(Long post alert)
Yello.
I think it's uncontroversial to say that so far, humankind's representation of Pre-Columbian cultures is just fine, apart from the fact that it's unexistant outside of Mesoamerica, luckily, this problem will probably be one of the first addressed by DLC, but for now, as someone from two Latin American countries, I think I'm somewhat qualified to give some opinions/recommendations about what could be added later (or at launch in some cases), or at least what I think could/should be added
Note 1: I'm not indigenous, I don't speak any indigenous language and I'm not an expert on indigenous subjects, I'm using knowledge from wikipedia, school, and my knowledgeable dad
Note 2: I won't be addressing First Nations representation, someone that actually knows anything of note about them could do a much better job than a total rando
Note 3: I don't wanna come off as negative, I'm really hyped for the game (which you can probably notice by my 3 posts yesterday), I just wanna give les gars chez amplitude (and the fans) some ideas
Introduction
When I learned about Humankind I was really excited about being able to play as precolumbian civs, in a lot of other games, the only thing we ever get is the aztecs, and maybe the inca and maya if the devs are feeling generous, maybe even a first nations culture if they're feeling extra representative, of course, this isn't bad representation by any means, the problem is how cliché it has become to include the aztec and inca in particular, specially compared to Europe over there getting like 4 or 5 times the civs compared to other places (including South America).
Following this you can probably see that I was kinda disappointed when there wasn't anything precolumbian outside of central america, the cultures they chose are actually great (albeit very expected) and they nailed their traits and special abilities (apart from maybe not giving the aztecs the little rafty farms), the problem comes from the lack of anything else, the fact that the *NEW WORLD* has only three peeps is a weird design decision, specially considering how many gamers there are in Latin America, now I'm expecting to see at least Mexico and Brazil later down the line, maybe even Argentina and Colombia as well, which is swell, but if the players are anything like me they'll be kinda sad to not be able to be american apart from the mesoamericans.
Now, considering that the Andes are the sixth cradle of civilization, I'll mostly be focusing around them, mostly because A. there were a lot more kingdoms/empires here than anywhere else on the continent, B. we know a lot more about those people that lived there, C. I live in the Andes so I was taught about these guys at school and D. there are actually still indigenous people here, making studying them a lot easier than say, Uruguay.
Also I'm only going to be talking about deconfirmed (for now) cultures, from the ancient, classical and medieval eras, because there could easily be some indigenous boys waiting for us in early modern, and I find it more interesting personally to talk about something less possible
Ok, let's get into the meat of this, who are the dudes that we (and by we I mean I) want in the videogame.
Here's my narrowed down list of options

1. Norte Chico
2. Tiwanaku
3. Wari
4. Inca
5. Muisca (Confederation)

(I'm also expecting either the Mapuche or Guaraní for early modern, so I'm excluding them from this list)
First up you'll probably see that all of these cultures are andean, I'm not kidding with the sixth cradle thing, it's like if you took the avengers, but instead of Thor you picked War Machine, and Iron Patriot, and a lot of other dudes whose names I don't know because I'm not a marvel fan (looking at you MENA), all of these cultures were important and left their mark on future andean societies, plus I think they could all be relatively unique and different.
You might be asking yourself, why is the Andes so prosperous? The answers are simple, a. the mountains give freshwater, b. relative isolation, c. the only domesticated animals in the Americas (llamas and alpacas), d. good food, that's a recipe for cvivilization right there.
(I've excluded a couple of cultures, mainly Chavín, Chimu, Moche, Nazca and Moxos, these in particular could still very easily be added)
A big thing that makes this weird is the time frame, the american continent uses a different method to mark the different periods of its history, there was no bronze, or copper, or medieval, or renaissance ages here, we use a system divided into pre-ceramic and ceramic halves, the latter being subdivided into formative, intermediate and horizon eras.
I'll try to go off this model and the time frame set by the mesoamerican cultures, so if it's a bit sloppy then I'm sorry (mind you that's still hard, because the mayas have existed for a veeeeeery long time, so being honest idk), taking into account that the ingame the "early modern" era has the dutch and the "medieval" has the aztecs, I'm choosing to interpret "early modern" as colonial in America, I'm classifying these cultures in this order.
Ancient: Norte Chico
Classical: Wari, Tiwanaku
Medieval: Inca, Muisca
I know it doesn't line up the best with the rest of the world, here specifically I'd really like some criticism from people who know about this stuff about not only the eras but the cultures chosen, thank you in advance.
The Cultures

1. Norte Chico

Caral, built around 3500 BCE, home of the oldest known civilization in the Americas, possibly even the most densely populated area in the world at that time, rivaling northern China, all of this according to Wikipedia of course.
It's honestly surprising that Norte Chico isn't already in the game, it beat out the olmecs by 2000 years yet they beat out our dear Little North to Humankind, oh well, we can still dream right?
Some info on them, they relied a lot on fish and other seafood because they lived next to the ocean, had a distinctive lack of visual art and pottery, liked to build mounds, probably had a theocratic society (the first signs of the staff god, a famous religious motif are found here) and engaged in what is known as "ecological steps" trading, where a tribe from the shore, would trade for goods from the mountains, and those mountain folks would trade with guys from the jungle for their stuff, creating a chain of trade where people could acquire food and valuable items from completely different biomes, this continued until the conquest by the spanish and portuguese, this was essential for life in the Andes, and most big andean cultures used this strategy, including all of the ones I've chosen for humankind (except maybe the Muisca I'm not sure), a lot of interaction between different andean peoples was caused by this.
EDIT: u/pachakamaq01 showed me some sources showing that the Norte Chico did indeed have some sort of visual art, in this html article right here
Mechanically I'd say their best bet is Builder for their focus, but it could be all other ones but militarist and expansionist, it's pretty hard to place such a different society to that which we're used to into this honestly, for their emblematic quarter, it will be a **mound** for sure, their emblematic unit on the other hand is hard to choose, mostly because we have found no real proof of violence related to the Norte Chico, it'd probably be something like with the olmecs, where it's a big, important predecessor weapon to posterior cultures, so it'd probably be a slinger in this case.
Before we close this out, can we talk about how badass these guys were? They made seats out of whale vertebra and flutes out of pelican bones, they originated the famous quipu (or at least a prototype) a system of knots and cords that can be thought of as an alternative to writing, used to store information coded in the length, color and placement of the knots (they're really interesting I'd recommend you reading up on them), and did all of this without using pottery?! like damn these guys were metal as hell.

1. Tiwanaku

I'm a bit biased here, but can you blame me? The archaological site of Tiwanaku is 2 hours away from where I live, and I've visited it a couple of times, it's a pretty nice place (and there's llamas walking around over there), if my memory serves me, the site was a place where many people from different cultures all came together, in a sort of pilgrimage, that was where Tiwanaku's power came from, as we haven't really found evidence of weapons there, the "empire" of Tiwanaku had territories from southern Peru, to western Bolivia and northern Chile, and had political power far from it's center near lake Titicaca.
These guys made amazing architecture, their stonework is honestly jawdroping, the (probably) most famous structure from the main site is the "Gate of the Sun" featuring our good old friend the staff god, there were also a number of monoliths (or stelas), probably of previous rulers, that curiously represent certain crab motifs, showing us the effect of "ecological steps" trading. A large temple called Pumapunku (quechua and aymara for "Puma door" or "Door of the Puma"), that sadly is kind of in ruins and the sunken platform kalasasaya, where the alien guys from history channel went once to argue that some of the heads in the structure represented martians. The tiwanakotas (demonym of someone from Tiwanaku) even exported high quality stone from quarries kilometers away for their buildings, their building style incorporated big grafts of stone and bronze in the shape of the letter H, that could lock together in order to mantain the integrity of the structures where they were used.
In game they'd probably be either aesthetes or builders, I'm leaning more towards the former myself but they could really be either, their emblematic quarter could be a monolith (the unique structures should be reserved for wonders in my opinion) and once again we are at a crossroads for an emblematic unit, but it'd probably be some sort of monk or other religious figure.
Of course I didn't pick them just because of my personal circumstance, but because I could easily see them being DLC along with Wari in particular, their relationship was compared to that of the US and USSR in the cold war, so I feel like they could be compelling choices for new cultures if they came together, speaking of Wari...

1. Wari

Wari, also called Huari, were a culture and empire that ruled in western and southern Peru, just north of Tiwanaku, these two together were part of the middle horizon historical era, their dominance can be attributed to the spread of knowledge of agriculture and communication, most notably some of the first definite usage of terrace farms, quipu and the mit'a system where instead of currency there would be a system of reciprocity, where if you helped your neighbor shear her alpacas, she would help you harvest your corn when it's due for example (oh and taxes would be handled this way too), all of these would later be adopted by the famous Incan empire.
Peru in particular has a lot of choices for cultures, I chose Wari mainly because of their heritage from cultures like the Moche, Lima, Nazca, and ironically Tiwanaku, their rivalry with the latter, and their successors, like the Chimor and the kingdom of Cuzco, who would later become our friends the Incas. You can correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm neither peruvian nor an expert on peruvian history, but I feel as if the Wari could be a good representative for pre-Incan Peru in general, kind of like how the Teutons represent the HRE and medieval Germany as a whole.
The Wari themselves were famous because of their textiles, that featured highly abstract representations of things such as good ol' Staff God, they also were great at metallurgy, utilizing metals such as gold and silver. In the last millennia or two since Norte Chico the andean cultures learned how to do pottery, and they were absolute masters of it, ceramics being some of the most common objects left behind by these mysterious people, being used to make pots, vessels and containers for chicha (corn beer), the latter specifically being smashed after their contents have been drunk as part of a ritual. I would like to mention Moche ceramics in particular, one time I had the pleasure of going to a museum in Lima, and there was a temporary exhibit showing their ceramics and other art forms, and my god they were horny, very very horny, a lot of jerking off and things like that.
Moving on, their focus could be agrarian, my reasoning is that they would have the terrace farms as emblematic quarter, the Incas could have them as well, but when we get to them shortly I'll explain why I'm giving them something else, plus originating the technology is a pretty good case for having it in the game, contrary to our previous two cultures these guys have proof of combat, there isn't much info on it on the web, but I could find that they used clubs and slings, both of those would work well.
Now for the moment you've all been waiting for...

1. Inca

Do these guys need an introduction? yeah probably, the Inca empire was the largest empire in Pre-Columbian America, their contributions include steamrolling all other cultures in the Andes, and being the final users of many of the Andean technologies and techniques I cited before, seriously, these guys were beasts, they controlled territory in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and they did all of this without the wheel, draft animals or western writing, very deserving of a spot if you ask me.
Some more info on these guys, the "inca" people still exist! they're called the quechua (inca means king or ruler in quechua), I even know some of them, such as my grandparents' maid/housekeeper, and their language is still alive too, thanks to efforts by the Peruvian, Bolivian and Chilean governments. The Inca empire was divided into 4 "suyus": Chinchaysuyu to the north being the most populous "suyu" where a lot of empires were conquered and reaching up to southern Colombia, Antisuyu to the east lying in the high Andes, Kuntisuyu to the west being located mainly in the southern peruvian coast and finally Qullasuyu, named after the aymara speaking Qulla people and the largest "suyu" by area, encompassing the Bolivian altiplano down to the southern Andes of Argentina and Chile, the whole Incan empire being known as Twantinsuyu.
The Inca believed in a pretty well known mythology, including Viracocha, the old man upstairs, Pachamama, literally "Mother Earth" and Inti, our favorite sun god, the Inca being the "son of the sun" and an absolute monarch. They were pretty good builders too, with that whole Inca Road System and Machu Pichu and whatnot. They also carried on the traditions of textiles and ceramics. They could record information, including calculations in Quipu and solve them using Yupanas (basically abacuses) (abaci?)), they were also good at skull surgery and chewed a lot of coca, this plant was revered as sacred and was used in many religious and medical ways (and still is). And they even had two calandars, one for the sun and one for the moon. But now we'll really look at the main part I wanna focus on for the Inca, their army
The incan army was their main asset, you ain't getting the biggest empire in the continent without some blood, sweat and tears, even though not all of their territory was gained by conquest, a lot of it was. Their equipment consisted of javelins, slings, bolas, maces, spears, bows, axes and their most common weapon, the macana, a blunt weapon made of stone or obsidian (EDIT: u/Affectionate_Phase98 helped me correct this mistake, they didn't actually make obsidian weapons) in the shape of a star to maximize force when attacking, capable of breaking bone. Their armor consisted of shields, helmets and body armor, made of wood, leather and sometimes copper.
Their armies were amazingly organized, having comparable roles to modern armies, such as generals, liutenants and captains, and it's said that their armies could reach 100 000 people, but their main advantage came from their road network and the mit'a system. Shelters called "tambo" and storage silos called "qullqas" were situated 1 day's traveling distance apart from each other, that way an advancing or retreating army would always have fresh equipment and a place to rest relatively nearby, this coupled with the mit'a system being able to enlist any capable male of age into the army meant that the Inca always had potential soldiers that could be enlisted and equipped very fast, solidifying their status as "empire"
Mechanically, there's no way they aren't expansionist, I've seen some people say agrarian or builder, and from an outside perspective that might make sense, but looking a but deeper it's difficult not to make them expansionist, their emblematic quarter would be the Inca Road System, allowing the player to build it in segments in order to help advance their army and solidifying the Inca's playstyle. Their emblematic unit could be a guy with a macana, idk if they have a specific quechua name but yeah, another possible unit could be a chasqui, fast and agile messengers that were essential in the organization of the Empire, being charged to deliver quipus, messages and gifts through the road network, either way if they didn't at least have the road they'd really not feel like the Incas.
EDIT: u/Pachakamaq01 showed me some possible names for the macana wielders in quechua, being Maqaq (the one who beats), Maqanayuq (the one with the Maqana) or Maqana Kamayuq (the Maqana specialist)
From personal experience most people don't know too much about the incas, apart from the fact they lived in the mountains and had llamas and farms, I hope I explained what made them so interesting to me and cleared up some misconceptions.
Finally, last but definintely not least

1. Muisca

After the wall of text that was the Inca I'm kinda tired, I just wanna preface that I know way less about the Muisca than the previous guys, so this part in particular is very vulnerable to my mistakes, if any of ya could review it to check that there are no errors that'd be lovely.
The Muisca were, according to some faceless expert, the fourth "advanced" civilization of the Americas (implying that other cultures in the Americas weren't advanced *grumble* *grumble*), these guys weren't an empire or a kingdom, they were a confederation of sovereign states, subdivided into tribes lead by chiefs or caciques, they were also not as big as their contemporaries in size, but they stood up very well in terms of impact and what they produced, a couple of years ago I went to the museum of gold in Bogotá, and there were some absolutely beautiful golden Muisca artifacts, they are honestly some of the most aesthetically pleasing things I've ever seen.
P.S. If you ever go to Bogotá please go there, it's amazing
Anyhow, their society was mostly based around the agriculture of coca, quinoa, yuca, and looots of different kinds of fruits and the extraction and refinement of emeralds, copper, coal, salt and most importantly **gold**.
Most of their legacy is cultural, they had a heraldry system, a complex religion that we know a fair bit about, a sport that still survives to the modern day (*cries in mesoamerican ball sport*), a calendar and they even inspired the myth of "El Dorado". Aparently they also had complex art, cuisine and mummified people, like I said I'm not very qualified to talk about them, but there's a lot, and I mean a **lot** of info out there about them, so you're completely free to use up an afternoon studying them.
Mechanically I'd personally make them aesthetes, not only would that give us a medieval aesthete culture (*doots*), but from what I've read it could really show their "non-empire" status and celebrate their heritage of gold crafting. Their emblematic unit would be the güecha warriors, a carefully selected group of young men that fought with clubs, darts, bows, spears and slingshots. As for their emblematic quarter, from what I read they didn't construct large stone structures and a lot of what they did build was destroyed, their living quarters (a.k.a. houses) were called "bohíos" and that could be a candidate for their EQ, if not that then some sort of temple or religious structure would be ideal.

1. Conclusion

Wow, that was a thing, this took around 8 hours of work including research, I did this because I really want this game to as good as possible, so I'll try to contribute to it in any way I can, I'll probably make a second post on other south american things that could be implemented, like resources and wonders, also like I said, I'm expecting either the mapuche or some guaraní culture for early modern, as well as argentina and colombia for late and brazil for contemporary so mark my words if (and only if) I'm right.
I greatly welcome any criticism, if an expert on any of these cultures is here then I'd love it if you could correct some of my mistakes, even if you know as much as me (not much) I welcome your suggestions and thoughts.
Peace!
Olivia the bored person

This is part 2 of 5.
Part 1
LET'S DO THIS!
Big thank you to everyone that upvoted and commented on the last post.
I’m pumped, this is part 2 of 5 for those keeping track at home.

1. Start with your revenue and monetization plan (are you targeting a sector that has money and can/will pay - Part 1)
2. Align yourself with others in your space (cheapest way to get traction/credibility)
3. Work on road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships (cheapest distribution)
4. Work on building a marketing strategy that can help expose and align your brand while strengthening its recognition with your partners (will this make us both look good)
5. Build customer advocates along the way, tell their stories (lead with examples)

Early traction, everyone wants it, very few people know how to do it effectively. Hell I’ve seen it all, run all the experiments, all the tests and I can tell you from experience if you have the patience, slow, steady, and surgical is the way to grow. Especially in the beginning.
In part one we spent a lot of time asking some basic fundamental business questions. Including, an exercise in the importance of being able to niche down.
We’re going to expand on the niching down because it’s how you gain clarity and find people to align yourself with early on.
The goal of this will be to understand:

1. How to niche down
2. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
3. How to position within that market
4. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success

I’ve chosen to outline these in all our steps for niching down.
You’re going to see these steps move from research to market evaluation to list building stopping just short of outreach. We’ll touch on this in part 3.
Last week I took a call where someone told me their target market is males 25-45 that like sports.
This is the most important part of your entire business. I’m serious.
Let’s rock through this together so we can get you super focused and know where and how to spend your time and money.
(The below was laid out in part 1 and was the layered niching exercise)
LEVEL 1: We’re a helpdesk product.
How to niche down
The big question is “for who”?
So you’ve picked the type of product you are building and a use case, the problem is there are lots of people like you out there and this doesn’t tell me much about your market, it’s too broad.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Because this is so broad, it’s impossible to actually target a market and without being able to do that, it’s not possible to recognize opportunities, there’s just too many of them.
How to position within that market
Competition is good and bad, but it’s always better to be a big fish in a little pond, the best way to reduce the size of your pond is to niche down as much as possible while still understanding a large enough TAM (total addressable market).
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
No wasted effort. Every idea, concept, must have a small goal attached to it.
It’s too expensive to try to be everything for everyone and when you take this approach you end up failing at doing any one thing well enough for people to switch.
Let’s build on this.
LEVEL 2: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies.
How to niche down
Pick an industry or trend that is on the rise - look towards a shift or something that relates to changes people are making in their daily routine.
In this case we picked eCommerce because it’s on track to hit over $7 Trillion worldwide this year and has steadily been increasing across all brands. So we have an industry with a large enough economic driver to let us start niching down.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
We now buy things online that we never would have thought to do so even just a few years ago. Amazon is selling Tiny Homes now, seriously, if you can buy it, odds are you can do it online. There are massive opportunities to bring goods and services to people through convenient online shopping. And with that increase they will all need a help desk platform to provide the best experience for their customers.
Customers today don’t want to speak with people, they want answers quickly and easily. It’s all about reducing friction.
How to position within that market
Narrow down within the market. eCommerce is a good starting point, there are different industries, subsets, and categories. Go narrower. Start thinking about where the friction exists in the industry and for what subsets.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
In the beginning, it’s going to be an uphill battle, picking the right trending industry will give you the best chance of success. Something that is rising up to the right in popularity is way easier to sell into than a trend that is declining.
Know your competitive landscape.
Everyone has a competitor, whether direct, partial, or mildly related. Spend a lot of time on understanding this and knowing that your product is part of a very large landscape or landscape of potential competitors. Any one of the existing partial or mildly related competitors may be building something to more directly compete with you down the road.
Practical advice
Most companies stop here and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a go to market plan or a sustainable business model.
There’s an important bit worth mentioning here as it will become a theme of this entire post.
Great products enhance workflows through features, the focus isn’t on the product but what the product enables people to do. Success in the software business is all about understanding existing workflows and simplifying the experience.
As you do this exercise to niche down ask yourself:
What does the current workflow look like?
What are they currently using?
How are they currently using it?
Where are the gaps?
What are the best practices for creating workflows?
Always seek to understand how your product works in a workflow - what role it plays, how it best optimizes - this is the data play referred to in Part 1.
What are the things that matter most to people in the eCommerce space?
That’s a lot of questions with even more answers, when you peel everything back it becomes very clear that it’s not possible to answer all of them without going deeper.
Too many people to talk to, too many industries, too much everything.
Let’s take a different approach - how I got to Shopify in the next niche down.
No successful new SaaS company today launches without an integration.
So let’s find an eCommerce platform to integrate with.
We have to look for a stable player that has an app store and is a market leader.
As a starting point, my goal is to be a help desk for ecommerce companies.

1. I need a list of all eCommerce platforms
2. I need to understand which help desks they already integrate with
3. I need to understand what people like and don’t like about them
4. I need to find out which platform is going to be the best fit for my product

There are lots of sources for this and even more articles, google and read.
If you’re looking for numbers though and data, use BuiltWith and run a search on the platforms after you have your list to figure out which is the most popular.
Ok so we have our list of eCommerce platforms, we’ve analyzed the data, made sure they tick all the boxes and we’ve run our reports and found that Shopify powers 1.2 million stores.
Let’s lock it in as our next step in niching down.
LEVEL 3: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify.
How to niche down
It’s more than just market size. Going with a market leader is always a safe bet but it also provides the most competition. Sometimes going with a smaller platform that doesn’t get all the attention is a worthwhile research project.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
There are two sides of the opportunity and this is something that I didn’t touch on in the original niching down. Shopify and BuiltWith categorize the types of stores that are on the platform, so you can niche down to a certain type of store, for example just cosmetics or just apparel.
The other side of the opportunity is putting together your list of companies currently operating in the ecosystem.
How to position within that market
Smart people are really good at collecting data and interpreting it.
Let’s get some data.

1. Go to the shopify app store
2. Type in “Support”
3. Click paid on the left margin and click the “Support Category”
4. Use something like Simple Scraper ( a great chrome plugin, no affiliation)
5. Get your scrape on, this shows 87
6. Time to get busy - categorize them
7. Pick the ones most similar to your offerings
8. Click on them, look at their reviews - all of them on shopify Scrape them
9. Go to G2 and Capterra and look through all those reviews as well
10. Put them all in a spreadsheet, read them all, highlight those that stand out
11. Find the ones that are popular, others that have features people like etc.
12. Document, and integrate the baseline features into a trello board on your product roadmap
13. Take all the bad reviews and complaints - look for gaps that you can fill

How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
So take a look above, we went from a bunch of questions to being able to do a ton of market research to do product research and understand the current market offerings and where we might be able to gain some ground and offer something people might be interested in and ARE PAYING FOR.
How do you stand out?
You need to have a workflow that is 10x better than a current competitor in the market with a strong roadmap that lays out how you intend on optimizing this workflow. Features are built to augment the workflow and simplify the work of your clients employees, less work, more data, better understanding.
Ok so we’ve narrowed it down to eCommerce and Shopify and we have a list of other products that are currently playing in the space. We’re now looking at workflow - let’s figure this bit out.
LEVEL 4: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation.
How to niche down
Add another variable - it doesn’t have to be Shipstation, but it’s a good example as for eCommerce you’re likely shipping products places. By adding another variable, we’re shrinking our population to target.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
The biggest problem for all companies these days is combining different one off services and getting them to play nicely together. Stand alone products usually outclass all in one products as stated above because the focus is better. This is generally always going to be where you can find a gap in the market as the integrating of products is an afterthought rather than something contemplated in the very beginning.
How do you decide on the technologies you want to work with?
How to position within that market
Don’t guess. Understand the workflow of an eCommerce company and how it relates to support. For instance, most support tickets relate to order status, tracking, and returns. These all involve the store, transaction, the service desk, and the shipping carrier. Look for ways to streamline the experience for the service rep - for instance if refunds require approval, build a system that allows for all those tickets to be queued up with an easy interface for approvals or different color tagging to allow for them to be easily sorted by type.
By focusing on two technologies you can start by creating a better visual collaboration between tools to improve overall experience.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Stack the deck in your favor.
Focus on where you can drive early alignment between your product offering and the audiences of your now two products. When you reach out to both companies especially the smaller ones like a Shipstation, you can collect more information about who they are catering to, volumes etc.
Most companies have a partner program - look into connecting with the lead.
When the time is right you might even get a shoutout on their social or blog or you can decide to co-publish some research report together. Lots of options.
Let’s double down on what being niche allows us to do:

1. Know our audience
2. Research with purpose
3. Personalize outreach with early feelers
4. Better understand a realistic TAM (total addressable market)
5. Understand overlap between products
6. Early alignment with bigger names

This whole topic is about alignment, alignment with partners, customers, and your product.
We have a list of potential customers now, but we need to segment them down further.
LEVEL 5: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus.
How to niche down
Why less than 100 skus?
This means they are small enough to try a new product. It also means you can see what works and what doesn’t work on a potentially smaller store. When you’re managing a store with more than 100 skus, things get a little complicated, it’s an arbitrary number but changing internal processes and workflows when you get to that level means that your staff is coming from a place of having used a system before that could handle the volume and trying out something newer or unproven is a tall order.
This process can be applied to anything, if your product does better project management look for people that run less than 20 projects at a time or projects that are less than 6 months, whatever it may be. We’re starting small.
Always default to the path of least resistance. Work smarter, not harder.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
I’m sure this could be automated, but in lieu of it being automated, you should start by manually figuring this out for yourself.
That list you have from BuiltWith that has urls, yeah we’re going to use that one.
Put the websites in the spreadsheet you downloaded, then create a new column and add “products” to the url - so you have the website in cell A, the word “products” in cell B then in blank cell C write “=CONCATENATE(A:B)” congratulations now you have cell C that will take you straight to the product page to see how many skus they have.
Update this hack doesn’t work on all shopify websites like I had hoped and after some research it seems like this is a bit of a struggle point for others as well.
I’m sure someone could write a script to scrape this information.
Go find an intern or hire someone to do all the lookups for you or find someone to write a script to automate the results - remember always work smart.
Run this and you’ll come up with your go to target list.
How to position within that market
The best helpdesk for stores on Shopify using shipstation with less than 100 skus - all of a sudden this starts to sound like something someone would almost search for. That’s the point.
We’re working our way down where it becomes a simple checklist if someone was searching for things.
Shopify - check
Shipstation - check
Built for smaller stores - check
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Remember you’re not building a product for everyone yet, your goal is to dominate a niche. You can always expand from there.
So we’re about half way through and we have figured out our potential partners and now we’re working on narrowing down this customer list. Before we dive in and start reaching out we need to really understand who we’re targeting and we need to start small.
Let’s narrow this down even further.
LEVEL 6: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue.
How to niche down
Why the less than $10 million in annual revenue? The only reason I would say this in the beginning is that they won’t have as much traffic and ticket volume, they make for better early clients, you can learn a lot more from their use cases and improve the product without worrying about something going wrong and a larger client really getting mad and churning. You also usually have greater access to work with their staff to improve your product.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Unless you’re currently on the front lines, you need to find some early providers of feedback that are on the front lines. In essence, this is the starting point of a community and information play.
There aren’t a lot of data points available about companies in the early stages. People always have questions and there are limited resources in the early days, even across similar companies.
(Just look at reddit there are tons of repeat answers and questions.)
Someone answering tickets all day is the last person that wants to provide feedback, as much as they would like their job made easier, they don’t have the time.
How to position within that market
“But I need a big logo to let people know that I’m real.” You don’t, not in the beginning. All you need is a few good customers that are open to lending you the feedback you need to get better. A lot of smaller brands do a good job of branding, play the long game, find brands that are growing and try to get in early - grow with them.
Logo hunting has its place but you need to find product market fit before you can really make that happen.
By now you have probably figured out that whenever possible you should automate things. The way you do this is through data collection.
Using logic, math, and a spreadsheet you can do enough to be dangerous.
Use a service to figure out what their unique traffic is, take a look at their products and assume that their cart value is around 2-4 products per order then take the conversion rates by industry - you can find these online they are openly listed.
Your sheet will look something like this:
Company, Traffic, Conversion Percentage, Order Value, Sales Percentage, Revenue
eCommerce blended average is 2.2% - go use a spreadsheet and some formulas and bam you now have the revenue numbers. We’re not looking for exacts here, but more generally a good estimate.
I’ve actually run these numbers, if the products are sold through other channels, Amazon, retail, etc, then a rough estimate would be around ~33% of the revenue will come from the ecommerce store.
Factor in a range based on the size of the brand and it’s channels this should give you a rough estimate of the revenue even if they don’t publish it.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Provide value - the most overhyped phrase but still true - the question then becomes, with something as subjective as “value” rather than just create, instead ask and create. This part is coming up, we’re almost ready to turn this on.
We’ve started to move from who are partners are to who are our potential customers. This is on purpose - my stance is that your first customers are really your partners and you should work on aligning yourself with those that are the best fit for your product.
You want your first clients to buy into your vision and invest the time to help shape it.
Ok on to the next -
LEVEL 7: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people.
How to niche down
So now we’re getting into the easier stuff - this is just a simple LinkedIn Search - small teams are usually before the real deep process point, they are also really good at providing feedback on tools that can actually help them out.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
If you have less than 5 people on a team, it’s a small enough number to target the entire team - multi prong approach to product awareness.
For customer support they are often the least paid and they have the most stressful jobs - it’s an all around shitty position to be in, so if you can provide them joy, you’re going to make fans quick. Also, they aren’t usually sold into, they are rarely asked their opinion, etc.
How to position within that market
Give them a voice. The same goes for any lower level positions as well by the way. When people are getting started in their careers they are looking to hear about the jobs people have even at the lower levels but the resources just aren’t there. Even for more senior roles, it’s hard to get a beat on what the current status is of their projects, people don’t like sharing - I still don’t know why.
We’re seeing communities around Sales popup SalesHacker, sales, Bravado etc. We don’t see as many for other roles, there is a wide open space in this. I don’t see any places for people to better understand customer support/success which is THE ONLY INBOUND TOUCHPOINT WITH CUSTOMERS POST SALE.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
This is part of the philosophy and psychology of understanding human dynamics. Find a persona that you can relate to immediately and build your product around fixing their problems, be obsessed with this.
They get paid nothing, but they’d like less tickets, how do you reduce that ticket count, how do you bring other parts of the business that they may need to have access to more prominently in your support system so they don’t have to have multiple windows open. How do you build something to maximize their efficiency?
Better yet, how do you tag someone in the CRM and flag it over to the sales system to see if they purchase more product as a result of a good interaction with support - this is how you turn a cost center into a revenue generator. This is a killer feature that I’m not aware of out of the box.
This could unlock a commission structure and reward system for what is arguably becoming a dealbreaker for most companies.
Which is a great segway to the next drill down - you should be starting to see how this all really blends together if done correctly.
LEVEL 8: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes.
How to niche down
They have to be looking to automate their process or improve their workflow. When people find a tech stack that works, oftentimes new technology doesn’t stick around very long, we’re all creatures of habit.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
You’re only looking for people that are talking about processes or a company that has something related to the pride they take with their process - you can check out BuiltWith and see a list of products they have tried over the last 18 months.
When a company is testing a bunch of different products it means they are looking for a better process. This is your sweet spot.
How to position within that market
You’ve seen me sprinkle “workflow” into this post. This is pretty much a preview of Part 3 and the importance of product design.
Your product must improve someone’s existing workflow. If it doesn’t it’s not a viable product.
There are two parts to this, does your product improve an existing workflow AND how easy can your product be inserted into that workflow?
Remember, this is their business and they need to make a transition as smoothly as possible with as little disruption as possible. This goes for any product you’re selling. Change is hard.
Understanding a company’s process really is everything.
If people aren’t looking to automate or improve their process, there’s a good chance you should change your approach immediately and work towards more of an education campaign and double down on what it would take to let people quickly switch over from an existing platform. Focus on reducing friction.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Looking for people that are interested, not those we need to educate early on.
Data migration and implementation is one of the main reasons people don’t want to switch or entertain new products. There is always a fear of lost productivity.
Everyone is looking to automate right now, but the price has to be right, and that includes not the subscription amount, but the training, the migration, the new workflows, the time to adopt, the willingness to adopt, etc.
During almost any transition, the company will be paying for two systems at the same time during that handoff. This is rough, not enough companies actually address this in a meaningful way.
The argument is that a pure SaaS play doesn’t exist or shouldn’t exist for an early stage company, there should always be a service and consulting component. Hold everyone’s hand, understand their problems and make them feel like you’re building a product just for them.
Ok we’re almost there -
LEVEL 9: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes who are currently using Zendesk.
How to niche down
Let’s spearfish.
Zendesk - great platform - but has its limits that only show up based on workflows. Zendesk will work great until you have a workflow that incorporates other tools - then it starts to struggle.
This is true of most large legacy platforms. As legacy platforms moved up market to Enterprise for revenue reasons, they usually forget about smaller teams. Instead relying on dev house partners to do customizations.
This is where industry experience really comes into play - knowing the goals of a company or team, their workflows, and where you can create a better solution for those with those workflows for things that the legacy platforms prefer to source out to their dev house partners.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Your calls can now go from generic to focused with questions that can hone in on workflows and gaps. For example, Zendesk’s UX/UI sucks for partner integrations, we’ve seen companies like Kustomer, Gorgias, and others become more popular because of a better UX/UI that supports the whole customer experience and journey. This is a fundamental switch in approach.
From one of our earlier research steps we found 87 companies that people were using for support with shopify, we have them in a spreadsheet, we then could take those and put all the competitors in builtwith to run some reports to understand market penetration (you can do this with number of reviews as well by the way if you’re lazy - don’t be lazy).
Download your list - populate your CRM - you now know what people are using, how long they’ve been using them.
Narrow down your list to the top 20 clients - yes only 20.
Even if you have 100 clients or a thousand clients at this point, this process works for every single Sales rep you have - and I’m going on a 95% chance none of them are doing this stuff. And if you tell me they are, I know from the amount of generic ass emails I get regularly spewed out to me they aren’t doing it well and I guarantee you money is being left on the table. (Topic for another day)
How to position within that market
You know what software they are using, you know their tech stack, your goal is to figure out their workflow. If you don’t know, ask. You should understand the general business workflows for the industry - again industry knowledge is required.
Engage them with conversation and find out. Base your questions on conversations you’ve had with other people in the space and be a source of information about how other people are doing it.
The above is completely able to be put into a human measurable process, one based on quality over quantity, relationships over transactions, and geared towards long term growth.
Be about the things that other platforms are not. Focus on changing the narrative from cost center to revenue generator.
The helpdesk for Shopify and Shipstation customers looking to streamline their processes and free up their support teams to become revenue generators in an organic and measurable fashion.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
It’s all about workflows, data, and automation.
Niche down, learn from the inside out, follow the trends and work on being able to tie back data to creating more revenue no matter what your product does and you’ll be able to start conversations with people actively looking to create more optimized workflows.
Focusing on a legacy product and small businesses usually allows you to find a sweet spot, they don’t find value in all the features because they won’t use them all. But they do want the more advanced features like automation and workflow help. These are usually cost prohibitive in the platform.
This is why you focus on workflow over features, you’ll never catch up with the big guys in terms of features, but there are always ways to compete on workflows, because everyone has their own independent goals around them. There aren’t standards, only best practices.
Side note - there are entire companies that are hired to implement systems like Zendesk and build integrations on top of it and it’s a market leader. The same goes for any market leader.
LEVEL 10ish: You can add location to the end of our narrowing down. A company physically local to you (at least this was the case prior to COVID-19) can allow for an in person visit which has been massive in building trust with early clients. Makes it easier to have a conversation as well.
That’s it. Go through this process, substitute your values, keep drilling down and recognize opportunity along the way. When you do it correctly you’ll see massive improvements for your initial outreach.
Emails go from:
We’re a new helpdesk company.
To:
We’re a new helpdesk company for customers that use Shopify and Shipstation. We help agile support teams that are looking to better automate their workflows. Our integrations also allows your support team’s interactions to be directly tied into future revenue generation.
___________
I can tell you from experience I’m visiting the url for the second email even if I’m not looking to make a change.
This is a good place to stop, we hit question 2 of 5 and we’re almost at the halfway point.
If you have more specific questions about this part just drop them in the comments and I'll respond to them.

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Breaking the Mould in Southern Europe - Anna Bosco & Susannah Verney(self) 4 [Article] Legal and Ethical Imperatives for Using Certified Sign Language Interpreters in Health Care Settings(self) 5 [Article] Bottles and Bricks: Rethinking the Prohibition against Violent Political Protest by Jennifer Kling & Megan Mitchell(self) 6 [Book] Corruption in International Investment Arbitration - Aloysius Llamzon(self) 5 [Article] Sports prediction and betting models in the machine learning age: The case of Tennis, Wilkes 2019.(self) 1 [chapter] Handwriting Recognition Systems and Applications(self) 3 [Article] Designing robust policies under deep uncertainty for mitigating epidemics, Siddhartha Paul, Jayendran Venkateswaran(self) 4 [ARTICLE] IJSSSP: TLS Certificates of the Tor Network and Their Distinctive Features(self) 1 [Book] Methods in Yeast Genetics and Genomics, 2015 Edition: A CSHL Course Manual(self) 3 [Article] Optically improved mitochondrial function redeems aged human visual decline(self) 4 [ARTICLE] Getting Involved with Time: Notes on the Analysis of a Schizoid Man (PROQUEST)(self) 7 [Book] URGENT If you have access to Project MUSE please help me with finding the pdf of "Where is Ana Mendieta"(self) 4 [Book] Rites, rights and rhythms: a genealogy of musical meaning in Colombia's black pacific by Michael Birenbaum Quintero(self) 1 [BOOK] Corrupt Research: The Case for Reconceptualizing Empirical Management and Social Science by Raymond Hubbard(self) 4 [Thesis] Protecting education from attack: Humanitarian agencies and the implementation of a new global norm in the case of Palestine (Proquest)(self)NSFW 3 [Chapter] from A History of the Soviet Union From the Beginning to Its Legacy By Peter Kenez chapter 11,12,13(self) 2 [Article] The effects of NBPTS‐certified teachers on student achievement + Douglas N. Harris Tim R. Sass(self) 5 [Book] Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics - Simon Robertson(self) 1 [Book] Smolensk Under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia(self) 1 [Article] [Ingenta] A Study on the Complementary Economy of China and the Philippines Under the New Normal Situation (2010-2016) by Zhu Bin and Jing Lei(self) 4 [Article] Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India 1750-1790 by S. Arasaratnam(self) 1 [BOOK] Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship - Manuel Balán & Françoise Montambeault(self) 6 [Article] Autonomous industrial mobile manipulation (AIMM): past, present and future. Author: Mads Hvilshøj, Simon Bøgh, Oluf Skov Nielsen, Ole Madsen.(self) 1 Removed: Pending moderation REQUEST [eBook] The Assessment Book – Physiotutors Guide to Orthopedic Physical Assessment(self) 1 [Article] [Brill] The Tragedy of Small Power Politics: The Philippines in the South China Sea by Charmaine Misalucha-Willoughby and Robert Joseph Medillo(self) 1 [BOOK] Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960(self) 5 [Article] EFFECTS OF HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF PLANT OILS AND FATTY ACIDS FOR MYCELIAL GROWTH AND PINHEAD FORMATION OF HERICIUM ERINACEUM(self) 1 [Article] [HeinOnline] "Disposable Deontology: The Death Penalty" by Tung Yin(self) 2 [Article] Efficient conversion of pretreated brewer’s spent grain and wheat bran by submerged cultivation of Hericium erinaceus(self) 1 [Chapter] The Imperial Institute: The state and the development of the natural resources of the Colonial Empire, 1887–1923(self) 1 [Book] Pieter Steyn - Zapuphizo: Voice of the Nagas(self) 3 [Article] Critical Constructivism and Postphenomenology: Ethics, Politics, and the Empirical(self) 5 [BOOK] Political Populism: A Handbook - Reinhard C. 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G.(self) 6 [Chapter] MULTICULTURALISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM by Slavoj Zizek(self) 5 [Article] Value articulation : A framework for the strategic manage- ment of intellectual property by Conley, James G., Peter M.Bican, and Holger Ernst(self) 3 [Book](JSTOR)Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being by Agustin Fuentes(self) 1 [Book](self) 1 [Book] Ottoman Explorations of the Nile: Evliya Çelebi’s Map of the Nile and The Nile Journeys in the Book of Travels (Seyahatname) - Dankoff, Tezcan & Sheridan(self) 1 [Article] The Jewels of Adad by FNH Al-Rawi, JA Black(self) 1 [article] A measurement of collective learning effects in Italian high-tech milieux(self) 1 [Article] Parasympathetic activity is reduced during slow-wave sleep, but not resting wakefulness, in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome - Fatt et al., 2020(self) 1 [Book] Linked Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, by Seth van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh(self) 4 [Book] The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy - Edited by Matthew D. Adler and Marc Fleurbaey(self) 4 [Book] The Ostrich Communal Nesting System(self) 1 [Article] Protracted Effects of Ketamine Require Immediate Kappa Opioid Receptor Activation and Long‐Lasting Desensitization - Jacobson et al., 2020(self) 1 [Book] The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas by Olaf Kaltmeier et al.(self) 1 [Article] Dispute Resolution Provisions of the Energy Charter by Philippe Pinsolle(self) 1 [Book] Regional Development and Planning for the 21st Century New Priorities, New Philosophies(self) 4 [BOOK] Need a book from Oxford Scholarship online on International law subject.(self) 1 [Book] Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru: Volume 2, The Wanka Region(self) 4 [Book] Varieties of Virtue Ethics - David Carr, James Arthur, Kristján Kristjánsson(self) 4 [Article] Combustion Characteristics of a Swirled Burner Fueled With Waste Cooking Oil(self) 1 [BOOK] 'Beyond pleasure : Freud, Lacan, Barthes' by Margaret Iversen(self) 5 [Article] Empirical Studies of Adolescent Sexual Behavior: A Critical Review(self) 3 [Article]The sexual attitudes, behavior, and relationships of women with histrionic personality disorder(self) 2 Midsommar: Thing Theory [Article](self) 6 [Article] Microdosing psychedelics as cognitive and emotional enhancers.(self) 1 [Book] (Taylor&Francis) Human Evolution An Introduction to Man's Adaptations by Bernard Campbell(self) 1 [Article] Changing settlement patterns in the upper Mantaro Valley, Peru(self) 1 [BOOK] Fighting for Abortion Rights in Latin America Social Movements, State Allies and Institutions - Cora Fernández Anderson(self) 1 [Chapter] from the book The Crimean War: 1853–1856 Winfried Baumgart chapter 1 , 3 ,18(self) 1 [Book] Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America -Joan Kee(self) 3 [Article] Forensic medical evaluation of children who present with suspected sexual abuse: How do we know what we know? by Grace Wong(self) 4 [book] Grammatical Voice — Fernando Zúñiga and Seppo Kittilä(self) 2 [Article]Naturally occurring 5′ preS1 deletions markedly enhance replication and infectivity of HBV genotype B and genotype C (supplementary materials)(self) 1 [Book] Commercial Real Estate Analysis and Investments (International) 3rd Edition(self) 2 [Book] Best Practices Guide to Residential Construction: Materials, Finishes, and Details by Steven Bliss(self) 2 [Book] Green Logistics: Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Logistics(self) 1 [Article] Black Codes and Slave Codes by Nakia D. Parker(self) 1 [Book] Marsh's Becoming a Teacher(self) 4 [Book] Germans Against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich: Essays in Honour of Peter Hoffmann by Francis R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes(self) 4 [Chapter] The Standard Story and Its Rivals(self) 1 [BOOK]Agrarian and Other Histories Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri - Edited by Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik(self) 1 [Book] Regional modernities : the cultural politics of development in India. Ed. K. Sivaramakrishnan; Arun Agrawal(self) 1 [Chapter] Damping in Structures(self) 1 [Book] Gerontología y geriatría: valoración e intervención. Editorial Médica Panamericana. 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Brisbane: Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University, 1997.(self) 3 [Book] Request: Migration and the Refugee Dissensus in Europe: Borders, Security and Austerity by Nicos Trimikliniotis.(self) 9 [Article] Masculinity in videogames: the gendered gameplay of Silent Hill(self) 1 [BOOK] 'Truth games : lies, money, and psychoanalysis' by John Forrester, Harvard University Press, 2000(self) 1 [Book] Osterloh, Jörg, und Clemens Vollnhals. NS-Prozesse Und Deutsche Öffentlichkeit: Besatzungszeit, Frühe Bundesrepublik Und DDR.(self) 2

Anti-corruption background checks begin for public officials

The govt passed a law to require judges and officials to undergo "background checks" before being hired.
 
Additionally, asset forfeiture law was passed to confiscate embezzled property. A new prosecutors' department was created to handle asset forfeiture.
These new prosecutors are also going through background checks before being hired.
 
The new anti-corruption institute tasked with doing these new background checks has audited 26 potential prosecutors: 2 failed, 11 barely passed, 13 passed.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191736

U.S. sends $1mln anti-corruption aid

https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191739

New stray dog shelter and strategy to reduce numbers

In 2018, newly-elect Yerevan Mayor Marutyan vowed to end the practice of killing stray dogs. It wasn't just to be humane. City says mass-killings make the other dogs more aggressive, and research shows they breed faster. Not killing is a long-term strategy.
 
City took over the task of catching dogs from the private industry, which was mired in corruption.
They began neutering, tagging, and releasing the non-dangerous ones.
 
City's dog-department has just launched its new facility. It has a clinic, surgery, post-surgery rooms, more cages, and soon a disease lab.
They neuter 25 dogs per day. 1300 in 2020H1, twice more than last year. 4300 since 2019.
 
City says equally important is dog owners' behavior. They shouldn't dump pets on the streets.
The law requires pet owners to register their pets, but only 400 out of 20,000 have done so.
 
If they were registered, the owners would less likely dump them, and if they did, the pets' micro-chip would allow City to find and punish the owner.
 
To encourage more owners to register, City wants to eliminate the $10/year ownership fee.
https://hetq.am/hy/article/118973
Tags: #StrayDog

La casa de papel

It's a TV show that blew up in Armenia during the pandemic. One of the main actors is Lebanese-Spanish-Armenian Hovik Keuchkeryan. Today he visited Armenia.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191744

Parliament asks Constitutional Court to delay Kocharyan hearing...

... because Parliament wants time to discuss the opinions recently received from Venice Commission and ECHR on whether Kocharyan can be charged with the law he's charged with as part of March 1st case.
Parliament asked CC to translate and send them the documents.
 
Kocharyan earlier withdrew his case from CC but that doesn't mean CC won't discuss the topic, especially since another entity had also asked CC to discuss the topic.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191689

ex-CC judge's entrance is blocked

Hrant Nazaryan is one of the three CC judges who was recently fired. Today he tried to return to his office but the security blocked his entrance to the building, citing the law that fired him.
 
Another fired judged Gyulumyan hasn't visited CC for several days now because "she doesn't want to confront the police".
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191697 , https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.am/arm/news/589219.html

Polls: Pashinyan's rating refuses to drop

85% approve Pashinyan's job, 79% President, 68% Ministries, 55% Parliament, 23% opposition.
 
What is Pashinyan's weakest point?
16% not tough enough, 10% hires bad officials, 4% not drastic enough.
Gallup International. June 10-27. https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191701 , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020520.html

Poll: is Armenia on the right track? / Were your expectations met?

Did the revolution outcome satisfy your expectations? 79% fully/partially yes, 6% no.
 
69% says Armenia is on right/definitely-right direction. 2% definitely-wrong direction (15% in Georgia)
 
Will things improve in Armenia? 80% yes (69% in Georgia)
 
Is democracy better than other forms of govt? 63% yes (49% in Georgia)
 
"Most people are aware of CC crisis and support Constitutional reforms," said CRRC pollster.
CRRC pollster: https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020509.html , https://factor.am/265768.html , https://factor.am/265779.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020508.html

Chamber of Lawyers files complaint against NSS

Lawyers complain that NSS violated the attorney-client privilege by wiretapping the suspect when he made a call to the attorney. "The content of the call was later used as evidence," said lawyers.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191750

Healthcare Minister testifies as a witness in bribery case

Months ago the deputy Healthcare Minister Armen Davtyan was charged with accepting bribes. He denies wrongdoing.
The person who gave bribes is Razmik Abrahamyan. He confessed.
 
A trial was held today. Minister Torosyan was called to testify as a witness.
He spoke about the anti-corruption fight within the system and how he routinely spoke with directors of various institutes to make sure they don't even try to offer bribes to Ministry officials "because the old way of doing things is gone".
 
P.S. The bribe giver is the same guy who is also a defendant in a separate case about the extortion and trafficking of dozens of newborn children. He's the director of the Republican Childbirth Clinic.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191691

COVID stats

+662 infected. +448 healed. +13 deaths.
118,102 tested. 11,211 active. 15,484 healed. 469 deaths.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191683

COVID donations

Kalashnikov began producing AM-103 rifles (up to 50k/year). Their Armenia-based partner donated $170,000 towards COVID.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191713
 
11 Lithuanian doctors have finished their 2-week campaign to help Armenia.
https://hetq.am/hy/article/119002

Banks and loan vacations during pandemic

As of June 1st, banks gave loan vacations to 550k people and 17.4k businesses to ease their COVID burden.
They reviewed $2.7 billion in loans.
 
Bank deposits shrank 1.1% but went back to pre-pandemic levels recently.
Interest rates are unlikely to increase, says the president of banks union.
 
"Unlike the financial crisis of 2008 and 2014, today's situation isn't due to changes in economic fundamentals. This makes managing the problem harder. The parts of the economy that serve as engines are heavily damaged. We hope the govt, businesses, and citizens will succeed in overcoming it."
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191536

Grandma's cellphone / Medical worker disciplined

Context: a grandma's body was lost because of bad handwriting that led to confusion. Then her body was picked up by the wrong people who misidentified her. Her body will be exhumed and returned to the correct family.
 
St. Gregory Illuminator hospital says they've identified a junior nurse who allegedly took the dead grandma's phone and stole cash from her account, before grandma's family came to pick up her stuff.
There is an investigation. He could be fired if confirmed.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191663

Oncology institute workers...

... are getting that sweet VIP deal. The institute will use "modern high-quality buses to transport employees for free". Two routes for now.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191687

Real estate prices & transactions

Earlier we learned how COVID affected housing purchase/rent market. All realtors recorded a drop in transactions.
 
One realtor saw a 3x decline in transaction numbers. While the prices remained stable at the beginning of the pandemic, in June it dropped by -5%.
 
Another realtor recorded a sharp drop in second-hand housing transactions, but no drop in the newly-built housing market.
A noticeable drop was recorded in non-residential property lease prices. "Many landlords gave discounts."
 
Across Yerevan, sales transactions +84% in May vs April, but -61% YoY.
New rent transactions +7.8x in May vs April.
More: https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020466.html

Beeline workers are against TEAM merger

Context: UCOM's co-founder was fired. He formed a new TEAM ISP. TEAM wants to purchase the financially troubled Beeline.
 
300 Beeline workers asked Pashinyan to suspend any merger because they're afraid that TEAM will replace them with TEAM's own workers.
TEAM says they won't lay off anyone because they need the existing Beeline workers' experience. "It's a big company. We can't replace the workforce."
https://factor.am/265961.html

SU-30SM jets conduct first target practice

"All targets were hit struck accurately," bragged Pashinyan, who will brag about the jets for another 50 years.
https://youtu.be/bmfsO7PH0jo
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191733

A dude claims Akna Lake belongs to him

A local "heavy guy" claimed the iconic Akna Lake is his property, and he'll do fish-breeding in it.
The Nature Ministry had to respond with "now it's not yours" after environmentalists raised an alarm.
http://www.panarmenian.net/arm/news/282613/ , https://newarmenia.am/ակնա-լճում-ձկնաբուծարան-լինելը-կուսո/

Azerbaijan's chief epidemiologist goes 404

"I'm not in Baku. I'm in rayon. Sitting in a village without internet or news. I don't know anything. Call the Ministry," said Abdullah Agaev when someone tried to contact him.
 
Meanwhile, Aliyev brought the military to help with the pandemic.
http://www.panarmenian.net/arm/news/282603/ , https://www.lragir.am/2020/07/03/561165/

update: Soccer tournament suspended over match-fixing

Last week we learned how Soccer Federation cooperated with INTERPOL, NSS, UEFA, sports betting agencies, and found that 5 teams were fixing the match results in the secondary league (not the main Premier League).
 
The entire secondary league is now suspended indefinitely. 45 people associated with those 5 teams are permanently banned. Another 13 are suspended.
 
Meanwhile, the Premier League continues its matches. Only 2 rounds left. 3 teams have a chance to win.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191706 , https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191716 , https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191724
Tag: #MatchFixing #Soccer

Former soccer federation chief's restaurant raided

ex-HHK MP and soccer boss Nemets Rubo is hiding in Russia. He's wanted for alleged kidnapping and torture, and financial crimes.
His restaurant Harsnaqar, where the alleged kidnapping victim was held, was raided today.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191723 , https://www.reddit.com/armenia/comments/go26nw/may212020_news_1_hhk_mp_charged_with_abduction/?

Journalists find "fishy" corruption / 2 mayors busted

In January, Hetq outlet published a report about fishy things going on around a fish business in Ararat province.
 
Prosecutors say: in 2004 a lease was signed for an 11ha land in Sis. In 2007 the company illegally built fish-breeding pools on 5ha.
Sis's former and current leaders knew about this but ignored it.
The former mayor cannot be charged due to statute of limitations, while the current mayor qualifies for Pashinyan's 2018's mass amnesty.
 
Sis was told to either destroy the facility or take it under public control. They chose the latter. The facility was recently sold for $230,000.
Free money: https://hetq.am/hy/article/118996

infrastructure and road upgrades

Norakert has a 7km water delivery network. A govt subsidy will repair 2.5km this year, with the rest being repaired last year. It'll also help 60 businesses to get regular water delivery.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191666
 
Sevan is having 5 of its roads leading to residential complexes repaired. A $316,000 infrastructure project. It'll also renovate the curbs and water drainage.
https://armtimes.com/hy/article/191665
 
Syunik province has 3.4x more infrastructure upgrades this year, worth $17.7mln. Apartment energy insulation, roads, etc.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191734

Top-5 documentary/biography books Yerevan residents read in May

5) Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. (about how other people will get rich but you won't)
4) D'une porte l'autre, by Charles Aznavour. (about why Marvel movies are nothing more than a theme park)
3) A subtle Art of Not Giving F, by Mark Manson. (about helping mark Manson to get richer)
2) Becoming, by Michael Obama. (about being black)
1) The monk who sold his Ferrari, by Robin Sharma. (about helping Robin Shirama to get richer)
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020395.html

this guy plants

Stepan Taroyan takes the dried out branches and wood and turns them into natural art. He works at Yerevan's Green Department.
Photos: https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/191160

$10mln Yerevan project for a new leisure center and park

Arabkir district's Komitas St. has a neglected park. It'll be renovated and a multi-functional center will be built.
The works have already begun, with 30 budkas being removed from the area to clear the way. The main construction begins in 2021.
 
5,000 plants will be installed to close the large gaps. They'll be joined by an amphitheater and a fountain. This will allow concerts and theatrical performances to be held.
 
The nearby 'Arabkir' shopping area will be brought under a roof and turned into a modern center with food, Armenian wine-tasting, international cuisine, an area for kid's entertainment, and handmade product sales.
The center's backside will be made out of glass and face the renovated garden.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1020467.html
 
You've read 1894 words.

Disclaimer & Terminology

1) The accused are innocent until proven guilty in the court of law, even if they sound guilty.
2) Currency in Armenian ֏ unless specified otherwise.
3) NSS/SIS/SOC = law enforcement agencies. QP = Civil Contract Party. LHK = Bright Armenia Party. BHK = Prosperous Armenia Party. HHK = Republican Party.
4) ARCHIVE of older posts by Idontknowmuch: PART 1 ; PART 2 ; PART 3 ; PART 4 ; PART 5.
4) ARCHIVE of older posts by Armeniapedia.

Quarterbacks

There’s no way to discuss the Miami Dolphins looking ahead to the 2020 season without addressing the elephant in the room. Ever since Ryan Tannehill was shipped off to the Titans, a single question has loomed large over the future of this franchise: who is the long term answer under center? As we head into the 2020 draft with a top-five pick, it’s a question we’re going to be hearing an awful lot over the next few months.
I’ll be blunt from the outset: a great deal of this series this year is going to deal with that question. I understand that this is going to cause contentious debate, just as it has throughout the season and will continue to throughout the offseason. I understand also that some of my takes about our strategy this season are going to be controversial.
I’ve tried to stay out of the pro-/anti-tank arguments throughout the season as much as possible. I have not always been successful. Spoiler alert for those who hadn’t already caught on: Cidolfus was pro tank. I understand that this position makes many of you viscerally angry just as I understand that many who supported tanking were annoyed at those celebrating “meaningless” wins. So before we get going, I want to ask everyone to keep one thing in mind not only in regards to my own commentary to follow, but for any discussion in this series or in the many other posts that are sure to occur over the next several months:
Let people be fans in whatever manner makes them happy.
I understand that we have emotional reactions to this sport. Nevertheless, it bears reminding: football is a sport and watching is supposed to be fun. If someone wants to win every Sunday because it’s just more fun to win? Good for them. If someone is willing to trade losses now for a perceived advantage in the long term and is happy to see us lose now because they think it’ll be better later? Good for them. If someone wants to bandwagon a team because they just like to watch winning football on Sundays? Good for them. If someone wants to pick the Dolphins as their team for the future because they like the animal? Pity the poor fool, but good for them.
It’s not my job, your job, or anyone else’s job to tell someone else how to enjoy watching sports, so we should all just try and live and let live. That’s not to say that we can’t discuss these differing viewpoints. The whole point of this series is to generate discussion. Just keep it respectful.
Like last year, I plan on posting one of these each week throughout the postseason, and then when I can find time as appropriate through the offseason I’ll try to follow up with an additional free agency and draft discussion. I’m expecting a lot of real work to hit me beginning on March, though, so we’ll see what happens. As always, this series will be primarily geared towards team-building with a focus on contract management under the salary cap. I don’t pretend to be any great evaluator of NFL talent and instead rely pretty heavily on other sources for that type of analysis. This analysis is pretty statistics heavy, by which I mean the math part. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician and I’m pretty far removed from what little stats I took in college at this point, so as far as the real math goes, it’s still going to be pretty rudimentary.
With all that said, let’s start The Offseason with Cidolfus III.

• Wildcard Round Weekend: Quarterbacks
• Divisional Round Weekend: The 2019 Season in Review
• Conference Championship Weekend: Potential and Expected Salary Cap Casualties and Positions of Need
• Pro Bowl Weekend: Building the Offense
• Super Bowl Weekend: Building the Defense
• Pre-Draft Recap

The Quarterback Conundrum

Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic of Flores as the coach to drag this franchise kicking and screaming out of mediocrity, I hope it is not too controversial to suggest that getting a quarterback should be our first priority from a roster-building standpoint.
But of course it is.
Especially due to the recent uncertainty regarding Tua Tagovailoa’s intentions to declare for the 2020 NFL draft, this subreddit has seen enthusiastic suggestions from using any of our three first round selections all the way to not even drafting a quarterback in the first three rounds at all and instead rolling into the 2020 season with Fitzpatrick and Rosen. Some suggest faith that Rosen can still develop into the heir apparent. Others recommend punting to the 2021 draft where we can try our chances at Lawrence or Fields. Still others suggest that first round quarterbacks are overrated and point to successes found in the middle and later rounds.
Those who have read these posts in previous years know that I’m a numbers guy. So I spent a good chunk of my holiday vacation this year compiling statistics on every quarterback drafted since 2000 to see what we can learn to inform a strategy as how to best find your future quarterback in the NFL. The data has mostly been culled from Pro Football Reference cross-referenced with Wikipedia for information on when players were rostered but did not play. Being a numbers guy, I would have liked to get into some more advanced metrics like ANY/A+ (which is useful for comparisons over a long period of time since it’s normalized to the league average over a three year period). Unfortunately, this information, and many other stats (like QBR) were not available going back the full twenty years, and I wanted to be as consistent as possible. Instead, I decided on 12 different values across three broader categories:
Activity: Availability is the best ability in the NFL. How many games did the player start? How many seasons was that player on an active roster? What percent of their possible games played did they start? What was the QB win percentage in starts?
Accolades: How many accolades did the quarterback acquire over their career? A lot of people will make appeals to these accolades when determining a player’s value, and while I find them the least helpful for this discussion, it’s good to know for argument’s sake. How many Pro Bowls, First Ballot All Pros, and MVPs did the player receive? How many Super Bowls did they win?
Stats: Nothing too fancy here. How did the player perform over their career? We’re looking mostly at career completion percentage, touchdown to interception ratio, adjusted net yards per attempt, and passer rating. These are some easily-digestible, high-level metrics on a quarterback’s general passing performance. I intentionally omitted rushing performance from this analysis because it’s so extremely skewed in favor of a small handful of quarterbacks that the data wouldn’t be particularly useful.

Some Caveats and Acknowledgments

I tracked total attempts initially as a metric to exclude or weight individual quarterback stats. For example, when calculating the average ANY/A, I wasn’t satisfied with simply taking the simple mean of the stat across all quarterbacks in a given round. After all, why should Tyrod Taylor’s 5.96 ANY/A on 1362 attempts be weighed just as heavily as Jordan Palmer’s -2.50 ANY/A on a mere 18 pass attempts?
On the other hand, weighing these stats would vastly overinflate the value of any single long-time player to skew the averages of any single round. Tom Brady’s 9959 career attempts, for example, account for more than 50% of passes thrown by sixth rounders drafted in the past 20 years. Tom Brady is obviously an outlier in the dataset: to weigh his 7.08 ANY/A as over 50% of the entire sixth round would dramatically skew the results even further.
As a result, I have not weighted any of the stat averages based on attempts or games player or any other metric of longevity. I admit that this skews the results the other way. Sticking with the sixth round, 26 of the 43 players drafted threw 50 or fewer attempts their entire career. Many of them never threw a pass in an NFL game, which I evaluated as straight 0s across the board. I decided that this is very much the point for this analysis: if a quarterback never throws an NFL pass, that is a completely unsuccessful draft pick.
I do not expect NFL drafting behaviors in general to change. Most sixth-round quarterback selections will never get a legitimate chance to start, so tracking averages in such a way that devalues a sixth-round quarterback by scoring them as straight 0s while allowing even bad first round selections to put up marginally better numbers is at least an acceptable reflection of a team’s actual attempts to draft quarterbacks.
There are going to be variables I can’t account for, at least not with the data available to me. Rules changes and general trends in the NFL have resulted in the bar moving pretty dramatically upwards especially in the past couple years.
With that all out in the open, let’s take a look at the past 20 years of drafting quarterbacks. As a quick note, I’ve made the assumption that Lamar Jackson wins the MVP this season (because obviously), but I’ve not projected a winner of the 2020 Super Bowl.

Round by Round

The quick and dirty: 242 quarterbacks were drafted between 2000 and 2019. Let’s start with a simple breakdown of the averages.

Means by Round

Round	Players Drafted	Games Started	Seasons Rostered	Start %	Win %	Pro Bowls	All Pros	MVPs	Super Bowls	Completion %	TD:INT	ANY/A	Passer Rating
7	36	8.44	3.86	5.31%	6.39%	0	0	0	0	22.86%	0.28	1.06	24.87
6	43	15.53	4.58	8.86%	13.87%	0.39	0.14	0.08	0.17	36.67%	0.67	2.34	43.02
5	34	3.50	3.74	4.77%	15.27%	0	0	0	0	27.38%	0.35	1.81	31.80
4	26	16.08	5.35	14.57%	21.05%	0.12	0	0	0	50.07%	0.72	3.17	60.43
3	26	22.42	6.08	19.42%	22.41%	0.35	0	0	0.08	50.17%	0.98	3.64	62.03
2	21	41.38	7.29	30.83%	35.97%	0.48	0.19	0	0.05	53.18%	1.07	4.28	67.06
1	56	70.52	7.38	58.57%	46.68%	0.93	0.11	0.11	0.13	60.12%	1.59	5.50	82.68
ALL	242	28.16	5.41	23.02%	23.96%	0.36	0.06	0.04	0.07	43.10%	0.95	3.18	53.88

Medians by Round

Round	Players Drafted	Games Started	Seasons Rostered	Start %	Win %	Pro Bowls	All Pros	MVPs	Super Bowls	Completion %	TD:INT	ANY/A	Passer Rating
7	36	0	3.00	0%	0%	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
6	43	0	3.00	0%	0%	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
5	34	0	3.00	0%	0%	0	0	0	0	35.80%	0	0.11	17.05
4	26	3.00	4.50	4.48%	5.00%	0	0	0	0	56.80%	0.59	4.37	63.95
3	26	10.00	5.00	13.28%	22.22%	0	0	0	0	59.00%	0.89	4.45	74.10
2	21	21.00	6.00	26.79%	38.71%	0	0	0	0	58.60%	0.86	4.68	72.70
1	56	50.00	7.00	63.54%	47.54%	0	0	0	0	60.30%	1.43	5.47	81.70
ALL	242	7.50	4.00	93.11%	20.00%	0	0	0	0	56.20%	0.71	4.11	69.00

A couple things to note looking at both of these tables in tandem: accolades are a poor metric by which to judge the worth of a quarterback pick in each round. This is easy enough to explain: the same few players have won the same awards multiple times in the past 20 years and there are also a limited number of each award per season. Only one quarterback can win MVP or win the Super Bowl, but multiple players can post a solid ANY/A over 6.00 each season. This scarcity is reflected by the median where the vast majority of players never win any of these awards. Case in point: Tom Brady accounts for 13.63% of all Pro Bowl nods, 33.33% of all First Team All Pros and MVPs, and 37.5% of all Super Bowl victories in the entire population examined. That doesn’t change that drafting a quarterback in the sixth round is functionally worthless.
Similarly, the number of seasons rostered and games rostered correlates very strongly to draft position. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, as even poorly performing players often get more opportunities to start draft position. The steadily increasing seasons rostered also indicates that the higher drafted a player is, the more likely they are to play a second contract. A median seasons rostered of 3.00 for rounds 5-7 indicates that quarterbacks drafted in those rounds are more often than not cut before completing a standard rookie contract.
At a glance, the data confirms what most probably suspected already: the higher a quarterback is drafted, the more likely it is that the team got it right and the quarterback in question was a successful pick. What can be observed from above is the general trend that all statistical measures trend positively with the round the player is selected. In general, from the data here it should be pretty obvious that a team is not likely to find their franchise quarterback after the third round as the means for nearly every category for all of those are lower than the means of all quarterbacks drafted. Shocker: quarterbacks in the back half of the draft are, on average, worse than the average of all quarterbacks drafted. So the question then becomes: how do the top three rounds stack up?

Completion Percentage

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of All
1	60.12%	3.82%	0.64
2	53.18%	17.81%	0.38
3	50.17%	21.73%	0.27

TD:INT

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of All
1	1.59	0.81	0.42
2	1.07	0.80	0.08
3	0.98	1.02	0.02

ANY/A

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of All
1	5.50	0.98	0.79
2	4.28	2.09	0.38
3	3.64	2.15	0.16

Passer Rating

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of All
1	82.68	9.89	0.79
2	67.06	27.33	0.36
3	62.03	29.78	0.22

Again as expected, the first round selection is, in aggregate, better. Importantly, though, first round selections are better not just because they have higher mean values for the stats we’re tracking here; they are better because they typically have less variance and also because they’re notably better relative to an average quarterback from the entire draft. Not only is the average ANY/A of a first round selection much higher than that of a second or third round, the standard deviation within its own population is dramatically lower. It’s a safer pick. The standard deviations of the mean from the mean of all draft selections also suggest that the average first round pick is, in general, better relative to the average of all picks than the second or third is. Again, that shouldn’t be a surprise given what we’ve already seen and the positive correlation between draft status and performance.
The takeaway from this should not be that you can only find success in the first round of the NFL draft for QBs or that top-selected quarterbacks are locks (more on that later). This is obviously and demonstrably not true. The takeaway should be that in the aggregate, quarterbacks in the first round are more successful than those drafted in any other round, and it’s not particularly close.
This brings me to the first of the draft suggestions proposed that I want to directly address.

But the best quarterback from the 2011 draft was a third rounder!

Look at Russell Wilson! Look at Dak Prescott! Drew Brees! Tom Brady! They are some of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and they were all drafted outside of the first round. Tony Romo was a really good quarterback, and he even went undrafted! You don’t need to draft a quarterback in the first round to find your quarterback of the future.
Let’s look at all the teams in the NFL and who was projected as the team’s starting quarterback headed into the preseason and what round they were drafted in.

Team	Quarterback	Round
Arizona Cardinals	Kyler Murray	1
Atlanta Falcons	Matt Ryan	1
Baltimore Ravens	Lamar Jackson	1
Buffalo Bills	Josh Allen	1
Carolina Panthers	Cam Newton	1
Chicago Bears	Mitch Trubisky	1
Cincinnati Bengals	Andy Dalton	2
Cleveland Browns	Baker Mayfield	1
Dallas Cowboys	Dak Prescott	4
Denver Broncos	Joe Flacco	1
Detroit Lions	Matt Stafford	1
Green Bay Packers	Aaron Rodgers	1
Houston Texans	Deshaun Watson	1
Indianapolis Colts	Andrew Luck	1
Jacksonville Jaguars	Nick Foles	3
Kansas City Chiefs	Patrick Mahomes	1
Los Angeles Chargers	Philip Rivers	1
Los Angeles Rams	Jared Goff	1
Miami Dolphins	Ryan Fitzpatrick	7
Minnesota Vikings	Kirk Cousins	4
New England Patriots	Tom Brady	6
New Orleans Saints	Drew Brees	2
New York Giants	Eli Manning	1
New York Jets	Sam Darnold	1
Oakland Raiders	Derek Carr	2
Philadelphia Eagles	Carson Wentz	1
Pittsburgh Steelers	Ben Roethlisberger	1
San Francisco 49ers	Jimmy Garoppolo	2
Seattle Seahawks	Russell Wilson	3
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Jameis Winston	1
Tennessee Titans	Marcus Mariota	1
Washington Redskins	Case Keenum	Undrafted

Only 10 of 32 teams planned to start a quarterback drafted outside of the first round at the beginning of this season. Of those teams planning to start a quarterback drafted outside the first, three of them were rostering quarterbacks drafted in the first who were expected to start at some point of this season (Josh Rosen, Dwayne Haskins). A full 75% of NFL teams went into 2019 planning to start a first rounder at quarterback at some point.
Tom Brady is one of 43 sixth rounds who has amounted to anything. Minshew has a chance at being the second, but his head coach won’t even commit to him as the starter for next season despite his solid performance. What Brady and Minshew have in common is that both got their first opportunity to start because the guy ahead of them on the depth chart who had just inked a massive new deal got injured.
Drew Brees had an up-and-down start to his career in San Diego before he started lighting the world on fire in New Orleans. Dak Prescott, like Brady, got the nod to start because Tony Romo got injured. He looked good in pre-season and flashed there, but if Romo doesn’t go down, is Prescott still the heir apparent? Does he survive two seasons on the bench, or do the Cowboys bring in competition when Romo retires?
Even Russell Wilson wasn’t projected to be the starter when he was drafted. The Seahawks had just inked a deal with Matt Flynn and he was expected to be their starting quarterback. Nobody was betting on the undersized guy to beat him out for the starting gig. Wilson came in and started playing extremely efficient football, sure. But without Beastmode pounding away on the ground and the Legion of Boom keeping scores low, how does that story go?
To be clear, I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I’m not saying this to discredit these players, but rather to demonstrate the reality of the circumstances in which they were drafted. The Patriots and the Seahawks didn’t outsmart everyone by drafting Brady and Wilson late. They got lucky. If Bill Belichick really, truly believed that Tom Brady would lead the Patriots to six Super Bowls, he wouldn’t have waited to the sixth round to draft him.
Banking on getting lucky is not a valid team-building strategy.
Tom Brady, Gardner Minshew, Dak Prescott, Kirk Cousins, Russell Wilson, Nick Foles, Jimmy Garoppolo, and Drew Brees are the only quarterbacks drafted outside of the first round in twenty years to have a completion percentage of 60%, a TD:INT ratio over 2.00, and an ANY/A rating over 6.00. That’s a pretty low bar for franchise quarterbacks these days, and only eight out of 186 quarterbacks drafted outside of the first round qualify.
I’ll say it again for those in the back: banking on getting lucky is not a valid team-building strategy.

First Round Breakdown

So Cidolfus, you might say, what about within the first round? Top quarterback picks are overrated. Look at the past few seasons: the top QB drafted often isn’t the best QB in the draft. This is often true, so let’s take a look at the numbers here, too. I’ve broken down the quarterbacks selected in the first round by those taken in the top 5, those with picks 6-15, and those with picks 16-32.

Means by Pick

Picks	Players Drafted	Games Started	Seasons Rostered	Start %	Win %	Pro Bowls	All Pros	MVPs	Super Bowls	Completion %	TD:INT	ANY/A	Passer Rating
16-32	17	50.76	7.41	38.59%	44.77%	0.59	0.18	0.18	0.12	58.99%	1.60	5.12	76.70
6-15	14	55.14	6.07	56.32%	45.94%	0.79	0.07	0.07	0.14	60.19%	1.59	5.45	82.87
1-5	25	92.56	8.08	73.42%	48.39%	1.24	0.08	0.08	0.12	60.85%	1.58	5.74	84.22

Medians by Pick

Picks	Players Drafted	Games Started	Seasons Rostered	Start %	Win %	Pro Bowls	All Pros	MVPs	Super Bowls	Completion %	TD:INT	ANY/A	Passer Rating
16-32	17	33.00	7.00	32.64%	41.67%	0	0	0	0	58.10%	1.19	5.12	76.70
6-15	14	33.50	5.00	57.29%	46.22%	0	0	0	0	59.20%	1.40	5.38	78.95
1-5	25	73.00	7.00	76.79%	50.00%	0	0	0	0	61.50%	1.57	5.80	86.10

The first round plays out similarly to the entire draft. In general, quarterbacks taken in the top five (which, in this data set functionally means quarterbacks drafted in the top three, as only Philip Rivers and Mark Sanchez have been drafted at fourth and fifth overall respectively) are better in the aggregate than those selected elsewhere in the round.

Completion Percentage

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of First
1-5	61.50%	3.16	0.36
6-15	59.20%	4.00%	-0.24
16-32	58.10%	5.00	-0.53

TD:INT

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of First
1-5	1.58	0.47	-0.01
6-15	1.59	0.91	0
16-32	1.60	1.14	0.01

ANY/A

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of First
1-5	5.80	0.78	0.31
6-15	5.38	1.32	-0.12
16-32	5.12	0.93	-0.39

Passer Rating

Round	Mean	St. Dev.	St. Dev. of Mean From Mean of First
1-5	86.10	7.71	0.34
6-15	78.95	12.45	-0.37
16-32	76.70	10.85	-0.60

Like before, nothing too surprising here. We already knew that first round picks had relatively low variance, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see statistics clustered really heavily here. Only the touchdown to interception ratio doesn’t outright favor the top five picks, and even then the first five picks have the lowest standard deviation and a difference of 0.02 on a touchdown to interception ratio is only one extra touchdown for every fifty interceptions. That the standard deviation of the means for the 6-15 and 16-32 picks are below the mean of the entire first round in general also isn’t too surprising when considering that nearly half of the quarterbacks taken in the first round in the past twenty years have been taken in the first five picks.

What This Means About the Draft

So, to summarize so far: quarterbacks taken in the first round tend to be better than quarterbacks taken in any other round. They generally post better aggregate stats and there’s also a trend of decreasing variance among draft picks the higher you pick. The same applies to the first round itself but on a smaller scale. In the aggregate, a top five pick on an NFL quarterback not only typically yields the highest average performance, it is also the safest place to draft a quarterback as those who are drafted in that position exhibit the lowest variance of their performances. All of these numbers support what conventional wisdom already tells us.
What should definitely not be ignored in this conclusion, however, is that the data also tells us one other very important thing, and it’s yet another thing that conventional wisdom tells us: drafting a franchise quarterback is really, really hard. If we conclude that the average top five pick is the best chance we have in the aggregate, we also have to come to terms with the fact that the average top five pick also isn’t a great quarterback.
A career completion percentage of 60.19%, a touchdown to interception ratio of 1.59, an ANY/A of 5.45, and a passer rating of 82.87 for a player who wins 46.22% of their games and starts for not even three and a half seasons of games is not great. For some perspective: those numbers are worse than Tyrod Taylor’s career numbers.
A top five quarterback pick is obviously not a lock for a franchise quarterback, but it offers the best chance to find your guy.

What About Free Agents or Trades?

All right, so that’s the draft, but that’s only part of how you put together a roster in the modern NFL. What about our options in free agency or on the trade market? Historically speaking, starting quarterbacks who hit free agency or are traded do so for a reason. You don’t have to go back nearly as far as 2000 to demonstrate my point here. Just look at the last several seasons of transactions:

• Josh Rosen traded to the Dolphins for a 2nd and a 5th
• Ryan Tannehill and a 6th traded to the Titans for a 4th and a 7th
• Nick Foles signed by the Jaguars, 4 years, $88 million
• Joe Flacco traded to the Broncos for a 4th
• Case Keenum and a 7th traded to the Redskins for a 6th
• Case Keenum signed by the Broncos, 2 years, $36 million
• Kirk Cousins signed by the Vikings, 3 years, $84 million
• Alex Smith traded to the Redskins for Kendall Fuller and a 3rd

Hindsight on most of these has looked pretty bad for the team acquiring the quarterback. Cousins and Tannehill have been the most successful of the bunch, but that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Tennessee is obviously glad to have Tannehill this year (as are we all), but in 2019 Tannehill and Derrick Henry had a combined salary cap cost under $4 million. The Titans have $48 million in cap space in 2020 and Ryan Tannehill, Logan Ryan, Jack Conklin, and Derrick Henry are all unrestricted free agents. Cousins hasn’t lit the world on fire in Minnesota, and I don’t think anyone is rushing to call his fully-guaranteed contract the deal of the century, but it hasn't been the worst deal in the world.
Teams do not generally let good quarterbacks go unless they have a clear successor ready to roll in their absence. When you see names like Cam Newton, Marcus Mariota, or Jameis Winston thrown around this offseason, take a look at who’s replacing him on that roster and ask why we would want to pay veteran quarterback money for someone another team is ready to walk away from.

Okay, So What?

That’s all great, but what does this tell us? There are three prime takeaways from this:
In the aggregate, quarterback performance appears to correspond with draft position. The higher the quarterback is drafted, the better the in general he is likely to be. Most quarterbacks drafted aren’t very good. Busts are common even at the top of the draft where a team has the best chance to find their guy. Free agents are free agents for a reason. If a team is willing to let a quarterback go, odds aren’t good that he’ll be someone substantially different with another team.
With all of this in mind, how should it inform our strategy moving forward? The first takeaway suggests that we shouldn’t bet on beating the system by passing on quarterbacks until later in the draft. It takes a special kind of hubris as a general manager to believe that you’re smarter than everyone else and will be able to find your guy that all the other teams slept on. In the hunt to find a quarterback, most teams will have to invest meaningful draft capital into the position. We have the fifth overall pick, and if a guy we think can be our franchise quarterback is available at that position, we’d be foolish to wait until one of our later firsts or even our seconds to draft him. The only reason that we should be passing on a quarterback in the first round this year is if we do not think that guy is there.
The second takeaway suggests that the single most important thing that we can do to maximize our chances to find our quarterback of the future: keep drafting them. Since Dan Marino left, the Dolphins have drafted six quarterbacks:

• Josh Heupel (2000; Round 6, Pick 177)
• Josh Beck (2007; Round 2, Pick 40)
• Chad Henne (2008; Round 2, Pick 57)
• Pat White (2009; Round 2, Pick 44)
• Ryan Tannehill (2012; Round 1, Pick 8)
• Brandon Doughty (2016; Round 7, Pick 223)

That’s fucking scandalous. In the twenty years since Dan Marino retired, the Dolphins have drafted only six quarterbacks, and only one of them in the first round. We’ve relied heavily on free agents and castoffs from other organizations trying to replace one of the greatest pure passers of all time.
Last year we spent a second round and fifth round selection to trade for Josh Rosen, a first round pick only a year removed from being selected 10th overall. He hasn’t been able to supplant the textbook definition of a journeyman quarterback in Ryan Fitzpatrick this season. There’s no indication beyond wishful thinking that we should be willing to allow Rosen to be the only young quarterback developing on our roster right now. I believe strongly that unless our front office truly, truly believes that our quarterback of the future isn’t in the 2020 draft, we should be spending our fifth overall pick drafting a quarterback. And even if we don’t love anyone enough to take them at five, we should still be open to drafting someone in the second or third if anyone falls.
As mentioned earlier, the hiring of Chan Gailey as our offensive coordinator probably suggests some level of commitment to Ryan Fitzpatrick as a starting quarterback for at least the beginning of the 2020 season, but no sane fan believes that the 37-year-old journeyman is our future. That said, keeping him on does allow us to avoid throwing a quarterback right into the fire. The reality is that quarterbacks drafted in the first round rarely sit for their rookie seasons anymore. Mahomes only played the last game of his rookie season after the Chiefs had already clinched and Rodgers obviously sat behind Favre, but they’re the two notable exceptions in more than a decade. Even though I expect Fitzpatrick to kick the season off, it’s a good bet that he won’t start the full season.
And then, until we are absolutely certain that our young starting quarterback is the future of our franchise, we should continue to draft quarterbacks. Obviously you don’t need to continue to invest high picks every single year, but until a team has committed to a quarterback on a long-term, veteran contract, it’s in the team’s best interest to continue to invest picks in rounds 2-4 on quarterbacks at least every other year.
One of the biggest mistakes the Dolphins made during Ryan Tannehill’s tenure was ignore the quarterback position after drafting him. The front office should have been drafting quarterbacks if not to push him then to have a young, cheap back-up quarterback with upside. When Tannehill went down with an ACL injury, it’s an absolute travesty that our front office made no effort to augment our QB room until Tannehill reinjured the ACL and missed the season and instead overpaid to bring Jay Cutler out of retirement.
Tannehill’s injury not progressing as expected or being reinjured should have been a scenario we planned for, and that we signed Cutler so late suggests that we never had a serious conversation about what a season of Matt Moore would look like. With Tannehill recovering from injury, we should have used that as an opportunity to add a young guy with upside to our quarterback room. Would it have worked out any better? Given the quarterbacks who came out of the later rounds of the 2017 draft, probably not, but that’s something we know in hindsight, and given the results of the 2017 season and the cap cost of Cutler, it’s a move we should have made.
This team shouldn’t make the same mistake again. The Miami Dolphins have pussyfooted around investing in finding a quarterback for the future through the draft for years, and it’s time that changes. I’ll address my specific thoughts on our options in the draft later in this series. Frankly, until Tua Tagovailoa makes an announcement tomorrow, it’s really too early to say anything for sure. Even if you’re skeptical of Tua for whatever reason, his availability likely shifts how other quarterback-needy teams act (including the possibility of jumping us as the Cardinals did to secure Rosen). In the meantime, to sum up my thoughts on general strategy:
We should almost certainly draft a quarterback in the first round of this year’s draft. Probably at fifth overall unless we really, truly, do not believe in any of the guys available. We should continue to spend middle-round selections on quarterbacks in subsequent seasons until we’re absolutely certain we have our quarterback of the future. Even after we have our quarterback of the future, we should continue to invest in selecting quarterbacks in the later rounds regularly (although not every year) to try to develop talent from within.
What are we looking to find? Based on the numbers, in order to meet what most people would expect of a starting quarterback in today’s NFL, expect the quarterback to hit the following benchmarks at minimum:

• Completion percentage of at least 60%
• TD:INT ratio of at least 2.0
• An ANY/A of at least 6.0

Typically, if a player manages to hit all three of those benchmarks, he’s well on his way to being a winning quarterback, although not necessarily an elite one. And as we’ve just seen in the wildcard round, having a quarterback who’s good enough can sometimes be enough.
Next week, I'll be continuing with where I usually start with this series, the season review including thoughts on the coaching staff, player performance, and a review of in-season transactions. Enjoy the rest of wildcard weekend, all.