The Boring Company Not-A-Flamethrower

The Boring Company Not-A-Flamethrower was casually announced by Elon Musk in this Dec 10, 2017 tweet.

The remaining promotional hats sold out quickly.

Seven weeks later:

100 hours later:

The Boring Company – Musk’s underground drilling company – sold 20,000 Flamethrowers in about 100 hours. That’s $10 million in top line revenue and millions more in free press and captured mind space.

Opps.. It’s not called a Flamethrower. It’s a “Not A Flamethrower” – a brilliant regulatory decision, drawing even more attention (and desire) to Musk’s scheme:

Musk drew some heat for this move – many criticizing him for making a flamethrower for his “rich friends” instead of giving a bunch of money to charity or ending world hunger.

What the non-strategic thinker missed was that Elon wasn’t making a toy for his friends. They have plenty of toys. This was a brilliant marketing stunt.

Of course it’s not just a stunt. The flamethrowers were real. And so is the deal the company just signed with the city of Chicago. The Boring Company will build an 18 mile high-speed (150mph) skate-based tunnel transit system between O’Hare International Airport and downtown Chicago.

Bottom Line: If Musk can get people excited about city planning and tunneling, you can get people excited about what you’re doing.

Entertaining review of the Not-A-Flamethrower pickup day in LA.

June 14, 2018

Capitalizing on Changing Beauty Norms

It’s one thing to be obsessed with our looks, our beauty…

As the demands of beauty rise, not only do we have to do more all the time, but their nature also changes. Beauty becomes more important. It has begun to function as an ethical ideal. Beauty is often what we — rightly or wrongly — value most. It is what we think about, talk about and what we spend our time and hard-earned cash on. If we are good at beauty, we feel we are good, virtuous; if we are bad, we feel we are no good, almost no matter what else we do. We judge others too on how they look. We make assumptions about what people are like and how successful they are. We read character traits directly from looks, and we start doing this as young as four years old.

…but it’s another thing to confuse beauty practices for health practices.

Consumers are allowing themselves to be manipulated by obvious marketing tactics and the beauty industry is capitalizing on the opportunity. These marketing and advertising tactics remind me of the diamond industry, which I’ve written extensively about.

Let’s take hair for instance. “Shaving, plucking, waxing and lasering” have become so normalized that hair removal is no longer a “beauty practice” but has been “redefined as a hygiene practice, as part of so-called “routine” maintenance.” And these redefined social norms aren’t just for celebrities – they’re for everyone.

Hair removal becomes something we have to do, a requirement. It is not an option to refuse — like teeth-cleaning, but without any of the health benefits. Beauty practices are indulgent and optional; hygiene practices are necessary and required. You don’t have to do a beauty practice; you do have to do something that is required to meet minimum standards, just to be normal. Once the shift to routine is complete, the fact that this is a demanding beauty practice becomes invisible.

The Beauty Market

The Economist reported in 2003 (Real Men Get Waxed) that the US male grooming market was $8 billion. 15 years later, that number has nearly tripled and is on pace to grow by 12% annually.

(source)

Bottom Line: Societal norms and their changes drive huge shifts in spending – especially when there’s strong emotional connection or potential for embarrassment. What shifting & emotionally-charged norms can you capitalize on?

June 13, 2018

Building a Business from Hate

Bianca del Rio didn’t set out to be “the nastiest bitch on the planet,” but she kind of is–and it’s really working for her career.

Del Rio, formerly Roy Haylock, is the crowned queen of the 6th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. One key to her success has been simply embracing who she is and not copying what everyone else in her industry is doing.

The queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race were all competing as queens. Bianca Del Rio realized that she needed to stand out, to do things differently. Her management recommended that she record an album. Her reply: “I’m not going to do an album. There’s enough horrible drag queens singing.”

And Del Rio’s intuition is spot on. When everyone else is zigging, zag.

What Del Rio is doing is quite expansive. Since RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bianca has headlined and sold out standup comedy tours worldwide, starred in two feature films, released a satirical self-help book, and created a line of no. 1-selling makeup removers.

“It kind of snowballed. I didn’t plan to be a comedian. I didn’t plan to be a drag queen. It just kind of evolved,” says Del Rio, who was a professional costume designer before doing drag full-time.

As a host for drag shows Del Rio got a lot of stage time, dealing with back-stage delays, hecklers, and impatient patrons. She seized the opportunity and integrated insult comedy into her hosting routine.

Since then, Bianca Del Rio has bloomed and business has boomed.

“Everything is offensive, so I’m enjoying the fact that I’m anti-kind. You’ve got to go out and just speak your mind. It needs to be heard,” Del Rio says. “There was a young boy who was 13-years-old who was in drag with his grandmother that came to see me [during a comedy show] and I was nervous because he was like, ‘me and my grandma love Drag Raceand we watch the show together!’ And I looked at [the grandma] and I said, ‘you do know my show’s going to be a little racy?’ She goes, ‘well, what the fuck do you think I came for?’ So I’m bringing families together–through hate.”

Find your niche – no matter how offensive or off the beaten path.

[Photo: Daisy Korpics for Fast Company]

May 31, 2018

Profit and Competition – Stephan Kinsella

Profit and competition are inherently intertwined.

Profit is always being pushed down by competition. So profit is an unnatural thing. So you always have to to think: how can I make a profit? and once I make it how am I going to keep making a profit knowing that I’m going to attract competitors? — Stephan Kinsella, “Your Welcome” with Michael Malice 001 – Intellectual Property with Stephan Kinsella

The above concept is at the very core of profit-driven business strategy.

I wanted to dig deeper into what Kinsella meant by profits being “unnatural” so I pinged him on the twitters. Here was his reply:

Profit is in a sense unnatural–it tends to be driven down to the natural rate of interest as the market tends to equilibrium. Profit is hard to maintain in the face of competition. This is fairly standard Austrian economics AFAIK, though my argument doesnt depend on this insight — Stephan Kinsella

By the way: What he means by the “natural rate of interest” is the interest rate of borrowing money if we only consider the time-value of money and ignore the risk (and therefore increase in interest rates) associated with the borrower defaulting on their loan. Don’t worry if the natural interest rate part isn’t clear – I needed him to explain it to me as well and it’s not the point anyway.

Profit and Competition

Increasing Hooters Utilization

WeWork has new competition in Tokyo – Hooters. It’s all about utilization.

Hooters in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood has teamed up with Spacee – a space-matching service – to rent out work areas during the restaurant’s downtime.

Hooters has over 400 locations worldwide and they, like all brick and mortar businesses, have a utilization problem. After lunchtime traffic at the Hooters in Ginza dies down, 20 seats open up for rent via Spacee until the dinner rush begins.

While WeWork may not be worried about the competition yet, it’s going to be hard to beat the Hooters price. Spacee members pay only 50 yen, or about 48 cents, for a 30-minute work block, and that includes a discount on some beverages and an atmosphere that some will undoubtedly find truly inspiring.

(Oddly enough, students don’t have to pay the 50 yen fee. But if they’re under 18, then they have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. Glad someone’s thinking about the children..)

Utilization

From an entrepreneurial theory perspective, one enormous path for adding value is to reduce inefficiencies. Low utilization – especially for capital intensive goods – is a huge contributor to inefficiency. And over the past 10 years, a new wave of utilization-focused start-ups have flourished on the shoulders of both the internet and mobile phones.

AirBnB increases the utilization of your spare bedroom or couch. Getaround increases the utilization of your car. Lyft and Uber increase the utilization of your time (and your car).

What’s interesting is that these companies are all marketplace plays. The business is in connecting parties with spare capacity with parties who need capacity. Bring together both parties in a trusted forum and you’ve got yourself an interesting business.

Look around you: What inefficiencies do you see? Where is utilization low? Is the value being squandered worth recovering? Can you create a trusted marketplace? Can you acquire customers at a reasonable price?

PS: In other WeWork news, the company is continuing to expand very rapidly. You may have seen some misleading headlines about $18 billion in leases, but that number is the sum of many years of leases, $13.2 billion of which is for 2023 and beyond. Their 2018 and 2019 lease payments are for $706 million and $984 million respectively. Bloomberg covers the story here and here.

PPS: Hooters and strategy. Strategy and Hooters. Are you not entertained?

(Photo Credit)