Alex Muir

I would never have predicted the boom in handcrafted, boutique, upmarket versions of existing discretionary consumer products over a period when consumers were supposed to be feeling squeezed.

From craft beer (homebrew), to street food (junk food), to coffee shops on every corner, and ideally cold-brewed premium hand-roasted coffee at that. The rational side of me thinks that all these things are ripe for cost-cutting. I really don’t feel that budget brands like Aldi or Wetherspoons have seen anything like the sort of growth I expected - compared with Apple (* probably not a fair comparison), Nandos, and Innocent.

I can see an argument that a pint of ‘craft beer’ represents better value than a pint of mass-market Fosters. Perhaps it is also more of an experience or a treat. Or maybe we’ve seen the reversal of a trend of offering a decreasing quality of good for the same price: I literally just sat down to finish this blog post and ripped the arse out of my jeans. They are just over three months old from H&M. I feel like a pair of jeans should last a couple of years. If someone offered me a pair of hand-stitched premium denim jeans right now I’d probably take them.

Fred Wilson is something of an idol to me. I just finished watching his conversation Jason Calacanis at the Launch conference .

Towards the end of their chat, Fred says he thinks there’s a shortage of reasonably priced opportunities in the market:

But we’re still making investments. We’re still finding places to put money.

I love that definition of investing. Money needs to be put somewhere to prevent it being devalued. Being an investor means finding and using those places - whether stocks, real estate, lego, gold or private equity.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working on a prototype of an idea for small high-street businesses to attract and retain customers. A friend of mine, who is something of a mentor to me, called on Friday and we had an hour-long chat about various things. I pitched the idea to him and among other questions, he asked “How would it work for convenience stores?” We back-and-forthed for a two minutes as I didn’t want to write off the tens of thousands of convenience stores that could be potential customers. A couple of times I fumbled for some edge case that might be useful.

And then I said “Actually, it won’t work for convenience stores at all. They’re never going to use it.” I felt an immediate sense of relief. Instead of flailing around trying to find some plausible reason for a group of potential customers to use this product, I realised I should just ignore them. That moment led me to ask myself what defines my target market? It’s businesses with a physical presence, providing high net margin services and products to customers. That’s bars, restaurants, hairdressers, cinemas, coffee shops, car washes etc. It’s not retailers, accountants or tradesmen.

Sometimes an idea needs to be bulked up, but I find far more often it needs to be carved into shape, and that means removing material and saying no.

A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson wrote down a few thoughts on the iWatch. He writes:

Yesterday at the Morgan Stanley Internet Conference […] there were several hundred public market tech investors in the room. I asked the room how many wore watches. About half raised their hands. I then asked how many were going to get the iWatch. About 20% raised their hands.

I agree with Fred in his view that smart watches aren’t going to be huge, and I also think a good way of measuring how successful a product will be is to look at people with a choice. But, asked about buying an iPhone back in 2007, a similarly low proportion of this sample of bankers or investors would have raised their hands - they already had (and loved) their Blackberries. Asking the question of “real people who have the means to buy anything they want” has the downside that those same people are already early into a system. In the same way that Blackberry owners were slow to move to iPhone (or other touchscreen format smartphones), perhaps watch owners will be equally slow.

I got to thinking about how an iWatch complement my phone usage, so I’m going to detail roughly what I use my phone for at the moment.

1. Browsing & Reading - The bulk of my time goes on Safari - on the loo, in bed, in some down time. It’s also the most useful utility feature when I’m out and about.
2. Messaging - I prefer iMessage but a lot of my friends aren’t on iOS, so I probably use iMessage, What’s App, and Facebook Messenger equally. I also really like Snapchat but hardly any of my contacts use it.
3. Email - I doubt I send more than one or two emails per week from my phone, but I read often on it. The most useful thing is that my emails show up as alerts - kind of like a second screen even when I’m at the laptop. I use the Gmail app, I can’t remember the last time I used the iOS native mail client.
4. Music - I use Spotify. I haven’t used the native Music app since I got Spotify. I probably listen to music on my phone for at least an hour and half each day (while working out and walking). This may actually be my biggest use in terms of time.
5. Photos - I’m not hugely into photos but 95% of the pictures I take are with the phone.
6. Google Maps - A good utility app depending on what I’m doing. I dragged Apple Maps to the last page and I’ve never gone back. Their initial launch was such poor quality that it’s going to take a long time for them to recover. I can think of at least two occasions where Apple maps took me to completely the wrong destination or route.
7. Apps - I make very little use of Apps (actually, having written more of this, I realise that some apps are in fact critical to me). I don’t play games. My most used app is Interval Timer which I use most days at the gym to act as a round timer for boxing. I use Airbnb occasionally to manage a rental property, and sometimes I use my banking apps (most often to as part of the login process). Uber is invaluable when I need it. I’ve recently given up napping during the day, but before that I used Pzizz on an almost daily basis.
8. Bitcoin - Recently I’ve been experimenting with paying for things using Bitcoin. I use the Blockchain app, which is effortless. I added $60 and still have plenty left. Of all the uses, this is one for which the phone and app are essential. Without my phone, I would be unable to pay for things with Bitcoin, so while it’s a minimal use in terms of time, it’s an important one.
9. Talking on the phone. I probably take a phone call less than once a day - and when I’m abroad (which is most of the time at the moment), I use a $60 Android phone with Skype permanently signed in.

Things I don’t ever use

• Video (apart from Youtube when launched from a web page)
• Passbook
• iBooks
• Calendar / Reminders

How would this fit with an iWatch?

Disappointingly, I’m not really sure. Controlling music might be good, but I already do this with the inline remote on my headphones, which I can operate one-handed and does most of what I need.

Getting alerts on my wrist to emails and messages could be cool - but I think I might feel too physically connected to them and end up switching this off. I really don’t want to feel a vibration on my wrist every time I get some spam.

I can see that Bitcoin payments could be even easier with a smartwatch - in fact anything that displays a QRCode (until NFC or whatever makes them redundant).

My core uses of the phone for reading, listening to music and messaging will be unimproved.

The murder of the al-Hilli family and Sylvain Mollier

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

The murder of Gareth Williams, GCHQ officer

The Lockerbie bombing

Flight MH370

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann

D. B. Cooper

The seismic event at Banjawarn Station

The theft of a Boeing 727 in Angola in 2003