Shaving Pieries on Demand-Side Sales: Short Summary Notes. "People convince themselves, we convince them of nothing." (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell. This complication of tales from the world of schooling isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it. School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave. (school is prison) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education #8: Dealing with the Internet. It’s rough out there. In this post, I’ll cover the latest arguments that smartphones should be banned in schools, including simply because the notifications are too distracting (and if you don’t care much about that, why are the kids in school at all?), problems with kids on social media including many negative interactions, and also the new phenomenon called sextortion. (more)

Cedric Chin: A Demand-Side Mystery. This week's Commoncog piece is free; next week's piece will be members-only: Vanguard as a Demand-Side Mystery — This is Part 3 of the Understanding Customer Demand series. At the end of the Part 2, after we walked through the Jobs To Be Done framework, we explored the setup for a mystery together. The two frameworks (Sales Safari and JTBD) that we’ve explored together actually rests on a common premise: both frameworks assume that demand is a function of pain — a customer only becomes a customer when they experience some lack in their lives; something that they want to make progress on. (more)

Bob is one of the principal architects of the Jobs to be Done theory and founder of The Re-Wired Group. https://therewiredgroup.com/about/bob-moesta/ https://www.bobmoesta.com/ (more)

basis-case of Jobs to be Done framework

mutual fund designed to mimic an already-existing market "index", resulting in lower fees than managed mutual funds, often resulting in better net returns to customer.

largest manager of index funds (more)

irrestible (more)

an acute gap between a person's desire and reality; cf compelling

What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, ISBN:633697223 - problem solving via re-framing (more)

Joe Procopio: How the Tech Industry Stopped Building Things Customers Want. When was the last time you waited in line to buy the latest and greatest tech product? (more)

Teacher for programmers and BootStrapping One Man Show-s. (more)

Martin Cagan: Customer Inspired; Technology Enabled | Silicon Valley Product Group (more)

see James Burke

Cedric Chin: Speedrunning the Skill of Demand. This week's essay is freely available and kicks us off on a new series on getting good at demand — the skill that underpins sales and marketing and product. (2025-03-20-ChinSpeedrunningTheSkillOfDemand) (more)

Cedric Chin: Speedrunning the Skill of Demand. This is Part 1 in a series of essays about Customer Demand. Skill at understanding demand is what underpins the domain of marketing, sales, and product. There’s an old Peter Drucker saying that goes “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” (Drucker on The Purpose and Objectives of a Business) (more)

Ash Maurya: The Backstory Behind Customer Forces Stories. Good customer / problem discovery is key to achieving problem/solution fit. (more)

The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1] These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic... The first known occurrence of the term in its Latin form (Respublica literaria) is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini dated July 6, 1417;[3] it was used increasingly in the 16th and 17th, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals... There are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's Republic.[5] Part of the difficulty in determining its origin is that, unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters (more)

Rosicrucianism (/ˌroʊzɪˈkruːʃəˌnɪzəm, ˌrɒzɪ-/) is a spiritual and cultural movement that arose in early modern Europe in the early 17th century after the publication of several texts announcing to the world a new esoteric order. Rosicrucianism is symbolized by the Rose Cross or Rosy Cross. There have been several Rosicrucian (or Rosicrucian-inspired) organizations since the initial movement was founded, including the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (1750s–1790s), the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1865–present), and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1887–1903). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucianism