For Starters #9: Be Better than the Internet
Over the holiday weekend, I finished grading a set of tasting exams for the Beer Judge Certification Program ( https://www.bjcp.org/ ). I’ve graded 350 of these tasting exams over the past 9 years. The tasting exam is one of two exams prospective and ambitious beer judges take to improve their standing, in this exam, examinees write a full sensory analysis of 6 beers and provide multiple suggestions for improving it relative to the declared beer style. The ‘suggestions for improvement’ component is graded disproportionately hard as the guiding principle is that feedback should “Be better than the internet.”
In the context of this exam, “Be better than the internet” means providing specific, detailed suggestions; mash temperature recommendations, fermentation temperature recommendations, hop addition recommendations. Not a vague, theoretical suggestion - but a clear, actionable recommendation. Not simply “more roast character”, but “15% more roast malt added at lautering.”
Be better than a Google search, be better than a homebrew group on Facebook, be better than HomebrewTalk, be better than ChatGPT.
Be better than the internet.
This principle is applicable outside of beer judging. I consider it key for any new business endeavor, if the value proposition can’t surpass the beige latte of the internet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte), if an equivalent solution can be Google’d or GPT’d, it’s back to the drawing board.
Things that are almost always better than the internet:
active listening
physical presence
human connection
synchronous collaboration
taking the time to more fully understand context
accommodating exceptions
Yes, all of these are reasons product companies should start as consulting firms.
But you don’t necessary need a consulting firm, just a “how can we delight customers?” mindset. According to legend, early on, one of the key milestones of Sportngin becoming the go-to place for youth sports was having every Minnesota high school hockey score. To achieve that milestone the first time, the founders needed to drive hours into a dark Northern Minnesota winter. It didn’t matter what percentage of score coverage they had - it wasn’t 100%. In getting 100% of the scores, they better than the internet and by publishing them, made the internet better.
If you’re worried about how these things will scale, don’t. It’s too soon. Scaling is a ‘how’ question, we’re still trying to get traction on ‘what’ (see For Starters #7 - https://tinyletter.com/garrickvanburen/letters/for-starters-7-how-innovation-and-what-innovation-pick-one )
“Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can't. But you can. That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can." - Paul Graham, Do Things That Don’t Scale, http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
I once asked a business leader - wildly successful at scale - why they still cared about the emerging trends that may never achieve economies of scale, “strategically, we prefer to set the standards, not react to them.”
This requires being better than the internet, and remembering the internet is a trailing indicator.
On a related note:
“[J]ournalists should beware of far-fetched claims from AI developers describing their tools, avoid quoting company representatives about the power of their technology without providing a check on their assertions, and avoid focusing entirely on far-off futures over current-day concerns about the tools.” - Associate Press Guidance to Journalists on covering generative AI. https://blog.ap.org/ai-guidance-terms-added-to-ap-stylebook
P.S. Not to leave you hanging: https://ollama.ai/blog/run-llama2-uncensored-locally