The email that made $4 Billion 💰

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If it is your first time here or you want to binge-read past letters, here are all of them.📰

These are the highlights of the past week!

1/ Last week, my friend Kyriakos suggested playing a video game called "Vampire Survivors". I think games are interactive movies, and creating an addictive and interesting game requires a lot of skills. Most of these skills apply to Startups, businesses even life.

Vampire Survivors is a very simple game. Very simple graphics. Very simple story. Trivial to learn and play. The game is still in "alpha version" meaning that it hasn't been released fully yet.

And it is already insanely successful with more than 77k players per day!

Slaying monsters in Vampire Survivors is like walking through a casino.

It is a dopamine hit. The game costs $3 and has generated at this moment millions in revenue without being out yet.

If you watch the game on YouTube (don't download it, you'll lose your sleep), you'll see simple mechanics and low-quality graphics. What is remarkable is that this little $3 game is more engaging than other games that had a $100M budget.

🎯 My point? Focus on providing value. Money doesn't buy value.

2/ In this week's video, I talk about the three things I learnt from pitching to tons of Silicon Valley VCs.

⚠️ There are not the usual stuff you read on blog posts. ⚠️

💬 Please leave a comment on the video. I would love to know what you think.

3/ This email has generated $4B revenue. 💰

It is Amazon's email about the price increase of Amazon Prime. Just like that. One email and tons of money hitting the bank.

I love subscription products! But not all companies can pull this off.

I've seen tons of companies trying to increase prices, and most of them are welcomed by backlash and lowered sales. How is Amazon doing it?

Amazon tries to integrate its services as close as possible into our everyday life. They try to become essential. The moment it is more painful waiting 5 days for your delivery than paying a few dollars per year, Amazon turns into a painkiller than a vitamin.

And maybe vitamins are good for you, but when you have a headache, you'll give anything to make it stop. These are the best products.

See originally on Twitter.

4/ My Social token $Victory ($✌️) went live this week! 🚀

You can check out the website, and starting next week; I'll start posting videos and YouTube Live describing how I made,

• the web3 app
• the smart contracts
• the marketing and design behind it and tons more!

🛒I hope I'll start adding things that you can "buy" with your $Victory in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, you can claim for free 99 $Victory by following this link. 🔗

💡I would love to hear your feedback and ideas on how this currency can be used (trust me, I have 1000 ideas)!

5/ Building prototypes is my favorite thing. ⚒️

I love exploring customer dynamics and behaviors, and I launch hundreds of tiny prototypes every year to verify my assumptions (I learnt that the hard way after spending tons of time building products that no one wanted)

This post is from my friend Paul, a kickass Product Manager, about building MVPs.

My favorite is the "Piecemeal MVP". Which one is your favorite❓

That's all for now. See you next week!

-- Jon V (as in Victory) 🚀

- Thu 24 February 2022