Lex Helped Write This Newsletter

Happy Sunday!

Wow, what a week! In case you missed it, last weekend we launched a product. It’s called Lex, and it’s a word processor with AI baked in, created with the goal of helping you unlock your best writing. In fact, we had Lex help us write the digest this week! 

The response so far has been incredible—thank you to everyone who has signed up, given feedback, and helped spread the word.

If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up to join the waitlist (paid Every subscribers get priority access, so subscribe to skip the line).

Now, on to this week’s posts!

How Lex HappenedButton

Nathan Baschez / Divinations

About a month ago, Nathan decided he wanted a weekend hack project. Last week, we launched Lex into the world. The results were better than any of us could have imagined: 25,000 signups in 24 hours, 1 million impressions of the announcement tweet, DMs and emails overflowing with interest.

In this post, Nathan unpacks what he’s learned from building Lex, and why he thinks the launch went so well. He also shares what’s next for Lex, and how we hope to grow it from a promising new product to an essential tool—and maybe even a pretty good business. 

Read.

An AI Might Have Written This

Fadeke Adegbuyi / Cybernaut

In case you haven’t noticed, the entire team at Every has had AI on the brain—including Fadeke. Last month, she wrote about the rise of AI companion chatbots. This month, she’s writing about… wouldn’t you know it, AI writer tools.

While it’s not quite the Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, AI is starting to play a role in content creation—not to replace writers, but as a creative sparring partner of sorts. In this post, Fadeke explores how writers are harnessing the creative potential of AI writing partners—and where the trend might lead to next.  

Read.

How to Make Unfixated Choices

Michael Ashcroft / Expanding Awareness

You’ve likely heard the quote commonly attributed to Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

No, Frankl didn’t actually say that, but embedded in this well-known quote is some real wisdom: if we can create space between stimulus and response, we can give ourselves the opportunity to choose our response to situations, even difficult ones. In this post, Michael explores the types of choices we have at our disposal—and why a modality he calls “unfixated choice” offers the most freedom. 

Read.

A Business Insight for the Day

In criminally underreported news, TikTok has taken steps to build out a full ecommerce offering in the U.S. This is really aggressive for the U.S. market. 

There are two ways to monetize consumer attention. First, and most familiar for our American readers, is to monetize attention with ads. Get people to your site, serve them a relevant ad, and then charge companies for that privilege. Second, and more familiar to our Chinese readers, is to also handle the logistics and ecommerce portions of the transaction. All of the SE Asian apps (Line, WeChat, Grab, etc) have offerings along this spectrum of in-app purchase experiences to fully handled delivery services. 

Most U.S. companies have stuck to ad serving because the margins are much better and you can scale with way less capital expenditures. TikTok appears to be unafraid to simultaneously dilute their margin profile and take on apps like Shopify. In a recent Tegus interview, a leader within their ecommerce unit described earlier marketplace tests they had done in the UK and Indonesia which hints at what is to come in the U.S.

Tegus Client: For TikTok shopping, you said that you guys directly got involved in logistics and aftersale. What do you mean by that? What is that like?

Former TikTok Exec: Yes. We choose logistics partners. We do due diligence on their capability, their reliability, and then we choose them. And then we open a corporate account with the logistics company to negotiate discounts.

We also build our warehouse, and they do delivery. We do some warehousing for the merchants. And then when the merchants need to ship our products, the logistics company with a wider shipping service, they provide us shipping service, but using our corporate companies because we already negotiated the price.

And we do due diligence on their capability and reliability. So the merchants cannot choose any other logistics company, which are not on our white list. It has to be on the TikTok side, the TikTok e-commerce team to select and negotiate a contract and then put it on the white list.

Tegus Client: Got you. So if I'm a merchant in Indonesia, do I store my inventory in a TikTok warehouse and then that gets shipped to customers? Or do I store the inventory in my own warehouse, and I just ship to customers merch myself but with like the TikTok-negotiated shipping people? Like how does that work?

Former TikTok Exec: In current pace, the merchants ship out by themselves. Although here in China in Douyin, some of the brands, they stock our inventory, and Douyin warehouse some of them. But in Indonesia, it’s still very early stage. Still, the merchants, they stock up by themselves, and they ship out by themselves.

Tegus Client: Okay. That's helpful. And when the merchants ship out by themselves, how long does a delivery usually take?

Former TikTok Exec: If it is local shipping in Indonesia, it takes like three to five days. If they're shipping in the same city even, for example, shipping from Jakarta, somewhere in Jakarta to somewhere else in Jakarta, it will be quite fast, like one to two days. Shipping from Jakarta to another province, especially to another island, it may take up to a week.

Tegus Client: Helpful. And then what about in the U.K.? Was it the same arrangement with like white-listed logistic partners? The merchants ship themselves?

Former TikTok Exec: Similar, yes. Similar. And for U.K., TikTok e-commerce right now are focusing more on cross-border, which means the China merchants are selling to U.K. from China because the local brands, the Western brands are more hesitant to commit resource on the new endeavor, to put more resource and spend more time on this new format. But in China, cross-border merchants are more eager to find new opportunity to sell, especially ByteDance, like Douyin, is quite famous in China.

So they do a lot of PR here. So a lot of Chinese merchants get very excited to try it to sell to U.K. And shipping from China to U.K., the logistics lane is quite mature. So it takes just a few days and is not very expensive. But shipping from China to Indonesia is not very mature.

It's more costly, especially their custom charge, yes, custom tax involved, and it takes more days to ship from China to Indonesia. So the strategy in Indonesia is to mostly rely on local merchants in Indonesia, including Chinese companies who has stocked our inventory in Indonesia and play as an Indonesian local seller.

Tegus Client: Okay. That's helpful. And if you had to estimate what percentage of GMV comes from cross-border merchants in TikTok's Indonesian business versus in the U.K. business?

Former TikTok Exec: Very little for Indonesia. It's less than 10%. But for the U.K., it's more than 80%.

A Few More Recommendations

AI: Startup Vs Incumbent Value | Source

With each new wave of technology, success—value, revenue, profits, talent—is split between two groups: startups and incumbents. Sometimes (e.g. smartphones) incumbents reign supreme; others (e.g. social networking) startups take the prize; sometimes, success is split between the two. So who will win the AI wave? Startups? Incumbents? Some from column A, some from column B? Elad Gil investigates. 

A New Doorway to the Brain | Nautilus

While standard ultrasound is already popular in clinical imaging, it’s rarely been used to image the brain. But a new technological breakthrough promises to change that. It’s called ultrafast ultrasound, and it has implications ranging from faster diagnoses of brain cancer and Alzheimer’s to the development of brain-machine interfaces.  

The Bruce Willis Deepfake is Everyone’s Problem | Wired

As excited as we all are for the creative potential of AI, it’s also important to be mindful of the practical and ethical quandaries the technology opens up. One recent example involves an ad featuring Bruce Willis, tied to a bomb on the back of a yacht, growling "Mississippi" in a Russian accent. The only problem: Willis never filmed the ad. So who owns Bruce Willis? As this article argues, “it's a question that implicates everyone, portending a wilder, dystopian future—one in which identities are bought, sold, and seized.”

That's all for this week!