The Branded and Gilded Life
The Branded and Gilded Life
The single title bookshop
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The extreme opposite of Amazon

Only one title is on sale in this bookstore at a time.

Where else but Japan?

In Ginza, in a single room,  Morioka Shoten, transforms book retailing to high art.

The clientele is invited to interact with authors and absorb the creative atmosphere around the title.

Book readings and interactions with the author are all part of the package.

The books are changed only once a week

That limits the number of titles to just over 50 in a single year - which makes every book an experience.

It is the brainchild of a former bookstore clerk who arrived at this concept after two decades of experience in the industry.

Amazon, within a few years of launching had over 2 million titles.

This bookshop will never sell as many in a lifetime.

Like bookends on a shelf, it represents business models that are poles apart.

Abundance with minimal attention or scarcity with maximum attention.

The idea is to delve into the mind of the author who wrote the book.

Get to know the creative process and the drive that made the book possible.

A labor of love gets the love it deserves.


A remix of a remix

One of the earliest viral videos on YouTube was a lip-synch

A young man sitting in front of his screen recorded himself mouthing inane lyrics to a peppy tune.

For all those wandering down the evolving genres of YouTube, this was one of those happy intermissions.

The Moldovan pop group who recorded the original were never in the limelight but their song took off.

47 million views for a version voiced by a guy recording it in his dorm room and uploading it to YouTube, just for kicks.

But the group capitalized on the popularity with a video in 2011 that went to 75 million views

That may have been the end of that story but it was recently revived in a tweet.

And this time, the faces are famous across the world - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Jack Ma. 

There are 9 faces on screen. And they change expressions in perfect synch to the same song.

Mark Zuckerberg looks more animated than he has ever been in real life. 

This whole sequence was created by an AI program. 

The remix of a remix looks like it's here to stay.

Talk about a random route to success.

Update: That particular tweet was taken down and the account suspended. Sorry.


Solve one problem at a time

Building a product requires several steps.

Identify a problem, then create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) find the product market fit and so on.

What if you had no such ambitions but simply solved whatever was bugging you?

A web designer who knew a thing or two about building websites and banner ads had to keep finding new clients. Revenues were ok but stagnant for nearly five years.

Then he took a hard look at the features most clients were requesting.

Back in 2000, it was the ability to create an email list and send out email promotions.

It was a side project but it was already paying more than web design 

The revenue was negligible - $50 per client but the number of clients who required this increased steadily.

Now billing those clients for this service brought up the next problem to be solved.

A monthly invoicing system that included a credit card debit feature.

That was one of the earliest executions of Software as a Service. No one knew that it would become so big of course.

The company? Mail Chimp. Built with zero investment from outside.

To a current value of $4.2 billion.


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