The Traitors, Pea Milk And Jewellery

I was watching The Celebrity Traitors final and somehow ended up thinking about distribution for our jewellery business.

Someone I work with had sent me a brand that was apparently getting a lot of Shopify orders. I looked at its Instagram and didn’t think it looked particularly good.

Then I looked at the founder’s account.

Ah. Maybe that’s where the growth was coming from.

Founder-led growth is a kind of influencer thing too, to a degree. The audience might be attached to the person rather than the brand’s Instagram.

Meanwhile, Maya Jama was on the television, and I remembered seeing her on a bus advert for some sort of plant milk.

Sproud. I looked it up.

Peas, it turns out. And she’s a co-owner and ambassador.

Hmm. Interesting.

What would the right version of that look like for us, at some point?

Someone who fits the jewellery, likes it, and brings an audience. Distribution, trust, authority. People see what they wear and want it too.

I don’t feel particularly influenced by that myself. But my own reaction isn’t the whole market.

There are different levels of it. Affiliates, creative partnerships, all the way up to a proper brand ambassador with a stake in the business.

And you couldn’t rely on one person saying yes. You’d need a pipeline of possible fits. Maybe you’d have to work a network.

I hate working a network.

It feels a bit Machiavellian to me. I don’t find influencing people into buying things the most morally inspiring pursuit either. But if you’re selling something, influencing people is part of it.

There could be a proper win-win with the right person. I find that interesting, even with the bit I don’t particularly like.

I don’t know how much equity Maya has, what the economics look like, or how much the partnership has contributed to Sproud’s growth. We’d have to work through the fit, the terms, the risks and the execution for our own business.

We’re not at that stage yet. It just connected.

Then I thought about Skool.

Sam Ovens co-founded it. Alex Hormozi came in as a partner. What interests me is the combination: a product, and someone who can bring distribution to it.

I don’t look at Skool and think the technology is particularly fascinating. That’s my opinion. I could be wrong about what I’m missing. But the partnership is interesting to me in much the same way.

Which sent me off towards software again.

Building software doesn’t feel like the difficult part to me now. Maybe picking the right product and finding the right distribution partner deserves more of my attention.

I still have a fundamental question about where software goes as the interfaces change and the frontier labs can do more. I don’t want all my eggs in a basket that might change underneath me. A consumer brand feels more likely to still be around.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic about software. I haven’t resolved that.

But that was the chain. A founder’s Instagram, Maya Jama, a bus advert, pea milk, jewellery, Skool, and another possible way to think about software.

Weird connections. Multiple things arriving at once. A bit of pattern matching, then AI helping me look into it.

I get a lot of these ideas. Some are much weirder than this one.

I don’t need to judge myself for having them. They flow, flow, flow. I capture them in a little idea garden in a database and review them periodically. An agent can help review them too.

Some make me think: hmm, that could work. Different stage. Not that stage yet.

I can put this one in the garden and come back when we’re actually there.