The Growth Vault

As Alex starts his post: “What should a strategy actually LOOK LIKE? What is the "thing"? What is the format?”

It's not a 50-page business plan or an Excel file with 10 years of projected cashflows.

Instead, here’s how to write a simple & effective strategy: as a Google or Word doc.

It’s divided into 4 sections:

1. The strategy argument: Outline your interpretation of the market, your plan, and why you think your plan will work.
2. The strategy statement: A short practical statement of the strategy. Boil it down so your friend can understand it when you tell them over drinks.
3. The implications: A list of the key things you must do to execute the strategy.
4. The execution flow: A suggested order and prioritization of these actions.

Strategy argument

Structure your argument in a narrative flow:

1. The status quo: This is what the market is like right now
2. Why this sucks: Why the status quo needs to change
3. Our belief: How we think differently to everyone else (our breakthrough insight)
4. Our solution: Based on our breakthrough insight, this is how we will fix the status quo and deliver massive value

The narrative flow helps you refine the weak parts of your thinking.## 

The strategy statement

Our brains are lazy. Even exceptionally intelligent people like simplicity.

The best strategies can be summarized in a simple sentence.

Everyone on the team should be able to hear this statement, understand it, remember it, and help it shape their thinking.

As Alex recommends:

• Don’t make it pretty (or cute)
• Don’t make it too short (or you’ll confuse people)
• Don’t make it sound like a tagline (this isn’t marketing copy)

Just make it clear. Unambiguous. Practical. Usable.

For example, when Tesla started, EVs were small and boring. Tesla could have said:

"Use EV technology to create luxury, high-performance vehicles to attract people to the segment and grow the size of the market (before going down market).”

(The bolded text is my addition to Alex’s example.)

In other words: “Make electric cars cool and desirable, then make them accessible.”

The implications

Outline the changes that need to take place to bring the business to a position where it is obviously delivering the strategy.

Obviously means that an external observer could explain your strategy to you simply by looking at what you’re up to.

For example, we never explicitly told the world that our strategy was to create a media/education business to provide free value to early-stage founders so that they trust us and want to work with our agency. But that became obvious to many people.

Break this down into sections across different parts of the business. Product, Brand, Marketing, Sales.

What does it mean for each of them? How do they each need to change?

Execution flow

If you nailed the strategy, it should be easy. If it’s not, your strategy isn’t clear enough.

Sketch out the order of the high-level actions to implement this strategy:

1. First we need to do this
2. Then this
3. Then this

This isn’t every single task. That’s what Asana, Basecamp, and ClickUp are for. Instead, these are the high-level things your company must do to fulfill its strategy.

For example, to create a media/education business to provide free value to early-stage startups so they trust us and want to work with our agency, that could have been:

1. Start a free growth community
2. Start a free newsletter to nurture the community
3. Create free resources and distribute them on our website and social media and include mentions of the agency
4. Grow the audience and traffic to these resources

What’s next

Run the strategy by the team and friends. Then, start implementing it.

And stick to it. Don’t get distracted or compromise until the strategy is proven wrong.

If you want to dive deeper into some of Alex’s strategic ideas, I’ve written about 3 of them in previous newsletters:

• Play the Opposite’s Game with your strategy
• “Normalize the Weird” or “Weird the Normal”
• Contrarian Value

I also recommend his book No Bullsh*t Strategy.

Or you can read through the 48 strategy tactics we've had in the newsletter.

I’ve spent far too many hours scrolling through the top posts on Reddit, YouTube, X, and Instagram to reverse-engineer what made them go viral.

Three distinct types of posts go viral:

1. Remarkable world news: pandemics, wars, explosions, new presidents, etc. This goes viral because of its real-world impact.
2. They’re cute, hilarious, funny, amazing, inspiring, infuriating, or heartwarming.
   1. A woman’s car melted by a fire, but her Stanley mug remains pristine.
   2. The Dallas Zoo simply tweeted: “The Zoo is closed today due to a serious situation.” Comedy gold.
   3. Greta Thunberg dunks on Andrew Tate.
3. Someone went extremely over the top and did something 99.9999999% would not. More on this below.

#1 and #2 are quite hard to manufacture.

But with #3, you have a serious chance if you’re creative and put in the work.

Some examples of going over the top:

1. Mr Doodle spent 2 years doodling all over the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture of a completely white house and filmed it as a stop motion video – 6.4M views on YouTube and 158k upvotes on Reddit
2. MrBeast spent 17+ hours saying "Logan Paul" 100,000 times – 23M views
   1. This is MrBeast’s thing. Doing insane stuff that no one else will: recreating Squid Game, burying himself for 50 hours, rebuilding Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, or going through the same Drive-Thru 1,000 times.
3. A man turned his missing eye into a working flashlight –192k upvotes on Reddit
4. KamuiCosplay spent 1.5 years creating an insanely detailed cosplay costume with over 1,000 LEDs – 152k upvotes on Reddit
5. Richard Linklater filmed the movie Boyhood over 11 years with the same cast to accurately portray growing up – $57.3M box office on a $4M budget.

The above are flashy consumer examples, but it can be applied to B2B as well

The bar (and the viral ceiling) is often much lower. Some simple and effective examples:

• The massive CopyHackers guide Every Copywriting Formula Ever. It's an obvious bookmark as a copywriter.
• Lenny’s Newsletter’s goes incredibly deep in his articles, often featuring quotes from dozens of people he interviewed at hot startups.
• Naim Ahmed’s post, where he analyzed 100 hooks in detail.
• Richard van der Blom’s annual 100 page PDF reports on the LinkedIn Algorithm.
• GrowthInReverse’s deep analyses of how creators grew to 50,000 subscribers.

You want someone to say: “Wow, this is insane! I can’t believe someone did this.”

Because if they do, they’ll forward it to someone else.

An important caveat

So yes, this may be the most likely way to go viral.

But it requires a really good idea and a TON of work (that's the whole point).

To be more than a simple flash in the pan, you need to find something related to what you sell. Otherwise, it's just a cool thing that people share, and you don't get anything lasting out of it. Your product/service needs to be an inherent part of the story.

Takeaway: Make your message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell or experience the story without it.

Mr Doodle's is a great example of that. He took his regular art to an unparalleled level. If you liked the video, you'll love his art. You can't tell the story of the video without talking about his art.KamuiCosplay, too, created a great piece of marketing by highlighting her skill.

But, the man who turned his missing eye into a flashlight got nothing but a few days of dopamine from all the fleeting attention. No one knows or cares who he is specifically.

So find something that no one in your industry has ever done or is likely willing to do, and do it in a way that makes your product an integral part of the story.

I recommend the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger.

Ad creative (imagery) is the number one way to make your ads profitable—or not.

Your job as a marketer is to:

1. Think out of the box
2. Draw inspiration from others
3. Make it clear what you sell
4. Make it hooky and to the point

Here are two great ad campaigns to learn from:

Chirps: Sharon, not Karen

2.4M views on YouTube and 5.6M views on Facebook.

And a lot of love in comments:

And it’s just an ad. An ad one of our team members saw on TV of all places.

What this ad does well:

• It starts in “TikTok format,” showing a woman yelling at people. This is a big “pattern interrupt” when you’re watching on a TV where everything has a high production value and is in a landscape format.
• It plays off of the popularity of the “Karen” meme, and who doesn’t love the spicy outrage from watching a Karen yell at someone?
• If you notice the comments on Facebook, many people are tagging their friends named Sharon. It's a perfect excuse to engage and spread it.
• It then switches to reality TV/documentary style with a dynamic back and forth between her, her Karen-like actions, and her husband’s take.
• It transitions to the product nicely and pitches it in a funny way that keeps you watching. It’s not a robotic ad read.

Gett’s black cab ads

Gett is an Uber competitor. They’re much smaller and can’t compete on speed, cost, brand recognition, or ad spend.

Here are the ads they made to display in London to advertise their taxi booking service.

For context: The ubiquitous taxi in the UK is the “black cab.” A big car that looks straight out of the 1950’s:

What these ads do well:

• They’re fighting a different fight. Uber and Lyft battle over cost, wait times, and ride options. They’re basically the same app. Instead, Gett focuses on the benefits of the quirky black cab: they’re big, they use bus lanes, they’re iconic, and they’re a great way to show up to a fancy event in heels.
• They’re funny, memorable, clever, and tongue-in-cheek. It leaves you with a positive association with the brand—which a lot of ads do not.

One of the most important metrics for an ad is memorability. It’s rare that someone sees an ad and immediately buys, particularly for in-person ads, but even digital ads.

Typically, people hear about a brand or product dozens of times when they don’t need it. Then a Trigger Event causes them to finally take action. They’ll typically buy the ones that first come to mind that they have positive associations with.

Creative, rhyming, and tongue-in-cheek copy help make you the one they think of.

Additional resources for ads

1. 52 growth tactics about Ads. And 55 on Copywriting.
2. Our popular Growth Guide’s Making Ads and Running Ads sections.
3. Browse our Ad Vault (a library of 164 curated ads) or the Meta Ad Library.
4. We can run your ads for you. Everyone on our ads team has 10+ years of experience.
5. I also recommend saving great ads to find as inspiration. Save them to Facebook, Instagram, Notion, mymind, or whatever tool you prefer.

What you don’t do is as important as what you do.

1 person businesses up to $1 trillion businesses have to decide what to focus on.

The smaller you are, the more important it is to spend precious resources on what matters. The larger you are, the more important it is to prevent a horde of people from doing a lot of the wrong things.

Many startups use the RICE prioritization framework, in which you rank each initiative on four factors (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort) and combine them into a score. Then, you prioritize the ones with the highest score.

Let's dive into the parts of RICE:

#1. Reach 

How many customers would see the change (product), or how many new potential customers would it reach (marketing)?

How to rank it:

• The exact # of people you expect (50, 1k, 50k). You’d need to assume “per year” or “per month” for all your answers.
• Or something like this:
  • Most/All = 10
  • About half = 5
  • A fraction = 2

#2. Impact

How much would it affect the business if it worked? For example, how much more revenue this year?

How to rank it:

• A 1-3 or a 1-5 scale
• Or something like this:
  • S (<5%) = 3
  • M (5-10%) = 5
  • L (10-20%) = 10
  • XL (>20%) = 20

#3. Confidence

How likely is it to work?

How to rank it:

• A percentage confidence like 10%, 25%, 50%, and 80%

#4. Effort

How much time, money, or energy it takes. This is the only “negative” factor. You want this to be as low as possible.

How to rank it:

• A 1-5 scale
• The number of hours, days, or number of person-weeks or person-months
• Or something like this:
  • Trivial (XS) = 1
  • Few Days (S) = 2
  • 1-2 weeks (M) = 5
  • 1 month+ (L) = 20
  • Quarter+ (XL) = 60

Note: Everyone does the scoring and calculation differently depending on how they want to weigh the different things. Some do Low, Medium, and High on each. Some do more complicated ones. The “Or something like this” values above are from this template made by Alexey Komissarouk, which I recommend.

An example

For example, if you want to decide between re-doing your drip email campaign for new subscribers to promote your product and adding a blurb to your weekly newsletter, everyone would have various opinions about which is better.

But let’s RICE it:

Based on this scoring, even though the drip email rewrite would have a greater impact at a higher confidence level, it’s still worth doing the newsletter blurb first because it requires minimal effort and reaches more people.

Now, the team can objectively agree to prioritize that.

This becomes even more important when there are 100+ different ideas rather than just two. It makes it far easier and more objective to choose.

As important, however,  is that everyone on the team can throw ideas to the list, and you can go through and RICE each one and choose the winners. Everyone can feel their ideas are heard, and they can understand why they aren’t chosen.

It becomes objective rather than subjective or personal.

And if people feel comfortable submitting ideas, they’re more likely to do so, especially when the ideas are a bit crazy. You’ll not only be better at prioritizing ideas, but you’ll also have a team that’s better at generating interesting ideas.

And interesting ideas are the ones that often move the needle in a big way.

Get the whole team involved. There is no bad idea. Just put it in the table and RICE it.

Again, I recommend this template.

If you want to go even deeper

RICE is great, but the 30 seconds of evaluation are often guesswork.

So, for larger, more sophisticated companies that have already picked all the low-hanging fruit, you should do an even deeper analysis. This is what Darius and Alexey call the DRICE framework—a Detailed RICE.

Here are the components:

• Hypothesis: Briefly explain the idea with justifications for its effectiveness.
• Impact estimate: A bottom-up financial model estimating the idea's impact. For example, Darius and Alexey’s article provides a more detailed impact estimate.
• Cost estimate: Roughly break down the idea into smaller tasks and estimate the number of hours/days/weeks expected from the team for each (with a buffer) plus additional costs like production or legal costs.

The same components as RICE, just more detailed. You might discover that the impact or cost is significantly different than you first anticipated.

Check out Darius and Alexey’s article for more detail :)

SEO articles are not “one and done.”

It’s an iterative process that depends on how well the article is ranking and its trajectory. 

First, here’s evidence of WHY you should consider this. SEO expert Tim Hanson updated some stale articles when he discovered they were trending downwards. You can see the difference they made:

Here’s Tim’s process:

1. Pop up Search Console every quarter.
2. Go through all your articles that are at least a few months old. Find articles that are trending downwards and add them to a list.
3. For each page on that list, apply the below changes depending on how they currently rank.

Ranking 1-7 and getting traffic

These are the articles doing well. They rank for their target keywords and get a decent number of eyes and clicks. Once an article gets 100+ visitors a week change your goal from SEO increases (views) to conversion increases (sign ups, purchases).

Consider things like:

• Adding CTA’s/signups/relevant next blogs
• Adding videos to go deeper
• Creating lead magnets and content upgrades
• Potentially adding more context to the article

Do not fundamentally change the concept of the content.

Google has placed it high for a reason, and that reason is usually the “feel of the whole blog”. Don’t change that. Changing that more often than not results in losing rank.

Position 8-25

Content ranking here is on the right track, but needs a little something extra.

Often the article is not addressing the actual search intent. Why are people searching what they’re searching for? Are you actually answering that question or just addressing it? Are you answer their next question?

You’ll want to add things like

• Core keyword in the H1/H2’s. You’re likely missing it
• Shorter paragraphs and bullet lists to making skimming easier (improve readability)
• More internal links
• More focus on the key search intent
• Expanding further to answer their “next question”

Pos 25+

Assuming the blog is at least a few months old, it’s likely stuck.

The most common reason why it’s stuck is it doesn’t match search at all. It’s not even close. Go and take a deeper look at the pages ranking for the keyword you’re going for. See what patterns they all follow.

How are they talking about the keyword/keyphrase you’re trying to rank for? More than likely you’re missing something obvious that 5+ pages on the SERPs are doing well.

The second most common reason why you’re not ranking? Likely word count. Check the average word count and make sure you’re matching that average. Shorter is unfortunately not considered better in SEO most of the time.

Pos 50+

Rewrite entirely. If you’ve been holding this position for your core keyword for 6-12 months. You likely need to rewrite the whole thing. No one is ever going to see this page.

Quick note

The problem with content marketing is that every time you publish something, you're giving yourself future homework to edit and update it in the future—especially if it's about topics that shift and update frequently. This can become quite unwieldy quickly.

It's one of many reasons we recommend less, but better content.

Some SEO resources

• Our past and future tactics about SEO and Content Marketing.
• Newsletters/blogs from SEO creators like Kevin Indig, Eli Schwartz, Backlinko, and Marie Haynes
• Some of our fave SEO tools: ahrefs, Semrush, Exploding Topics, and Surfer.

Tiny word changes can massively impact how people feel and react.

Our partner, Katelyn Bourgoin, and Phill Agnew (host of Nudge) coined the term “Wallet Opening Words.” Powerful words that cause people to reach into their wallets.

Here are some of my favorite lesser-known ones that are simple to implement:

Because bias

Simply telling people WHY you’re making a request is powerful. Even if it’s meaningless.

An experiment showed that 60% of people allowed the researcher to cut in line at the photocopier by saying “I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine?”

By simply adding "because I'm in a rush" raised compliance to 94%. Surprisingly, adding the obvious "because I have to make copies" also reached 93% when there was 5 pages, but had no change when they said it was 20 pages.

Specific prices

Specific numbers are both more believable and more memorable than round numbers. We’ve taken advantage of this by running sales for UNIGNORABLE for 37.5 hours vs 24 hours.

A study found that beggars received +60% more donations by asking for oddly specific amounts rather than the typical quarter, dollar, dime, etc.

Framing

There’s a classic psychological bias called “what you see is all there is.” We often take what is presented and evaluate it without bringing in all our knowledge about the world.

A powerful way this manifests is that you can control how someone perceives and experiences something by framing it a certain way. For example:

If you know the job your product does for customers (an indulgent snack), you can better frame it as being really good at doing that job (an unhealthy lassi). Whereas if you tried to frame your lassi as a healthier alternative to a milkshake, all the people seeking indulgent snack would go buy a milkshake.

Authority

Would you rather talk to a customer support person or the founder? Which would you more likely believe and reply to?

Turns out, letters from a dentist’s office saw a 54% reply rate when signed by the dentist, but only 18% when signed by the dentist’s secretary.

Emails that come from the founder will always perform better than emails that come from Bob the SDR. This donation request coming from Obama was the most successful email of his 2012 presidential campaign:

Present tense

People commonly write in past or future tense on websites and in emails.

But, present tense is far more powerful. A study found customer reviews using present tense receive 26.4% more upvotes and increase product purchase intent by 12.3%.

Studies also found that languages that use present tense to describe future actions (i.e. “I buy that tomorrow” rather than “I will buy that tomorrow”) are better at saving for the future because it feels more tangible.

Words are powerful

Just because you run a few ads or send a few emails that flop, doesn’t mean that no one wants your product or service. The words you choose are critical.

Here are some helpful copywriting resources:

1. Above the Fold Playbook: This will walk you through rewriting the most important part of your website: the beginning.
2. The Growth Guide: We walk through how to write copy for your landing pages and ads in this free guide to growth marketing. 
3. My copywriting articles: I have written a few free articles on copywriting ranging from copywriting frameworks and 10 ways to hook people.
4. Wallet Opening Words: This newsletter is a snippet of 5 of the 26.5 techniques that Katelyn and Phill cover in WOW.
5. Julian’s Guide to Writing Better: My cofounder Julian spent months developing his free writing guide after getting millions of views of his content.

52% of the Fortune 500 companies in 2000 went out of business by 2020. These are the world's largest companies with the biggest budgets.

And most of them died in just two decades.

Companies have two options to stay or become relevant:

• Sustaining Innovation. You make iteratively better products that you can charge more money from your current customers/market.
• Disruptive Innovation. You make products cheaper and more accessible for people outside your current market, which undercuts current products. Or you completely change the technology or form factor to make it way better.

Examples of this playing out

• Toyota emerged and made gas cars cheaper (which actually helped reliability). Ford had to decide if they tried to compete (#2) or make bigger and bigger trucks and SUVs (#1). Meanwhile, Tesla invested in electric, futuristic cars and became worth more than every other gas car company combined.
• Kodak made film cameras and focused on improving them each year. Nikon, Canon, Fuji, and Sony invested heavily in creating digital cameras and killed Kodak.
• Google focused on making more money from Search. Despite having more data to train AI than anybody else, a startup, OpenAI, creates ChatGPT and replaces the need for many Google searches because you can get nuanced responses.
• Lockheed Martin and Boeing made insanely expensive rockets and satellites. SpaceX emerged and made them way cheaper and reusable. It has already launched more satellites than all other companies combined (which is also acting to disrupt traditional Internet Service Providers with Starlinq).

If a company doesn't do #2, someone else will and kill them over time.

Most companies focus on #1 for a simple reason:

They’re made up of individuals trying to accumulate short-term evidence of achievement to demonstrate an upward life trajectory. This means more money, promotions, and awards.

And avoid evidence of incompetency, such as demotions, firings, or failure.

A company is a collection of individuals.

Individuals within the company all focus on accumulating short-term evidence of achievement. And profit this quarter or this year is king.

Employees and executive staff are often compensated with annual bonuses. Companies don't retroactively take that money back if the company fails 10 years later.

To maximize profit (and bonuses), they focus on improving current products for current customers and charge more money. An example of this is the iPhone. The iPhone 4 cost $199 to $299. The iPhone 15 costs $899 to $1599. Consumers are happy paying that because the iPhone 15 is so much better.

However, many companies neglect to invest in long-term, risky bets that could make their products cheaper and more accessible (but often worse) or completely different (and often better).

Startups are initially less profit-focused.

For them, short-term achievement is gaining any market share at all. And hungry, young founders are often driven by longer-term big payouts rather than short-term marginal gains.

Startups also typically can’t compete with incumbents on the best. But they can compete on different.

Startups are run by ambitious founders. Massive corporations are run by committees.

If it ever happens, it’s unlikely Apple will ever choose to disrupt the iPhone. iPhone sales are 52% of Apple’s revenue. Disruption could kill the cash cow.  

It will most likely be a startup that does unless Apple can maintain a culture of pushing disruptive innovation, even if it hurts in the short term. But I think that's unlikely now that a committee runs Apple.

Quick takeaway, you need both:

1. Sustaining Innovation to sustain or increase profit and keep customers happy.
2. Disruptive Innovation to stay or get ahead, and wow new or existing customers.

I recommend three videos and one article to dive deeper into these concepts:

1. Clay Christensen's TEDx talk and Harvard Business Review interview, which inspired this newsletter.
2. George Hotz's take on Lex Fridman's podcast, where he discusses the difference between companies that are "alive" and can pivot (ex: Facebook pivoting to Meta) and innovate and companies that are "dead" and cannot (ex: Google being so focused on Search that it missed generative AI). Here's the timestamp.
3. Clay Christensen's theory narrowly focuses on innovative disruption in making things more accessible and undercutting the market. Ben Thompson's 2013 critique of the theory says that's more true in B2B than B2C. Above, I discuss undercutting (Toyota and SpaceX) and drastic technological shifts (Tesla, digital cameras, OpenAI) as the two major forms of innovative disruption.

Classic maxim: If you want to increase a behavior, make it easier and more fun.

But this tactic flies in the face of that. It’s about intentionally adding friction in the form of:

1. Additional steps (more pages or more things to click or fill out)
2. More information or reading (more text, less images)
3. More decisions to be made (annual vs monthly, Pro vs Premium)

Here are examples curated by Ali Abouelatta of how adding friction increased conversions:

Additional steps + reading – Headspace

Headspace increased conversions by adding an intermediary page before the paywall to prime people with “why” they should subscribe.

Additional steps + decisions – Duolingo

Duolingo found that removing the 14-day pre-selected option increased retention. The pre-selected option is a quick “yeah, whatever, next!”

Having to stop and make a conscious decision causes you to take the goal seriously.

More reading + more decisions

Peloton used to have a super smooth one-click button to start their trial. Then they replaced it with a dense page with a lot to read. And you had to decide between two tiers. I suspect this did better because it highlights all the cool things you’re gonna to get, and you feel more in control.

People enjoy control.

So don’t just try to remove steps. Strategically make the process a little harder to get people to feel more in control and bought in.

The only way you find the best version is by experimenting.

Ali has a few more examples of Positive Friction here. I also recommend going through Growth.Design’s visual case studies.

A common mistake service-based founders make:

“I currently charge people $$$$ for my expertise, and it’s a ton of work. I'll make a $49 course and sell it to a LOT of people. It’s scalable, and they’re getting a big discount.”

Sadly, in most cases, that does not work.

Here’s why: the Sales to Fulfillment Continuum (from $100 Offers by Alex Hormozi):

Let’s use an example to illustrate this.

You’re a busy founder. You know the importance of growing a personal audience. You see two people online that can help you with it:

1. For $10k/mo, Person A will 100% do it all for you: come up with ideas, write the content, engage, DM people, and set up meetings. All you have to do is answer questions upfront, meet new people, and sell them. They’ll start posting next week, guaranteeing you at least 10k followers and 10 leads/month in 6 months.
2. For $100, Person B has a 50-hour video course that teaches you everything you need to do it yourself. However, it will take you 10+ hours per week at minimum, and there are no guarantees it will work.

Unfortunately, option 1 would sell much more revenue than option 2 (and be a nightmare to fulfill as it scales). Sure, fewer founders could afford it, but it’s a way easier because:

• They’re experts, and they guarantee results (high perceived likelihood of success)
• More followers + leads (tangible dream outcome)
• You don’t have to do anything (no effort or sacrifice)
• Starts next week, and results guaranteed before summer ends (short time delay)

Whereas option 2 will take you hours to get through the content, there’s a low chance you’ll succeed (in fact, you haven’t finished most courses), and it’ll require a ton of effort and time away from your business and family.

According to the Value Equation, that makes Option 1 a lot higher value in your eyes:

It might be tempting to create a DIY product or course so you can stop doing service work, but it’ll be a hard sell.

Only those with large audiences or a ton of existing demand can pull it off. Here’s a way to do it instead:

1. Start with a “Done For You” option. Try to systematize and simplify things as much as possible and document how to do it.
2. Switch to “Done With You” 1:1 coaching. Give them your systems and help THEM do it. Iron the bugs out.
3. Then, offer DWY small group coaching.
4. Then, create a cohort course that many people can take at once, with less individual help from you.
5. Then, create a self-serve version (with accompanying tools/templates).

At each step, only move forward if you have proven demand and customers are seeing results. If not, keep tweaking it.

If your product misses just a single piece of fixing someone’s problem, they often won't buy.

Let’s use the process Alex Hormozi details in $100M Offers to generate product ideas.

This is a quick overview. Here’s a thorough example I made.

1. Map out everything users need to do to achieve their goals or solve their problems.

For example with losing weight: Buying healthy food, cooking healthy food, resisting unhealthy food, choosing a gym, getting to the gym, choosing exercises, exercising regularly, preventing injuries…

Be thorough, you don’t want to miss anything. You only need to do this once.

2. Map out the problems (either real or imaginary) for each of them. For example, buying healthy food:

1. “I don’t know what to buy”
2. “It’s gonna be expensive”
3. “I’m not gonna like it”
4. “My family won’t like it”
5. “It’s gonna take a lot of time”
6. “I travel too much, I won’t stick with it”

3. Think of solution statements for each problem

Ask yourself, “What would I need to show someone to solve this problem?” Then, reverse each problem into solution-oriented language.

1. “I don’t know what to buy”: How to make buying healthy food easy and enjoyable
2. “It’s gonna be expensive?: How to buy healthy food without increasing your grocery bill
3. “I’m not gonna like it”: How to cook delicious healthy food
4. “My family won’t like it”: How to cook healthy food your kids will love
5. “It’s gonna take a lot of time”: How to buy and cook healthy food quickly
6. “Travel too much…”: How to get healthy food while travelling 

4. Write down specific ideas on how to achieve that solution.

There are various ways to solve every problem. Different ways require different amounts of your time and effort and have a greater impact for customers. As you’re creating solutions, use this to help you think through different ways you could help:

For example, for “How to make buying healthy food easy and enjoyable”

• In-person grocery shopping tour + lesson
• Selfie-style tour of a grocery store (live or recorded)
• Personalized grocery list
• Full-service shopping
• In-person lesson (not at store)
• Text/phone support while shopping to help them if they get stuck

Be as creative as possible, even if it’s not something you want to do. The next step is to trim. Let ideas flow.

5. Trim and stack.

Go through the list of solutions and figure out the rough costs to service. Remove all the expensive and low-value ones. Then remove low cost, low value. Ultimately, you want to optimize for things that (as quoted from the book):

1. They financially value
2. Cause them to believe they’ll be likely to succeed
3. Make them feel like they can do it with much less effort and sacrifice
4. Help them accomplish their goal and see the result they want with far less time investment

Here's a thorough example using our audience-building course, UNIGNORABLE.

Newsletters are ephemeral.

Once they're sent out, reads trickle in only for a few days. People do not re-read old emails.

If you put your newsletter on your website, you get additional longevity from people promoting it, bookmarking it, stumbling upon it, or finding it via Google.

Or, if you're lucky, you'll earn some backlinks with steady referral traffic.

But for that, it needs to be a thorough guide (like our Growth Guide and my 10 Ways to Hook People) or reference material, like Lenny Rachitsky's benchmark articles:

Our newsletter isn't conducive to any of those. It's 3 separate tactics in one edition. As a result, they receive little organic traffic after they're sent out. 

How we're solving that problem: The Growth Vault

Instead of hiding our tactics across 163 newsletter pages, we've created a searchable and filterable database of 435 startup growth tactics (and counting).

Not only does this provide additional value to subscribers, but it's also something:

1. People can bookmark.
2. We can share on social media.
3. We can launch on Product Hunt.
4. That can earn organic backlinks.
5. That can generate even more subscribers.

If you generate content on an ongoing basis, find better and better ways to package it and let people consume it.

Check out the Growth Vault.

The different stages of startup growth and the common tactics within them (click for a high-res image):

You use the different components of the race car at different stages:

1. Get the race car moving with Kickstarts and maybe a few Turbo boosts. These are the “things that don’t scale.” Good for bursts of growth, but aren’t scalable.
2. Then, invest in getting the Growth engine running. These are the self-perpetuating engines where growth begets growth (ex: profitable ads → more budget to run ads). Another name for these is Growth Loops.
3. Once your Growth engine is running, invest in Lubricants to help it run more efficiently and the occasional Turbo boost to boost growth. And consider adding Fuel to do it faster.
4. Next, invest in Mid-stage accelerants to expand the reach of that Growth engine.
5. Before you max out your first Growth Engine, experiment with and kickstart another Growth engine while continuing to Lubricate your existing growth engine(s).
6. Once the various Growth engines are running, create additional products, expand to new segments (e.g., enterprise), and grow revenue with current customers.

Lenny has a monster article about all these concepts. Dive into it here to learn more.

Promos work thanks to urgency and scarcity. You give people a reason to act now.

But most promos cause people to just quietly use them. Few cause people to talk about them.

Wharton professor, Jonah Berger's research tells us how to make a promo that people tell others about:

Make it big

5% off = meh

50% off = whoa

Big discounts are more share-worthy because:

1. They’re more helpful than small ones. A 5% discount is barely helpful.
2. They’re remarkable. They’re surprising, impressive, and exciting.

Note: People judge a deal based on the original price. Don't just say 50% off as that requires them to do math. Don't make them do math. Always show the original price.

Limit availability

Urgency causes action. Scarcity causes desire. Ideas:

1. Limit time. Example: Deal last 37.5 hours.
   1. Specific, unrounded numbers are more believable and remarkable.
2. Limit total quantity. Example: Limited to the first 420 copies sold.
3. Limit quantity per customer. Grocery stores love this one. It makes it seem more valuable. And it’s a suggested quantity to buy, also know as “quantity anchoring.”
4. Limit quantity at different discount tiers. Start at 50% for first 100. 40% for next 100. And so on. Creates urgency and shows social proof from past sales.
5. Limit to "members only.” Example: Prime Days.

Note: If the promo isn't limited, it's interpreted as the regular price.

Apply the Rule of 100

$5 Product: $3 off seems like nothing. But 60% off seems like a lot.

$10,000 Product: 10% off seems minimal. But $1,000 off seems like a lot.

Rule of 100:

• Price < $100: use a % discount.
• Price > $100: use a $ discount.

Make it obvious and public

We mimic the behaviour of others. But most sellers don’t make the popularity of their promo obvious.

• Show a site notification every time someone purchases during the promo.
• Display how much people have already saved during the promo.
• Limit quantities and display how many are left.
• Automatically tweet for every sale.
• Encourage social sharing in exchange for a bonus gift after the purchase.

What job do you hire a milkshake to do?

Your customers “hire” products to do certain “jobs” for them.

Often, they’re not consciously aware of this.

The milkshake example is from a restaurant client of Clayton Christensen’s. To sell more milkshakes, the restaurant polled customers to see what attributes of the milkshake they liked best and what could be improved (chocolateiness, thickness, etc.).

They improved all of the most common answers. Nothing happened to overall sales.

Unsurprisingly, customers didn’t have insight into their purchase preferences.

Instead, the answer was much deeper.

So, Clayton’s team dove into WHO the customers are, WHEN they’re buying milkshakes, and WHY they’re buying them at that moment. Here’s what they found:

1. 50% of milkshakes sold before 8AM to solo customers who drove off in their cars.
2. After confronting customers in the parking lot to ask them WHY they were doing it, they eventually determined they used it for breakfast during a long commute.
3. The milkshake optimally achieved that because it fit in the car’s cupholder, required only one hand, was clean, and lasted throughout the commute.

So compared to most other breakfast items like bagels, muffins, fruit, cereal, a plate of eggs, and doughnuts, milkshakes (and likely smoothies) performed that job best.

Knowing what customers cared about made improving the product and marketing it easier.

Here’s Clayton’s famous talk about his so-called Jobs-to-be-Done Framework:

Examples of famous products’ non-obvious jobs:

• Rolex/Ferrari: Make me feel like I’ve succeeded and signal that to others.
• Doordash: I’m too exhausted to cook tonight or go out to eat; bring me food.
• Slack: Email crushes my soul. I want to feel like I’m texting with my team.
• Duolingo: I want to feel smart, but I want it to be fun and easy.
• Airbnb: I don’t want to feel like an annoying tourist. I want to feel like I live there.
• TikTok: I don’t want to do this thing I’m procrastinating on.

Remote OK is a remote-only job board with ~3M page views and 1.1M unique visitors per month. (Note, I know this because their analytics are completely public, which is a genius idea for a job board.)

Their purchase page is an upsell and CRO gold mine. Let’s dive into it:

Some key things to pull from this:

1. A ton of upsells. Massively increasing the LTV of each purchase. And they frame the upsells directly to the benefit you’ll get (and likely care about most). Bonus that a few of them are auto-applied so you have to click to remove them (and remove views), triggering loss aversion.
2. A ton of social proof. Testimonials. Big name companies. Lots of positive reviews.
3. A ton of objection handling. The number one concern job posters have is whether the job will get seen by a lot of people and get applicants. 

Creating a job post requires quite a bit of work for the poster. Lots of form fields that will take quite a bit to fill out. All of the elements above help to encourage people to put in the effort by proving to them it’s worth the effort.

Use this page for inspiration for your own checkout page.

The Pricing page is arguably the most important page on a SaaS site.

Everyone wants to know:

1. What this gonna cost me?
2. How much am I gonna get?
3. How do costs scale?
4. Is this a good deal?

Here’s Kyle Poyar’s (and our) advice on how to optimize it:

#1. Benefits > features. Do not just copy-paste the pricing table you used internally. Instead of “ZOOM, Slack, and Google integration” do “Connect existing ways of working to Miro with 100+ apps and Integrations like ZOOM, Slack, and Google Drive.” Here’s how we did it for Un-ignorable:

#2. Reinforce the key value props over and over again. People visit your pricing page quickly and are often barely familiar with what you sell. Hammer in your value props over and over in the pricing table. Treat it like a marketing page.

#3. Handle objections. Add testimonials, reviews, FAQs, and social proof (logos, # of users, etc), and handle the biggest objections your salespeople hear on calls with leads.

#4. Don’t use jargon or acronyms. No one knows what an MTU is. Don’t use internal terms. Instead, use terms that are commonly used by your customers. 

If you must have something potentially confusing, add a tooltip explanation.

#5. Leverage behavior psychology. 

• Anchor: Offer a higher tier to get buyers to trade up, or to cause them to perceive lower tiers as a deal. Hence the VIP plan above.
• Guide: Highlight the most popular plan to visually guide buyers to select it. Ex: “Recommended” or “Most popular.” Above we used the blue bar on the Core tier.
• Deal effect: Make certain tiers look like a bargain by playing with price points and features across tiers. For example, 2x the price gets you 5x of the “core thing.”

#6. Don’t overwhelm. Don’t have 10 pricing options; do 2-4. Don’t list 100 different features; do 3-10 of the top ones and bold key details. You can list all the features in a big matrix below the main table.

#7. Price annual plans based on lifetime value. As mentioned in Newsletter #141, instead of doing the standard “2 months free,” base the annual price on the average retention of a monthly user. If retention is 5 months, price it at 6 or 7 months. If retention is 20 months, then don’t offer annual plans (like Netflix).

Treat your pricing page/table like royalty. It’s one of the most important conversion elements.

Nomad List had 1,200,000 visitors from Google last year. The top 100 pages account for only 500,000 page views, with the 100th most visited page receiving 1,000 organic views.

That means they get 700,000 page views from Google across thousands of other pages with only tens to hundreds of annual views each.

First, some context: Nomad List is a crowdsourced database of cities for digital nomads. You can filter the cities by hundreds of categories: temperature now, region, cost, “least racist,” cost of living, and dozens of more categories.

As you apply filters the URL of the page changes. For example, cheap-places-near-a-beach-in-europe-with-fast-internet when I apply the filters of “<US$2K/mo”, “Europe,” “Near beach,” and “Fast internet.”

This is useful for two reasons:

1. It’s easy for someone to share the results with someone else.
2. Each one of these pages can rank in Google for long-tail keyword searches.

Take the keyword, “least racist places in United States” for example—whose page on Nomad List had 17,000 views last year, you can see Nomad List in the 3rd and 5th position:

Again, these are simply autogenerated pages created by combining two Nomad List filters: “Low in Racism” with either “United States” or “North America.” 

The “Low in Racism” + country/continent pages generated ~27,000 views from Google last year, over 2% of their search traffic. 10,000 for the filter “<$2kUSD/mo.”

As Harry from Marketing Examples said: “Aggregating all combinations of filters together, you're looking at several thousand indexed pages, hoovering up organic traffic from long tail keyword phrases:”

Takeaway: If you have a lot of filterable data that people search for, create auto-generated pages for every combination of filters and target the URL to the most desirable keywords.

Here’s a great metric for helping track the health of your SaaS business:

What this all means:

• New MRR: Monthly recurring revenue from new customers in that period (month, quarter, etc).
• Expansion MRR: Additional revenue from existing customers, such as upgrades, upsells, and cross-sells.
• Churned MRR: Lost recurring revenue from canceled subscriptions.
• Contraction MRR: Lost revenue from downgrades and refunds.

A high SaaS Quick Ratio indicates that your startup is growing revenue quickly and effectively managing churn. A low ratio suggests that churn is negating growth efforts.

Some benchmarks

• A ratio of 4 or higher is considered excellent, indicating strong, efficient growth, particularly if it can be sustained month over month.
• A ratio between 2 and 4 suggests healthy growth but with room for improvement in acquiring new customers or reducing churn.
• A ratio between 1 and 2 signals you might be at risk, with churn significantly impacting growth. It's a call to action to either accelerate customer acquisition strategies or find ways to reduce churn.
• Below 1 indicates that you’re losing MRR faster than it’s growing. Code red.

Of course, if you have some large enterprise accounts that churn, you may have months that look grim, but the idea is to keep the SaaS Quick Ratio above 2 (and ideally above 4) on average throughout the year.

It's a helpful metric for getting a quick pulse on growth vs churn.

For over 450 tactics to grow revenue and reduce churn, check the free Growth Vault, which includes every tactic we’ve shared in this newsletter.

Have you ever used a freemium product for years, and then suddenly decide to upgrade to premium?

Or you’ve heard of a product over and over again, and finally you decide to buy it?

Those moments are the most important to dive into as a founder or marketer. 

They’re called Trigger Events. An event or set of circumstances that trigger someone to be interested in or take action on purchasing a product.

People will often suffer through painful problems for a long time before they finally have a trigger event that pushes them to relieve it.

Momentum is powerful. You need an external jolt to change direction.

You want to dig into:

1. The common trigger events for your product.
2. The emotions customers feel at that moment.
3. The job the customers are hiring the product to perform.
4. How you might be able to target them and speak to them at that moment.
5. Whether they’re random, recurring, or caused by macro events. More on this below.

A few examples:

1. Seasonal: Signing up for courses or fitness memberships in January. People reflect on their year and decide to make changes. This caused our first cohort of UNIGNORABLE to sell out in 6 minutes.
2. Seasonal: In a 3 day period I had 4 people ask me if I skied. I felt ashamed to repeat that I never had despite living in Vancouver with 5 ski hills nearby. So I signed up for lessons on my phone that night.
   1. The trigger event was caused by it being the beginning of the season when everyone is excited about skiing. 
   2. The pain I experienced was being 30, not knowing how to ski, and having to tell people that. The trigger event made that pain more acute. The job of the lessons was to make me less ashamed. If I had waited a few weeks, fewer people would have been talking about skiing, and I would have found a new pain to focus on.
3. Random: A startup just raised money and is now looking to ramp up marketing and hiring. Or their in the process of raising money and need to show strong growth numbers.
4. Random: Someone decides to buy a Tesla because their neighbor did.  An example from Branding That Means Business: In a 2007 survey, Prius drivers said the main reason they bought their hybrid car was that it “makes a statement about me” and “shows the world that its owner cares.” But in reality… “one of the strongest predictors of whether someone buys a hybrid is whether the people in their same neighbourhood own one.”
   1. So much for caring about the environment 😂
5. Macro: A recession is starting and companies are laying people off and people are either looking for increased financial security and side hustles, or new jobs.

And you can do this by

1. Talking to customers. Surveys. 1:1 calls. Casual DM or comment thread convos. Just be wary, the reasons they give are not necessarily the true reasons. Dig deeper.
2. Observing customers. Reddit posts. Social posts. Quora questions. Look at both the original post and the comments.
3. Observing competitors: Does your competitor’s marketing change throughout the year? Has it changed recently? What do they say in their ads? You can use the Meta Ad Library and Archive.org to dive into the past.
   1. For this, a competitor doesn’t need to sell the same product. It needs to target the same audience.

Speak to someone’s pain and emotional state at the right moment, and you’ll have their attention.

“Our tool saves you 5 hours per week!”

– Nearly every SaaS tool

Software inherently saves people time. That’s why people make it. So focusing on it as a primary value prop isn’t interesting, nor does it help you stand out.

Instead, translate “saved time” into the valuable output the user now has time for thanks to your product. Let’s use Calendly and Zapier as examples:

Calendly helps people save time by reducing the back-and-forth of scheduling meetings. They could say “save 3 hours per week by removing calendar tetris.”

Instead, they focus on the value different personas get by the scheduling process being quick and painless. For salespeople that’s more revenue, faster sales cycles, and more deals closed.

Zapier lets folks easily connect apps without code. 

Saving time from manually coding integrations is the point of the product. Zapier does talk about time savings, but they emphasize what users can do with that extra time:

• Higher-value work: “Do what you do best, let Zapier do the rest.”

Rule of thumb

If saving time is the main benefit of your product, how do you build upon this benefit in a way that will land with users, buyers, and the CFO?

Does the time savings result in lower costs?

• Smaller full-time team needed to do same job
• Reduced need for freelancers, contractors, or consultants

Does that time savings result in higher revenue?

• Shorter sales cycles
• Increase conversion rates
• Increase lead flow
• Get to market faster

Does the saved time impact their life meaningfully?

• More time to spend with your family

There are 3 moments of truth for any product or service.

If you fail any of them, people will leave, possibly never come back, and talk negatively about your product. 

If you nail them, you’ll get the sale, keep the customer, and have them raving about you to their friends.

Let’s dive into ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT:

#1. Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

Picture this: It’s the first warm weekend of the year and you hang out on your friend’s amazing new patio set. Suddenly your patio sets feels inadequate.

That is a Trigger Event to make you interested in buying patio furniture. And you’ve entered the Zero Moment of Truth: the initial research phase.

You ask your friend how she likes her patio set, where she got it (Costco), and how much it cost. It kicks off an entire 30-minute conversation about patio furniture with everyone there. 

(Yep, you’re over 30 and fully domesticated.)

This moment is key. What your friends say here will define how you feel about the different brands and products. If someone says they don’t like something, or that they love something, it’ll shape how you view the products and it’ll take a lot to change your opinion.

Typical ZMOT moments:

• Asking friends what they use
• Reading articles for “best patio furniture”
• Going to Amazon, Wayfair, or Costco and browsing the results
• Going to Reddit or Quora to find what people recommend
• Researching what an influential person or company uses

Important aspects during ZMOT:

• Positive word of mouth. Happy customers are the best sales people.
• Presence on listicles about “best X”
• A strong search presence for important keywords
• Presence in Reddit or Quora posts on related topics
• Paying for Search Ads to show up during the product research phase

#2. First Moment of Truth (FMOT)

You’re back from the party, and yep, your patio set looks sad in comparison. You want to replace it.

You head to Costco to take a look at the patio set and you find it, sit on it, and read the box. You also look at the other patio sets they have there.

This is now the First Moment of Truth: when you encounter a product or brand on a store shelf (or website) and decide to buy or not.

This is where the product’s presentation, packaging, in-store/on-site marketing need to grab your attention and convey the desired message to convince you to buy it.

Note: Oftentimes you don’t even get the chance for the Zero Moment of Truth prior to this because a product is presented to you without you having time or ability to do research.

Typical FMOT moments:

• Seeing a product on store shelves or on Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Wayfair
• Visiting a product landing page
• Seeing a product ad or an influencer talking about a product
• Seeing a promo email about the product

Important aspects during FMOT:

• Distinct packaging or presentation that makes it stand out (Pringles vs Lays chips)
• The right marketing to convince you that the product will do the “job” you want it to do. (More on the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework)
  • Social proof, strong copy, imagery, objection handling 
• A price that seems fair based on the perceived value they’ll receive.
• Previous positive brand interactions or perceptions, for example, they heard great things about your product during the ZMOT.

#3. Second Moment of Truth (SMOT)

Your friends said great things (ZMOT), and you liked what you saw in store (FMOT). You buy the patio set and bring it home. You throw the box onto the patio and open it up to assemble.

You’ve now entered the Second Moment of Truth: when you experience the product for the first time after buying.

Positive experiences during the SMOT can lead to repeat purchases, brand loyalty, and word-of-mouth recommendations, while negative experiences can lead to returns, complaints, and negative reviews.

Typical SMOT moments:

• You open up the product at home after buying it in-store or online
• You open up the app after downloading it on the app store
• You start using the software after signing up for the free trial
• You open up the first lesson of the online course you bought
• You start working with a new agency and you kick off your first week of work

Important aspects during SMOT:

• The unboxing experience. Does it feel high quality or cheap?
  • Apple invests a ton of effort into their unboxing experience to make it feel premium.
• The “onboarding” of it 
  • Is it easy to use? Or is it hard to use (or put together)?
  • Is it intuitive? Or is it confusing?
  • Are there instructions to guide or help you? Or are you left to your own devices?
• The “feel” of it
  • Does it feel nice to use?
  • Is it delightful?
  • Does it feel worth the price you paid?
• The effectiveness of it
  • Does it immediately prove itself as being able to do the job you bought it to do? 

Of course it’s not always this clean

There are various other ways this could go down:

1. You see an ad (FMOT), you visit the site, then you start doing research by asking friends and checking Reddit (ZMOT). You don’t buy now but you do about a year later.
2. You’re given the product as a gift and jump straight to the SMOT.
3. You use a Macbook at work for 2 years, then lose it when you change jobs. You then start doing research to buy a new laptop to make sure a Macbook is still the right decision. You started with SMOT and eventually entered ZMOT.

The order does not matter, nor whether an individual consumer does all three. 

What matters is that these are critical moments to convert and retain happy customers. And they all need to be considered and worked on.

Nothing turns people off more than pitching something completely irrelevant to them.

To avoid that, you must be selective about who, what, and when you pitch. Bad examples:

• The instant pop-up modal on all pages pushing them to book a demo.
• A 5 email sequence to everyone on your list promoting an expensive product.

Here's one way to do it better: Infer by past behavior. If they've:

• Visited relevant product pages.
• Clicked on relevant links in your emails.
• Read relevant content.
• Or came from a specific website.

You can infer things about them and what they might be interested in. 

For example, when we promote new cohorts of Un-ignorable (next coming mid-April!) , we focus on people who have joined the waitlist, visited the landing page, clicked an email related to Un-ignorable, or read our LinkedIn Organic Playbook.

Not everyone wants to build a personal audience, and that's okay. We don’t need to keep bugging people who aren’t interested.

But here's a better way: Ask people directly.

A few weeks ago, I added a question before News & Links asking people whether they're a founder, freelancer, or have a full-time role. This then links to a survey page where we ask more questions. Their answers are automatically saved in our email tool.

(We hide the section if you've already answered the question.) 

People are also given this survey right after subscribing, both on the thank you page and in the welcome email.

Several thousand people have already filled it out. Now, we can customize our drip emails, promo emails, and page content to what they actually care about.

Takeaway: Gather data from users and personalize their experience. We use RightMessage.

~50% of emails are spam. And 75% of emails are opened via Gmail.

Google and Yahoo are rolling out stricter requirements from email senders to combat the never-ending wave of spam. 

Here's the 80/20 of what you need to know:

#1. It was originally targeted for Febuary 2024, but it has been delayed to June 2024.

#2. If you send > 5,000 emails to Gmail users in a day, you need to meet these 3 criteria:

• Add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication to your DNS records for your mail server. This is technical, check out this article for help.
• Have one-click unsubscribe buttons and process them within 2 business days.
  
• Maintain a spam rate of 0.1% or less. A "spam" happens when a user marks a message as spam. If you send an email to 5,000 people, 6 people marking it as spam is enough to upset Google. For reference, we get 1 to 3 out of ~90,000.

#3. Email deliverability is serious. Every sub that doesn't get your emails is a lost potential customer and revenue.

The average open rate for business emails is ~20%. Our newsletter hovers around 45-50% for 90,000+ subscribers because we take it very seriously.

Read "Give single opt-in a chance" from a previous newsletter for a breakdown of everything we do to keep our open rates high (beyond the technical stuff above).

Which would you choose:

1. Initiative A: Gives you 500 new users this week but nothing afterward.
2. Initiative B: Gives you 20 new users in week one, 22 in week 2, etc (growing 10% WoW) for every week going forward.

Initiative B will take 14 weeks to reach 500 new users.

But after 1 year, you’ll have 28,208 new users and grow by ~2600 per week. By the end of year 2, you have 4,035,039 new users (assuming a constant 10% growth rate).

This is the general principle behind compounding Growth Loops:

In short, the output of a marketing initiative feeds back into the input. Examples:

Another classic example is ads:

1. You spend money to run ads
2. You profitably acquire new customers
3. You use said profit to acquire more customers. If you need help running ads, we’ve built an ad agency specifically designed for startups.

In short, your primary marketing efforts should not be one-off tactics. Instead, they should be initiatives that can compound. Here are examples that do not compound:

• Launching on Product Hunt: You get an influx of users. You… can’t launch on Product Hunt again.
• Timed-limited Promos: You get a big influx of customers and revenue. You can’t just run another promo.
• Press coverage: You get featured in Forbes. You get a big spike in traffic. It disappears a couple of days later. You can’t be featured all the time.

The things that don’t scale can be great ways to launch or get initial users and attention. But what truly scales a company are compounding growth loops.

This image summarizes this tactic perfectly:

Whenever you write copy, whether it's for:

• An ad
• Your homepage
• A sales email
• A pitch deck

Always anticipate and address people's biggest objections.

Your offer and product should be bold and interesting. But people naturally think it's too good to be true. We’ve all been disappointed by false promises. 

Or they're going to misunderstand and misinterpret. If you don't handle their objections, they will likely come to the wrong conclusion, leave, and never return because they've already ruled you out.

Examples of big companies we all know:

Of course, to handle objections, you need to know what they are, so:

• Ask your sales team.
• Talk to your customers. What questions do they ask? What hesitations do they have?
• See what they talk and complain about on Reddit, Quora, and social posts.

Then, handle their biggest objections upfront.

To learn more about creating landing pages that convert, check out our Landing Page guide and our Above the Fold Playbook.

1. The best way to do outreach is to know the person personally. You know them and they know you.
2. The second best way is to know a lot about the person already. You can reference small details or commonalities.
3. The third best way is to do a lot of research into the person to find commonalities.
4. The fourth best is weak personalization from easy-to-grab details from Clearbit.

The way most do it? They buy a list and blast it with zero personalization or research. It's a numbers game with terrible conversion rates.

This is often the case with sales calls, too. The salesperson follows a script without personalizing anything to you or your business.

Here's a new way to research people using Arc browser's AI feature called "Browse for me:”

All I did was:

1. Download the Arc Search app
2. Type in "who is neal o'grady"
3. Then tap the "Browse for me" button

Within 3 seconds, it summarized my career, education, notable highlights, and links to learn more.

You can get Arc to perform any search for you, not just for people.

It's not perfect. And some of the details are out of date. But for 3 seconds, it's pretty good.

If you send an outreach message or hop on a sales call with someone, you'll have a much better chance if you understand who you're talking to first. It only takes a few minutes.

$1,400,000,000 is spent on Amazon every day.

They're one of the most heavily tested and optimized product page and checkout experiences.

First, let's analyze the smart stuff they do on a product page mobile view:

Quite a lot. And this doesn't even include one-tap checkout.

Here's an overview of the lesser-known things on there:

• Social proof: We value what others value. High, plentiful reviews. Amazon Choice. And 2k+ monthly purchases signal it's a desired, de-risked item.
• Small price in red: A price in a small font is interpreted as cheaper than a large font (the Numerical Stroop Effect). Red is also interpreted as cheaper, particularly by men.
• Requires effort: A small amount of effort towards something increases the likelihood of completion. Requiring a simple tap for the 20% off coupon likely increases conversion rates.
• Fitt's Law: In the image below, you'll see Amazon used to have the Sub/One-time toggle on the left-hand side. Fitt's Law dictates that large and close objects are interacted with more often. As most people are right-handed, putting important tappable elements on a mobile screen's right and bottom edges is key.

Note, for that reason, they may keep the Heart button on the left-hand side to discourage its use. They want people to buy now, not add it to their wishlist. But it's always nice to have the fallback action available.

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Talking about what you're not is as important as talking about what you are, especially if you're challenging the status quo.

BRLO is a challenger startup in the alcohol-free beer category. It can't compete with massive beer brands' multibillion-dollar media spend, so it knew it had to get creative.

People are growing tired of perfect yet wholly inauthentic portrayals of men, who have dominated beer advertisements for decades.

(This sentiment away from "perfect" towards "authentic" is everywhere.)

So, they positioned themselves to be the complete opposite:

An authentic, full-bodied, and juicy beer leaning into Berlin's alternative reputation.

Much like Liquid Death did to the water industry.

Yet, the cleverest part of this strategy?

They stole fame from one of the most famous, inauthentic ads of the moment by Calvin Klein and satirized it. Here's a snippet of the comparison:

They found their enemy and satirized them.

Check out Will Poskett's post for the entire video.

Fun fact: Will is an alumnus of our audience-building course, Un-ignorable ;0

We're a bootstrapped, lean company. We love other bootstrapped, lean companies.

This insight is a kick in the pants for startups looking to run profitable ads.

But it's also incredibly motivating.

Here are the biggest drivers of profitable ads (from analyzing up to 28,000 brands):‍

1. A huge brand – up to 20x multiple on ROI‍

Yep, that's not what any of us wanted to hear. Here's the data:

The bigger you are, the more effective your ads, thanks to existing awareness and affinity. Often, you're just reminding people to buy or that you are selling something new they should get.

Sadly, we can't control that one, but we can control this one:

2. Great creative – up to 12x multiple on ROI

Here, you can see the difference in performance across creative campaigns for two established brands:

And if you look at all the other ways that influence ad profitability, focusing on great creative is really the best way (since you can't control your brand size or budget):

The magic doesn't come from button pressing and knob twisting in an ads dashboard. It comes from great ads that are noticeable, memorable, and cause an emotional response that drives action.

It's 12:35AM, you've swiped your 420th TikTok/reel, and you know you should go to bed, but you can't stop. Often, it takes some external jolt to get you to stop finally.

You then think, "Ugh, I need to delete it from my phone.”

If your app is never-ending and potentially addictive (Duolingo, Tinder, games, social media)

1. First of all, congratulations, that's hard to achieve.
2. Add in graceful exit points. This keeps users from getting so burnt out that they stop returning and increases overall satisfaction with your product.

Surprisingly, TikTok actually already does this.

If you watch too long, they have a video that tells you to take a break. But it misses the mark for a few reasons:

1. It looks like all the other videos.
2. It's too easy to skip.
3. It doesn't use data against me.

Here's what Growth Design suggests instead:

Being told I've watched 293 videos would get me to put the phone down. And I'd be extremely appreciative that THEY took the initiative.

Duolingo could add one as well. After you hit your goal for the day, they currently dump you back into the lesson tree, where you see the weeks of effort ahead of you. You feel like you've barely progressed and are less satisfied with your efforts.

Instead, they should do this:

Give your users a graceful exit. They'll appreciate you for it.

Check out Growth Design's case studies for both TikTok and Duolingo.

Baby carrots now account for 80% of all carrot consumption.

(For those who don't know, baby carrots are simply a sweeter variety of carrots that are chopped up into shorter pieces and have rounded edges.)

What can be learned from the humble baby carrot:

#1. Create a new experience for an existing product

• A full-sized carrot: A vegetable you cook.
• A baby carrot: A healthy snack food—at home or on the go.

This shift allowed for 4 interesting benefits:

1. Convenience as a value prop. Making carrots "grab and go."
2. Reframe from vegetable to snack. Are carrots the healthiest vegetable? Unlikely. Are they healthier than a chocolate bar? Absolutely.
3. New usage occasions. Instead of just in soups, now carrots can go in veggies trays, kid's lunches, and in the backpack for a snack in the park.
4. New distribution opportunities. As a grab-and-go snack, it makes sense for them to be in gas stations—a place that will never have a vegetable aisle.

#2. Push into the new category, don't fight it

Instead of leaning into the health value prop (carrots good—junk food bad), they found that treating baby carrots as a part of the junk food category, rather than in opposition to it, led to 10% more sales.

People already know they're healthier than candy and chocolate.

People need to be convinced that they're delicious, addictive, and indulgent, and can satisfy their junk food craving.

Look closely at most successful creators and you'll notice something. For example, let's take a look at MrBeast's YouTube channel:

Just in his last 20 videos, you can see a few repeat formats:

1. $1 vs $XXXXXXXX [thing]
2. [something] vs [adjective] [something else]
3. I [verb] X [thing]
4. World's [superlative] [thing]
5. Somebody surviving something and winning money

You'll also notice his thumbnails have recurring elements. And the videos themselves follow a certain structural pattern.

There are a few great reasons to find repeatable formats:

1. If you like $1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel, you'll probably like $1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht. Which in itself is smart because:
   1. It's easy for the YouTube algorithm to know what to recommend next.
   2. It's easy for your audience to decide what they should watch next. It's de-risked that they're going to like it.
2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Hence, the 5,000 Marvel movies. Every piece of content is an investment. You de-risk the investment by repeating what worked in the past.
3. It's less effort. This newsletter has a repeat format: Intro → sponsors → 3 growth tactics → news → something fun → outro. I'm not reinventing the wheel each time. I know what a "growth tactic" looks like. I like to say it's more like "filling in the blanks."

Get creative and find your repeatable content formats. Then, you can be creative within those boundaries.

Note: This concept also applies to ads :). If you find something that works, keep experimenting with that idea.

Americans (mostly men) spent $26,000,000,000 for Valentine's Day last year, and only 52% was for their partner. The rest was for their family, friends, coworkers, and kids.

It's one of the biggest gift-giving days of the year and is a huge opportunity for DTC brands.

You should test some ads using copy and creative targeted to Valentine's Day. Here are some example ad openers using a few of our hook types: 

#1. Credibility: 12,166 boyfriends have already bought X for their partner.

• Leverages the social proof of how many have bought from you.
• It also triggers an "Oh damn, I'm behind.”
• Depending on the product, you can try variations other than boyfriend or partner.

#2. Fear: There's only 2 more days until Valentine's Day.

#3 Counter-Narrative: Valentine's Day is BS. But your love isn't. Treat your partner anyway.

• Gets attention with the opener.
• Calls out the growing sentiment that people think Valentine's Day is overly consumeristic or fake but reframes the day as a positive.

#4 Celebration + Curiosity: It's Jack and Jill's 25th anniversary! Here's what Jack got her for their special day.

• Ad creative could show a couple with Jill looking excitedly down at the gift she's getting, but you can't see what it is. Piques the curiosity. Here's a quirky AI example:

#5 Identity: Still looking for the perfect gift to show your love? 

• Speaks to the situation they're in using a Barnum-style question.

#6. Surprise: 48% of Valentine's Day gifts aren't for partners. Treat your mom for Valentine's

• Surprising fact gets their attention. 
• Make it seem socially normal to buy for someone other than a partner.
• It reminds them of a specific person they could buy for. 

#7. Value: 10 Valentine's Day gifts that will WOW her (him/them).

• The ad sends to a piece of content where your product is the first on the list. 

As always, get creative with your Valentine's Day experiments.

"This reminds me of that time I was in a witch’s coven in France."

7 years ago in Thailand, I learned the power of a strong hook from a quirky German man.

He had spent the past year backpacking around Asia when I met him. His most profound skill was finding the perfect one-liner to hook you into one of his travel stories.

One that makes you immediately stop and say: “Wait, what? Go on...”

His line about a French witch’s coven is a perfect example. The actual story is just of him and 3 ladies at a music festival in France deciding to call their group a “witch’s coven.”

There are infinite ways he could have introduced the story where I'd halfheartedly listen to another story about partying. But this opener got me extremely invested in the story.

A hook is the opening to anything you want people to pay attention to

Whether it’s a:

• Ad
• Social post
• YouTube video
• Cold email/DM
• Fundraising pitch
• Newsletter tactic 😜

Or even a quirky travel story including French witches.

People are gone if you don’t intrigue them immediately.

Because hooks are so important, I've compiled various free resources as I've grown my LinkedIn audience to 58,000 followers. Here they are:

1. The Hook Vault. We used Readwise's list of top Twitter thread creators and analyzed the top 4 hooks from the top 100 creators. We'll expand this as time goes on.
2. Un-ignorable Hooks Email Course. After analyzing hundreds of hooks, patterns emerged. In this course, I teach the 11 fundamental ways to hook someone.
3. Breakdown of the top 26 hooks on Twitter. Each hook is color-coded to show the smart thing each creator did to hook you.
4. An analysis of the top 20 female creator's hook. Due to the total lack of gender diversity of the top 100 creators, I created one for the top 20 women.
5. An analysis of 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image too.

We've taught 1596 founders how to build their personal audience. The lesson on hooks is a favorite of every cohort. All of the lesson contents (and more) are in the resources above!

Most company's "strategies" are either purely:

Mark (aka Strategy Friend) defines a strategy as "an informed opinion about how to win." 

Your strategy is supposed to tell you exactly what your team needs to do in grow. Yet, according to Mark, most strategies look like this:

They're missing the key insight to the real cause of the problem and a strategy to help solve the problem. Instead, they just jump straight into tactics with no clear vision.

"Tactics are simply the activities that make a strategy happen."

Here are two examples of what a good strategy looks like:

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You may know the Ladder of Product Awareness, where you tailor the message to where the person is at in the buying journey based on whether they:

• Experience the problem
• Want to solve the problem
• Are aware that solutions exist (products)
• Know which solution is best

The Stages of Market Sophistication are instead based on the maturity of the market that your product exists in, which is a factor of:

• Awareness of your product/category—is it a fork or a Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle?
• Number of existing competitors.
• Sophistication of existing competitors.

Here are the 5 stages:

In summary:

1. "The Only:" Explain what you are and why that's good.
2. "The Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 1.
3. "How It Works:" Focus on HOW your product achieves the benefits.
4. "The Even Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 3.
5. "Who It's For:" Focus on how the product aligns with their identity and lifestyle.

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!