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Letter to Elon Musk
Home > Blog >
Letter to Elon Musk

Letter to Elon Musk

Author:
Satvik Soni
·
January 12, 2023

Dear Elon,

We hope this letter finds you in the middle of a rant on vaccines.

We love seeing important products succeed.
We also love Twitter and believe that it can define the future of communication.
Without a doubt, it has shaped internet culture.

You have faced nothing but criticism ever since you took up the burden of helping Twitter.

You can spend your time actually working on your other companies.
You can spend it smoking with Joe Rogan.
You can spend it taking untraced private jets to distant islands.

But you’re spending it all on Twitter and we can all be a little more appreciative.

As a small team of Twitter fans, here are four things we suggest you keep doing at Twitter.

Alphas don’t waste time in beta testing

Stock price of Eli Lilly

It’s stupid to invest development time in testing products before a global turnout.
Beta
testing is slow, “secure”, and really takes away the fun and thrill of putting out products.

Take the rollout of Twitter Blue — an innovation that tore down power structures!

Here is how Twitter could have approached it:

  1. Roll it out to a limited set of beta testers.
  2. Collect a bunch of feedback from these testers. See them invent use cases you hadn’t thought of earlier.
  3. Cut down or build upon these new use cases. Roll it out to a larger set of users.
  4. Work on their feedback. Then roll it out globally.

However, this is what Twitter did instead:

  1. Hastily roll it out to as wide of an audience as possible.
  2. Learn that some kid posing as Eli Lilly has bought a blue tick and tweeted that insulin is free (the horror!).
  3. Watch Eli Lilly’s market share drop by upwards of USD 20 Billion.
  4. Put some checks and balances in place once the damage is done.

It was raw and real. A masterful gambit of attracting global eyeballs.
To quote you, “🤣”.

Asking 1 (one) question to 1 (one) user is MORE than enough 

Pricing study at Twitter

Stupid idiot teams would have spent their days talking to dozens, even hundreds of users before deciding their price point. This would have been a thoughtful and evidence based process 🥱🥱.

Being a Maverick, you took the advice of one user who had something to say and cut down your initial price by more than half.

The result?

✅ Quick decision making
✅ A nice hit of adrenaline
✅ Beloved author Stephen Edward King respects you now

What could be better?
Stephen King should also be asked to make other decisions, including the color of Twitter’s logo and your successor as CEO.

To quote you, “interesting.”

Your fans represent all of Twitter

Twitter Poll
Polling your fans

We love that you’re so welcoming to feedback out in the open.

UX Researchers will say that your fans will “only tell you how good you are” and that this poll is “not representative of all Twitter users” but what do they know?
Bet they are also vaccinated am I right sir?

There are TONS of ways which you can use to sample a population.
The one you are intuitively using for your polls is called Convenience Sampling.

UX Researchers will say that convenience sampling “won’t let you represent the population” but what do they know?
Bet they also take booster shots am I right sir?

To quote you, “working on it”.

Cherry pick the surveys you want to use

User polls
User polls to ignore

The first maxim of product development is and will always be to discard the surveys that tell you something other than what you want to hear.

You did this when the Twitter users (stupid idiots) said they would not pay for a blue tick.
You persevered in your vision as a true American should.  

Henry Ford once said, “If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse.”

You are the Henry Ford of our generation, except that you actually have gifted horses so you’re a man of your word.

To quote you, “here’s a horse don’t tell anyone about this”.

Keep saving humanity!
With love and respect,
Team Looppanel

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