I loved the newsletter. However, what also needs to be reflected upon is the sustainability of the first two buckets. A lot of businesses, start with the motto of democratising access by providing a free service but run into sustainability challenges because their monetisation models are absent or unsustainable to say the least. A lot of these businesses rely either on advertising or charging the supply end of the marketplace but these models invariably have their challenges. So, in my mind democratising is a great idea but it stands more firmly on 3rd pillar ie Convenience ( = greater value) and delivers more sustainability & competitive advantage compared to Free / Cheaper services.
Democratizing implies making available to a larger or universal audience. However, just like in this country, having the opportunity to make every decision is not always better, and so for government, we have representatives (this may qualify as "easier" in your essay).
It will be interesting to watch the long term performance (assuming they don't dive into each others market) of Robinhood and Wealthfront. Both democratizing in different ways, but one has far less cognitive overhead than the other (personally, I would like Wealthfront to have a radar map where I could adjust the sectors to my liking over time, so it could be in between).
For SMBs, all the new choices have become overload. Keeping open/closing times accurate across Yelp and Google, making sure you are on the map for Google and Apple, that your advertising is where your customers are, etc, etc.
Sometimes, you would like to just designate an agent to deal with the new complexities of choices on your behalf.
This is awesome! Paradoxically, thank you for distilling your thoughts and expertise for free. A cool paid (cheaper) version of this would be how to develop a mental model for identifying gaps in the market to exploit these techniques. Certainly cheaper than business school! 11/10 post.
Great post Nikhil. Letting the working class have access to the analysis tools that high price points have excluded them from is a primary driver for me and my company. It's exciting to see so much activity around the same thesis. Thanks for sharing your thoughts (for free!)
Hi Nikhil - thank you for a great write up! If you have experience with developer tools, where would you put No-Code tools? I think they would fall into "More Convenient" category although the actual name might be different ("easier", "faster", "no coding required").
Robinhood makes a lot of its revenue through selling its order flow. I agree that democratising access generally is a very good thing but not always. The options trading Robinhood enables shouldn't be available to retail investors IMO because they don't understand the products they are investing in.
Nikhil,
I loved the newsletter. However, what also needs to be reflected upon is the sustainability of the first two buckets. A lot of businesses, start with the motto of democratising access by providing a free service but run into sustainability challenges because their monetisation models are absent or unsustainable to say the least. A lot of these businesses rely either on advertising or charging the supply end of the marketplace but these models invariably have their challenges. So, in my mind democratising is a great idea but it stands more firmly on 3rd pillar ie Convenience ( = greater value) and delivers more sustainability & competitive advantage compared to Free / Cheaper services.
Democratizing implies making available to a larger or universal audience. However, just like in this country, having the opportunity to make every decision is not always better, and so for government, we have representatives (this may qualify as "easier" in your essay).
It will be interesting to watch the long term performance (assuming they don't dive into each others market) of Robinhood and Wealthfront. Both democratizing in different ways, but one has far less cognitive overhead than the other (personally, I would like Wealthfront to have a radar map where I could adjust the sectors to my liking over time, so it could be in between).
For SMBs, all the new choices have become overload. Keeping open/closing times accurate across Yelp and Google, making sure you are on the map for Google and Apple, that your advertising is where your customers are, etc, etc.
Sometimes, you would like to just designate an agent to deal with the new complexities of choices on your behalf.
This is awesome! Paradoxically, thank you for distilling your thoughts and expertise for free. A cool paid (cheaper) version of this would be how to develop a mental model for identifying gaps in the market to exploit these techniques. Certainly cheaper than business school! 11/10 post.
Great post Nikhil. Letting the working class have access to the analysis tools that high price points have excluded them from is a primary driver for me and my company. It's exciting to see so much activity around the same thesis. Thanks for sharing your thoughts (for free!)
Hi Nikhil - thank you for a great write up! If you have experience with developer tools, where would you put No-Code tools? I think they would fall into "More Convenient" category although the actual name might be different ("easier", "faster", "no coding required").
Robinhood makes a lot of its revenue through selling its order flow. I agree that democratising access generally is a very good thing but not always. The options trading Robinhood enables shouldn't be available to retail investors IMO because they don't understand the products they are investing in.