Peter Kang

A Quick Thought Experiment Discretionary spending refers to purchases of non-essential items. It’s what you do with income after you’ve paid for housing, utilities, other bills, groceries, personal hygiene, household items, and whatever else you deem essential to keeping life operational. The most common discretionary spending items are luxury goods, entertainment, recreation, and travel. In this thought experiment around discretionary spending, I focus on wines, dining out at restaurants, and trips/vacations–the areas where I personally […]

Prelude: Check Out Volume 1 Over three years ago, I wrote about common opportunities I saw with growing e-commerce businesses that approached Barrel for help. These were low-hanging fruit opportunities that could make immediate impact for many businesses. While new software, services, and approaches have become available, the original list of opportunities still remain very relevant: Google Analytics Setup & Campaign Tracking Email Automations Product Photography Image Size / Website Speed Product Organization Product Recommendations […]

If there was a skill I wish I had worked on earlier in my career, it would be networking, which I define as the act of connecting with other people, sharing stories, finding common interests, and developing long-term relationships. I consider myself pretty average when it comes to networking, but I wanted to share some tactics and lessons I’ve picked up along the way and found to be helpful. I also figure that writing these […]

I’ve been making my way through The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien (see my Twitter thread of highlights & excerpts from the book). It’s an informative and fairly dense book about the qualities of a luxury brand and what these brands can do to maintain their status and business health. The authors define the “essence of luxury” as the desire for social stratification, […]

In The Motive, a leadership parable by Patrick Lencioni, he shares two types of leadership approaches: Reward-centered leadership: the belief that being a leader is the reward for hard work; therefore, the experience of being a leader should be pleasant and enjoyable, free to choose what they work on and avoid anything mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable. Responsibility-centered leadership: the belief that being a leader is a responsibility; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and […]

I’m pretty certain that when I’m an old man looking back on my time as an agency business owner, the thing that’ll matter most won’t be how much money I made or the prestige of the clients we worked for. The actual work we did for clients will also largely be forgotten. What will matter to me the most, by far, will be the relationships I had with the people I worked with as well […]

“If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, ‘What will I think at that time?’ it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion.” – Jeff Bezos, on his Regret Minimization Framework Bezos recalls how he made the decision to leave his cushy hedge fund job to start Amazon. He used what he called the “Regret Minimization Framework” to think of himself at age 80 and imagine […]

“The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.” “Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy—an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.” (Will […]