✄ What’s the Wirecutter effect?

Plus: Make an offer on Beer Can Island, two decades of Gmail, are you flying on a Boeing?, and more. View Online Could you do us a solid? You may know that The Hustle is a part of HubSpot Media. (Didn't know that? Well, now you do.) We want to know what else you know. Are you a HubSpot power-user? Love it. Never even heard of HubSpot? Also love it. If you can spare two minutes for a survey, please enlighten us here. In today's email: Overloaded: Viral success isn't always a blessing for businesses. Baseball's back: Does your team have a shot? Their payroll will give you the answer. Digits: A very high meal, managers beware, and more weird numbers. Around the web: Fighting food deserts, guess the house price, and more. 👇 Listen: World Series winners often spend freely, but a loaded roster is no guarantee of success. The Big Idea The 'Wirecutter effect' is everywhere now Viral fame seems fun for businesses — until it's really not. 2024-04-01T00:00:00Z Juliet Bennett Rylah Bloomberg recently discussed a phenomenon in which retailers experience too much of a good thing thanks to the internet. In 2023, product review site Wirecutter named the Wok Shop in San Francisco as the purveyor of the best wok. But the Wok Shop was unable to handle the volume of orders, resulting in angry customers and a frustrated proprietor. Wirecutter eventually changed its top wok to one from Sur La Table — which is now sold out. The Wirecutter effect… … isn't exclusive to Wirecutter; it's also booming on social media, where pretty much anything can go viral on a global level: Fujifilm ran out of parts and had to suspend orders for its X100V camera after it went viral on TikTok. Hailey Bieber's beauty brand, Rhode, is constantly selling out of its products, at one point amassing a waitlist of 314k+ people for a lip balm. Trader Joe's ran out of its frozen kimbap for weeks after TikTokers hyped the Korean dish. Trend forecaster Coco Mocoe told Elle that TikTok's FYP feeds users products with high engagement, creating "a sense of pandemonium" and the desire to buy something before it's too late. Plus, our online shopping behaviors have changed, alongside manufacturers having slowed production amid the pandemic. Viral success seems like it'd be an unquestionable win, but that's not always the reality, especially for smaller businesses. Restaurants, for one, can be overwhelmed by internet fame, from sudden crowds to irritating menu hacks that employees are unable to make at scale. Example: A Paris ice cream shop/wine bar dealt with people stealing its glassware, regulars leaving due to lines, and neighbors calling the cops about crowds. Finally, it hired a bouncer and installed a "No TikTok" policy. Free Resource 5 mad skills development templates You have to keep on learning new things — every day, all the time. Because staying curious is one of those classified secrets to winning at life. For a stronger sense of structure, try these tidy skill-building templates. Use the space to kick-start new habits, better manage time, read more books, or otherwise get shit done. You get a template, and you get a template… Five-year plan template Individual skill development template SMART goal-setting template Management by objective template Performance improvement plan template We also call them "skillets." They help you break in beautifully. 5 free skillets → TRENDING Gmail is all grown up. The service launched 20 years ago today with a press release that looked a whole lot like an April Fools' prank. But it was very real, and today ~1.2B users — about a seventh of the global population — are following up and circling back using Gmail. SNIPPETS AT&T said it's investigating a data breach that led to the personal data, including Social Security numbers, of ~73m current and former customers being released on the dark web. OpenAI's latest tool, Voice Engine, which needs only a 15-second recording of a person speaking to clone their voice, is here, kinda. The company is thankfully pumping the brakes on a wide release to work through the tech's obvious safety concerns. Nice: The S&P 500 had its best Q1 in five years, up 10.2% on the strength of — you guessed it — the AI bonanza. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia did most of the heavy lifting on the gains. It's the end of the road for Google Podcasts. The app, which has been downloaded 500m+ times, will be discontinued tomorrow after being used by only 4% of US podcast listeners. Good luck: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government to develop its own gaming consoles, a process estimated to take up to a decade. Industry leaders Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have all halted sales in the nation over the last two years. Oops: A car chase in Los Angeles ended when a stolen Tesla Models S ran out of battery. The owner told police that the car had 1% battery when it was stolen. Alaska will use "Aurora" — a Boston Dynamics robot disguised as a coyote or fox — to scare wildlife away from the Fairbanks airport's runways, preventing dangerous collisions between animals and aircraft. Las Vegas resort Tropicana will close on Tuesday to make way for a baseball stadium. It opened in 1957, hosted Siegfried and Roy's Vegas debut, and appeared in Diamonds Are Forever. Better late than never? Kid Rock criticized Ticketmaster for its monopolistic behavior, decrying its model as "highway robbery." This comes only 30 whole years after Pearl Jam filed a complaint about the company's anticompetitive behavior. Don't miss this... The Final Four is set, as you'll hear over and over again from anyone in your office whose picks panned out. That's not us, so we're left wondering: Do March Madness bracket competitions at work have a positive impact on company culture? CHART Olivia Heller Money can't buy championships? Uh, actually… A new baseball season brings hope to all fans, but mostly those of the highest-spending teams. 2024-04-01T00:00:00Z Ben Berkley The first few games of the MLB season are now in the books, and hope springs eternal for your favorite baseball team (unless you're a fan of the Colorado Rockies, already facing 0.0% odds of making the playoffs). But everyone outside of Denver may want to calibrate their title hopes on where their team's opening day payroll ranks among MLB teams — since 1995, 26 of the 29 World Series-winning teams have come from the upper half of the list, per Baseball America. Over that span, only one team from the league's bottom 10 has won it all (the 2003 Florida Marlins). How does that sound to you? That fact sounds pretty promising if you're a Los Angeles Dodgers fan. The team outspent everyone this offseason, committing ~$1.1B to a class of free agents led by Shohei Ohtani, the $700m man/modern-day Babe Ruth. Ohtani's compatriot Yoshinobu Yamamoto also landed on the Dodgers, but with a comparatively chilly $325m contract. On the flip side, the spend-to-win reality sounds miserable if you're a fan of the bargain-basement Oakland A's, by far the lowest-spending team in the majors. If you piled the A's current 26-man roster on each other's shoulders to create one megatall ballplayer with 26 salaries, he still wouldn't make the top-10 list of the league's highest-paid players. At least Oakland fans are already conditioned for misery, given their beloved franchise is set to decamp for a $1.5B ballpark in Las Vegas in 2028. But hey, at least ticket prices in Oakland will be super cheap all summer? Now, how about the players? Forbes expects eight players to clear $40m+ this season, including the two aforementioned Japanese stars, New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, and 3x league MVP Mike Trout. The ballplayer walking away with the most cash this season will, of course, be Ohtani. He tops the league in endorsement deals, which brings in $60m+ annually for the international superstar. That haul makes up for his minimal on-field earnings, which, because Ohtani deferred 97% of his Dodgers salary, will only total $2m. He'll be fine, though. You can bet on it. FIT THE BILL There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today's billion-dollar brand? Clue 1: This company's first product wasn't all that novel, it was just built to be better than its rivals. One of the founders said they wanted to "make it lickety-split fast, and intuitive—hence the name." Clue 2: Welcome to April, the biggest month on the calendar for one of this company's most-popular products, which typically provides around one-third of its annual revenue. Clue 3: This company's proud that it "powers prosperity" for its customers, but it didn't think it'd do it like this: It had to repay $141m to the people last year after it was found to have tricked them into paying for a free product. 👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇 By the Numbers Digits: Beer Can Island, sky-high cuisine, a serious Mac fan, and more wild numbers A very high meal, a meticulous recreation, managers beware, and more weird numbers. 2024-04-01T00:00:00Z Juliet Bennett Rylah 40 weekends: How long it took German designer Kevin Noki to 3D-print a working replica of Apple's 1986 Macintosh Plus. Noki found a real Macintosh Plus in poor condition on eBay, then meticulously recreated each part for his spot-on "Brewintosh Plus." It even takes floppy discs and makes all the same sounds. Though the process was arduous, Noki told PopSci that such work not only "preserve[s] computing history but also ensures it's accessibility for generations to come." (Check out a video of his work here.) 9 acres: Unsubmerged land on Pine Key — AKA Beer Can Island — an unzoned island located in Tampa Bay. Four friends purchased the man-made island, which got its nickname thanks to boaters littering it with beer cans, in 2017 for $63.6k and turned it into a venue for parties and concerts. Now they're auctioning it off as an NFT for crypto, though they will accept cash offers. Buyer beware, though: Last year, during Hurricane Idalia, it was submerged under five feet of water. 40%: Share of managers who want to replace workers with AI, according to a survey of 3k of them from AI company Beautiful.ai. Forty-one percent said they thought they could swap humans with "cheaper" AI tools, while 40% thought their teams would be fine if they replaced multiple people with AI. Yet, as Inc. points out, these same managers may find themselves being replaced, as such positions are often the first to go when a company downsizes. $495k: How much it'll cost you to enjoy a meal from a Michelin Star restaurant in a so-called "SpaceBalloon" 100k feet above sea level. The six-hour "Stratospheric Dining Experience" will take place aboard Space Perspective's Spaceship Neptune in a pressurized cabin that can accommodate six diners, all outfitted in custom gear from French fashion house Ogier. There will be WiFi for guests who wish to bypass the glory of looking down at our pale blue dot to let all their friends know how cool they are. AROUND THE WEB 🚬 On this day: In 1970, President Richard Nixon banned cigarette ads in US radio and TV programs. 🌸 That's cool: Nourish + Bloom — a market aimed at bringing fresh, healthy food to food deserts — is raising money via GoFundMe to expand. Read our previous coverage here. ✈️ Oof: Are you flying on a Boeing? 🏡 Game: Guess the asking price of a house with only its location and photos as clues. Each wrong guess gets you one more picture. 🐿️ Aww: Everyone needs a sleeve chipmunk. SHARE THE HUSTLE Hey. Don't keep us a secret. Refer just 3 people and we'll send Hustle essentials as a thank you. Share this custom referral link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Your referral count: 0 Today's Fit the Bill answer is Intuit (Market cap: $181.99B) Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman. Editing by: Ben "Prank responsibly" Berkley. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. PODCAST JOBS CONTACT US The Hustle, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA 02141, US. Never want to hear from us again? Break our hearts and unsubscribe.