Naming strategies from Bill Gates' shady past
Also: Descript, the best captioning/subtitle tool
:::Issue #17. Why are you receiving this? You’re friends with Cam Houser. This is where I share atypical stories of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the ups and downs of Actionworks:::
🎟 Welcome Goodv, J, David, Rakhi, Cristal, Noah, Dr B., Molly, Kadidja, Vis, Sebastian, Parin, M, Unwind 🎟
Greetings, Rulebreakers!
What I’ve been up to:
🚀 Kicking off the debut cohort of Minimum Viable Video. We have 20 students!!!! All interested in using video to further their ideas, their careers, and themselves. I’m over the moon about this group of people.
📹 Delivering a guest instructor series in Ali Abdaal’s Part Time Youtuber Academy course. Yesterday, I led 100 people through a workshop on smartphone video. Because Ali and I started courses at the same time, I think I need to start a playful rivalry/beef between our respective cohorts. Still marinating on how to pull this off…
🇨🇼 🇸🇽 Running workshops on customer validation for entrepreneurs at Sint Maarten/Curacao’s Global Entrepreneurship week. I love Curacao and I’m a big fan of Ife Badejo, the Sint Maartenian woman running the show
🌶️ Infusing tequila, part 10: No experimentation this week, just consumption :)
The best video tool for auto-captioning
Descript is a video editing tool that uses AI to transcribe your audio. It usually reaches 80% accuracy, which is better than anything else I’ve used.
The explainer video for the product is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
Descript is not a perfect product—some of the UX is slightly counterintuitive—but the ease it makes of an arduous task (subtitles and captions) makes it worth it for me.
Rulebreakers in History: Bill Gates
Bill Gates was quite shady as a young man.
He architected one of the most lopsided deals in the history of business, not to mention the “sexy” photo above.
As he got older and shifted his focus away from Microsoft, he used those same creative and intellectual powers for good, such as leading the most effective anti-malaria effort in history.
But let’s go back to a story from his early days.
Bill once admitted that he gave Microsoft’s word processing software “Word” a generic name so that one would have to say the company’s name before it everytime.
This strategy converted early users to unwitting evangelists of the Microsoft brand.
Generally speaking, naming strategy is overrated when it comes to products. But this is pretty clever.
See you in gallery view,
Cam
P.S. Never forget: mindset over toolset
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Twitter: @cahouser
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Just for fun: slow motion bird footage from my balcony to your inbox…