Enjoyed this interview a lot @kdaigle – glad you weren't too creeped out by my admission that I had cloned an AI version of you to practice for it.

Toys need to leave space for the child's imagination

You just invented YC

Wait till you see the call notes in Salesforce I keep for every argument with my wife.

I found out my cleaner has a cleaner and that made me feel less guilty

I swear Musk could cure cancer and they'd complain he was putting cancer doctors out of a job or something.

Facebook is going all in on MMM: here are the major takeaways from a 1hr webinar I was invited to.

That's a top 5% income in the UK believe it or not.

My rent in London was less than half what it was in New York ($1,000 per month vs $2,500). In London most people don't live in the center, as there are plenty of nice, safe, cheap places within 30 mins to 1 hr commute. In New York basically everybody lives in the center and almost everything safe is expensive.

They actually work more hours than the EU average. They just take a longer break in the middle of the day and work later (works out because they also eat dinner much later).

Some intern at Netflix was testing a new recommender and hadn't been taught about the Harry Potter effect.

This is a real thing the actual president said...

This was the turning point

This was an extremely high alpha podcast episode because I had a radically different view of Kushner before and after. Pains me greatly to learn how close we were to a peace deal in the middle east. Is he part of the administration this time around?

Holy Sh*t if Twitter only has 2,300 advertisers (vs 10m for Meta!) the upside opportunity for Musk is even more insane than I thought.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS Zuck bellows as I carefully rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

The X axis annoys me: because it's "Men/boys more right-wing than women/girls" couldn't it equally be the case that young women have gone to the left?

Yup it's a common problem in recommending systems. Because almost everyone has watched Harry potter, it almost always ranks as the highest recommendation unless you have some sort of strategy for dealing with it. quora.com/Recommendation-Sys…

Marketing Attribution 101

Made myself a no code interface for optimizing prompts with DSPy. Thought I'd open source it.

Surely capitalism is just them sitting in seats they could afford to pay for

If it was really to escape danger they would stop in France.

Also living paycheck to paycheck is a terrible measure of fairness. I have friends in finance with coke habits who live paycheck to paycheck on far more than I earn.

Startup failure rate is 90%, so you should simply start 12 startups and you have 120% chance of success.

One stupidly simple thing they could have done is not scrub message history on free accounts. That's the number one reason every online community moved to discord during the crypto and AI waves, and if they added discords growth curve to this they'd be completely dominant.

When you ask 500 AI personas who they'll vote for, 90% of them choose Kamala over Trump... Here's how I used @DSPyOSS to completely remove bias:

3/ Click-based attribution is a joke: they found *no correlation* (R2 = 0.0001) between engagement metrics and sales (this is something traditional marketers have been harking on about for years, good to see it verified by FB).

ChatGPT deserves my citizenship more than me I guess.

This is rats stamping their ticket to be able to come back in case the ship doesn't sink in the end.

They made a really dumb movie about how this was a sign the moon was made by aliens: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon…

Technically it should mean every two weeks. Twice a week should be semi weekly.

It's not Communist unless it comes from the Petrograd region of the USSR. Otherwise it's called sparkling poverty.

We implemented a simple excel test (literally just vlookup and pivot table, open book) when I ran a marketing agency and about half of all applicants simply gave up. They didn't even try to cheat (the whole test was published on our blog and they'd find it if they googled)

Not for developers located abroad, important caveat

You get the energy of an office but nobody comes to tap you on the shoulder.

From what in understand it's not that simple. The countries that have these things have low birthrates as well. The only major correlations with high birth rates are being poor and being religious.

I may have underestimated the power of my product appearing in an Every post. RIP my calendar. 130 onboarding calls booked in <24 hours!

Everyone is sleeping on Google Data Studio - world class analysis and reporting functionality... for free. I literally couldn't do half of the things I did today with GDS for any amount of money a couple years ago.

If you want to be taken seriously you need to learn the 4 Ps of marketing. 1. Pfacebook ads 2. Pgoogle ads 3. Pemail 4. PSEO

Wasn't his point that the noise was irrelevant to the task, introduced by the way they recorded the signal?

This is the men in black HQ

When the Google rep reaches out to 'help'.

Don't do what I did to become successful, do what I preach now that I can afford to virtue signal.

Meta has seen an 80% increase in MMM adoption. Listening to their summit right now, will tweet anything interesting.

The assumptive close: whenever there are a few options to decide between, rather than waiting for input and making your manager a bottleneck, instead state which option you'll move forward with by X deadline unless you get any objections.

Don't forget that a visit to a supermarket helped topple communism.

Yes they are apart from Bolt, but the dog one is Up.

It also makes no sense to me – the number of people searching replit is flat... wouldn't you at least expect a huge spike from more people searching to log in?

When I tell people I am about to publish an O'Reilly book on prompt engineering and AI, their first question is always "won't it be out of date the moment it's printed?". It's something @jamesaphoenix12 and I had to think about, a lot... So we took the things that were working for us back in 2020 with GPT-3, and ditched any hacks or tricks that stopped working when GPT-4 came out. What was left was a set of timeless principles that are transferrable across models: 1. *Give Direction*: Describe the desired style in detail, or reference a relevant persona. 2. *Specify Format*: Define what rules to follow, and the required structure of the response. 3. *Provide Examples*: Insert a diverse set of test cases where the task was done correctly. 4. *Evaluate Quality*: Identify errors and rate responses, testing what drives performance. 5. *Divide Labor*: Split tasks into multiple steps, chained together for complex goals. The whole book is based on these principles, so even if OpenAI drops GPT-5 the week after the book is published, I'm still confident the content will remain relevant. That said, after a year and a half of writing and editing, I'm really looking forward to getting it out there in the world and see what people think!

Sure you built a $5.2 million dollar company, but your parents gave you $1 when you were 29.

Also the American Psycho reference

When I ran an agency I could barely get my own staff to copy my marketing strategy after training them in it. Nobody is copying you.

Unluckily my daughter was having peanut butter 3 or 4 times a week then suddenly one day had a reaction from it.

The only thing that successfully let non-programmers make software is Excel.

Does the UK get money off for banning slavery before any other major European power and deploying the Royal Navy to West Africa for 60 years to enforce the ban?

Diminishing marginal returns: as you spend more money your average ROI goes down. This happens because to spend more you have to expand to audiences with lower intent to purchase and your creative fatigues quicker (people get tired of seeing the same offer over and over).

An agency is a collection of creative people that would be fired or quit if they worked directly for the client, loosely held together by a commercially savvy but talent friendly translation layer we call 'account management'.

My publisher asked me for some headshots and I can't do a shoot because I'm on holiday so I ran FLUX LoRA on fal.ai and it cost me $1.

Happy to announce I'm writing a book on Prompt Engineering for @OReillyMedia with @jamesaphoenix12 The first few chapters are available for early-release here: oreilly.com/library/view/pro… No I didn't get to choose the animal on the cover (always wondered if authors did...).

Its often cheaper to go to Europe than it is to stay in the UK for a holiday.

The shoggoth strategy for freelancing / job applications / company building for ambitious people. Ambitious people are usually generalists, but clients and customers want to hire specialists. How do you solve this? The shoggoth strategy: hide your messy generalist experience behind the friendly face of specialism. I'll give you an example: When I was starting my agency, I was going to a networking event every night, and having mediocre conversations that never led to clients. I did a little bit of everything in digital marketing, and every conversation I had was on a different topic. Finally, I mentioned to someone I had spent $50m on Facebook ads and his jaw hit the floor. He immediately asked if we could meet for coffee, because he was struggling with his Facebook ads, and wanted the opinion of an expert. He also referred two people he knew who also had the same problem, both of which became clients. I didn't hide my other interests, I just started started telling people what I did was Facebook ads when they asked. The follow up question would be querying my experience, which is when I'd drop the $50m ad spend figure and close a coffee meeting or referral, which led to clients. Over time they'd also need complementary skills, like setting up tracking, writing copy, or designing creatives, all of which I liked doing. As I built trust, they'd also ask if I did Google ads, or we'd do some advanced analysis with data science, and start A/B testing landing pages for them. Smart sales people call this 'land and expand': get your foot in the door, then upsell. It works because the gelatinous blob of generalist skills you've accumulated (the shoggoth, a lovecraftian monster) is complex and scary for people to process. Nobody believes you can be good at everything. Some people actually are polymaths, but it bruises our egos to admit that fact. It makes us look bad when someone is good at something you aren't without having to make the tradeoffs you think exist. Smart, ambitious people are particularly badly affected by this, to the point were many of the most talented people I know actually can't get jobs without moving into senior management (where generalism is tolerated), or starting a company. The problem is when they start a company they now have to figure this out for their company, or it'll suffer the same fate. There's another reason specialism wins: people allocate way less time to hiring and buying decisions than you might think. If you're lucky if they remember more than 1 thing about you or your company. Every additional interest you communicate only dilutes your personal brand, and more than 2-3 increases the chance they won't remember anything at all about you. Marketing science knows this, which is why most consumer brands spend millions just to get to you form one memory association (lucky strike is toasted). There's a double penality to being a generalist, which is that as well as conversion, it also decreases word of mouth. There's way less chance someone will remember to refer you when there's an opportunity to, if it's not crystal clear in their mind. Even if you are referred to someone, there's way less chance they'll call you if you don't fully identify with the category of job they need doing (you call a plumber when your pipes are leaking, not a handyman). The main force pulling in the other direction, is that most people hate to focus on any one skill for a long time. It gets extremely boring. Variety is the spice of life, and always talking about Facebook ads, or whatever specialism you choose. However, if you don't do this you'll always be broke, unable to get the best jobs or to grow your company. You can afford a lot more spice when you're making good money, just live your generalist life with your real friends, behind the veil of specialism you adopt for clients. For companies, this means staying extremely disciplined. You know you should specialise, but it's really hard to turn down revenue when someone offers you something outside of scope. I did the same thing and it took me 5 years of struggling trying to go my agency to learn this lesson. One day I read an article that said Uber was doing 7,000 conversion optimization tests per year. We had run 7,000 tests across all marketing channels over the course of 5 years. If we had just focused on one specific area we might have been good enough to land Uber as a client, and we'd be doing more in 1 year than we had in 5. Most people never get exposed to the extreme scale of Fortune 500 companies, so they just can't imagine how much room there is at the top to have an impact. So they settle for a small amount of revenue today, and get trapped in a cycle of always accepting things that are out of scope. They don't compound on their specialist skills, and never build a personal brand focused enough to get into the room with the top tier companies. I know it sucks that the world works this way, and I'm not asking you to change or drop your interests. Just hide your shoggoth behind the friendly face of specialsm and nobody will know the difference. If the first thing you say to everybody is your one specialism, you'll land more clients in that specialism. Then that'll lead to better case studies, and your credibility grows. Eventually it compounds, and you can get your foot in the door anywhere you like. Land and expand. Eventually when you've built up enough trust you can release the shoggoth, just don't do it on day one.

If you showed a single Facebook ad impression to everybody in the country today, they would claim attribution on 100% of your sales for the next 24 hours (even though we all know you would have had sales today anyway). Digital isn't as measurable as you think. #FBAds #FacebookAds

We've completed the cycle, performance marketers have looped back around to branding.

The problem is that the most talented Brits compare themselves to Americans, and the least talented compare themselves to other Brits.

It's so funny that prompt optimization is turning out to be more important than fine tuning. Given every ML engineer told me four years ago prompting was irrelevant.

Seth Godin linked to my article today

Is it because most anglophones expect to own their own home, whereas in Europe / Asia apartments are more normalized? If most of your voters (locally or nationally) are NIMBY homeowners restricting supply increases the value of existing homes.

It'd be the funniest thing ever if the UK shooting itself in the foot with brexit ends up establishing it as the central AI hub in Europe thanks to being able to avoid over-regulation.

You don't want someone that worked at FAANG whose impact was a rounding error, you want someone who gave it everything and still didn't get there. They still need that win and all you have to do is give them better odds this time.

After Apple killed user-level tracking in iOS14, Facebook went all in on Marketing Mix Modeling with Robyn, an open source library. Now Google is getting into the game with an *unofficial* library called LightweightMMM, and it couldn’t be more different.

Lend me your case studies: anywhere someone has talked publicly about using Marketing Mix Modeling, Multi-Touch Attribution, or Conversion Lift Studies. I'm building a database.

Yes it should be calibrated to surface non-obvious recommendations. That's where value is created.

5/ ...so they recommend including it with a 'score card' approach. You score creatives against a set of quantitively measurable best practices. Then include that as a proxy in your model. i.e. share_of_impressions_following_best_practice = [0.23, 0.24, 0.3, etc]

There's only so many times you can visit the computer museum.

Isn't it on the EU to block the content for their citizens? Why is it up to the social media networks to do it.

Can we do SimCity next? Would love to see what kind of vibe city they go for.

It's unethical to use an adblocker if you work in marketing

I bought myself a Nintendo Switch after Christmas and now my wife and I play Mario Kart instead of watching Netflix. This is the life 8 year old me always wanted.

Working with a Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) client, and a Conversion Lift Study (CLS) client, now all I need is a Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) client and I will have collected all the incrementality stones.

In traditional marketing we're taught to work out our strategy first, then choose our tactics based on that strategy. In practice I've found that the most successful startups change their strategy based on the economics of the available tactics.

You could literally build an "import from Meta" feature like Bing had from Google and I guarantee you hundreds of agencies will jump at the opportunity to add "turned on Twitter ads" to pad out their quarterly business review.

Basically every scientific paper that says "AI can't do X" only tested it on GPT-3.5 or below and when you try it on GPT-4 it works. Even professional researchers are too cheap to pay for plus.

I think it is the consulting industry that doesn't understand

Can't really copy some of these policies...

Total cultural domination from the US that even its enemies are counseling each other to be more American.

£180k, so like what an intern SWE might make in Palo Alto

1/ Facebook is bullish on MMM to solve the iOS14 problem. They are investing a lot in open source code (Robyn) and have created a special MMM feed for measurement partners. facebookexperimental.github.…

4/ The biggest mistake analysts make with MMM is not incorporating creative: it has the largest impact on performance but is almost never included (for practical reasons, you just can't have more than 1 variable per 10 observations, so there's no room to spare)...

Yesterday I went viral on Twitter live tweeting a Facebook event on the normally dry topic of Marketing Mix Modeling, an attribution technique from the 1960s. Over 80,000 views in 24 hours! Good news – Facebook has a (more technical) talk on right now.

Writing publicly about your work. What you think will happen: - they'll steal all my secrets and laugh my mistakes What I thought would happen: - people will point out where I'm wrong so I learn and improve What actually happens: - "hey can we pay you as a consultant..."

Uber has no cars. Airbnb has no real estate. Boom doesn't make a sonic boom. This is the new economy

le 11-09

The answers are there but they're blurred out until Sam signs into his Quora account.

I did this for our first head of marketing at my agency. First salary he had taken in years. He took a month to push the first campaign but then doubled our business every year for the next three years.

Tabasco is three simple ingredients: distilled vinegar, red pepper, salt. 100% of it is made on Avery Island, by a family-run company over five generations. Most indie businesses should aim to be Tabasco companies, not the next Uber, Google, or OpenAI.