That One Guy MG💡📈

William is a great reminder that the people who win become obsessed with something very small and stick with it far longer than anyone else. Enjoy three minutes of him explaining how to become the very best at one thing: "I'm probably the best in the world at a couple small, boring stuff. I do think the world for builders is the world of specialists. And you have to go extremely, extremely deep into your area and that's where you find value. One of the best determiners for success of founders is can they find the most boring thing humanly possible, interesting, over a multi-decade period. How AI is going to disrupt software...These are generalist topics that I can probably find a thousand people that have interesting, compelling ideas and can go pretty deep on that. But you can't create value there. You can create value if you're the number one person in the entire world at this little niche thing. And I think this niche thing can generate billions of dollars over time. The problem is those places are really boring and requires you to read hundreds of thousands of pages that you cannot Gemini Deep Research your way through."

@shaig I just happen to be listing a great piece of family land here - zillow.com/homedetails/0-…

The biggest take off in AI isn’t a lobster, it is that millions of weekly phone calls to confirm trucking loads and appointments that used to be done by overseas call centers and are now done by AI callers. It flipped in like 12 months.

The age of opaque lead sources and blind traffic in financial publishing is over. Ad networks used to send leads and refused to provide any information about where the leads came from. This allowed them to get away with shady business practices. Media buyers are not putting up with that crap anymore.

What is the over/under on when they roll this back? I'm thinking 3 months. Making people order on their phones during a movie is nonsensical, the current system works fine.

I can’t be the only person that found the malpractice insurance the interesting part. How does that policy work ?

Big news for taxpayers: the Texas Bond, Tax, and Project Database is LIVE! Now Texans can see exactly how much debt their local governments carry, what bonds voters approved, and how those dollars are being used. BIG step for transparency and accountability! comptroller.texas.gov/transparency/l…

Haus year in review. An exec summary of all the research that we published in 2025. We’ll be talking a lot more about what this means and how to use this to your advantage in 2026. 1. View based channels (YouTube, TikTok, & CTV) are systematically undervalued by click attribution because their impact is delayed and skews omnichannel. - YouTube is a powerhouse: It drives 3.4x more incremental lift than Google Ads reports. - Like YouTube, Tiktok builds your funnel and is best viewed as demand creation. It delivers 68% more lift in the post-campaign window as audiences take time to convert and drives 1.9x more value when you account for its impact on Amazon and retail sales. - CTV has the most delayed return. During big moments like Cyber Week, Connected TV sees efficiency improve by 344% when you account for delayed conversions. 2. Meta is king but beware the automation trap - Meta remains one of the most reliable sources of incremental performance. 77 of the top 100 highest lift Haus experiments ran on Meta. - Automated tools are excellent at identifying intent, but they may prioritize capturing cheap, easy conversions over generating new ones. - Meta Advantage+ vs. Manual: Advantage+ is great for speed, but it over-reports revenue by 12 percentage points compared to Manual campaigns. Manual campaigns frequently deliver higher incremental ROAS because they are less likely to cannibalize existing organic demand. 3. Branded Search & PMAX Buying your own keywords is often not necessary; it is a defensive tactic that depends on competitive pressure. - Competition dictates value: Branded search is highly incremental when you have 3+ competitors bidding on your terms. If competition is low, you may be paying for traffic you would get for free organically. - Sales Channel Shift: Branded search tends to cannibalize your own Amazon sales, shifting that revenue to your DTC site. - PMAX Brand Exclusions: If your goal is acquiring new customers, you should almost certainly exclude brand terms from Performance Max (PMAX); doing so lowered Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) in 100% of tested cases. However, High-AOV brands (>$238) may need to keep brand terms included to give the algorithm enough signal to work. 4. Black Friday / Cyber Monday and Seasonality - You may not see immediate payback on ads, especially in the lead up to holidays. That doesn’t mean media is not working. - For Q4/Cyber Week, consumers add to cart early (early November) and buy later. Brands that ramped spend early saw 75% efficiency improvements when accounting for this lag. Apparel brands saw outsized impact. - Don't cut a test too early: Cutting spend based on midpoint results runs the risk of "false negatives." Run longer tests and adding a Post-Treatment Window (PTW) that runs through your sale period to see the full payback.

Extremely interesting! (source: #robots-txt" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review…) Seems like more and more sites are blocking GPTBot, unclear to me what that will mean. Perhaps another long term advantage for GOOG.

for my ecomm friends, is there a trick to getting decent support from @klaviyo ? So far I've gotten wrong answers from the LLM and then wrong responses from support and tickets closed w/o resolving. Do you dial 1 for spanish or something?

This Kurt Vonnegut short story reminds me tremendously of LLMs - esl-bits.eu/ESL.English.Li… - and why they (apparently) drive some people crazy.

I did not think any aspect of my life in 2025 would include attempting to prove I am a human and failing at that, but here we are.

If you have any doubts about who Prop Q benefits, the love Austin pac (pro prop q) campaign financial statement is out and it is chock full NGO'S trying to save their grifts. Donation highlights: ECHO $25k Foundation communities $25k @KirkPWatson PAC $20k Sunrise homeless center $5k The Other ones Foundation $10k @chitovela3 $1k #atxcouncil #txlege

Airbnb uses a fascinating, composite approach to measure the lifetime value (LTV) of listings. First, they start with an estimate of the number of bookings they expect that listing to receive in the next 365 days. This is a rolling estimate that is updated over time. Then, they adjust that prediction by the number of bookings that listing might cannibalize, meaning: the bookings that listing might take from other listings in a zero-sum fashion versus incrementally new bookings that wouldn't occur absent its presence on the platform. This is the core of the estimate and distinguishes it from naive LTV estimation approaches. Airbnb determines this with a value function that takes into account various features of the local supply/demand dynamic. This is "Incremental LTV." Finally, they modify the LTV prediction by incorporating the value of a broad range of marketing efforts that may enhance listing appeal. One example could be interventions with Airbnb owners that improve their booking rates, but this also might include product improvements to things like Search or Recommendations.

The true face of DEEP VALUE

All the things wrong with Austin’s new “brand” 1) “We are launching our first-ever brand, aimed at improving our engagement with + service to Austinites.” Marketing 101: A brand is not a logo. It’s the narrative, values, and feeling that a company, city, etc. evokes, expressed through a logo, stories, and assets. Slapping a new logo on everything does not improve engagement. 2) The logo is just not visually appealing. 3) “Austin City Council voted in 2018 to make developing a cohesive brand for the City a strategic priority.” Seven years of work for this?! 4) As City Council demands a massive tax increase, they're spending $1.1M on this. Priorities are out of whack, or, better yet, we see what the real priorities are. 5) If a rebrand is so important, crowdsource it and let the public pick. Way more cost efficient, effective, and it would create real community buy-in. Austin’s brand is what you feel on the streets, what we build, and the story that carries past our walls. Focus there, not on a $1M grift.

The City of Austin needs to reverse course on this gawd forsaken. Council needs tell City Management to go back to the drawing board. #txlege

Open offer - I will redesign the City of Austin logo & brand for free & I will do a better job. The $1m spent on this can instead be spent figuring out how to pass an audit and implement basic controls. For $50k, I'll do the website, logo, all of it.

It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the fact that, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers. 2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year

Using AI in business: - writing JS for event tracking - success the 3rd time, would do again, only doing this moving forward. - doing research on vendors & making recommendations - persistently makes significant factual mistakes, but the deliverables are beautiful.