Monday, November 2, 2026
In today's issue
The news: Instagram wants 90-minute videos, with no plan to pay for them
The Quiet Solution: Google Trends: check demand without asking anyone
Advantage Introverts: The loudest salespeople sold less
Try this: A 15-minute demand check for your idea
For years I wrote sales pages and emails for online personalities, from the background. So I've always been suspicious of the idea that selling takes a big personality.
Today there's research on exactly that, plus a free way to check whether anyone wants the thing you're thinking about making, without asking a single person.
Quiet Win: the news
Instagram is testing 90-minute videos, with no plan to pay for them.
The Verge (Oct 28) reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Features, long videos of up to 90 minutes, now in testing with a small group of creators in the US and Brazil. Creators pushed back right away because there's no ad revenue share. Mosseri said Instagram is "exploring multiple options to help long-form creators get paid."
This is the rented audience problem in one headline: the platform wants your best work now and decides later whether you get paid. Whatever you make, give readers a way to find it somewhere you own, like your email list.
The Quiet Solution
Google Trends
You want to make something to sell, but you have no idea if anyone actually wants it. The usual advice is to go ask people: post a poll, hop on calls, survey your followers. If you don't have followers or don't want the calls, you end up guessing, and a wrong guess can cost you weeks of building.
Google Trends shows how search interest in a phrase rises or falls over time, and lets you compare a few phrases side by side. It's a quiet demand check with no audience, survey or call. Two things to know from Google's own help pages: the 0 to 100 scale is relative, not a count of searches, and phrases with very low search volume show up as 0.
Free tier: free to use (checked on trends.google.com today).
Advantage Introverts
The loudest salespeople sold less
Wharton professor Adam Grant tracked 340 call center sales reps for three months to test a common belief: that extraverts make the best salespeople. The study ran in Psychological Science in 2013.
It didn't hold up. Over the three months, the most extraverted reps brought in an average of $12,401.13 in revenue. The introverts brought in $13,226.60. The top group was in the middle: people who talk enough to make the offer and listen enough to understand the buyer. They averaged $16,393.05.
To be fair, the introverts didn't top the chart either. But Grant's explanation is the useful part for us. The reps who listened more were more likely to hear what customers actually wanted, and less likely to come across as too excited or overconfident. Listening is a skill most quiet people already have.
You don't have to get louder to sell. Listening is half of what works, and you already do it well.
Try this today (15 minutes)
Open Google Trends and type the plain phrase someone would search if they needed what you want to make, like "budget template for freelancers." Add two other ways people might say it, set the time range to the past 5 years, and note which line is rising, flat or fading. Write one sentence about what you learned. If every line shows 0, try broader wording before you drop the idea.
Hit reply
What phrase did you check, and was it rising or fading? Reply with both. I'm curious what this group is thinking about building.
Quietly sovereign,
Sterling