Kamikazes, Coca Cola and Belgian Horses

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These are the highlights of the past week!

1/ If you've never heard about "Kamikaze Marketing", grab a chair and listen to the story of how Coca-Cola destroyed Pepsi's Diet by destroying themselves.

It's 1992, and the "wellness" hype is taking over corporate America. It's all about "clean" and "healthy", and Pepsi decided to take over that new market by introducing a new product called "Crystal Pepsi".

Crystal Pepsi was pretty much like a transparent clear Pepsi, with the same calories and same amount of sugar.

Coca-Cola planned to release their version called "Tab Clear," whose primary focus was wellness and fitness - even though the beverage had tons of sugar.

The idea that Coca-Cola had wasn't to create just new diet soda. They wanted to poison the minds of the consumers with the idea that diet drinks especially drinks marketed as "clear", are actually bad and unhealthy. Tab Clear will go down with Crystal Pepsi as consumers get confused.

And that's what happened!

Tab Clear went out of production in 2 months, and Crystal Pepsi went out in 18 months burning more than $40M just in marketing.

2/ 📢 I am preparing a mega video where I answer as many questions as possible, and I thought, why not make it more interesting!

And I want you to help me out!

On this phone number ☎️ +1 (323) 540-4263‬, there is a voicemail. You can call any time you like and ask ANY question you have about Startups, NFTs, crypto, life, or whatever. You can even pitch your Startup!

Surprise me. I think it is going to be hilarious.

Pick up the phone and give me a call! 🤙

Join the Jon V YouTube channel

3/ A couple of months ago, I posted about Nike acquiring an NFT company that made digital shoes.

This week Nike released their new NFT shoes (2000 of them to be exact) that go for $7k to $10k, and you can use some "vials" to change their skins. One vial got sold for around $450k and another for $133k.

Yes, Nike made around $2M just from selling skins for the digital shoes.

It seems that Nike made 12X of the money 💰 they spent in less than 3 months.

Not a bad investment at all.

4/ Belgian horses 🐎 and Startups 🚀 have a lot in common.

Belgian horses are extremely powerful animals. One horse can pull around 8000 pounds. The intriguing part is that two horses can pull three times more (yes, 24000 pounds).

But what blows my mind is the following:

Horses that have been training together for some time, can pull 32000 pounds. FOUR TIMES.

That's exactly what happens with Startups.

One dedicated Founder can change a city. A team can change a country. A team with a common cause can change the world. 🔥

5/ Do you have some hands-on experience with Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning and Deep Learning) and want to get better while making some bucks?

Then you should check Numerai.

Numerai is an AI-run, crowd-sourced hedge fund in San Francisco. This means that thousands of Data Scientists join forces every week to build Machine Learning models based on abstract financial data to predict the stock market and control the Numerai hedge fund. This is called the Numerai Tournament.

The exciting part is that you can put skin in the game yourself by staking on your models with the NMR cryptocurrency to earn rewards based on performance.

Recently, Numerai formed a DAO to engage the community and join forces to build more exciting projects funded by the community.

👋 Hello everyone, the last topic was written by me, the Chief of Chaos Panagiotis Papaemmanouil! Connect with me on Linked In, where I write about how you can break into Data Science and more cool stuff about Python, AI / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, Product, and entrepreneurship.

See you next week. 🚀

-- Jon V (as in Victory)

- Thu 28 April 2022