• Ramp: The Best Experience Is the One You Don’t See

    Ramp: The Best Experience Is the One You Don’t See

    Ramp, Eric Glyman, and the position they built by accident and never named A note before we begin: I have been watching Ramp for a while now, and I think highly of what Eric Glyman and his co-founders have built.…

  • Fin: The Man Who Hated Bots Now Sells the Most Personal One

    Fin: The Man Who Hated Bots Now Sells the Most Personal One

    I have been following what Intercom, now Fin, has been building for years. Eoghan McCabe’s willingness to destroy a functioning business to rebuild it around a conviction is rare, and it deserves to be taken seriously. This analysis exists because…

  • Up Didn’t Build a Bank. It Built a Generation of Savers

    Up Didn’t Build a Bank. It Built a Generation of Savers

    A note before you read this: Dom, Grant, Xavier: I have been watching what you have built with genuine admiration for the past few weeks. Up is one of the few products in Australian finance where you can trace a…

Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.

  • Positioning is not about what you say.

    It’s far from it. Positioning is about what they think. Who’s they? Your customers. Your market. Your world. You don’t control positioning. You influence it. Think of it as mental real estate. Prime property in your customer’s mind. What’s your plot? Is it front and center? Or lost in the…

  • Most ‘experts’ and businesses get positioning wrong.

    Tragically wrong. This isn’t just theory. It’s battle-tested wisdom. Your clever tagline? Not positioning.Your unique selling proposition? Not positioning.Your elevator pitch? Still, not positioning. And just to drive the point home, these iconic slogans? They’re not positioning either: “Just Do It” – Nike“I’m Lovin’ It” – McDonald’s“Think Different” – Apple“Because…

  • You’re running an e-commerce empire

    It’s growing fast. Your servers are melting. Your IT team’s on life support. Black Friday’s coming, and you’re sh*tting bricks. What do you do? “Let’s buy more servers!” “We need to hire more IT staff!” “Maybe we should slow down our growth…” Sound familiar? Now imagine you’re Amazon in the…

  • Guinness, Michelin, and Red Bull: When your actions speak louder than ‘marketing.’

    We’ve been sold a lie. The lie: marketing is about ads, slogans, and social media campaigns. But what if the best marketing isn’t marketing at all? Guinness, Michelin, and Red Bull figured this out long ago. A beer company cataloging world records?A tire manufacturer rating restaurants?An energy drink brand racing…

  • Ever pitched an idea and felt like you were talking to a brick wall?

    Yeah, me too. It sucks. But here’s the thing: We’re doing it all wrong. I used to think selling ideas was about being the smoothest talker in the room. Boy, was I wrong. It’s not about talking. It’s about listening. Remember that client who seemed impossible to please? The one…

  • We love to talk strategy

    Big words. Grand visions. Five-year plans. But what happens when the rubber meets the road? Suddenly, it’s all about this quarter’s numbers. Next month’s targets. Tomorrow’s stock price. We’re strategic thinkers with short-term actions. Visionaries with myopic tendencies. It’s like planting a seed and digging it up every day to…

  • Why your ‘customer-first’ BS is fooling nobody

    Ever sat in a meeting where “customer-centric” was thrown around more times than a Frisbee at a beach party? Yeah, me too. It’s easy to say you’re all about the customer. But actually doing it? That’s where things get tricky. Let’s cut through the jargon and get real about customer…

  • We’re obsessed with numbers.

    Metrics. KPIs. Growth hacking. But what are we really measuring? Often, it’s just noise. Short-term gains that fade like mist in the morning sun. What if we zoomed out? Saw the forest, not just the trees. Brand isn’t fluffy. It’s not a checkbox on a to-do list. It’s the bedrock…

  • We often think brands are built by logos and slogans.

    But that’s surface-level thinking. The real brand? It’s built by actions. Coca-Cola knew this when they created Coke Studio. A soft drink company launching a music platform? Fizzy, right? Wrong. It was genius. Because Coca-Cola understood a fundamental truth: Your business is your brand. What does that mean? It means…

  • Doom scrolling for hours and still found nothing to watch?

    That was the problem Reed Hastings faced in 1997. His solution? Netflix. But Netflix didn’t become the streaming giant we know overnight. It started with a bold business decision that eventually redefined its brand. Remember when Netflix was all about DVD rentals by mail? No late fees, no trips to…

  • What do reusable rockets have to do with business and brand?

    Let’s launch into it. It’s because we’ve been throwing away rockets after every launch. Imagine buying a new car every time you want to drive somewhere. Crazy, right? Enter SpaceX and its reusable rockets. In 2015, SpaceX did something revolutionary. They landed a rocket after launching it into space. Why?…

  • Toyota’s ‘Just-In-Time’ Manufacturing

    Toyota’s ‘Just-In-Time’ Manufacturing

    In the 1970s, Toyota fully implemented its Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing system, tailored to eliminate waste by producing only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the exact amounts required. JIT is a ‘pull’ system that delivers components to assembly lines only when needed and in the exact quantities…

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Platonic — Blog of Paul Syng

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