The Growth Vault

Churn kills growth.

Combating churn is a mix of:

1. Selling to the right person in the first place.
   
2. Having a great product that solves an ongoing problem.
3. Wowing them with great onboarding so they start using it.
4. Keeping them hooked on your product.

This tactic is for #4. 

Duolingo is the best at gamification. They've turned what is one of the most boring and gruelling things to do (learn a language) and made it fun and addicting.

They do a ton right but this is about their Early Bird and Night Owl chests:

Early Bird & Night Owl Chests‍

If you complete a lesson before Noon, you'll get a Early Bird chest giving you an 2x boost to XP from lessons for 15 minutes. BUT you can't open it until 6PM. You get a push notification when it's ready to open. 

Then between 6PM and Midnight if you complete a lesson, you get a Night Owl chest (same reward) that you can only open the next morning (again with a push notification).

For this to work, Duolingo had to gamify in others ways first:

• Gaining XP let's you compete with friends & strangers. And people get super competitive about this.
• Every day you do a lesson you add to your streak. There are people with a streak of several years—my own record is ~500 days.

Meaning the reward is meaningful to them, and it costs Duolingo nothing to give. 

And the chests encourage using the app TWICE per day, not just once—and gives them an excuse to give you a push notification in a non-annoying way.

Takeaway: A hooked user that uses your product multiple times per day is very unlikely to churn any time soon. Get creative with incentivizing frequent use.

Psych Energy (coined by former Head of Growth at Airtable, Darius Contractor) is your visitor's emotional energy level as they go through your funnel.

• 0 Psych = "f*** this"
• 50 Psych = neutral/indifferent
• 100 Psych = "I'm in love"

Every positive interaction adds to their Psych. Every negative interaction subtracts from it.

The amount they have when they hit your site depends on HOW they get there. Branded search, assume > 50. Cold email link click, assume < 50.

It also depends on how they feel about your brand in general from previous interactions (directly or indirectly). A brand with a great reputation and positive word of mouth will lead to more people having > 50 Psych when they hit. 

Things that add to their Psych (and increase conversions):

• Nice design.
• Positive reputation.
• Clear, concise copy.
• Fun, humour, and ease of use.
• Bonuses and surprises

Things that subtract from their Psych  (and decrease conversions):

• Bad design or reputation
• Vague copy
• Confusing UI or UX
• Slow loading pages
• Form fields

In short: Build up their Psych high enough before you deplete it by asking them to do things like entering email, card info, address, add a profile image, etc.

Audit your funnel to maximize Psych before conversion steps.

Last week I shared Jenny Hoyo's structure for her 10-million view YouTube Shorts. 

Viral videos immediately open a loop that viewers desperately want to close.

But your video needs to have a built-in "retention mechanism" to keep them engaged throughout the entire video so they don't just skip to the end to close the loop.

Nobody does this better than MrBeast. Examples:

Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,00 

Instead of just watching the contestant sit in boredom in an empty house with limited food, MrBeast does things like break the house in half, hire a marching band to play music all night, and hire creepy clowns to stand outside and stare in through the windows.

$10,000 Every Day You Survive Prison

Every day the contestant is in the room, he's forced to give up one of the items in the room, making it progressively harder to be there. It's engaging to watch his suffering amplify. 

MrBeast takes it up another level by hiding a $100,000 check in his guitar. You keep watching just to see if he finds it.

$1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel Room!

Comparing hotel rooms at different prices levels has a natural retention mechanism as we're all curious to see them ramp up to $1,000,000, and pick our favorites.

If you plan to make videos, including video ads, study MrBeast's videos. Ask yourself:

• Why is he doing this?
• Why am I still watching?

Basically everything in his videos are intentional retention and engagement mechanisms.

Jenny Hoyos is 18 and has 1,029,345,221 views on her YouTube videos—averaging about 10M views per Short.

She's watched nearly every top creators' Shorts to reverse engineer the structure of a viral YouTube Short. Here's what she's landed on:

Here's an example she gives of the first three parts:

Note: The word illegally is quite hyperbolic, so tailor this to your audience's sophistication.

And here's an example from her video $5 Mother's Day Gift:

This format can be applied to other kinds of short-form video. Whether it's a reel, TikTok, an ad for Instagram, or a promo video.

Check out the the whole interview!

Someone with a small audience has to WOW you to get you to hit Follow.

Someone with a huge audience can post a platitude and you’ll say, "damn, that's so TRUE," and you'll likely hit Follow without much thought.

Social proof is a powerful motivator, and the lack of it is a powerful demotivator. This is particularly true on social media where your audience size is public.

That's why growth is so hard at first: No one wants to be the first one to a party.

You need to reach certain psychological thresholds to be taken seriously:

1. 1,000: This is where people go: “okay, they're not completely new.”
2. 5,000: “Not a complete nobody.”
3. 10,000. “Hmm, maybe they do have something to say.”
4. 50,000. “Oh okay, this is a creator on the rise.”
5. 100,000. “They're legit.”
6. 500,000 or even 1M+. “How do I not already know this person?”

Here are some scrappy ways to reach those thresholds:

• Get every friend you have to follow you if you're <100. 
• Follow and DM people who engage with your posts to thank them or start a conversation. They'll often follow.
• Meaningfully comment on other people's posts who are at a similar stage. Start a convo. Then eventually follow them/send a connection request and DM them.
• Comment on other people's comments big creator's posts. Again, start a convo and follow/connection request + DM.
• Leverage relationships you have with people with large audiences than you. See if they'd be willing to engage with some of your posts or to tag you in one of their own.
• If on LinkedIn, use tools like WeConnect or Lemlist to automate 20-30 connection requests per day with people in your target audience and who share communities with you (went to the same university or live in same city).

These are hacky. But that's sadly what you gotta do early on.

And I highly recommend going through our free Hook Vault—we compiled 400 of the top hooks from the top 100 creators on Twitter (based on Readwise's data).

Learning how to hook people is critical.

59% of people feel UGC (user-generated content) is the most authentic, and can be six times more influential in swaying purchase decisions.

No company encourages and promotes UGC better than Barkbox.

If you share a photo on Instagram of your pup being cute (particularly if it includes a barkbox product or logo) and tag @bark, your photo may be shared by the Barkbox account with more than 473k followers. Example:

This works so well because:

• People are a bit nuts about their pups.
• They want excuses to share photos of them.
• They would love to see their pup go viral.
• People often create Instagram accounts just for their dog, and everyone loves the dopamine of a bunch of likes and new followers.

This gives Barkbox a constant source of authentic organic content and ad creatives.

Another company that does this is online furniture store Article.

They encourage people to post photos of their homes featuring their Article furniture. They then embed these photos into the product pages. This is smart because:

1. It's built-in social proof.
2. It shows the product in homes to help people imagine what it will look like in theirs.
3. It gives people inspiration on how they can mix and match other pieces of Article furniture together
4. It's helped Article grow it's Instagram account to 1M followers.

We’re drawn to statements that feel personalized to us.

A classic way that fortune tellers, astrologists, and marketers take advantage of this is with the Barnum Effect (aka the Forer Effect).

In his experiment, Forer gave a personality test to his students, then provided them with a generic personality summary description as a result. Despite it being a vague statement, the students rated the accuracy of the result very highly.

The way marketers often leverage this is with "Barnum-style questions." Here are two examples from the cohort course Ship30for30 that teaches people to write consistently:

Although these are not so vague and general that they apply to anyone, there are a ton of people browsing social media who it does apply to.

And it feels like it's directly speaking to and labelling the problem they're experiencing.

This is powerful for a few reasons:

1. When someone articulates your problem, you trust that they can solve it.
2. "Nothing is more important than when you're thinking about it" (Daniel Kahneman). Reminding them of the problem makes the pain more acute and in need of solving.
3. It makes them the focal point of the story, not your product.

To do this properly, you need to understand your customers:

• Goals
• Problems
• Selfish desires
• And trigger events (what moment/experience/feeling in their life makes them buy?)

March: 8k subscribers.

November: 1.8 million subscribers.

Today: 2.75 million subscribers.

Sam Sulek is a fitness YouTuber (and college kid) who posts daily vlogs that are barely edited, have dark & uninteresting thumbnails, have no meaningful title, and are always 30-40 minutes with him either in his car or at the gym:

Essentially he's breaking every rule in the marketer's playbook.

The beauty of this is summarized perfectly by these two comments:

The key ingredient here is authenticity.

He just takes his viewers through his day-to-day life and talks shop with them, as if they're hanging out with him. And he's just himself. No content creator voice. No filtering. 

(It helps that he's extremely jacked, so it's built-in credibility.)

This is essentially old-school YouTube through and through. Complete with quirky inside jokes repeated in the comments of every video:

Even the best content will be ignored if it fails to hook them.

With ads, this is even more true because they're intrusive and every impression costs $$$.

For video, you have max 1-3 seconds to stop the scroll. Here are some creative ideas:

1. Phone-ception 📲

Show your product in a variety of settings and transition using close ups of screenshots on phones from the recording of the next shot in the sequence. Like these earplugs:

(Note this also eye catching due to the dynamism)

2. Text Interrupt

Ads do best when they don't feel like ads.

This selfie video of someone outside doesn't immediately look like one. The text notification coming in is enough to catch you off guard and think it might be yours:

3. Fake Podcast

Create a fake podcast setup and talk about your product:

In summary: get creative with your creative.

When you're paying for every impression, you gotta work hard to get people to pay attention.

Education and information products have a few huge disadvantages:

1. They're vitamin pains. No one desperately needs another course.
2. They require an investment of time and effort to take advantage of.
3. They're inherently non-urgent. "I'll get it later when I have more time."
4. You need to convince people you have "figured it out." A lot of information is free. You need proof that you're giving up some secret sauce.
5. It's hard to determine a price since there is no marginal cost.

This is why you see course creators do things like limited-time promos and cohort courses. The urgency encourages action—today. 

I love Steph Smith's strategy for her upcoming course Internet Pipes about research. (A savvy reader will notice that the sales page copy is convincing you of #4 above).

Her "Price Hike" strategy:

 This is smart for a variety of reasons:

1. Built-in urgency. Buy now or pay more later.
2. Rewards fast action. Her biggest fans get the best deal by buying first, making them feel delightful and appreciated.
3. Built-in social proof. The list of prices proves that she's sold over 280 copies already.
4. Price discovery. Instead of guessing, she has data to back up the final price.
5. It's clever and novel. Novel things stand out. They also lead to people like me talking about it and sharing it.

You've just moved, and you've decided to get rid of your old Poäng chair from IKEA (yes, I know you've had one at some point) and upgrade.

You could sell it on Marketplace, but... people are so flaky it'll take days/weeks. And you'd feel bad if you just threw it out.

Then you discover that IKEA has a sell-back program, letting you get rid of it when you're grabbing a new chair at IKEA anyway.  

Score. And they'll fix it up and sell it again.

Not only does this increase the chance you get your new chair from IKEA, but it can actually increase the amount you're willing to spend on IKEA furniture by a whopping 12.2%.‍

(Note: Apple also does this with their Apple Trade-In and either re-sell the device or recycle the materials to use in new devices. And note, they charge a lot of money.)‍

This can also apply to a simple "take-back" program where they sustainably dispose of your old mattress or electronics instead of repurchasing from you (for example). 

According to Ariyh, researchers found that:

• "People were willing to pay:
  
• 39.1% more for a pen with a take-back program (versus a regular pen)
• 12.2% more for an IKEA circular program armchair (versus a regular armchair)
• 9.2% more for a backpack, but only when buying it for themselves, not others
• 65.3% of people chose a more expensive shirt ($10.15 VS  $11.90) with a take-back program, compared to a regular shirt.
• Return programs increased brand loyalty by 19.4% for a clothing brand and 13.3% for IKEA."

Takeaway: If you sell a physical product, consider offering a take-back or buy-back program. It can increase loyalty and the perceived value of your products.

A Canadian mobile app called Shakepay has one of the best gamified incentives to get people to open the app every day and brag about it to their friends.

For context: they're a simple app to buy/sell/send/spend bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum.

How it works 

Every day you open the app and shake your phone they give you a fraction of bitcoin (previously 0.00000001 BTC or 100 satoshi or sats).

Every day you keep the streak going, the amount goes up. Day 2 was 200. Day 3 was 300. As it goes up, it tapers the daily increase (ex: 50 per day). And as bitcoin has gotten more expensive, they've decreased the reward:

Note: They even gamify setting up direct deposit with your pay check (they have a debit card too) by offering a chance at a $1,000 bonus.

It starts off at a few cents (21 sats is literally $0.01), but if you kept it up you're basically getting $1-3 every day. And if you know anything about how bitcoiners think:  

"$1 today is $1,000,000 in a few years. Guaranteed. Sell the house

An army was created

A horde of people religiously set reminders and calendar events to open the app and shake their phones every single day (great mental image). 

When you open up an app every day you're likely use it for what it's intended, causing you to spend more and retain longer.

And you're gonna brag to your friends about getting "free money." So Shakepay incentivized that by also offering a $30 referral bonus (during the bull market—it's now $5 😅).

‍Takeaway: If you have an app that benefits from frequent usage, get creative:

1. Get people to come back daily.
2. Then incentivize them to talk about it.

Our friends at Contact Studios grew Shopify's "Learn with Shopify" YouTube channel to 230k subscribers in 18 months (now at 435k with 411 videos). 

They did this by taking advantage of SEO content. 

We're not talking YouTube Search. We're not talking Google Search going directly to a video.  

We're talking regular ol' Google search to a website.

They did a combination of two things:

1. Create videos for already ranking content

For anything Shopify had previously written that was ranking well in Google Search, they created a video version and embedded it into the page.  

2. Create videos and articles targeting specific keywords/topics

For anything Shopify didn't already have written, they identified topics with decent search volume and attainable difficulty (which for them is nearly everything).  

They then created a written article and a video to go along with it.

Why this works

• A percentage of visitors will watch the video.
• Some will watch another video.
• Some will hit the subscribe button in the watermark or the video page.
• Enriching the article with video likely improved the page's SEO performance.

For context: The topic of "what is dropshipping" has a traffic potential of 70,000 visitors per month (which Shopify is the top result for and has a corresponding video with 677k views). 

And that's just one of their keywords/topics. 

This strategy helped scale their YouTube channel to 435k subs and over 22M views. Obviously, it was way more effective due to their notoriety and 763M backlinks, but it's a strategy that can be used on a smaller scale as well.

Imagine you're like nearly every tech person and you listen to Andrew Huberman.

Naturally, you become convinced to buy Athletic Greens. You sign up for their monthly subscription for 1 arm and 1 leg per month (plus tax and shipping). 

But you're not as disciplined as Huberman and you end up forgetting to take it around 10 days per month.

After 3 months there's a whole unopened bag in your cupboard. 

After a year you have 4 unopened bags of AG1 🤬.

Overwhelmed and running out of cupboard space you cancel your subscription. 

There's a 99% chance you never subscribe again. Instead, you buy a different greens powder from Costco (after you it takes 6 months to get through your supply of AG1), or never buy it again.

The worst part is that subscribers for DTC products spend 3x more on average. 

So, do whatever you can to keep them.

Do that by offering flexibility. Let subscribers:

• Pause at any time.
• Configure how often they get it. A 30 day supply may take them 45-60 days.
• Change the cadence after they subscribe.

You can use something like Rodeo to email/text to check on their supply before sending.

If you overwhelm someone you may lose them forever.

The typical SaaS playbooks:

1. Pay me or else. You can't use it without paying.
2. Free trial. Sign up now and get X days for free, then switch to "pay me or else." 7-day free trial found to have the highest conversion.
3. Freemium. The same as #1 or #2 with a free tier involved as the initial entry point. People need to upgrade to unlock more features or usage limits, and that upgraded plan is either fully gate-keeped or has a free trial.

And then there's the lesser known: Reverse Trial. 

That's where your initial entry into the app is with a free trial of the premium tier. After it ends, you get downgraded to the free tier.

You start out with all the abilities of a premium user, but you have it taken away. You've tasted the good life. And thanks to Loss Aversion, you don't want to lose it.

Here's Elena illustration of these concepts:

According to Elena she's seen reverse trials lift freemium conversion rates by 10%~40%.

And lastly, she suggests offering free trial resets every so often (time based or engagement based). Just because it didn't work last time doesn't mean it won't work again after they've had more time on the freemium tier.

Content creators (of all sizes) get stuck into two ruts:

1. Top of Funnel only. They're continuously pumping out broadly appealing content with little substance. TOFU prioritizes new audience and shallowness of content. (Think AI creators sharing their 100th "Top 10 free AI tools that murder ChatGPT."
   
   
2. Bottom of Funnel only. They're always in the weeds of their core topic and offering, like SEO or fundraising. BOFU prioritizes current audience and depth of content.

The problem with #1 is that it erodes trust, turns people off after a while, and doesn't convince anyone to buy from you. It's hard to resist the dopamine rush of 10,000 likes.

The problem with #2 is that you're not discovered by new people. And you might be too in the weeds for potential buyers (founders), and instead you attract your peers (SEOs).

TOFU and BOFU

Content marketers created the concept of TOFU content (#1) and BOFU content (#2), and suggest mixing and matching the two in your content calendar.

But YouTube strategist Paddy Galloway (he's worked with the likes of MrBeast), says the true sweet spot is doing both at once in the same piece of content:

Find a concept your core audience loves, then wrap it into a big idea.

Couple examples from recent students:

1. Ed Cravo helps companies create in-house dev teams based in Brazil. BOFU is detailed hiring practices. A big idea to embed into is "equal pay for equal work."
   
   
2. Nikolas Konstantin is a leadership coach + meditation teacher with a focus on self-awareness. BOFU is mindfulness. A big idea to embed it into is "work-life balance."

Leverage the popularity of big ideas and trends. Use it as the lens to share your core message. This is hard to get right. But if you can, you get the best of both worlds.

I'll repeat: Don't be the best, be the only.

Otherwise, it'll be a bloody battle.

If you doexactly what other's are doing, it'll be a hard fight and margins will evaporate, particularly if they're wealthier and more connected than you are. 

You need to focus on having a unique offering. (2 weeks ago, I talked about one of the ways to do that with Contrarian Value.)

But once you have a strategy in mind, how can you tell if it's any good?

In No Bullsh*t Strategy, Alex details a few ways. Let's focus on two:

#1. Remove all subjective language.

A strategy should be completely objective:

• Not a strategy: "The world's best tasting yogurt"
• Strategy: "Replicate ice cream flavors in yogurt"

The first is all subjective and provides no clarity. What flavors do we make? How do we know it's the best? Who judges that? Why would someone choose us?

The second is a legitimate strategy that provides clarity of action and differentiates you from all your competitors who focus on fruit flavors like strawberry and blueberry.

#2. The Opposite's Game

Would the opposite of this strategy also make logical sense?

• If yes. Then it's probably a decent strategy.
• If no. Probably not. You're probably focused on being "better."

 The purpose of a strategy is to have a strong alternative to other offers on the market.

• “Low-cost option” vs “premium” ✅
• "Portable" vs "stationary" ✅
• “Win the most cases” vs “lose the most” ❌
• “Punctual” vs “most late” ❌

As Alex says: "Anything that everyone would want to do is not a good strategy." 

And once again: "Don't be the best, be the only."

2023 has been a hard year for fundraising.  

Investors (and employees) look for proof that your company is likely to succeed and, thus, is worth investing time or money into.

NfX calls this the Ladder of Proof. The higher up the ladder, the more attractive you are to an investor. And the red rungs are more critical than the others.

Go through this from bottom to the top. Be brutally honest with yourself:

• What can you check off?
• What are you missing?

Work your way up the ladder.

Last week, we had our kookiest sponsorship:

1. I loved it. It was creative, funny, and I figured it would probably work.
2. I hated it. I was afraid people might think I made a mistake 😅.

I decided to add the small PS and to run with it. I'm glad I did:

It's really scary to experiment.

We don't want to: waste money, look dumb, or fail. 99% of the time, we take the safe, logical option. 

As Rory Sutherland says: "You'll never be fired for being logical," but, "the fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors."

So be like Nate, be illogical.

If you confuse, you lose.

It's honestly horrifying how many home pages, landing pages, and product pages use confusing aspirational language that don't tell you what they sell or why you should care.‍

Here are some example rewrites:

The right one is better because:

1. It no longer sounds like corporate speak (all-in-one? visual communication solution?)
2. It describes the specific benefit of the product clearly.

The right one is better because:

• It no longer uses vague phrasing.
• It describes the specific benefit of your product.

The right one is better because:

• It doesn't talk in self-congratulatory terms. It talks in terms of benefits to the visitor.
• It clarifies the specific outcome of using the product.

Two videos (and their responses) went viral on TikTok lately that led to crazy brand exposure. Then their stories went viral on X/Twitter:

1. Car fire Stanley mug. A woman recorded a video of her completely destroyed car, but her Stanley mug was basically untouched. Within 24 hours, the founder of Stanley recorded a 30-second selfie video in response. This video got 38M views.
2. Amanda's tweet got 30M impressions as well.
3. North Face helicopter delivery. Another woman on a hike in New Zealand complained about her "waterproof" North Face jacket and got 11M views. 5 days later, North Face posted a video of flying a helicopter to her on the mountain to deliver a new jacket. North Face got around 4M views for this video.
4. Amanda's tweet got 19M impressions.

In both situations, the companies acted fast:

• Stanley did an off the cuff response to an amplify a positive mention.
• North Face did costly and staged response to make up for a negative mention. 

And Amanda, got nearly 50M impressions on her posts. Her tweet promoting her newsletter got nearly 700k impressions on the Stanley tweet.

Act fast, as either the brand, or the "reporter." Waiting two weeks, two months, or two years will hit way less hard than 2 hours.

Take a look at Apple’s site in 1997 compared to 2023:

They're not the only ones. Nearly every brand made this shift from busy to simple.

Simplicity beats complexity—that’s the idea behind processing fluency.

In short: we prefer things that are easy to read and understand (“fluent information”). Understanding something effortlessly helps us act quickly and confidently.

On the flip side, if you confuse, you lose.

If something is hard to understand, you're less likely to complete a task or make a decision. It takes extra brain power.

And when you're confused you feel like you need to examine something closely. Making it more likely you second guess yourself and not buy that weird product you saw on TikTok.

You may even value confusing products less.

How to apply this:

Make things as simple and clear as possible—particularly for conversion events (purchase, sign up, book a call).

• Keep navbars small (less than 7 links). If more, use dropdowns.
• Keep your writing at an 8th-grade level (reading level of the average American).
• Hold off on displaying popups until they're engaged. Wait a few minutes. 
• Reduce the number of fields in your checkout form. Use a single “Full Name” field. Don't ask for company name, website, phone number, job title etc etc. And use city and state auto-detection based on zip code.
  
• Get users to create an account after purchase, not before. Don't get in their way.

For conversion: clarity > cleverness.

MrBeast gets ~100,000,000 views per YouTube video. He doesn't make a video unless he can think of the perfect thumbnail and title for it.

A thumbnail really can make or break a video. 

The same concepts for a "hooky" thumbnail apply to ad creatives, social posts, and blog article thumbnails. Basically anything visual meant to hook people's attention. 

Here are ways top creators do that:

Big Numbers

Big numbers are unnatural. Unnatural events trigger curiosity. Particularly when it’s money.

Don’t make it too round, or it’ll feel fake. Write out the whole number to make it bigger.

Reactions

Dramatic faces attract attention. People click because they want to see what provoked it.

Your reactions need to seem genuine. Use a still from your footage, not a posed shot.

Ask a question

Asking a question in your thumbnail opens a loop that can only be closed by watching.

Use the video title to tease the answer you pose in your thumbnail.

For 9 more to hook with a thumbnail, dive into this carousel.

Don't be the best, be the only.

If you compete with all your competitors directly, you're playing on hard mode. You and your competitors will battle over the same features, and ultimately, price.

You need to find fresh market space.

To do that, you need to either normalize the weird, or weird the normal:

Normalize the weird

Juice shots, bone broth, staying in stranger's homes, and riding in stranger's cars—all pretty weird ideas when they first came out.

Now these are massive categories. 

Here's what you need to normalize the weird:

• Make the weird thing safe and familiar: "Your stay in Airbnb is 100% insured."
  
• Push into an existing category that people understand. Pick the right one:
• Juice shots' category shouldn't be “juice” as they'd be massively overpriced. But, as a supplement, they're a fresh alternative.

Weird the normal

If you sell a normal thing, tweak it a bit to make it weird:

• Put your water in a can and give it death metal vibes (Liquid Death).
• Put a giant cooling system on your mattress (EightSleep).
• Put your chips in a tube (Pringles).

All boring and mundane things twisted in some sort of way to make them more interesting.

Normalizing the weird is harder and riskier, but if you can do it right, it can really hit.

In short: You gotta be weird. You chose whether you make it more or less weird.

What works for others is more likely to work for you. So it's time to audit your competitors.

The goal is not to steal directly from your competitor's, it's to learn from their success.

And I don't mean your direct competitors. As I said above, you don't want to risk looking too similar to them. Instead, you want to look at other companies that:

1. Target the same audience. Affluent parents. 20-year-old college guys. Hard-core programmers. You have to sell to each of them in completely different ways.
2. Monetize in a similar way. Freemium SaaS, a high-ticket services, and physical. You have to sell each of them in completely differently ways.

They do not need to sell the same thing as you. Instead, you want to see how they're capturing and converting the attention of your audience.

Go to Crunchbase and find companies that fit this bill—preferably ones that are larger and older than your startup as they're hopefully more sophisticated.

Next audit their:

1. Ads
2. Onboarding
3. A/B Tests
4. Content
5. Tech stack
6. Their social media

Read our Growth Guide for a step-by-step instruction on how to do the audit.

Why is all this competitive analysis work worth it? Four reasons:

1. You learn how your audience's attention is already captured and converted.
2. You learn common growth patterns and adopt them as your starting point.
3. You find great ideas you’ve overlooked.
4. You learn what the norms are, particularly for competitors’ ads and landing pages, so you can break them to stand out from everyone else—to rise above the noise.

That last point is key. I'll repeat it a lot.

If there's a form on the Internet, it will be filled out by a bot.

Guaranteed.

And emailing these can hurt the deliverability of all your emails long term.

Double opt-in helps ensure a human clicked it, and hopefully a human who wants it.

BUT not everyone who actually wants the emails will read the confirmation email and click it. Even in the best of cases we're talking ~70% of people. Even if say 10% are spam, then that means 20% of people who want your emails won't get them.

Here's what we do:

• We use an email validation tool (Kickbox) to check if each email is deliverable, low quality, spam, invalid, and more. We only subscribe if marked "deliverable."
• We have an automated "win back" email sequence to people who haven't opened emails recently. If they don't open/click, they're removed.
• If a handful of emails bounce in a row, removed.
• We periodically go through and remove low-quality looking, or clearly test emails.
• We're also quick to remove if yahoo, hotmail, or aol.
• We make it easy to unsubscribe in every email so if someone got it and they don't want it, they can remove themselves.
• We let people configure which emails they receive from us.

We've run this newsletter for nearly 4 years, and our open rates are consistently 40-45%—which is considered very healthy.

It could be even higher with double opt-in, but we're willing to risk it for the biscuit with the strategy above.

In the book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland talked about how one might compete against Coke. You might logically try to compete by doing:

• Larger can
• Lower cost
• Better taste

And you’d be laughed out of the room if you suggested:

• Smaller can
• More expensive
• Tastes awful

But that’s exactly what Red Bull did.

They created a new category that was completely unique at the time: energy drink.

Red Bull’s small size, increased cost, and weird taste were critical to its success:

1. For you to believe its potency you have to put it in a small can so people think that it’s so potent that it’s unsafe to drink a normal-sized can.
2. For you to value it, the "potent ingredients" must make it cost more than a soft drink.
3. And for you to believe it has those potent ingredients, it should have a weird medicinal taste (like Buckley’s “It tastes awful, but it works.”)

As Alex M H Smith says in his book, No Bullsh*t Strategy, the best way to compete is with "Contrarian Value"—find what all your competitors are fighting over and purposefully underperform on it so you can overperform in other ways.

Xbox and Playstation are in a brutal battle to be the fastest console.

To compete, Nintendo created the underpowered Switch allowing it to be played both at home and on the go. And it's now the 3rd most sold console in history.

When all the other soft drinks are battling over taste. Red Bull made theirs taste awful.

Ask yourself:

• What are your competitors battling over?
• What do you already suck at?
• What would happen if you sucked at it even more?

To grow you need a website that converts visitors into purchasers:

Purchase Rate = Desire - (Labor + Confusion) 

To increase the purchase rate, increase the visitor's desire to purchase while decreasing their labor (effort) and confusion:

1. Increase desire — Entice visitors with how much value you provide. Create intrigue.
   
2. Decrease labor — Reduce the work your visitors have to perform so they don't get tired or annoyed. Be concise and ensure every word and element is of value.
   
3. Decrease confusion — Don't confuse visitors with obscure or verbose messaging. Ensure every sentence can be easily understood. And make it self-evident which action they should take next (e.g. sign up or purchase). And ensure your action elements (e.g. buttons) are unmissable.

This means don't get overly fancy with your pages.

It's not an art piece.
It's not a statement.
It's a tool to convert attention into intention into action. 

A lot can be accomplished with this simple, tried-and-true page structure:

By "Features" I don't mean just saying "easy-to-use!"

Instead translate features into the value they'll get from using it. And proactively handle any objections they might have. 

For a detailed breakdown of how to create each of these sections, read out Landing Pages section of our comprehensive Growth Guide.

Taplio scaled to $1M in ARR in 9 months. They then got acquired by Lemlist.

They did it with a small team and no sales people.

Perfect Keto, a former client of ours, grew to 8-figures in revenue in under 2 years with a team of less than 10 people.

A big driver for both were free tools: 

Taplio

Taplio launched 12 free tools that drove a ton of growth.

For example, when carousels were becoming popular on LinkedIn, people were manually repurposing screenshots of tweets. So they created a free Tweet -> Carousel generator. 

On that page they pitched to product, then added a watermark that'd only be hidden if you become a paid member of Taplio

Pefect Keto

Perfect Keto sells supplements for people on the keto diet. They started producing a ton of SEO-content about keto diets right as the trend of keto diets was on the up.

One of the biggest drivers of traffic, sales, subscribers, and domain authority (at least at the time) was a free ketogenic diet calculator.

Create your own

To take advantage on this strategy, the sweet spot is:

• It's related to what you sell
• Would-be or current customers would need to do it. Bonus if it's frequently.
• A lot of people are searching for it (do keyword research)
• It's trending upwards (keto diets in 2017 or linkedin carousels in 2022)

Product-Market Fit is a tiny piece of the puzzle.

Yet it's what every startup is chasing. 

Of course, creating a product that solves a painful and unsolved problem is critical. But it's way more complicated than that.

We like to use the 5 Fits Framework (adapted from Brian Balfour's Four Fits):

1. Product – WHAT you sell. What problem does it solve? How unique is that? And, how well does it solve it?
2. Market – WHO you're selling to. Do they have that problem? How painful is it?
3. Model – HOW you charge (monthly, one-time, per unit), and how MUCH you charge.
4. Channel – WHERE you're marketing and selling it.
5. Brand – The perception, identity, and reputation of the company/people selling it.

All five of these need to be in sync for a company to take off. Examples:

• A Rolex-equivalent watch wouldn't work if sold by My Little Pony.
• You couldn't sell a kids toy for a $10,000 monthly subscription.
• You'd go bust if you paid for LinkedIn Ads to sell Fidget Spinners.

A great product that solves your painful problem just doesn't work if:

1. It's sold by a brand that you don't trust to make it.
2. It costs either way too much or way too little.
3. If it's marketed or sold where you aren't spending time.
4. And various other permutations of how these fit together.

So as you're building a great product, consider how it all fits together. 

Wanna go deeper?

If you wanna go deeper into Five Fits, growth strategy, brand strategy, onboarding, landing pages, as well as setting up marketing channels like ads, cold emails, and SEO—we're offering $300 off our Growth Program in our Black Friday/Cyber Monday promo. 

It's for early-stage founders that need to get their startup ready to go grow. We'll teach you the 80/20's of growth for your startup. And show you step-by-step how to do it.

Grab your $300 off →

(Or reply to this newsletter with questions)

A lot of movies, books, and TV shows follow a typical arc: The "Hero's Journey."

Here's what that looks like (using Stars Wars Episode 4 as an example):

This 12 step storytelling framework is overkill in most marketing. But, you can capture its essence with a helpful framework:

"Emotional Resonance" maps. 

We buy with emotion and justify with logic. Stories tap into emotions, which tap into wallets.

When you script an ad, webinar, sales pitch, fundraising pitch, marketing email, or social post, map out the emotion you want people to feel as they consume it. 

Here are 3 arcs that Patrick shared:

You could have a bad product, mediocre offer and no ability to persuade people and still sell a ton if you have a ton of demand for your product.

(Masks and toilet paper were a great example of this during peak COVID) 

You need to find a market that's desperate for a solution. Typically this boil down to seeking improved health, increased wealth, or improved relationships. 

Four factors to find a great market with latent demand:

1. Pain
2. Purchasing power
3. Easy to target / easy to find your audience
4. It’s growing

Let's dive into each: 

Pain

They have to desperately need what you’re offering. It can’t be a nice-to-have.

How much you charge is proportional to the pain someone has and your ability to relieve it.

Share the dream of their life without that pain. 

Purchasing Power

If you target students, they cannot pay you $1200 for a course.

Target venture capitalists and they could cough up ten grand if you can make them more.

Easy to Target

But, if you can't get your offer in front of venture capitalists easily, then what's the point? 

You need to be able to consistently be able to get in front of a lot of your audience.

Where do they spend time? What mailing lists are they apart of? Social media groups? Communities/forums? What YouTube channels do they watch?  

Growing

Find a market that’s growing. You'll grow as it does.

Don’t go into the newspaper or radio business. You'll be fighting a downward trend. 

In short, an increasingly painful problem for people with money who are easy to reach.

Most social media advice for early-stage startups:

"Focus on one account, maybe the founder. Or just do something else, like ads." 

Well, Oliver, the 21-year-old college student and founder of tabs, did the complete opposite—and achieved months with $500,000 worth of sales of "sex chocolate" as a result. 

Here's how:

• They have at least 30 creators they work with.
• Each with their own tabs-branded TikTok account. Seriously, 30+ accounts.
• They each post 1-3 videos every day.
• They're all less than 10 seconds.
• Over a third of the accounts have > 10,000,000 total views.
• They feel like customer reviews, not ads.

Each of the 30 creators has their own unique link in the bio so they can track purchases. Assumably, they're all being paid per conversion—so the upfront cost for tabs is minimal.

Added benefit of this strategy:

Now, when tabs run ads on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, they have a ton of organic-feeling, proven-to-work ad creatives to use. 

PS: They're clients of ours at Ad Labs. We're running their ads now ;0

Tanay Jaipuria spent years working on Facebook’s algorithm to help make users’ feeds more relevant and engaging.

So when Twitter/X open-sourced its recommendation algorithm a few months ago, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a peek under the hood.

There was another algorithm update since his original article, so we've weaved in other analyses as well.

Here are some tactical recommendations to increase visibility on X:

1. Optimize tweets for maximum engagement.

• Include images and videos (including GIFs) for a 2x boost in ranking. Having 3 or 4 images can boost it even further.
• Post in the same language as your followers to avoid a 90% penalty.
• Tweet about trending topics. These are promoted in the "For You" tab.
• Avoid using multiple hashtags, which can result in a 40% penalty.
• Eliminate misspellings/unknown words to prevent a 95% penalty
• Ask questions. Replies to tweets are one of the biggest boosters.
• Don't link off platform. These get penalized.
• Avoid controversial (blacklisted) topics.
• Don't be offensive.

2. Build quality relationships with followers.

• Reply to people who comment. An author replying is worth 2x someone else replying.
  
• But, you can be penalized for engaging with low quality commenters—so don't engage with ones in the "show more" or with low quality / offensive profiles.
• Collaborate with users and influencers in the same niche.
• Share targeted, valuable content tailored to your audience’s interests.
• Showcase your personality and brand voice to humanize your presence and make your tweets more relatable.

3. Leverage user factors to boost twitter presence.

• Consider subscribing to Twitter Blue for a 4x boost for people who follow you and a 2x boost for people who don't follow you.
• Maintain a healthy followers-to-following ratio. You should follow no more than 60% of your number of followers.
• Improve your "TweepCred" score, similar to Google’s PageRank, by posting high-quality content, engaging with followers, and maintaining a positive reputation.
• Consider offering a premium subscription. Twitter/X makes money when people subscribe, so they're incentivized to boost you.

Combine the above factors with high-quality content and consistent posting, and you'll give your tweets a better chance of being seen and engaged by your target audience.

For deeper analyses check out Tanay's article, and NFT_GOD's tweets which are more recent (1 and 2). 

Let's build off the last one. 

Which of these orange circles is larger?

Almost everyone says the one on the right—when in fact they're the same size.

Why is simple: Our perceptions are completely relative.

Here are 3 ways to do that:

#1. Change your competitive set

If you don't choose who you're compared to, people will do it for you.

Seedlip naturally would have been compared to a $2 bottle of Schweppe's Tonic Water. So instead, they used premium branding to be compared to the cost of a bottle of gin.

#2 Create a "decoy" product

Make your core product seem cheap by comparing it to a premium option.

The Atlantic famously did this with its pricing. The $100 plan is to make the $59.99 (another classic pricing hack) seem more reasonable.

#3 Highlight the cost of NOT using your product (the alternatives) 

Durex doesn't compare itself to Trojan. Instead, it compares it to the cost of a baby:

Money has zero intrinsic value.

Money has value because we all believe the same story that it is valuable. In a zombie apocalypse, your $20 bill becomes valuable as a heat source—and your credit card useless.

Van Gogh and Monet paintings are worth millions only because enough people believe the stories that the artist and society created around them. Countless paintings were made with similar aesthetic value, but are forgotten by history.

Your product's value is the same—it depends on the story you tell.

You need to craft compelling narratives that position you as the obvious choice—across the full customer journey.

As April Dunford says, you need to become "Obviously Awesome."

Do that, and instead of selling a $5 soft drink, you're selling a $35 "non-alcoholic spirit."

Here are April's 12 steps to becoming obviously awesome:

1. Identify your most eager customers and what they love.
2. Assemble diverse folks across your team to help define the story.
3. Have an open mind. Try not to succumb to confirmation bias.
4. Identify REAL alternatives to using your product (like sleep for Netflix).
5. List your product's superior, verifiable features (2x suction, not "user-friendly").
6. Determine your features' value to customers.
7. Pinpoint customer segments most likely to care.
8. Pick a market segment that isn't dominated and dominate it. That could be:
   
9. An entire market (chips)
10. A subset (potato-free or baked chips)
11. A new market ("dehydrated superfood")
12. Connect your product to a current trend (ex: Millennials reducing alcohol consumption)
13. Create a document for the team to reference
    
14. Name and description of product
15. Market and market segment
16. Alternatives to your product
17. Product’s unique and superior features
18. Tangible value it adds to customers
19. The characteristics of ideal customer
20. Weave the narrative into your marketing and sales collateral
21. Track and adjust if necessary. 

Your unique story is hard to get right, but if you do it can do wonders.‍

#10 is a key step.

You need a system that the whole team can use to tell that story. 

We can help you craft that story, and the system to tell it—for hooks, ads, landing pages, emails, and more.

Learn more about our Story Systems

Now the average is ~0.35%.

A 222x decrease!

Andrew Chen calls this the "Law of Shitty Clickthroughs." Essentially, a new marketing tactic's effectiveness will be short lived. We're drawn to novelty (like the flashing banner ad), but as soon as it becomes common, we tune it out and it stops working.

That's why with any marketing, you need to stand the f*&k out (as Louis Grenier would say). 

But this is particularly true with ads where you're blowing money on every impression.

You need to not trigger the "this is an ad" reflex.

Here are some ad types that currently help with that:

1. Customer reactions

Show a user (or actor's) reaction to using the product. 

• Dramatic expressions grab attention.
• A lower quality "iPhone" shot or video feels more organic. 
• You can showcase your product's "wow" or "magic" moment.

2. Customer testimonials

Social proof is powerful. Share customer text reviews or testimonials. Even better, share a video testimonial. We use Testimontial.to to collect ours—like this one from Alex M H Smith about Unignorable.

3. Unboxing

People love unboxing videos. Oddly, even if it's for a product they know nothing about. There's built in mystery and curiosity, and opening up new products is a pleasurable moment for people so we have positive associations with them.

Cut your video to highlight the most exciting moments in the first few seconds.

4. Product walkthrough

Have a customer, influencer, actor, or just a team member do a selfie-style walkthrough using the product. It feels natural and let's you show off the product.

With all of these, make sure to have a good "hook" to get people invested quickly.

And if you're a startup spending <$50k per month in ads (or looking to get them started), our new service, Ad Labs, we can run the ads for you.

40~60% of users who sign up will never actually use your product.

So, nailing the onboarding experience is a key way to increase conversion and retention.

Wes Bush shares what he calls the "Bowling Alley Framework." Here's what that means:

Wes breaks this down in 3 phase:

Phase 1: Build your straight line path

Your user signs up, and hits the product (current state). You want them to get to the "magic moment" where they discover the value your product brings them (desired outcome).

1. Step 1: Map out the current path they take from Current State to Desired Outcome.
2. Step 2: Label each step as Green (necessary), Yellow (advanced features, can be introduced later), and Red (can be removed completely, like a phone number field).
3. Step 3: Remove all Reds. Delay all Yellows. You want nothing but green lights.

Phase 2: Create Product Bumpers

These are elements within the product that push people towards the desired outcome.

1. Welcome Message: Welcome them in, restate value props, and motivate them.
2. Product Tour: This is a step-by-step tour that hand holds them to the Desired Outcome. Let people opt out if they don't want that.
3. Progress Bars: Show their progress to being fully up and running to illustrate they still have stuff to step up. It gamifies onboarding.
4. Checklists: Similar to progress bars, show a checklist of the steps remaining.
5. Tooltips: Have tooltips pop up to show them where to click next.
6. Empty states: If parts of the UI aren't ready to go yet, have a message that explains why it's empty and link to what they need to do it fill it.

Phase 3: Create Conversational Bumpers

Product bumpers only work if they're actually in the product. Often, people will sign up and then bounce.

Conversational bumpers are to bring them back into the product.

This includes a lot of different email types, like onboarding, welcome, case studies, trial expiration, and post-trial surveys.

For a deeper dive into all 3 phases, check out Wes' full article.

Chewy Thompson started a daily fitness challenge on his Instagram 8 days ago. Here's his follower progress:

• Day 1: 520 followers
• Day 2: 526 followers
  
• Day 3: 535 followers
  
• Day 4: 644 followers
  
• Day 5: 1938 followers
  
• Day 6: 16000 followers
  
• Day 7: 50,000 followers
  
• Day 8: 88,000 followers
  
• Current: 128,000 followers

The premise is:

• For every 1 follower total, he walks 1 inch each day.
• For every 1000 followers total, he does 1 pushup each day.
• At the end of each daily video he says "I'm deleting this channel in (365-X, where X is days into the challenge) days unless I reach 1 million followers"

At the end of the challenge he'll be doing 1,000 push ups and walking 15 miles per day. Which at this rate is the end of this week—he struggled even just doing 1 pushup.

I think this works so well because:

1. It's gamified, the more followers the more he has to do.
2. People love watching people suffer. Mr Beasts most popular and highest retention videos are of him suffering (in a box underground).
3. It's a heroes journey and people get to follow along and see him get fit.
4. He has this big goal of working out with John Cena and people want to help him.
5. There's stakes. He'll delete his account if he doesn't hit 1M followers.

Of course, there's more to it. Here are the 6 core ingredients of viral content.

Copywriting is one of the most important skills.

Whether you're writing:

• Ads,
• Landing pages,
• Fundraising pitch decks,
• Cold emails,
• Social posts,
• Negotiations, or
• Speeches

You need to write clear, compelling copy if you want the person on the other end to take the action you'd like them to.

We created this cheatsheet that covers Hooks, Literary Devices, Tips, Post Types, and Frameworks. High-res version.