What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking

Happy Friday! Every week, I save dozens of posts, articles, and newsletters that challenge my thinking. Here's what stood out this week and why I think it's worth your time too.

🔥 This Week's Saves

🔗 Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

Summary: The Jevons Paradox occurs when improvements in efficiency unexpectedly lead to increased consumption rather than conservation. When we made coal more efficient to use in 1865 we used more of it, not less. Every tool that’s supposed to make us more efficient - AI, automations, workflows - ends up creating more demand for our time and resources. Instead of doing X in Y hours, we can do 2X in Y hours.

Why It Matters: This is the hidden cost of being “high-leverage.” We keep building better systems, stacking better tools…and end up busier than ever. Jevons shows up in our work when we mistake speed for strategy. When efficiency isn’t paired with intention, all you’re doing is scaling your inputs and your anxiety.

My Take: The Jevons Paradox shows up everywhere. I’m reminded of a Freakonomics podcast episode about advances in NFL football helmets: the introduction of safer helmets didn’t reduce the rate of concussions, it drastically increased the concussion rate. Why? As safety equipment gets better, our behavior becomes more aggressive.

Bottom Line: Efficiency doesn’t equal freedom. Left unchecked, it scales the wrong things (e.g. your obligations, your stress, your expectations). Use tech to subtract, not just to accelerate.

🔗 How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing

Summary: Paid marketing feels like some sort of growth cheat code, but it’s not. Many startups ride the CAC high until scale, competition, and saturation hit - revealing how fragile the unit economics really are. Paid as the main engine is not a growth loop, but a local max dependent on competition and the ad platform.

Why It Matters: Most growth leaders treat CAC as a single blended number and keep raising budgets or target CPA to chase growth. But that’s a trap. Paid campaigns decay in effectiveness, get copied, and become harder to measure. As you buy up your core demographic, the extra volume has to come from non-core who are, by nature, less responsive. When acquisition becomes your moat then you’re just renting attention.

My Take: This is a direct hit on the “we’ll fix LTV later” mindset. It’s not that paid is bad. I’ve had a lot of success with paid. Rather, it’s just brittle when it’s the only leg you stand on. True growth comes from pairing performance with systems that compound: virality, referrals, content, and retention. Dropbox didn’t scale because they hacked paid. They scaled because they built a product people shared.

Bottom Line: Stop worshiping at the altar of CAC. Paid marketing is gasoline, not the engine. Cap your spend. Diversify your channels. And build stuff worth talking about. Or don’t—and enjoy your shark-fin chart before the crash.

🔗 TikTok’s Enshittification

Summary: How do platforms die? First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. This is enshittification:

• surpluses are first directed to users

• then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers

• then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders

• then platform becomes a useless pile of shit

Why It Matters: Trust is the only moat that compounds. Once users get wise to exploitation (e.g. shadow-banned reach, jacked ad prices, bait-and-switch features) they stop building on your platform. Or worse: they build exit ramps for others. This isn't just about Facebook or Etsy or Google. This is the lifecycle of any extractive system: SaaS pricing models, marketplaces, aggregators. If you don’t create shared upside, you eventually create mutual resentment. And when incumbents shift from value creation to value capture, rebels smell blood. This is how Substack rose. How Shopify grew. How community-based products eat enterprise.

My Take: I love this concept—and I hate what Amazon, Etsy, Meta, and Google have become. They started out magical. User-first. Builder-first. You could feel the upside.
Now? Everything is extractive. Fees go up. Visibility goes down. Control disappears. It’s not innovation, it’s rent-seeking. And it creates the perfect opportunity for a better system.

Bottom Line: Every platform starts as a playground. Then it becomes a casino. Then a prison. The smart ones stop before the prison. Want to future-proof your product? Build a system where value flows both ways—and keep it that way.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your marketing journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.