll appreciate. You can see our other Tips and Tools articles here.)

A useful breakdown of SaaS pricing models

A workflow to create a landing page where there is work piling up in front of the designer

Matt Hodges has worked for SaaS heavyweights like Atlassian, Intercom, and Loom. We enjoyed his breakdown of SaaS pricing models—particularly his common-sense assertion that there’s no “perfect” pricing model that works every time. (See the Freemium can fail link in our last Tips and tools article.)

(Of course, the fastest way to optimize your pricing involves systematic research and a data-driven process.)

52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2023

small-Finnishfirewood-processing-machine-via-Tom-Whitwell.jpg

Each year, Tom Whitwell publishes a list of 52 things he has learned. Last year’s list is as fascinating as ever. Here are four of our favorites:

  • Humans are now roughly as tall as we were 12,000 years ago. 4,000 years ago, the average man was 5’4”.
  • Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the US in 2022. Eight of them were by romance novelist Colleen Hoover.
  • Scientists in Singapore have developed a tiny flexible battery, powered by the salt in human tears, designed for smart contact lenses.
  • 40% of people shown a photoshopped image of themselves riding in a viking ship as a child claimed to remember the (fictional) incident. This replicates a similar experiment from 2002 involving a fictional balloon ride.

The lose-lose battle facing social media

A graph shows engagement on the X-axis and Allowed/Prohibited content on the Y-axis. As content nears the prohibited line, engagement rises.
Armstrong demonstrates how engagement rises as content gets more extreme.

We learned a lot from Evan Armstrong’s article on Content Moderation Double-Bind Theory. (Well okay, not from the title.) He explains why companies like Facebook and X (previously known as Twitter) find themselves in a lose-lose situation and the implications for the rest of us.

Put simply, the Darwinistic nature of user-generated content rewards creators who push for the boundaries of what’s acceptable—to the detriment of the platforms (and society).

As Armstrong says, “basic phenomenon explains all sorts of success and failure in media.”

Free access to Poor Charlie’s Almanac—a real gift

A screenshopt of the book’s new website.
Munger’s sense of humor is evident on the website (as it was in his work).

In our last tips and tools article, we referenced the passing of one of our business heroes, Charlie Munger.

Although Munger’s thinking appears in thousands of articles online, his magnum opus is Poor Charlie’s Almanac, a collection of talks and writings. That’s why we were delighted to see that Stripe Press has created a free online version of Poor Charlie’s Almanac (including an audio version) that anyone can access.

The talks may be grounded in Munger’s investment experience, but they are filled with wit, insight, and pithy examples. It’s all good, but we particularly recommend:

And finally, AI builds Angry… uh… Pumpkins

A still from the gameplay video.

We were blown away by this AI-created “tribute” to a game you might recognize.

Javi Lopez documents how he created the entire game using a series of prompts on GPT4, Midjourney, and DALL•E 3. See his video and thread on X (previously known as Twitter).

Have you come across something worth sharing? If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

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