Connection, Not Tech Stacks
What does Taylor Swift have in common with a freelance web designer from Vancouver Island?
This week’s SubStack is short. We're at the in-laws for a family medical emergency and free time is scarce.
My husband is a political economist, so I sometimes mentally “collect” stories that might interest him. Taylor Swift has been in the news for concerts that have not only boosted the US economy, but are money generating enough on a global scale that countries not on her list have demanded to know “why not them"?
In a time of AI-generated content and writers and actors striking, this kind of revenue defies a popular idea in tech startups:
That your idea is what matters. That the IP is what matters. It's the mission that matters.
Whenever a problem erupts, it's always that no one person is more important than the "mission", or "all that matters is the code."
And yet, here you have a person disrupting economies by *not* scheduling a stopover in Canada or Singapore.
Who's recent albums are all re-recordings of ones published over ten years ago.
Personal connection matters to people.
Ok, you're bored. And you want to know who this freelancer is and how he or she is comparable.
When google analytics was deemed illegal in Europe because of its inherent anti-GDPR design, I had to look for a new analytics tool.
There are a few GDPR-friendly analytics tools to choose from, but the one I went with was Fathom Analytics. Is Fathom better than European owned, Plausible? Not that I can tell. The features look the same side by side. The price of Fathom is just a hair more than Plausible.
But because I used to subscribe to Paul Jarvis's email on working as a solo designer and business owner back in the day, Fathom already had a place in my subconcious.
If you asked me what nuggets I learned from Paul’s emails, I couldn't tell you. There were no lists, no simple take-home action I could take. They weren’t “newsletter” emails. They were just..emails.
I LIKED the guy, And I liked his integrity that came through the emails. For years he talked about being uncomfortable with data gathering on social media. From time to time, he spoke a little about a project he was working on to build an analytics tool that didn't "spy" on people. When I was looking for new analytics tools I remembered him. I had to google the name of the project.
His writing as a human first and foremost, not as a brand or a designer, is what made his product a lot more trustworthy to me. I had a connection to it.
If you're a founder or starting a product, don't hide behind "We".
Let your personality and humanity shine through. Products are copied or bought. Features are stolen.
Personal connection is what cannot be replaced. It’s what we value most.