The Mix Tape, Vol. 60

Matt Tillotson

Oct 9, 2020

Welcome to this week’s Mix:

📢 This week’s Signal Caller articles
🎸 Revisiting a wrong conclusion about “Dreams”
📈 The ideal age for start-up success
🛫 The shocking value of airline loyalty programs

This week at the Signal Caller

The daily writing experiment continues:

Get Kraken
Seattle's new NHL franchise created a common design language for the city's teams that others should follow

A Vayner long download
Notes on Gary Vaynerchuk's nearly 3-hour video on the sports card market

A full deck
In a year where everything has gone digital, traditional sports cards are surging

Excellence in Isolation
In the weirdest sports year ever, Tampa Bay's franchises deliver the best year in the community's history—as we watch from home.

The wrong conclusion

Last week, I shared this TikTok video from Nathan Apodaca, the guy on a skateboard, chugging cranberry juice and lip-syncing to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac:

DrewFrog @DrewFrogger

I don’t use this verbiage often but this is a whole vibe. simple as that

The video created a renaissance for “Dreams”, driving streams and downloads through the roof. I concluded that in many ways, marketing has become unpredictable and unplannable.

Wrong conclusion.

A better takeaway? Great art endures.

Forty-three years after it’s release, “Dreams” is enjoying a resurgence because it’s a great song.

P.S.: Ocean Spray bought Apodoca a new truck. Cranberry-colored, of course. And a ton of juice (he drinks one of those huge jugs every day).

P.P.S.: Dreams is #1 on iTunes.

Whatever comes after P.P.S.: Mick Fleetwood made his TikTok debut:

Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz

Mick Fleetwood just joined TikTok and recreated @420doggface208’s incredibly viral video longboarding while sipping cran juice that put Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” back on the top of the charts vm.tiktok.com/ZMJfSW3a8/

The real story on start up success

America is obsessed with youth, and the business start-up scene is no different. We love the story of the young person who takes over the world at 25.

But who really succeeds at entrepreneurship? This graph tells a different story:

Helen Tran 🇨🇦 @tranhelen

In his book "Range," David Epstein mentioned that older start-up founders are more successful so I looked up the data:

Tangentially related: someone on Twitter (look, I don’t pick the Twitter usernames, I just share ‘em) this week asked if 30 was too old to change careers. Good lord, no!

Matt Tillotson @matttillotson

Not only is 30 not too old for a career change, but you will likely change careers several times after 30. Maybe more.

Eff U @Chris_Bleezyy

Is 30 too old for a career change? Asking for myself

Airline loyalty programs are worth more than the airlines themselves

This is wild:

The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26 billion, American Airlines at $24 billion, and United at $20 billion. All of these valuations are comfortably abovethe market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19 billion, American $6 billion, and United $10 billion. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7 billion. But economics of the loyalty program don’t work without a robust airline operation.

This has all sorts of implications in decision-making. Cutting routes to key business cities can cause loyalty program churn. Cutting routes to vacation destinations can have the same effect—business travelers like to fly for business and use points on vacation.

Thank you for reading and sharing.

Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)