Dec 12, 2020

The R Number

By Mustafa Sultan • Issue #36 • View online

Friends,

We had some success with explainthispaper this week.

Our summary of DeepMind’s recent protein folding breakthrough went (sort of) viral on Reddit/Hacker News.

It’s nice getting a big influx of users — but what’s more important is how many return to the site/sign up to the newsletter. It’s about turning those initial sparks into sustained growth.

In those terms, we were less of a success (or in marketing speak, we have a leaky funnel).

The R Number

I’ve been quite happy with fleeting bursts of growth like this, but Stu made an interesting point—

Our ‘R number’ (~passive growth) is not >1 yet. It’s probably something like 0.8. Without our continued effort, the site would slowly dwindle and die.

An R number of 1.01 results in a 37x gain over a year

Of course, this isn’t an original thought. Atomic Habits popularised the power of daily incremental gains in self-development—

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

Atomic Habits, James Clear

In a project/startup, we need to make a passive growth engine to sustain this daily incremental growth.

How? That’s what we’re working on…

Podcast

#041 Leadership Shorts: Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram BEM

‎Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? Here’s what Dr Nadine said…

Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram BEM is a plastic surgeon and CEO of Proximie — an augmented reality platform for virtual surgical collaboration. Rather than telemedicine it’s about telepresence. It means that a surgeon in the UK co…

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All the best,

Musty

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