Hey, it’s Marek,

Almost every evening, my wife and I spend 45 minutes browsing Netflix, cross-referencing reviews, until one of us falls asleep and we end up watching YouTube videos about tourists arguing with border agents. We cancelled Disney+ because of too much choice. Let that sink in.

This episode explores a $2 billion paradox: while AI has made creation virtually free - infinite content, infinite features, infinite everything - the most successful businesses are the ones constraining themselves.

The pattern is everywhere: Costco charges $65 just to enter, then offers 4,000 products instead of 40,000. The Economist decides what matters and ignores everything else. In-N-Out has had the same menu since 1948, while McDonald’s tests 100+ items annually. Guess who makes $2 billion a year?

The three principles reshaping business:

Scarcity as strategy: Supreme’s Thursday drops have people camping at 3 am while Zara’s hundreds of weekly items get ignored

Curation as service: Wirecutter tests 100 toasters to recommend one

Constraint as value: Jobs’ 2x2 grid took Apple from dozens of products to four. That discipline is now worth close to $4 trillion

The creativity tension: I’m a huge proponent of using GenAI to generate thousands of ideas: it’s a creativity superpower. But maybe the real superpower isn’t generating more, but knowing what to delete.

The creator of anycrap.shop (where I created “glass toilet paper infused with microscopic shards”) reached out after the newsletter. His months-old satire project suddenly exploded after months of close-to-zero attention. Perfect example: even brilliantly executed projects struggle to break through the noise. Excellence alone isn’t enough anymore.

Your noise audit question: What would your customers thank you for deleting?

Sometimes the most radical innovation is subtraction, not addition.

Stay curious!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marekkowal.substack.com