Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Out-teach the competition
Out-teaching Microsoft
The idea comes from Kathy Sierra's writing in the mid-2000s. When Basecamp launched, 37signals had no money and a tiny team, while Microsoft had all the money and could have swallowed it. Outspending Microsoft on a marketing campaign was never going to happen, so the founders put out insights, lessons, and later software and open source, and some percentage of the people who benefited bought the products in return.
The urge to reciprocate
That has been the operating strategy for two decades. It rests on the desire to reciprocate: someone who got real value from free work looks for a chance to pay it back, including by pointing a friend with messy project software toward Basecamp.
Feeds fighting back
Algorithmic feeds are now cracking it. On the big social platforms, followers no longer see a post unless it goes medium viral, so free insights reach fewer of the people who followed for them. Podcast subscribers and newsletter readers still get each piece straight into their feed or inbox, though both are small next to social media.
Who was Kathy Sierra and why did she matter?
Kathy Sierra co-wrote the Head First series of programming books for O'Reilly with Bert Bates, starting with Head First Java in 2003. The books used images, stories, and conversational language based on research into how people learn. She also wrote the blog Creating Passionate Users from 2004 to 2007. Her central argument was that a product's job is to make its users better at something they care about.
Why do people repay free gifts?
Psychologist Robert Cialdini lists reciprocity as one of the main principles of persuasion in his 1984 book Influence. In a 1971 experiment, psychologist Dennis Regan found that people who were handed a free soda by another participant bought more raffle tickets from that person than people who got nothing. The urge to repay appears across human cultures. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss described gift exchange as a basis of social bonds in his 1925 essay The Gift.
Why do algorithmic feeds limit reach to followers?
Early social timelines showed posts from followed accounts in reverse chronological order. Platforms later switched to ranking posts by predicted engagement, and Twitter introduced a ranked timeline in February 2016. Under ranking, a post is often shown to a small sample of followers first and spreads only if that sample reacts. Email newsletters and podcast feeds sidestep ranking because each new item is delivered directly to every subscriber.
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