3 Things: Rainbow Wine, Personal SWOT, F**k It Ship It Bot

Happy Sunday (and if you celebrate… Happy Passover, Easter, or Ramadan!) and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Rainbow Wine

• Personal SWOT

• F**k It Ship It Bot

1. Rainbow Wine

Wine production dates all the way back to the neolithic period in Georgia from 6000 BC, Iran from 5000 BC, Armenia from 4100 BC (first evidence of large-scale production), and Sicily from 4000 BC. Wine quickly became a central part of rituals and religious practices going back to the ancient Egyptians, and then the Jews and Phoenicians who spread wine across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa through trade. Wine is still used today in Catholicism to represent the blood of Christ and in many other religious ceremonies. As European empires began exploring and colonizing much of the world, they spread wine and the practice of winemaking with them. The modern wine industry is split between “Old World”, represented by Europe, North Africa and the Middle East (primarily France, Italy, Portugal and Spain), and “New World” represented by North/South America, South Africa, and Australia/New Zealand. While the differences are mostly just geographic, there are still some winemaking traditions and vine varietals that tend to fall along those lines.

Until recently, there hadn’t been much innovation in the modern wine industry. The same practices, producers, grapes, and blends remained relatively unchanged. Even the form factor of the wine bottle has remained the same despite lots of innovation in the beer and spirits markets, including ready-to-drink cocktails. Over the past few years, the amount of canned wine has skyrocketed hitting $200M in sales in 2020, showing just how eager consumers (especially Millennials) are for innovation in the market and for fun, modern brands. Last weekend, I went with my family to Jack London Square in Oakland and we saw people drinking what looked like bright blue wine. It turned out to be Blanc de Blue sparkling wine and it was absolutely delicious. The color is a beautiful aqua blue that looks totally artificial but is completely natural and made using blueberries. That got me thinking… could you create a line of rainbow wines using natural ingredients? Imagine how well this would do on social media and with influencers. It could be packaged in fun cans or uniquely shaped glass bottles to get the full color effect. You could sell cases that contain all of the colors and run fun campaigns encouraging consumers to post pictures and videos, creating a ton of user generated content and organic traffic.

2. Personal SWOT

A SWOT analysis is a common tool used in business planning to help teams identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and create strategies by taking into account real-world internal and external factors. In 1965, groups at both Stanford Research Institute and Harvard Graduate School of Business published content about corporate strategic management and planning that laid out the basic framework for the SWOT analysis, and since then it has become widely adopted in the corporate world when evaluating the company, market, product, or specific initiative. While it’s not a perfect analogy, when it comes to individuals and not companies, there are a host of personality tests like Myers Briggs or the Enneagram test which millions of people take each year to identify their psychological type and help predict and explain tendencies and behavior. Myers Briggs brings in ~$45m a year alone, but the bigger pie is in 360 reviews and their ilk which have been popularized by HR and OKR tools like Lattice and a myriad of professional service and coaching companies, helping workers identify their core strenghts and areas for improvement.

The idea behind 360 degree feedback traces its roots back to the US military who used a process of multi-rater feedback during WWI designed to take in input from a number of parties when assessing a solider. During WWII, the German military introduced the concept of collecting feedback from subordinates in addition to managers and peers to create the concept we now know as 360 degree feedback. Today, this type of review is widely used among knowledge workers after Jack Welch popularized the format at GE. While it is often useful to collect and synthesize a holistic assessment of a worker, I think a more interesting approach would be applying a SWOT analysis to the individual as opposed to a more open-ended format. It’s especially pertinent now given the “great reassessment/resignation/etc” where many are trying to figure out what to do next and how to spend their working time in the most fulfilling ways. A tool would first have an individual self-assess their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and then collect insights from various people in their lives like colleagues, managers, direct reports, friends, or mentors. It would then create a visual 4-quadrant matrix outlining the areas the person accels and opportunities presented, as well as weaknesses and pitfalls to be conscious of. Similar to Myers Briggs or Enneagram, you can create different “types” of people and brand it like the other tests, creating a moat and also virality as people will often share their type causing others to want to take the test and find out their own.

3. F**k it, Ship it Bot

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, has a famous saying that “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”. Many humans, especially those who are ambitious, have a general tendency to be perfectionists and over-engineer things — trying to get every aspect exactly right before they are willing to share it with the world. The idea behind Reid’s quote is that often, the best thing you can do to make forward progress is launch the thing and get the feedback necessary to iterate and make it better (or kill it and move on to something else). This applies to areas well beyond product launches. Anytime you are either procrastinating or attempting to make something perfect like responding to an email, writing a thank-you note, doing taxes, working on a craft, organizing your closet, or literally any other project, the right thing to do is take action and move on. This helps both use time efficiently, and also clears up the mental space associated with putting something off or trying to over-optimize.

There are dozens upon dozens of productivity apps out there. Some try to lock you out of applications during certain times or mute all notifications. Some attempt to streamline note-taking or other workstreams. Some tools offer various types of music or sounds to get you in a flow state. The consistent thing is that they all use the carrot approach and not the stick. I personally respond better to more forceful nudges, constructive criticism, or flat out shaming when it comes to getting things done or tackling the harder items, and I don’t think I’m alone. A friend from college created a product called Pavlok which is a wearable band that *literally* shocks you into breaking bad habits. While I think this is a bit extreme (though I’m sure works well for many!), a softer “stick” could be a chrome extension that tracks your behavior and pops up a bot that says “F**k It, Ship It!” when it finds areas of procrastination or things you are spending too much time on. Snoozed an email for the 6th time? F**k it, ship it! Keep coming back to the same doc 9 days in a row without making progress? F**k it, ship it! You could add logic so the bot can hold you accountable for specific tasks and there can also be pre-built areas where it knows to look based off of where others find it useful.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine