In the past week, I’ve had two instances where someone has told me about a new technology or strategy that’s become huge and is gaining lots of traction. In both instances, I realized that they were things I’d learned about a year or two before. At the time, I got the gist of the strategy or technology, but didn’t understand it deeply or why it was different. I also had no idea that they could grow to become as large and important as they are today.

This got me thinking that I need to do a better job of spotting things that have large upside potential. I know it’s not possible to catch everything that will become big that crosses my desk, but I think there’s definitely room for me to improve in this area. I do a good job of finding new stuff because I like to research and learn, but I think I need to do better at understanding the current landscape and why these new things are potentially disruptive and game-changing given the current landscape.

I know several Atlanta entrepreneurs who made fortunes selling marketing technology companies. Think email marketing workflow, automation, etc. They nailed the timing because two major trends were happening at the same time. Software as a service (SaaS) was gaining traction thanks to cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services. And after the global financial crisis when companies were looking for inexpensive ways to market to customers, email was a perfect option.

The more I talk with people on the marketing front lines, the more I see that marketing is undergoing a huge shift again. I’ve been introduced to several factors, and  I’m trying to get up to speed on them. But even with my current shallow understanding, I can tell that the combination of these factors is upending how companies market to customers. It seems that a convergence of factors is creating white space. There isn’t any technology that helps marketers create, execute, and measure the latest marketing strategies. It’s all very manual, piecemeal, and painful.

Marketing is a requirement for all businesses because customers have to know about you. That means the shifting marketing landscape must be causing pain for a ton of people. Translation: a huge market opportunity.

I suspect we’ll see a new crop of marketing technology–focused entrepreneurs capitalize on the changing landscape. They’ll come up with new solutions that create, execute, and measure efforts in this new marketing landscape, and they’ll build massive companies in the process.

I’ve been looking into the current marketing landscape for selling physical products. From what I learned through my own research, things have changed considerably since I was selling physical products online. How companies reach customers has evolved materially.

After I felt like I had a high-level understanding of what’s changed, I reached out to an old friend who runs a marketing agency. He’s on the front lines every day buying ads on behalf of his clients. The conversation was great. He was able to give me a front-line perspective about what’s working and not working and share what he’s hearing from his peers who run agencies. It was also cool to hear his thoughtful approach to building his agency and structuring his team in a way that differentiates his services and better aligns his agency with his clients.

What I learned in a single call would have taken me tons of time to learn on my own (if I ever could have). Today was a reminder that when I’m trying to get up to speed on something fast, nothing beats talking with an entrepreneur who operates in the space. I just need to come to the meeting prepared so they don’t think I’m wasting their time.

An early-stage entrepreneur recently shared that being present with their friends and family can be a challenge because they’re thinking about work. This is something I’ve heard many times from many entrepreneurs. I had the same issue. When I wasn’t at work, I was thinking about all the things I needed to do and running through everything in my mind to make sure nothing had fallen through the cracks.

I found a simple hack to help me with this. I kept a list of all the “projects” I was working on in the notes app on my phone. Under each project, I listed all the “next-action items” I could take to move it forward. The important thing is that they were clear, tangible actions I could execute without putting tons of thought into how to complete them. On Sunday or Saturday, I’d go through that list and update the next-action items for every project.

One benefit of this approach was that it gave me the time to think about everything I was working on. Even though it was a ton of stuff, it made me feel like I was on top of everything, which made me feel like I was in the driver’s seat. Second, it gave me a hit list of actions I’d take when I got into work mode. This helped eliminate time wasted on context switching or trying to figure out what I should do next, maximizing what I could get done during work hours.

An eye-opening thing I’ve been thinking about recently is hit rate. In the context of investing, your hit rate is how often an investing idea or decision is correct. The concept isn’t new to me, but a book I read recently, Stock Market Maestros, contains a surprising stat. Using years of historical buy-and-sell data and a top-notch analytics platform, the authors established that the best stock market investors, who have gigantic returns, are right only about 50% of the time.

This got me thinking about my entrepreneurial decision-making hit rate. When I was running my company, I never measured my hit rate. But if someone had asked, I confidently would have proclaimed it was probably 70% to 80%. Reading this book humbled me, and I know that statement would be false. I’m pretty sure it was more like 40% to 49%. Maybe 50% at best. What I now realize is that as an entrepreneur, I was wrong a lot, and that’s normal, even for the most successful people.

I now think about decisions I make as having a higher probability of being wrong than I realize. That change has made me more open to alternative decisions and their higher probability of being right than I might naturally think. I also spend time thinking about the payoff ratio, also known as magnitude. What’s the magnitude of the consequences of a decision, right or wrong?

I think that hearing about this 50% hit rate is making me more flexible mentally, which I hope improves my decision-making.

Earlier this week, the CEO of Amazon announced (see here) that any business can now use Amazon Supply Chain Services, a freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping network, without needing to sell on Amazon. Translation: Amazon is selling the logistics infrastructure it built up to support its massive retail operation to other businesses. This wasn’t news to me. Honestly, it was really more branding. I think these services existed already, but they were offered separately. They’re now all housed under a single roof, Amazon Supply Chain Services.

After reading the announcement, I dug into their parcel shipping service, Amazon Shipping. This is their version of last-mile delivery, and it’s competing with UPS Ground and FedEx Ground. An Amazon driver will pick up packages from a business and deliver them to the designated recipient, who didn’t necessarily purchase anything on Amazon’s website. It’s truly a stand-alone small-parcel delivery service. I found two tables: base rates (see here) and discounted rates if you ship 150 packages a day (see here).

Having spent millions shipping with UPS and FedEx Ground in my company, I’m familiar with ground rates and how they impact the available strategies a brand can leverage to distribute products to customers. For example, for many brands, the cost to ship a low-priced item to a customer’s doorstep (say, $15 for a $20 item) makes a direct-to-consumer distribution strategy impossible. Instead, they rely on big retailers like Walmart and Target who have tons of stores and steady customer traffic. A brand can ship hundreds of units to each big box retail store, reducing its per-unit shipping cost to something like a few cents instead of $15. The caveat is that they have to sell the items to Walmart and Target at significantly lower than MSRP (usually 50%) so the big stores can make a profit. Brands give up margin and owning the relationship with the customer (among other things) in exchange for larger orders from a handful of huge retailers. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the gist.

When I looked at the rate table for Amazon Shipping, I saw something new. A brand has to ship only 150 packages a day (a modest number) to earn a substantial discount. Shipping a one-pound package within 150 miles goes from costing $12 to costing $6.50. That’s a massive discount. And if a brand is shipping more than 300 packages a day, Amazon will negotiate a custom lower rate.

This is a big deal because it changes how some (not all) brands can think about their distribution strategy: they can now consider direct-to-consumer. Especially brands that sell small, light items that have lower retail price points. Amazon Shipping makes it possible for those brands to profitably ship directly to consumers. More operational complexity comes with this, for sure. But for some brands, it might be worth it, especially if they want to own the relationship with the end buyers of their products.

Amazon Services isn’t new; it’s been around for about two years. But its latest pricing structure and discounted rate transparency are game-changers, and I think it could impact how brands develop their strategy for selling and getting their products in the hands of customers.

I’m following up on yesterday’s post (see here). A credible person I respect read that post and proposed an alternative solution to the problem I described. Instead of deciding between one 60-minute presentation (in a 2-hour meeting) or two 60-minute presentations (in a 3-hour meeting), they suggested making the presentation for urgent problems 30 minutes and the scheduled presentation 60 minutes, extending the total meeting time to 2.5 hours, which may not feel like as drastic a change. I like this and will share it with the entrepreneurs to see what they think.

The other takeaway is that as moderator, I have lots of follow-up to do and action items to take care of before the next meeting. Founders need assistance, preparation for the next meeting, etc. Meetings are held monthly, so in theory I could wait until closer to the next meeting to start working on action items. However, I find it more helpful to attack them immediately after a meeting while everyone’s memory is fresh and the momentum with the entrepreneurs is strong. For example, immediately after the meeting adjourned, I scheduled meetings with the entrepreneurs who said they wanted help, and next week I’ll help them work through roadblocks. I also immediately reflected on people’s feedback and created the agenda for the next meeting, incorporating the feedback and learnings while they were fresh in my mind. I feel better prepared for the next meeting and have a plan to keep founders engaged by helping them before the next meeting.

I’m very pleased with the first meeting, but I’m not satisfied. I want to improve it so the value founders get from participating trumps anything else they’re a part of and makes them excitedly look forward to every meeting.

As I shared last week (see here), for the past few weeks I’ve been working with Atlanta entrepreneurs to set up an accountability group. The group meets once a month for a few hours. My expectation for the group is high engagement and open sharing so they’ll learn from one another and solve their problems faster. I want them to get value similar to what entrepreneurs get from EO and YPO forums.

We had our first meeting this week, which I moderated. It was a success, but I learned several valuable lessons. Meeting length is the first. We aimed for two hours, which included one sixty-minute presentation. The presentation was selected based on which entrepreneur had the most urgent problem to solve. This worked, and the presentation was great. But the feedback from the group was that allowing only the entrepreneur with the most urgent problem to present likely isn’t sustainable. Entrepreneurs said they didn’t like the idea of having to pick from urgent house fires at every meeting. Some want to know they’ll have a guaranteed opportunity to present, even if they don’t have a burning problem. And last, some entrepreneurs want more time to think about and prepare a presentation and to know with certainty that their presentation will happen.

The challenge is that the meeting agendas are currently built around a two-hour meeting length: one hour of discussing the most important updates from each entrepreneur, with the idea of finding one worth presenting to the group, and a one-hour presentation.

To address the group’s concerns, we will likely need to add a second presentation slot. One would be the most burning problem selected on the spot from the updates. The other would be a scheduled presentation. We’ll either have to add another hour to the meeting, making it three hours long, or cut the presentation time in half. Each option has pros and cons.

I’m not sure what change, if any, we’ll make. The group will make the final decision via a democratic process. But it stood out to me that several entrepreneurs pointed out the challenges of having a single presentation slot for each meeting.

Regardless, the first meeting went well, and I’m looking forward to continually improving the meeting format to maximize the value to the entrepreneurs.

A few weeks ago, I shared that I’d listened to a podcast presenter talk about how sound neural entrainment can reduce distractibility and help you get into your flow state. He mentioned Brain.fm, and I signed up for a free trial.

It’s been two weeks, and I really like the product. It’s hard to explain, but when I turn on the service, I definitely feel more in the zone and more productive. I focus faster than usual and knock out my to-do list like a champ.

I’ve noticed a few things, though. The first is that I need to remember to turn on the service! I don’t consistently remember, but when I do, I’m glad. I need to work toward making turning it on part of my normal work habits. The other thing I’ve noticed is that I get the most impact when I use earphones. When I let it play over the speakers on my computer, it doesn’t have the same effect. I think the earphones block out all other background noise so the rhythm of the music is all I hear.

Overall, I’m a fan so far. I’ll keep testing it for the rest of the month.

Today I had a good conversation with a friend who’s an entrepreneur, and he said something that stuck with me. We were talking about his new venture, and I mentioned plans he could make for the future when his company is successful. He shared that he doesn’t want to think like that. He wants to stay hungry and consider only what he needs to do here and now. He believes that in the early stages, thinking too far ahead increases your chances of failure and demonstrates a lack of humility. Once he becomes successful, then he can expand his plans.

This is an interesting take, and after thinking about what he said, I agree. It’s what I did when I started my company. I was hungry and focused on surviving. All my energy went toward staying alive and moving the company forward. Only after I knew we wouldn’t die did I start thinking more about what decisions I should take to scale to company further.

My takeaway from my chat with my friend is that there’s a time and place to plan far into the future. And it’s not when the future is highly uncertain.