Developing The Ability To Sense The n+1 Effects Of Inventions.
Edition #167
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You share your valuable thoughts and comments, and start a conversation here.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.
How AI Will Reinvent Marketing.
Andrew Chen has written a brilliant article on how AI can potentially transform marketing. What’s great about this piece is that Andrew builds a great narrative about why AI fundamentally requires all marketers and brands to redefine how marketing will or needs to be done in the future. He makes this point emphatically, taking past inventions, like cars, and how some societal transformations cars created were not even envisaged by many. He writes, “First-order effects of inventions are easy to predict, but secondary, tertiary, and n+1 effects are very hard.”
Here are some key thoughts from his article on the topic:
Andrew outlines a concept of ‘infinite labour’ and ‘infinite content’ that can potentially transform marketing workflows.
How product launches can change: ‘Why not simply launch to the entire world and have all the ads, messages, and even product UX be in all the right languages?’
Product onboarding journeys can be reimagined: ‘..onboarding into any new product, or dealing with problems, will feel like a concierge experience.’
Content can become immersive and deep: ‘The depth and complexity of different digital assets become interchangeable and infinite, such that what we consider ads right now might be better seen as experiences/products in themselves.’
New marketing channels and ways to communicate marketing can emerge: ‘Many new marketing channels will be invented, and many existing channels will have to be reinvented (or will ride off into the sunset).’
AI will create companions as a new dominant channel: ‘But in the future, as AI allows the $-to-labor conversion, every startup could create a streamer that just demos their product 24x7. Or maybe an army of streamers.’
Marketing and Sales will converge: ‘Rather than 1:many broadcast, we will have many 1:1 agents selling people over chat/phone/video and providing a truly personalized pitch.
Read this entire article here.
How Zepto Became India’s Fastest-Growing Startup.
What does building a world-class internet company out of India take? China has produced many, and India is at the cusp of creating many. This conversation with Aadith Palicha, Co-Founder and CEO of Zepto, on the Y Combinator’s Podcast Build The Future provides some lovely insights on building one.
Here are some interesting takeaways:
When starting a startup from scratch, think of the user first or the consumer backwards, rather than the business processes or cost optimization backwards.
Try to have an audacious and ambitious goal - “Do things that don't scale”
It’s not so much about valuations, fundraising, exits, etc. Of course, they are essential, but what is more important is this statement from Aadith: ‘If you win the consumer, you win everything.’
Live the problem yourself. Experience what you promise as a business, like a customer. It teaches you a bunch of things, like there’s no tomorrow.
Scaling up involves keeping your ears on the ground and making slow iterations that become meaningful over time.
Why is it important to control the entire stack of customer experience?
On Work-life balance - “…but you definitely need, I believe, portions in your life where you take yourself to the maximum and really achieve a lot.”
Don’t do a startup for fame or money. There are far easier ways to do it!
If you are in a startup, you must be fundamentally excited by the next problem statement.
You can also listen to this episode on:
OpenAI's Sam Altman Talks The Future Of AI, Safety And Power — Live at TED2025
In this conversation with Sam Altman, Chris Anderson, Head of TED, asks some unresolved and intriguing questions about AI and its impact on society, people's lives, businesses, etc.
Here are some highlights from this conversation that can shed light on some far-reaching impacts that are yet to be resolved or beginning to unfold with the rapid adoption of AI:
‘How can AI use my data without my consent?’
How will the world navigate this complex scenario in which your content is being used by any AI company to answer queries?
Is it not fair for any named person in the prompt whose work is being used to get something back?
Therefore, are we heading to a new era in which digital marketing will transform itself? Will new business models emerge in the coming decade? Finally, how will content exchange or revenue share models be built that are distinctly different from the past?
You can click on the above link to watch this video.
Developing The Ability To Sense The n+1 Effects Of Inventions.
Andrew Chen’s article ‘How AI will reinvent marketing’ provided much food for thought about inventions and their impact. One of the most important points he makes is that while most of us will be able to see the first-order effects of inventions, it is very hard to predict the secondary, tertiary, and n+1 effects of inventions.
One of the best ways to understand the impact of disruptive inventions is to study their history and proliferation across a society. Anton Howes, Historian in Residence at the Royal Society of Arts, does a phenomenal job of studying inventions. This can reveal to you the unforeseen effects of the inventions on a society and its culture over time. Also, what studying their history does is to prepare you for the unexpected to happen. It can also open your mind to ideas of new businesses, future professional skills needed that will emerge from these inventions. Not to mention how the existing businesses will transform due to these inventions. Hence, studying the history and diffusion of inventions in a society can significantly help you build patterns in your head to improve your chances of seeing the unseen.
Let’s take a couple of examples to illustrate this:
Steam Engine—Nearly half a century after James Watt invented the steam engine, Britain became the largest empire in the world. Interestingly, the steam engine was not the primary invention that made this transformation happen. However, many innovators later repurposed it for other uses, such as mechanising manufacturing and production, especially textile manufacturing, iron smelting, ships, coal mines, etc.
Television—The invention of television forever changed how content is produced and distributed worldwide. Moreover, it has influenced and impacted stereo sound, online video services, education, cable TV, digital broadcasting, marketing communications, brand sponsorships, etc. The more significant impact is to study and observe how it has transformed society and culture, and therefore our behaviour and attitudes towards heroes, products, family settings, information dissemination, etc. This has led to the birth of new industries and professions.
A couple of common threads can be seen as you study these inventions:
Some inventions strive to add ‘Productivity Multipliers’ to existing working methods, for example, producing more goods and products at lower unit costs, moving people and goods faster, etc. These are first-order effects of inventions.
A few other inventions bring ‘Transformation Multipliers’ to how a society lives and works. The telegraph, an electric bulb, the internet, the mobile phone, etc., have transformed how we live, work, and communicate in society.
Many other inventions are ‘Imagination Multipliers’, which allow you to use both of the above and apply them to adjacent or totally unconnected industries or problems. E-commerce is an excellent example of the application of ‘Transformation Multiplier’ and ‘Productivity Multiplier’ across different industries and verticals.
There could be more multiplier principles, too. It seems like ‘Productivity Multiplier’ is the art of asking ‘How Much Better?’. ‘Transformation Multiplier’ is the art of asking ‘Why not? or What If?’. ‘Imagination Multipliers’ is the art of asking ‘ What Better If?’
If we can apply these principles and questions as to how AI will reinvent things as they exist today in our lives and work, maybe we will keep getting better at sensing and then predicting some of the secondary, tertiary, and n+1 effects that AI can impact in your business or profession in the near future.
These can also help us reimagine and do many things that we have taken for granted and done for years. We can also rebuild from scratch many things that will become irrelevant with the rapid development and adoption of new inventions in many fields and functions.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Rethink and reimagine every marketing principle and rule of the past in the age of AI.
Successful start-ups first think ‘customer backwards’ and then apply that in ‘business backwards’ processes.
AI will force new business models in sharing content and revenue between creators and platforms.