Making Sense: Alternative Explanations

• How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size. Bill Gurley: When you materially improve an offering, and create new features, functions, experiences, price points, and even enable new use cases, you can materially expand the market in the process. The past can be a poor guide for the future if the future offering is materially different than the past. […] the numerous improvements with respect to the traditional model lead to a greatly enhanced total available market.

• How 160,000 intercepted communications led to our latest NSA story. The Washington Post: NSA surveillance is a complex subject — legally, technically and operationally. We drafted the story carefully and stand by all of it. I want to unpack some of the main points and controversies, sprinkling in new material for context.

Making Do: Overall Impressions

• Just Like Facebook, Twitter's New Impression Stats Suggest Few Followers See What's Tweeted. Marketing Land: Focusing on the performance of a single tweet or post is almost like focusing too much on how you rank for a particular term on Google. It can cause you to lose track of the bigger picture, of how you’re performing overall.

Making It: Statistics Over Time

• Nine weeks to launch Vox — it’s easier to go downhill than up. Michael Lovitt: Why did we launch on that sped up timeline? It was an experiment for our team and our company, driven by our desire to get a product into users’ hands early, some constraints we could not change, and our enthusiasm for approaching a familiar problem in a new way. We don’t yet know for sure if it was the right decision, but here’s how we sped up the process, focused the scope, and shipped a site fast.

• Marc Andreessen’s first six months on Twitter were unbelievably epic. Quartz: During the first six months of 2014, Andreessen tweeted 21,783 times—more than any of Twitter’s founders have posted since its creation, and an average of five tweets per hour, every hour.

What are you reading?

[chart via MarketingLand]

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.