Stop Reading More

Stop Reading More. Start Reading Different.

Last year I was stuck on how to price the Do Radio subscription tiers.

I’d been running the Do Radio Mentor app for months. The audience was growing. But I couldn’t decide on a number.

I read everything I could find about subscription pricing. Asked every founder I knew. Nothing.

Then a friend sent me an article. In Korean.

A founder in Seoul had solved the exact same problem. Three years earlier. He’d written about it in a Korean business publication. Step by step. What worked. What didn’t. What he’d change.

I’d never heard of him. Neither had anyone I asked.

I had access to unlimited podcasts, newsletters, books, threads, tools, and expert advice. Every source a founder is supposed to consult. And the answer I needed was sitting in a Korean business publication I’d never heard of.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have enough information. The problem was that I didn’t know where to look.

I keep running into the same problem. Founders are drowning in podcasts and newsletters and books and threads and YouTube videos and AI summaries. Every day another person is telling you they’ve figured it out.

For a few pounds a month you can read every major publication. For free you can listen to the best founders in the world explain how they built their companies. AI can summarise a book in thirty seconds.

So why are so many founders still feeling stuck?

Because more information doesn’t help you make better decisions. It helps you feel informed. That’s not the same thing. What you actually need is help knowing what matters. Who to listen to. What to ignore. And where to look.

The Two Pools

There are two pools of business intelligence. The first pool is what everyone reads. English-language publications, Twitter, newsletters, podcasts. Everyone’s drinking from the same well.

You can be better at this than other people. You can read faster. Synthesise more. Connect more dots. But you’re still working with the same raw material. You’re still competing on how well you process the same information everyone else has.

The second pool is what almost nobody’s reading. Because it’s in a language they don’t speak. Published in markets they don’t follow. Written by founders operating under different assumptions. Different constraints. Different cultural defaults.

This second pool is enormous. And almost nobody you’re competing with is touching it.

I started tracking business publications in markets most British founders never read. China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Latin America. Fifty-three publications. Five languages. Machines read everything for me. But I decide what matters.

That became a newsletter: The Sixth Desk.

I didn’t build it because I wanted a newsletter. I built it because I needed it. I needed a way to see what I was missing. After months of reading this material, I started to see patterns. The insights weren’t random. They fell into five categories.

I call it SIGHT.

Strategy. Investment. Growth. Hiring. Technology. Five letters. Five categories. And each one contains assumptions that the English-language business media is getting wrong.

When Everyone Expects to Be Copied

When you read English-language business media, strategy is almost always about disruption.

Find an incumbent. Build something faster, cheaper, better. Take market share. Win.

When you read what founders in China and Korea are saying, the frame is different. They expect to be copied. Immediately. Relentlessly.

A Chinese founder launches a product and assumes a competitor will clone it within weeks. So the strategy question isn’t “how do I disrupt?” It’s “how do I build something that’s harder to copy than anyone else’s thing?”

That changes everything. It changes how you think about moats. It changes what you build and what you don’t bother building.

Coupang is the example I keep coming back to. The Korean e-commerce company. Everyone in the West looks at Coupang and says: “Korea’s Amazon.”

But that’s not what Coupang built. They actually built a logistics network so dense that 70% of the Korean population lives within seven miles of a distribution centre.

They didn’t try to be Amazon. They tried to be uncopiable.

And they did it by solving a specific problem (Korean urban density) in a way that made no sense anywhere else.

Now, I should be honest about this. Some of what gets called strategy in other markets is just different constraints. If you’re building in a market where capital is scarcer, you’re going to make different decisions about burn rate. That’s maths. That’s not culture.

But here’s what I do think is cultural. The assumptions you don’t know you’re making. The things you take for granted because every founder you know takes them for granted. That’s where the real insight lives.

Not in the different answers. In the different questions.

Growth Can Look Different

I used to think growth was growth. Find a channel. Optimise it. Scale. The playbooks are in English, but the mechanics are universal.

I was wrong.

In Brazil, the dominant e-commerce platform is Mercado Libre. But the way Brazilians buy things online doesn’t look like the way Americans or Europeans do.

A huge chunk of transactions happen through WhatsApp. The storefront is Mercado Libre. The actual purchase conversation happens in a messaging app.

The growth playbook for a Brazilian consumer brand looks nothing like the growth playbook for a US consumer brand. Not because the founders are different. Because the infrastructure is different.

Most English-language growth advice assumes a specific stack: Google, Meta, Shopify, Stripe, and email.

If your market doesn’t have that infrastructure, or has different infrastructure, the advice doesn’t apply.

But there’s a trap here. And I’ve fallen into it.

You read about what works in Brazil and think: “well, that’s Brazil. Doesn’t apply to me.” But that’s actually just lazy.

The real question is: what assumption about growth does this Brazilian tactic challenge? What does it reveal about your own assumptions that you didn’t know you had?

That’s the value. Not the tactic. The assumption it exposes.

What to Do About This?

You might be thinking: I don’t speak Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean, or Portuguese. Fair enough. I don’t either.

You don’t need to.

The machines do the reading. AI translation is good enough now that you can read what a founder in Shanghai said about pricing strategy. You can read what a founder in São Paulo said about customer acquisition. The bottleneck isn’t translation.

It’s curation.

Someone has to decide what’s worth reading. Someone has to connect the dots across markets. Someone has to separate the signal from the noise. That’s the human part. That’s what AI can’t do.

That’s what I built The Sixth Desk for.

But there’s a second objection. And I hear it a lot: "I already consume too much!! I’m drowning in information as it is."

I agree.

The answer isn’t adding more. It’s being more deliberate about what you consume.

Most of what we read helps us feel informed. But it doesn’t change how we think.

The Sixth Desk isn’t another newsletter to add to the pile. It’s a replacement. A swap.

One source that gives you something nobody else is reading, instead of the tenth source telling you the same thing as the first nine.

Every Friday, I ask one question. Answered by what the best founders in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and Latin America are saying in their own languages. Not a summary. Not a translation dump. A human decision about what matters.

The English-language internet is enormous. It’s also a common pool. Every founder you’re competing with reads the same publications, follows the same people, watches the same videos.

You can be better at synthesising that information. But you can’t be different.

The non-English internet is where the difference lives. The assumptions are different. The constraints are different. The answers are different. And almost nobody you’re competing with is reading it.

Someone already solved your problem. They just didn’t say it in English.

The question is whether you’re going to find them?

Until next time,

Jon "Lost in Translation" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

If you’re tired of reading the same thing as everyone else and hoping the answer’s in there somewhere, you can sign up for The Sixth Desk here.

Every Friday, one question. Answered by what the best founders, in the markets you’re not reading, are saying.

No AI-written filler. Just a human curating what matters.