3 min to read
What I learned from Jeff Bezos
Another guy who knows how to make money
Highlights from The Everything Store by Jeff Bezos
- “Amazon isn’t happening to the book business,” he likes to say to authors and journalists. “The future is happening to the book business.”
- they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer
- Bezos wasn’t looking for the correct answer, only for the individual to demonstrate creativity by coming up with a sound way to derive a possible solution
- if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them
- looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things
- Bezos, characteristically secretive, divulged only the legal minimum and withheld some data
- One of his first moves was to cut a rare office perk, free Advil,
- not taking the time to cultivate other leaders, listen to their issues, or invest in their personal growth.
- The shipping club also keyed off a faintly irrational human impulse to maximize the benefits of a membership club one has
- Bezos pointed out that those were emotional concerns, not logical ones.
- giving customers instant gratification—the immediate download of any e-book
- Inside the company at the time, the culture was self-perpetuating,
- found it increasingly hard to reconcile the company’s approach toward its partners with his own Christian values and says that for a year after leaving Amazon, he had post-traumatic stress disorder.
- alternated urgency with delay
- making every book ever printed available for instant digital delivery
- lose money on many of its sales. Bezos was fine with that—he believed publishers would eventually be forced to lower their wholesale prices on e-books to reflect the lower costs of publication.
- Amazon decided not to let publishers know about the planned $9.99 price, lest they object. This was easily rationalized; retailers have no obligation to tell their suppliers how they plan to price products
- Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site
- Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it
- Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers
Additional notes I picked up from other sources
- Velocity matters, you don’t want to be rich in your grave
- Remove friction - to reply SMS 3 clicks
- Everything but math/physics/biology are up for debate
- There is more gravity at the bottom of the building than at the top so you age faster on floor 1 than floor 30
- Use 6th grade vocabulary - lower friction - how can I make this easier?
- If it’s 3 forms now, how can I make it 1 field?
- Make sure the call to action is easy to understand
- Get to the point quickly
- A video is a quick way to build trust and remove friction
- Use association bias ‘like Oprah’s book club except I read the books for you’
- Online seminar (even pre internet people know) vs webinar (hard to understand)
- State benefits first THEN only then how you will do it
- “imagine how you will feel pulling up to the restaurant “ vs “10 cylinder, 500 HP”
- Not deterred by short term obstacles - look at long term obstacles. This problem may be big but I can get over it, it’s short term. If you’re flying in a jet you’re going so fast you have to look long term problems.
- Long term obstacle: people will want to read on electronic devices. Short term problem: there’s no such device right now. Solution: build the device yourself
- What is something you’re not doing, that you know you have to do but since it will result in short term pain you’re putting off. What are you putting off in the short term that you know you should stop putting off?
- If you have something hard to do, do it as soon as you get up. Blitz it.
- To start a business, get one customer
- Don’t worry charging your first customers $1/month and leaving them on this rate forever. Just get customers.
- If people can steal your idea quickly you shouldn’t do it - spread it out there and see how much traction is in there. If there’s not enough obstacles in execution you will have tons of competitors anyway.
