Keeping Up
Kardashians, startups and the art of self-promotion
Welcome to the MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter! Thanks to the 52 new fans who signed up for the newsletter this week. If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, now’s the time to join!
It ain't hard to tell, I'm the new Jean Michel
Surrounded by Warhols, my whole team ball
Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel
I just wanna live life colossal- Picasso, Jay Z
Imagine I told you about a company that had the following business lines:
Audio - recently signed an exclusive $100m deal with Spotify
Entertainment - TV show in its 18th season, regularly drawing 1.5-3m weekly viewers. Signed an updated $150m deal with producers in 2017
Beauty - recently sold a 20% stake in a beauty line for $200m
Cosmetics - recently sold a 51% stake in a cosmetics line for $600m
Fashion - multiple partnerships for exclusive clothing lines with Adidas, Puma, etc
If you read this and thought this company was Amazon or Disney, you would be wrong.
Enter the Kardashians….
Audio - Kim Kardashian West recently signed an exclusive $100m deal with Spotify
Entertainment - ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ TV show in it’s 18th season, regularly drawing 1.5-3m weekly viewers. Signed an updated $150m deal with producers in 2017
Beauty - KKW Beauty recently sold a 20% stake in a beauty line for $200m
Cosmetics - Kylie Cosmetics recently sold a 51% stake in a cosmetics line for $600m
Fashion - members of the family have multiple partnerships for exclusive clothing lines with Adidas, Puma, Fendi, etc
What is my point (other than making you look at the Kardashians differently)?
Regardless of your personal views of the Kardashians, they have proven to be shrewd at managing and maximising their brand and taking advantage of opportunities.
And the lesson here is about the focus on their brand and their ability to promote themselves.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had varying impacts to people’s personal and professional lives.
It has also forced digital transformation to the operations of many businesses. This has created an opportunity for startups offering solutions to support transformation, improve efficiency, etc.
On two occasions during the lockdown period, there have been international news stories that impact on the area of specific companies that I work with. And in both cases, neither company put themselves in the conversation.
Neither company spoke up. Nobody said ‘I have an opinion’. Nobody said ‘I have a solution that fixes this problem’.
Steve Jobs once wrote: “To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”
No company is truly unique enough to have a large addressable market and no competitors. By very definition, you operate in a market with other competitors and, be under no illusions, it is noisy.
Everything should be seen as an opportunity to create awareness for your company, to amplify your brand, to get your name out there.
Nobody will do it for you.
As an early stage company, everything is a fight. You are fighting to exist, to scale, to find customers, to meet their needs. You are fighting to be rise above the noise
Be clear on your message. What are you about? What do you offer that is different?
Tell your story, every chance you get.
Be like the Kardashians.
Tell me why I’m wrong…
- Eoin
Left Field
How do I describe ‘Left Field’? It’s a place to put the content (newsletters/articles, etc) that we have amassed over recent weeks or previous years that really make us think or change our thinking on a particular topic. All the content will offer an alternative view of some topic in financial services, technology or sport (or a combination of all three!)
Why Drug Dealers Live with their Moms?
This is a story of a University of Chicago graduate student who befriended a local drug gang and was given full access to the gang’s financial transactions over a 4 year period.
In a surprising turn, it appears that drug gangs work a lot like most normal businesses, but more specifically like a McDonald’s. If you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and the crack gang’s organizational chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.
The directors at the top of the pyramid earned approx $500k per year. Next in line earned approx $100k. And so on, all the way down to the foot soldiers earning minimum wage.
Important caveat….selling drugs is a lot more dangerous than most unskilled work. Anyone who was a member of the gang for the four years covered stood a 1-in-4 chance of being killed. That’s more than five times as deadly as being a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States.
And yet, like in most other fields, members of drug gangs all want to succeed in an extremely competitive field in which, if you reach the top, you are paid a fortune
Key takeaway.… criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives.
Anyway, enjoy the article and feel free to get in touch to discuss more!
- Eoin
Can’t Sleep??
MoneyNeverSleeps podcast episode from this week:
Ep 92: Money Talks #18: Wirecard & BaaS | Circit as a Panacea | Diffuse & Overseas Startup Investors
Podcast Recommendation: Check out ‘Freakonomics Radio’ from the authors of Freakonomics for a wide range of unusual topics covered in the unique Freakonomics way!
Book Recommendation: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy - Yannis Varoufakis. It feels like a mashup of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Michael Lewis’ Boomerang - great read!
Article/Newsletter Recommendation: if you haven’t heard of it already, check out the Not Boring newsletter by Packy McCormick where he writes about business and strategy in a ‘not boring’ way.
This newsletter has been written by Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend
Want more MoneyNeverSleeps?
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