Writing since 1999 On media, technology & strategy

Essays & Dispatches

45 essays · 157 dispatches · 38 notes by Narendra Nag
Cover Essay · Strategy

The Second Client Problem

Copying the first client's work and editing the copy is how a practice fails to become a business. It works for the second client, tolerably for the fifth, and not at all for the tenth — by which point the fix costs a migration.

Every service business begins the same way, and the problem is that the beginning works.

You do something well for one client. A second client wants the same thing. The obvious move, and on that day with that information the correct one, is to copy what you built for the first and edit the copy. It takes an afternoon instead of a week, the client is delighted, and you have doubled revenue at almost no marginal cost. It feels like the leverage everyone promises you.

Do it eight more times and ten near-identical versions of the same logic are running in ten places, diverging, and a fix to one reaches none of the other nine. The bug you patched for client three is still live for clients one, two, and four through ten, and you will find out which when one of them calls. The margin that looked like it was compounding has been converting into maintenance, and the fix now costs a migration performed on live systems belonging to people who are paying you.

Continue reading the essay
02 Research Report The Oil Must Flow: A Global Map of EnergyAn open, cited map of the world's oil and gas system: what its disruption scenarios show about exposure to Hormuz and three pipelines, what they cannot show, and how one person and five Claude models built it between May and September 2026. Q3 2026

More from the desk

45 essays since 1999
№01

Who Actually Decides Where the Model Runs

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№02

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№03

Twenty-Seven Years of Writing on the Web

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№04

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№05

How do you qualify 'credible'?

Strategy·9 Sep 2026

Saying influence should be credible is easy. Turning that into a repeatable selection process — research, a tooling stack per tier, and named crite...

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№06

Do the matching by hand until the algorithm has something to learn from

Product·9 Sep 2026

A talent marketplace I co-authored at Xynteo sequenced its product roadmap so that the matching was manual first, calibrated by people second, and ...

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№07

Influence is a measurement problem, not a casting problem

Strategy·9 Sep 2026

Most influencer work picks people by audience size, campaign by campaign, and starts again each time. The product I co-created at Publicis treated ...

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№08

Credibility and reach are not the same purchase

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Notes & marginalia

Short observations, filed as they happen

  • AUG 07 OpenAI said it had slowed development of its next major model, Astra, citing potentially critical cybersecurity capabilities.AI
  • JUL 21 Google released three new Gemini models. Gemini 3.5 Pro was not among them.AI
  • JUL 20 A federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement with authors — the largest on record. About 350 authors opted out.AI
  • JUL 16 Netflix disclosed in its Q2 shareholder letter that roughly 300 titles used generative AI in production this year.Streaming
  • JUL 14 US publishers sued Google over the use of their work to train Gemini.Media
  • JUL 01 Anthropic restored global access to Fable 5, and Mythos 5 for a set of US organizations, after the government lifted the June 12 directive.AI

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