Productive First Principles 🎰

It's Wednesday, this week we're all on a shortened 4-day schedule. Does that make Thursday the hump in this 4-day workweek? 🤨

It turns out, that the appeal of a 3-day weekend is higher than we thought. We must be on to something because we've been cramming in 9 days of work into 4, for over a decade now.

Recently, 33 companies with about 1,000 employees began experimenting with 4-day workweeks over a period of 6 months. The results are overwhelmingly positive! 97% of the respondents—including 27 of the companies—said they're sticking with it.

On a related note, Zapier has been getting a lot of press on an experiment they ran in Q3 2022 where they canceled all meetings. Yesterday, we learned that Shopify has done the same and taken the extra step of encouraging the team to excuse themselves from group chats.

Asynchronous work FTW! 👏🏽

We sure underestimated the liberty of flexible schedules and of course, that extra day of staring at your phone on the weekend.

In 2009, Stanford business professor Teena Seelig gave her class an assignment. She divided the group into teams and handed each team an envelope with $5 of seed funding. They had 5 days to complete the assignment.

They could take as much time as they wanted to plan within the assignment period. However, once they opened the envelope, they were on the clock and had 2 hours to make as much money as possible from the seed funding. ⏱️

The results were to be shared by each team in a 3 minute, one-slide pitch on the last day.

Not quite, but that's the typical—significant risk vs. low probability of return—response from most people when presented with the same challenge.

Another common response includes setting up a low-fi business, like a lemonade stand and using the $5 for startup costs. Not a wrong answer, but one that statistically will yield a limited and diminishing rate of return.

Nevertheless, in this experiment, Dr. Seelig's students were "remarkably inventive":

The group that took home the prize approached this experiment differently than the rest.

They used the concept of "first principles" to break down the problem to its most fundamental truths or assumptions. Looking at the problem through the lens of first principles helped them understand the resources at their disposal, from a completely different perspective.

They realized that the most valuable asset they had in this experiment wasn't the $5 or the 2 hours. It was the time slot for the 3 minute presentation.

They sold that 3 minute time slot for $650 to a company that was trying to recruit students from that class. Then, they used that time slot to show a commercial about the company. 🤯 

When we started exploring our options to launch Hey Rebekah, we used the power of first principles to help break down our thinking too. Here's what we came up with:

If you're using Webflow like us, then you need to meet the smart people at Whalesync.

Whalesync connects Webflow to other apps to keep data in two-way sync. We've checked it out and are migrating a bunch of our webhooks/data-scope to Whalesync.

We're also going to be using it to execute our programmatic SEO strategy, which we'll tell you about in detail as it unfolds.

In the meantime, here's a drop of 200+ free no/low-code backend tools for you.

Many of you have probably lost countless nights of sleep trying to figure out what stack we're using to power Hey Rebekah. 🤪

When examining the email newsletter publishing market, we decided to approach it from a different perspective. Yep, you guessed it—those first principles again. 

We envy the creative magic of industry leaders like our heroes at Morning Brew. The struggle to have our content even considered in the same realm as theirs is the first part of the equation. The second, is using our experience to leverage technology to make the first part easier and to a degree, more predictable.

We introduce you to the first iteration of our tech stack. The Hey Rebekah's Built With directory lists all of our tools with a short description of how we use them.

In the second phase, we'll be sharing:

We don't make a dime from any affiliate links and hope to pass on that potential revenue to you instead. We'll keep you posted!

Feast your eyes on the mind-blowing, 45+ tools we use to power our business.

Want to share your stack with us? Reply to this message and let us know what you're using.