1. Ads get attention and pique interest.
2. Landing pages convert interest into intention.
3. Emails convert people over time when they're ready.

Remember: It’s rare to see something for the first time and buy it immediately.

Use these steps to write email sequences that sell for you and make your acquisition efforts more profitable.

We need folks to open, engage, read, and take action. Let’s dive in:

1. Get people to open

Only three things dictate whether someone opens an email in their inbox:

1. Your reputation (the “from”)
2. The subject line
3. The pre-header (shown in most email tools)

Here’s what those look like:

A reputation is earned slowly. The subject line and pre-header are more immediately controllable. They need to hook people to get them to open.

Three triggers that cause people to click:

1. Self-interest: Offer email subscribers something that's going to help them.
   1. Example from Spotify: “Playlists made just for you”—save them time and effort.
2. Emotional interest: Spark positive emotion.
   1. Example from Typeform: “You're invited to the premiere”—make them feel special.
3. Relational interest: Get them to like you, trust you, and want to hear what you have to say.
   1. Example from Allbirds: “Leave a lighter footprint”—build connections to the brand and mission.

Write subjects and pre-headers that spark one of these three interests, and they’re more likely to open.

There are many more ways to hook. Subscribe to our free email course on Unignorable Hooks.

2. Get people to read it

Email copy needs to check these boxes:

• Aggressively concise. Don’t waste time with fluff.
• Not clickbait. Fulfill the expectations you set in your subject line.
• Keeps hooking them. Your subject line gets them to open, your opener gets them to keep reading. Continue to build interest and keep them engaged.
• Make the email valuable itself, but promise even more value that’s only delivered when subscribers click your CTA.

Help your readers. And do it succinctly. ‍Frameworks like PAS and AIDA can help:

3. Design it for engagement

Words aren’t everything. Once people open your email, they reflexively decide if they’re going to read it, skim it, or bounce based on their first impression.

Here are a few tips for designing attractive, engaging emails:

1. Make it easy to read and skim. Use a standard, large-ish font (12px to 16px).
2. Design for mobile, then adapt that design to desktop. Most people will read your email on mobile.
3. Hi-fi or lo-fi. If you’re going hi-fi, make it look great and on brand. If lo-fi, make it look like a regular old email sent by a person. Either can work well.

A job well done from Starbucks:

It’s simple, attractive, and easy to read on mobile.

4‍. Get people to take action

Why are you sending this email? 

Optimize the email to achieve that goal. If your goal is:

• To increase webinar signups, a possible CTA would be “book your spot” (which we think is a bit more motivating than the standard “register now”).
• To get feedback, your CTA might be “take the 1-minute survey and get 20% off.” Adding a time frame clarifies the commitment level.
• To drive sales, your CTA might be “Get 20% off today only.”

These examples are specific and directly relevant to the page at the other end of the click. We call these calls to value. Instead of generic prompts, they provide clear value to the reader.

Here’s an example of steps 2, 3, and 4 done right:

Why Cameo’s email works: 

• It’s personal—timed just before the recipient’s birthday. 
• The paragraphs are short and conversational. They use vivid language that paints a picture: You can have socks, or you can celebrate with a celebrity. That’s an appealing either/or. 
• The CTA “Celebrate…” is a clear, specific next step to getting value that leaves you curiously wondering: “which celebs?”

5. Measure, then improve

Don’t just create once and call it done. Monitor performance, figure out what needs improvement, and keep experimenting.

Pay close attention to click-through rate (what percentage of folks are clicking your CTAs) and, if your goal is a sale, revenue per email/subscriber.

We cover the most important email KPIs and how to use them in an article here.

There you have it!

Email funnels are the perfect supplement to a strong ad and organic strategy. 

Use this process to write good emails and place them in your sequences to convert more of your traffic.

A meh post with a strong hook will significantly outperform a strong post with a meh hook.

It’s just a fact of human nature.

We ignore everything that does not appear to satisfy our needs.

We’re constantly assessing each new stimulus (of which there are a near infinite amount these days) to quickly determine if it will fulfill our needs or not.

In developed societies, our needs have become primarily psychological (feel good) rather than physiological (get food).

We want to feel:

• Inspired and in awe
• Superior (the feeling around being outraged at some bonehead’s behavior)
• Like we’ve “learned” something
• Useful
• Entertained while we procrastinate doing work

We make snap judgments. Once that judgment is set, it becomes the anchor.

If you start weak, you have to work hard to get yourself out of the hole.

If you start strong, you have more leeway.

Success and failure compound

Every time someone fails to make it past your content's hook, they're less likely to get past it in the future.

Your reputation will precede you.

Some creators (like Huberman) write huge walls of text. He gets away with it because he’s built a reputation that what he posts is worth reading. To develop that, you must create things that people want to read consistently.

Here are the 10 hook types that get someone to consume your content:

Just remember, this applies to more than just social posts. It applies to ads, posts, sales emails, articles, podcasts, newsletters, and pitch decks

They all need to hook someone in or risk losing them.

Let’s dive into each of the hook types now.

#1. Establish credibility.

Tell them WHY they should trust you.

1. Your own accomplishments: “I sold my last company for $600M.”
2. Your own efforts: “I spent 100+ hours analyzing the top hooks on LinkedIn.” – Naim Ahmed
3. Someone else’s: “The 12 smartest things ever said by Simon Sinek.” – Eric Partaker

#2. Pique curiosity.

Open a loop they want to close with a question:

Or the start of a story:

#3. Celebrate wins.

People like to celebrate, and it gives them an obvious thing to comment.

1. “Today is my 35th birthday.”
2. “I just hit 250,000 newsletter subscribers.” ← combo of credibility
3. “I just sold my company for $10B.” ← combo of credibility

#4. Embody the counter-narrative:

Challenge a commonly held belief.

1. “People do not have short attention spans.” – Julian Shapiro
2. “Everyone is wrong about the metaverse.” – Shaan Puri

5. Surprise them.

Surprising facts often go viral as they grab your attention, make you feel something, and make you want to share it.

1. “75M baby boomers will retire by 2030.” – Codie Sanchez
2. “The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 46.”

#6. Promise value

Tell them what they’re going to gain from reading and why that’s important.

It can be as simple as these:

#7. Speak to their identity:

Call out exactly who it’s for and why they should care.

1. Use a Barnum-style statement/question:

1. Label them directly: “A rare find for my fellow movie nerds.” – Julian Shapiro

#8. Scare them a little:

1. Fear of Missing Out: “If you’re not mastering AI, it will master you.”  – too many people
2. Fear of Being Outdone: “I run a $400k/yr business with 0 employees” – Katelyn Bourgoin
3. Fear of Doing it Wrong: “Most companies suck at onboarding new team members.” – Wes Kao
4. Fear Itself: “LinkedIn can ban your account. YouTube can delete your account…” – Jake Ward

#9. Speak eloquently:

Label a feeling they’ve had but haven’t know how to articulate. You want them to say either:

1. “Finally, someone said it!”

1. “That’s so damn true.” **

1. “I never thought about it that way.”
   1. “Your number one job as a parent is to provide unconditional love to your kids, because it’s the one thing that they can’t get anywhere else.” – Naval

#10. Show your face

We’re hard-wired to look at and respond to someone’s face. We look where they’re looking and assign more value to it. We mirror the emotion displayed on the face.

This can be done tastefully (just showing your face), or it can be done less tastefully like you might see on YouTube:

Combine them for max benefit

Treat these as the fundamental building blocks. They hit the core emotions, but you will often hit one or more of these with an opener.

For example:

And that's all folks. If you wanna dive deeper, I go deeper in my article.

Otherwise, here are a few resources I’ve created to help:

• The 10 types of posts and how to use them. Use these to systematize your content creation process.
• 10 Copywriting Tips. 80/20 tips to improve copywriting.
• 7 Copywriting Frameworks (with cheatsheet). So you don’t have to start from scratch; these frameworks make “fill in the blanks.”
• Breakdown of the top 30 hooks on LinkedIn. Each hook is color-coded to show the smart thing each creator did to hook you.
• Breakdown of the top 26 hooks on Twitter.
• 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.
• 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image, too.

There's one week left to enroll in our last and best cohort of UNIGNORABLE, where we dive deep into how to grow an audience—of which hooks are a small but crucial part of it. Enroll now.

There are only so many fundamental ways to grow a company. And not all ways work for all businesses. 

Place your product on this chart to get a general idea of what will likely work:

Large bubbles = more money spent. But it generally also means that it works at scale for many companies. Smaller bubbles mean it either has a smaller impact, works less often, or people don’t give it enough credit.

Here's the data used for this chart.

If you haven’t seen the Racecar Growth Framework, it breaks down the “growth engines” and the “boosts/accelerants” that drive true growth,  and recommends the order of operations.

Let’s dive into the 4 quadrants (and edge cases):

• Top-left – Random people would want it + they’re looking for it:
  • Very broadly appealing stuff people actively search out when needed, like kitchen scissors, a plunger, a marketing agency, or a software tool. Usually, that’s done by searching on Amazon or Google.
  • You can’t control who searches for what on Google, so the broader the user, the better.
• Top-right – Specific people + looking for it
  • You can control which trade shows you go to. And people typically go to them to find things to use/buy.
  • You can also do your best to get onto review sites by contacting the creator or incentivizing past customers to post reviews.
• Bottom-left – Random people + not looking for it
  • Very broad things people don’t really need or are likely already using, like kids' toys, Tide, Dove, Colgate, etc.
  • And dumb new products people didn’t know existed in infomercials like the Slap-Chop, Shamwow, and dumb fitness doo-dad.
• Bottom-right – Specific people + not looking for it
  • If they’re not looking for it, you must go to them. You create lists of people that might be interested and contact them via email or mail.
  • Or you use LinkedIn’s great but expensive targeting.
  • To be honest, you can use social ads to do pretty specific targeting by uploading your lists of prospects to the ad channels.
  • One acquisition channel missing here is communities. Whether they’re on Facebook, Circle, Skool, Slack, Mighty, Meetup, or Twitter/X.

Things that fall in the middle generally mean that “it depends.” 

For example:

• Reddit: Sure, it has a very broad user base, but the people in subreddits often have niche interests so it could be a viable way to find your audience.
• Facebook: Posting organically is broad. Groups are similar to subreddits, you can find or create niche ones. And for ads, you can get pretty niche if you do clever things like uploading custom audiences of people you’ve prospected.
• Social Channels: All the social channels are broader if you post organically and can be a lot more niche if you run ads.
• Affiliate: This depends because affiliates can have very niche audiences.
• Magazines: Some are industry-specific, but newspapers, not so much.

Find where your product/audience fits on this chart, and focus your efforts on the proven channels. Check out:

• Our Growth Vault for tactics for each of these,
• Our guides on making/running ads and content marketing.
• And the Racecar Growth Framework for more granular recommendations:

Even if someone uses your product a lot, they'll start to take it for granted. They'll forget what life was like without it.

Reminding them of that value helps make them value you.

Instacart, the grocery delivery app, does this for time and money.

They continuously remind you of the amount you’re saving due to being a premium user (free delivery and reduction in fees), as well as the time you’ve saved so far.

And to celebrate submitting an order, they show you how many hours you’ve saved and how many orders you’ve completed since you’ve started using Instacart:

This is clever because it makes me:

1. Feel like my $100 per year Premium subscription is justified
2. Appreciate how useful Instacart has been
3. Realize just how many times I’ve used it. They use your past behavior as proof.

A few more rapid-fire examples

Opal tells you how much you’ve reduced screen time

Imperfect Foods tells you the impact you’re making

“Groceries that help you fight food waste.”

So it makes sense to highlight the impact:

Toothpaste and mouthwash famously does this

Does mint make your mouth cleaner? No.

Does mint make your mouth feel cleaner? It sure does.

Just like manufacturers add palm oil to shampoo to make it foamier. Because foam is a cue that shampoo and soap is working, even if it doesn’t do anything.

Lastly, Wealthsimple reminds you how much interest you’re earning on your money:

Some quick tips

• Remind people of your value as they use it and asynchronously with emails, push notifications, and texts. Keep doing it for as long as they're a customer.
• Only focus on what they likely care about most:
  • Time
  • Money
  • Impact
  • Efficacy
• Remind people of the:
  • Immediate value: what you’re getting now
  • Historical value: what you’ve gotten so far
  • Future value: what you’ll get if you keep doing it for life
• Make the impact seem larger by increasing the time scale.
  • You’ve saved 300 hours since downloading the app.
  • You’ll look at your phone 11 years less in your lifetime.
• If your product does things in the background (like Wealthfront’s tax loss harvesting), send push notifications indicating it’s working hard for them.
• Look for ways to make your product feel like it’s working. That could be both from clever psychological tricks (mint in toothpaste) or by leveraging the labor illusion (showing the effort you’re putting in).

Remind them how you’re helping them, and your customers will value you more and for longer.

Buyer journeys aren’t nearly as clean as we like to imagine. Most people won’t see your ad → visit your landing page → buy immediately.

It’s more likely to go like this:

1. They see your ad while doom-scrolling Instagram. They click.
2. Something distracts them away from their phone.
3. They remember later in the evening (or 3 weeks later) thanks to a Trigger Event.
4. They google your company name.
5. They visit your homepage—not the conversion-focused landing page you intended them to hit.

(At least, that’s how I tend to buy things online.)

Is your homepage optimized for conversion? If not, you may be leaving growth on the table. 

Yes, your homepage has many jobs (too many). One is to orient people to your brand and everything you do. But don’t forget that high-intent visitors often visit your homepage late in the funnel.

Design it with conversion in mind.

Here are some quick ways to make sure your homepage converts:

1. Start by nailing the above-the-fold

Your above-the-fold (ATF) is the portion of your website that’s immediately visible to visitors—your hero header, subheaders, imagery, and calls to action.

Header and subheaders: Keep your copy short. Concisely convey what your product is and why they should care. Visitors shouldn’t have to scroll to understand what you offer and how they’ll get value from you.

Imagery: Static images, slides, video—whatever you choose, keep your products at the forefront. Photos with people are optional, but they have a proven track record of increasing conversion.

Call to action (CTA): Your ATF is the most important part of your most important page, and your CTA here might be the most important part of your entire site. This is what drives action. CTAs for ecommerce tend to be “shop now.” For services, “get started” and “try now” work well. Make sure your CTA is high-contrast and unignorable.

Here’s an example of an above-the-fold done well.

• Concise, punchy header and subheader explaining what Mosaic is and why you should care.
• Attractive visuals of the product
• Clear, high-contrast call to action (although they should depart from their monochrome design and make the CTA a contrasting color to make it pop).

We wrote an entire playbook on ATF alone. When you’re ready to create your ATF, you can follow our step-by-step process.

2. Handle objections in your below-the-fold.

Below the fold, you briefly address any objections visitors might have.

Some elements you might include here:

Social proof: Share reviews, press, user-generated content, testimonials, and endorsements, ratings, customer logos, and customer stats.

• Include social proof near your CTAs to handle their objections at the key moment where they’re deciding to click or not. Trust leads to action.
• There’s basically no such thing as too much social proof. 

Product features: Highlight unique product features that address common concerns.

• Worried about quality? Here’s why we’re the best you can get.
• Worried it’ll take too long? We’ll have you onboarded in 5 minutes or less.
• Worried about not liking the product? If you don’t like it we’ll give you a full refund.

FAQ: Take it a step further and add an FAQ section.

• Start with the most common or highest-friction questions.
• Assume they didn’t read the whole page and repeat all the key points.

Bestsellers: If you have several products, highlight your flagship and most popular items. Or highlight a “starter pack” or samples.

Footer: Include pages in the footer that you want to give visitors access to but aren’t critical to the conversion journey, like your exchanges and returns policy.

I like how MUD\WTR uses their FAQ section to address common questions (objections):

Include CTAs throughout your homepage so visitors don’t have to scroll back to the ATF to take the next step in their buyer journey: the product, pricing, or sign-up pages. CTAs in a sticky nav work well, too.

3. Run an A/B test. 

But wait, it’s easy to make changes and assume they’re better. Time to test that:

Filter for people who have already visited your ad landing pages—these are the warm visitors we’re experimenting with. Send half to your current homepage and the other half to your new, conversion-focused homepage. See which performs better.

Put a little love into your homepage, you might see a big bump in conversion.

Dive into our Above the Fold playbook and Landing Page guide.

The highest ROI campaigns will always be to warm audiences. Whether they’ve:

• Visited your homepage
• Visited key parts of your site (FAQ, return policy, pricing, checkout)
• Purchased previously
• Filled out a lead magnet
• Jumped on a sales call

Cold audiences need a ton of convincing.

Warm audiences sometimes just need to be reminded that you exist. Or you need to overcome whatever unresolved objection they may have.

Here are some lesser-known remarketing strategies to boost sales & reduce churn.

1. Retarget high-performing audiences on cheaper channels

Use top-tier channels and targeting to find quality people, then use cheaper/lower-quality channels to remarket to them. For example:

1. Ensure all your ad sets and ads have unique UTM tags.
2. Find your top Google Ads keywords or Facebook/LinkedIn audiences.
   1. LinkedIn is very expensive but has great targeting.
3. Create custom audiences on Twitter or Display Ads targeting people who visited with those unique UTM tags where people’s attention is cheaper.

Find them where it’s expensive, focus where it’s cheaper.

2. Cross-sell, up-sell, and re-engage inactive customers

After a sale most companies just rely on email to do all the engagement and closing. But, the average open rate on emails is 30~40%.

And a lot of people just open and archive without reading. Instead, use remarketing:

1. Identify cohorts of people who are:
   1. Not reading or engaging with your emails.
   2. Less likely to repurchase or more likely to churn (haven’t been actively using the product)
2. Run retargeting ads to these segments on social platforms (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to re-engage them.

Here’s how Amazon does it:

3. Remarket for months to come

A lot of folks focus on remarketing within the first few days. Abandoned cart emails or ads after the first day or two. After a couple of week or so, they kinda give up.

Remember: Someone will rarely hit your site and be ready to buy at that moment.

Usually, it’s not “no”. It’s “not yet.” For example:

• For shoes, maybe they don’t need a new pair right now, but they might next spring/summer.
• For B2B services or tools, maybe it’ll take the company months to figure out if they actually need you or if the time is right.

It’s still a decent idea to use a higher budget the sooner the interaction because they are hotter. But try remarketing to people months later.

As a rule of thumb, you should get more salesy the longer it’s been. Don’t overwhelm someone while they’re deciding; it might turn them off. But if you wait 6 months and they’ve forgotten details, hit them with a more direct pitch.

4. Don’t just optimize for purchases

Ad platforms can tell when someone is close to purchasing and charge more for their eyeballs or clicks if your ad campaigns are optimized for sales. Instead:

1. Identify or create pieces of content that lead to leads/sales.
2. Make sure there’s a strong CTA embedded into the content.
3. Send people to that content and optimize your ads for “engagement”:
   1. 50% scroll depth
   2. 20+ seconds on the page (or longer)

This may lead to more conversions at a lower price. Example:

5. Get creative for sniffing for intent

Focus on more than just the obvious pricing pages, product pages, checkouts, and free trial events. Here are other ideas:

• Return policy page
• Clicked on 3+ FAQ items
• Clicked on numerous product photos
• Spent X time on the pricing page & scrolled through the different comparisons
• Used search or filtered
• Clicked to numerous pages on the site

Get creative with sniffing for intent and combine it with:

6. Be specific

Specific will always outperform general. Customize ads and emails to match users' confirmed interests and interactions. For example:

• If they visited a specific product page, hit them with an ad or email featuring that specific product.
• If they talked to a specific sales rep, include them in an ad for familiarity.
• If they spent a bunch of time on the pricing page, they might need help figuring out which plan is right for them.
• If they visited the return policy, maybe they're worried they won't like it

Example: Chaiirish used a product the user visited and added some urgency:

Remember:

• Warm > cold
• Specific > general
• Creative > same-old

If you want some ad inspiration, check out our Ad Vault. And if you want to dive deeper into ad tactics, check out the 461 tactics in our Growth Vault.

Here’s an example of my hatred:

As I said, it’s super common on ecommerce product pages, but I also see them on SaaS/service landing pages like this:

The thinking behind horizontal tabs is reasonable:

• We don’t want to overwhelm people.
• It’s vertically compact, so it doesn’t require loads of scrolling.
• For product pages, this allows all the info to be above the fold.
• Only people who care to see the info will click it.

But there are a few problems.

Let’s dive into each:

1. 1 in 4 users never find the info hidden in them

27% of users in a study of Sephora’s old product page never even discovered the content in the unopened horizontal tabs. 

For REI’s old site, it was a staggering 43% never noticed the horizontal tabs:

Look at what’s contained in those tabs; Specs, Reviews, Shipping & Returns info, and Ingredients—all key pieces of info people use to make purchasing decisions.

18% of Sephora's users and 21% of Crutchfield's users never saw the tabs despite trying to find the information they contained.

That’s 1 in 5 users desperately trying to make an informed buying decision that will likely turn to a competitor.

2. They have an unclear ROI

When you see something listed in a horizontal tab, you don’t know what it contains or whether it’s worth it to click to see it.

Numerous users in the study were disappointed when they clicked the Reviews tab to find that it was completely empty. Or a Specs tab with three dinky bullet points.

Once they fail you once, you’re less likely to keep exploring.

3. They limit your ability to stumble upon info

As Baymard says it:

When content is hidden in “Horizontal Tabs” layouts it’s very difficult for users to “stumble” onto content that could end up being extremely valuable to their purchasing decision — for example, a fuller description of the materials used, or a discussion of production ethics (both of which were observed to be happy “accidental discoveries” some users had when exploring product pages).

Users have to actively choose to see the title of a tab and click it. So it better be clear and enticing

4. They can be confusing to navigate

Tabs like Reviews, Shipping, Specs, and Materials are really clear what they care.

Tabs like the ones below, however, are not immediately obvious what’s contained within them:

For example, where do you go if you want product dimensions? Maybe Details?

Well, they’re actually just in Overview.

5. The title is everything

As you can see, the title of the tab is really doing a ton of the work.

And due to design considerations, you often need to summarize it with a single word, which may not be enough to accurately convey what’s inside.

For example, “Details.” Details about what exactly?

6. It pigeon holes you to the horizontal tabs

Okay, you realize that maybe the horizontal tabs aren’t great for a lot of things.

So you decide to put some some info in the tabs, but other, more important information in separate sections below the fold.

Well this actually performs very poorly. This causes confusion because:

1. Some people won’t find the horizontal tab info.
2. Those that do might assume that all info is in there.
3. Many will be confused due to the complexity of info being in different places.

These little confusions end up mattering a lot when you’re talking about thousands to millions of people navigating a page.

Alternate formats

There are two major formats to use instead:

#1. Vertically collapsed sections

This has become increasingly common on modern sites.

For example, this is what Sephora does today:

Here’s why it’s better:

• It’s far easier to find everything.
• They can auto-expand the critical sections and auto-collapse the rest.
• This decreases the importance of enticing titles.
• Each section can be designed to present the information best.
• There are no limitations on the number of words used in the titles.

#2. Long page, sticky TOC

Present all the info in separate vertical sections, with no collapsing.

Have a sticky nav that lets people bounce between them.

This has nearly the same benefits as above. The primary consideration is whether you want anything to be auto-collapsed or not.

Takeaway

Designers often create something because it:

• Looks good
• Feels efficient

In reality, it confuses and obfuscates essential information.

Confused people don’t convert.

So, the next time you design a page on your site or an app, prioritize usability and clarity above all else.

Calm makes $7.7M per month and has 150M+ downloads for their meditation app.

~50% of Calm’s social traffic comes on autopilot from handfuls of YouTube videos, getting thousands of views per hour on videos that are upwards of 7 years old.

You might suspect they’re all related to meditation, but they’re not. They’re almost all related to sleep:

Calm realized that their biggest usage time was between 9PM and 11PM.

Clearly, people used their app to help calm their minds and go to sleep. So targeting people who are pulling up videos to help them sleep is a high-intent audience that would be interested in their product.

It turns out related keywords have a ton of search volume on Google and YouTube:

So they created videos related to sleep: bedtime stories, rain noises, white noise, ocean sounds, and deep sleep meditations.

And then they subtly funnel viewers to their app:

There’s no other pitch besides the Calm logo as a watermark during the videos.

The beauty of this is that someone will likely pull up the same video every night and see Calm’s logo and CTA every time.

This is not only a great example of using data to find the next growth opportunity, but it’s also a great example of the law of conservation of attractive profits.

Law of conservation of attractive profits

“In the face of technological disruption, profit opportunities shift from the main product to specialized, hard-to-replicate components or services.”

This law was created by Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen.

Chris Dixon (a16z) summarizes it with an analogy in his book Read Write Own:

“Commoditizing a layer in a tech stack is like squeezing a balloon. The volume of air stays constant but shifts to other areas. The same is true for profits in a tech stack (roughly). The overall profits are conserved but shift from layer to layer.”

For example, Google started as a Search engine and now makes over $50B per year. To maintain their profits from Search, they’ve tried to own more of the stack required to access it: browser (Chrome), device (Google Pixel), operating system (Android and Chromebook), and telecommunication network (Google Fi).

Even still, they pay Apple $12B per year to be the default search engine on Apple devices to maintain their dominance—that price would be much higher if Android didn’t emerge as a massive contender to Apple’s smartphone dominance.

Takeaway: You can steal away land from your competitor by offering what they sell for free. As Bezos said: "Your margin is my opportunity."

Similarly, IBM invests in open-source operating systems (Linux) not to “give back.”

They just don't want to share profits with corporations like Microsoft. Meta is investing in open-source large language models (LLMs), so it doesn’t need to pay to use OpenAIs.

Now, Google’s strategy is to create free and just as powerful versions of ChatGPT. So far, they are not winning that battle.

Calm has done something similar to a smaller degree.

Most people post videos on YouTube to generate ad revenue.

Calm has created a mobile app that generates $8M per month. They don’t need to monetize YouTube videos for sleep, meditation, and relaxation sounds.

Instead, they want it to have as much reach as possible and build as much affinity as possible so they can convert more people to their app.

So, Calm can have the best sleep sound video with zero ads. That matters to people. This is the most popular ad from Calm’s most popular video:

HubSpot can pump out insane amounts of free marketing content because they don’t need to make money from selling education. They make all of their money from their CRM.

Alex Hormozi doesn’t need to charge you for his book or courses because he’ll make way more money by being able to buy into your business for a low valuation because of the affinity he’s built. This gives him a big edge against other creators who have to charge or add sponsors.

Takeaway question: What are people paying competitors for that you can offer to them for free?

For deeper dives into Calm’s YouTube strategy, check out Strategy Breakdowns and Foundation.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare’s famous line from Romeo & Juliet is wrong.

First, our perception is very sensitive. The color and shape of a spoon can make something taste sweeter. The sound of a deep fryer can make food taste crunchier.

So, if a rose were named “trash,” it might not smell quite as nice.

This is called the labeling effect.

Second, the popularity of roses might not have taken off if the word didn’t sound as lovely as it does. Products named with softer sounds are often seen as more luxurious (think Chanel or Moet) compared to products with harsher names, which might come across as lower quality or even unpleasant.

Think how many people are named Rose versus the harsher words Geranium or Orchid. Could that not have something to do with the popularity of roses?

All that is to say, the name of your startup or product is very important.

Metrics to optimize when choosing a name:

1. People’s perceptions. As discussed above, the name should evoke the appropriate emotion or set a certain expectation. This is why grocery store names imply lower cost (Costco) or high quality (Whole Foods).
2. Memorability. You want a name that is not easily forgotten, or they’ll remember your competitor.
3. “Googlability.” They need to be able to find you online.
   1. For example, the name Demand Curve is not particularly SEO-friendly.
4. “Spellability.” They need to know how to spell it when they hear it.
   1. This is a major sin of many startups trying to be clever.
5. “Sayability.” They need to know how to say it when they see it. And it should be nice and easy to say.
   1. People don’t like to feel or look dumb. If it’s hard to say, they won’t.
6. Understandability. When people hear it, can they guess what it is? If not, does it make sense when they know what it is?
   1. The “bnb” in Airbnb implies accommodation. VRBO is meaningless.
7. Distinct. You want something that’s not easily confused with something else.
8. .com preferred. Try to find something you can get a good domain for without spending insane amounts of money.

And yes, ChatGPT is an atrocious name on a few metrics:

1. It’s quite a mouthful to say.
2. GPT is a meaningless acronym to everybody but AI nerds, so it’s taken months for my girlfriend not to say ChatGTP (not memorable, and people don’t like things that make them feel dumb)

At least chat hints at what it is, but GPT means nothing (low understandability).

But it is googleable and distinct. However, it’s a rare product that was so good and revolutionary that the name didn’t matter. 99.9% of products aren’t that lucky.

So, let’s use the 8 naming strategies from Ali’s The First 1000 to name our startup/product. His article gives way more examples, so check it out, as I’ll just be doing a higher-level overview.

8 startup/product naming strategies

Here’s the great image created by Ali as a summary:

Creative names

1. Mashups

Two words become one. There are two main types:

1.1 Compound Names (fusion of 2 complete words):

Slam together two complete words.

• Ticketmaster: Ticket + Master
• YouTube: You + Tube (slang for TV)
• Paypal: Pay + Pal
• Coinbase: Coin + Base

1.2 Portmanteaus (Blending sounds and meanings of 2 words):

Blend parts of words together to create a new one:

• SpaceX: Space + Exploration
• Netflix: Internet + Flicks (movies)
• Duolingo: Duo (meaning two) + Lingo, from "Linguistics" (which comes from “tongues”)
  • This can mean “you and your language learning partner”, or
  • “Two tongued” which is exactly what “bi-lingual” means.
• Binance: Bitcoin + Finance

2. Play on words

Words that describe the product, service, or value

Here, Ali says they need to be creatively spelled. I’ll break this category into two.

Creatively-spelled words:

• TikTok: Sound of a clock ticking away as you waste hours of your life
• Reddit: “read it”
• Google: googol (the number one followed by 100 zeroes)
• Nvidia: from the Latin word “invidia,” meaning “envy”—as in, you’ll make people envious. And the “vid” implies it’s for video (which GPUs were for).

Real words, creative meaning:

• Stripe: The black strip on the back of a credit card
• Twitter: Birds making tweet, tweet noises.
• Kindle: Suggests warmth and inspiration. Curling up beside a fire reading.

3. Paying tribute

This category includes companies named after someone (or something) significant to the founder.

3.1 Tribute to the past [mythical or historical figure]

• Starbucks: Tribute to Starbuck, a character in "Moby Dick."
• Apple: Sir Isaac Newton’s apple
• Tesla: Nikola Tesla (inventor of DC current)

3.2 Personal tribute

• Walmart: named after founder Sam Walton (combined with Mart)
• X: named after Elon’s old payments company.
• Roku: means 'six' in Japanese. Roku was the founder's sixth startup.

4. Aspiration

Names that reflect the company’s mission or goals.

4.1 Expression

• Uber: from the German word über, meaning "over, above.”
• Target: symbolizing becoming the go-to shopping destination.
• AgelessRx (our client): implies their goal of increasing longevity.

4.2 Personification

• Nike: The Greek goddess of victory.
• Amazon: The South American rainforest, reflecting size and diversity

Practical names

5. Easy to remember, write and pronounce nonsense

Meaningless words that are short and memorable (ideally, they rhyme or have a .com available)

• Temu
• Hulu
• Tubi
• Brex

6. Value/service descriptor.

Words that simply describe the product/service.

• Threads
• Telegram
• Shop
• Messenger
• Bible
• Weather

Apple loves doing this.

7. Domain name

• The company/product name is just the domain:
• Character(dot)ai
• Booking(dot)com
• Customer(dot)io

This is my second least favorite.

It can get annoying to say. And it’s annoying it Slack/messages when the URL always unfurls. People often start writing things likes booking(dot)com or crypto(dot)com—like I did above to prevent your email tool from autolinking.

8. Abbreviation

When all else fails, use an abbreviation.

• VRBO
• CVS
• ADP

Choose an acronym that’s distinct and easy to say and remember. GPT is terrible. CVS is not bad. At least when evaluated for "is this nice to say?"

But tbh, this is one of my least favorite since acronyms don’t have any soul.

So what’s next

Honestly, I’d recommend shoving this article (both what to optimize for and the naming strategies) into ChatGPT (or fave AI). Then, describe your product/startup and ask it to generate a bunch of ideas.

Then, evaluate each one yourself. Base it on the 8 metrics above and how you feel about it. Remember, the perception and feeling is important.

Then, ask some friends and some people in your target audience what they think. What it makes them feel. How they would say it or spell it.

Keep doing this until you find an obvious winner.

Ideally, it should stand out like meeting your long-term partner. It just clicks and makes sense.

Check out Ali’s article, and the rest of his great newsletter!

Getting your first batch of customers can be one of the hardest or easiest parts.

It’s really hard if you do it incorrectly for your product type.

How you approach it depends on:

• Purchase intent of the customer (high vs low)
  • High: Something people already know they need. A known problem that people know there’s a solution for.
  • Low: Something people don’t know they need yet! An unknown problem or an unknown solution.
• The competitiveness and makeup of the market
• How broadly appealing the product is
• If they’re actively looking for a solution
• If the customer has switching costs (aka opportunity costs)
• Complex vs simple product
• Product category (B2B vs B2C)
• Geographic constraints
• Self-serve vs high-touch

Luckily, Ali created two flow charts depending on customer purchase intent.

GTM motions for high-intent customers

Here’s the flow chart, explanations of each channel below:

#1. Produce discoverable content:

High-intent, no competitors, looking for solution

Create content that people find while searching for a solution. This can be on Quora, Reddit, communities, YouTube, TikTok, or good ol' fashioned Google.

#2. Overservice 1 customer:

High-intent, no competitors, not looking for solution, complex product/solution

For complex, high-ticket products, go above and beyond for a single customer. Create a product/service that absolutely wows them.

Then, get referrals and create a case study.

#3. Hack a distribution channel:

High-intent, no competitors, not looking for solution, simple product/solution

Use clever hacks on existing marketplaces to get visibility:

• Airbnb: Automatic “post to craiglist” feature to increase visibility. [Source]
• “Tiktok: Appended “for Facebook & Instagram” at the end of the app name on the app store to get in front of people looking for FB or IG. [Source]”
• “Paypal: Created bots that reached out to eBay sellers pretending to be real customers and insisting on paying only via PayPal. [Source]”

Note: Quoted examples are from Ali’s article.

#4. Fish on forums/communities

High-intent, competitive space, no switching costs

Similar to #1, except you find existing posts/questions on Quora/Reddit/Forums, answer their question, and link to your product.

Don’t be spammy.

#5. Cold outreach (and reduce the friction)

High-intent, competitive space, high switching costs

If it’s harder for customers to switch from competitors, reach out to your customers directly, offer free value, and be willing to help them migrate. ConvertKit famously did this to get creators off of competitors like Mailchimp.

GTM motions for low-intent customers

#6. Launch somewhere (+ PR)

Low-intent, enterprise competitors, self-serve product

If your customers are massive, slow, clunky enterprises, get in front of the small guys. Launch on Product Hunt, Techcrunch, Hacker News, Indiehackers, or KickStarter, or do a PR push (see #12).

A great way to have a big launch is to be “building in public” (see #10) for months before launch.

#7. Warm outreach/intro

Low-intent, enterprise competitors, high-touch product
Low-intent, no competitors, B2B

Find people in your network who likely have the problem but haven’t found a solution (in person or via LinkedIn), overdeliver, and ask for a referral.

In general, warm outreach is infinitely better than cold outreach, so putting yourself out there is an excellent way to increase response and close rates.

#8. Embed yourself in a community

Low-intent, modern competitors, niche appeal

If the product is niche, be a key member in communities around this niche. These could be on Reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow, campuses, community centers, or dedicated sites and forums.

Or create your own community around it on Reddit, Facebook, Meetup, or Circle.

#9. Grab attention [on the streets]

Low-intent, modern competitors, broad appeal, geographically constrained

Place objects and signs where your customers hang out. For example, “the dating app Honeypot (now Thursday) got its first users by placing whiteboards with quirky messages around the streets of London. [Source]”

#10. Build in public

Low-intent, modern competitors, broad appeal, worldwide

If your product is broadly appealing and the market is competitive, then use social platforms to build an audience that likes and believes in you and your product. Attract people to you by being authentic.

#11. Use influencers

Low-intent, no competitors, B2C

If it’s a new product category targeting consumers, strike deals with micro and nano influencers to share your product on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube videos, and blogs.

Or, at the very least, get them using it.

Note B2B influencers are also on the rise ;0

#12. Full blown PR

Low-intent, strong social mission

If you have a strong social mission, like Tom’s “buy 1 give 1” business model where they’d give shoes to those in need, then you’re a strong candidate for a full blown PR cycle. You can manage this by contacting editors/writers at publications or working with a PR agency.

Ali gives examples of companies for each in the full article.

Takeaway: Find yourself in the flow chart, and then focus on that channel.

Nothing sells better than a happy customer.

Here are 10 research-backed recommendations for getting and displaying reviews:

Encourage comparisons in reviews

A review that compares your product to another is far better than a regular review:

• Positive reviews that compare your product increase sales by up to 26%. They anchor your product as being better than competitors. For example, “The iPhone 15 has a better camera than my friend’s Google Pixel” is better than “The iPhone 15 camera is really good.”
• Negative reviews that compare are up to 47% less harmful. We attribute their dislike to their personal preferences. Example: “The iPhone’s battery life isn’t as good as the Pixel” is less harmful than “The iPhone battery life sucks.”

Encourage reviews to compare your product by asking: “How was it compared to a similar product you’ve tried?”

Expert recommendations vs customer reviews

Should you display simple customer reviews or expert recommendations?

It depends on how easy it is for people to judge the product's quality by using it:

• If it’s easy to judge the quality, then do customer reviews. Examples: T-shirts, food, hotels.
• If it’s hard to judge and requires expertise, do an expert recommendation. Examples: insurance, dentists, educational institutions, software, agencies.
  • Would you trust “Bob Smith” to recommend a heart surgeon? Or would you trust your family doctor more?

How incentives boost reviews

Most happy customers will never bother to leave a review. Even if you ask them.

But incentivizing them with free products, cash, gift cards, or contest entries makes it much more likely that they will leave a review, and it’s more likely to be positive.

Here’s the data:

• Home improvement store product reviews were 83.4% more positive when incentivized via sweepstakes entries.
• Even a modest $0.25 incentive paid immediately for rating and reviewing a video proved effective, leading to a 20.6% increase in positivity

Do not ask for a positive review. That might backfire and is against Amazon TOS.

Don’t ask for reviews too soon

Getting asked to review a product you just got is like a popup modal asking you to subscribe before you even know what the website is.

Recommendation: Wait at least 10 days before asking for a review to increase the chance they review by 40-60%.

Additional recommendations for software reviews:

• Don’t do it based on time after signing up; do it based on milestones of usage (for example, they just hit their "aha" moment with your product.
• Don’t ask them when they’re clearly in the middle of something.

Some negative reviews are good for you

You see a 4.9-star-rated espresso machine and start reading the reviews. They’re all resoundingly positive…, but you start to get a little suspicious that they’re all fake.

You check the 1-star reviews and see: “There is a considerable difference in taste when mineral or filtered water is used rather than tap water”

You laugh and say, “That has nothing to do with the machine, you bozo!! Well, if that’s all people have to complain about, then it must be good.”

Oddly enough, a low, fairly irrelevant review will improve your perception of a highly-rated product by ~15%.

Takeaway: Don’t hide negative irrelevant reviews, or maybe even showcase them!

Show “likes” on the product page

Leverage the engagement your product has received on social media:

Oddly enough, this only increased sales during non-work hours. However, each additional like received increased sales by €0.26, about 0.14% of the product price.

Takeaway: Show a product’s likes and a few profile photos of people who liked it.

The first review sets the tone

We’re the pinnacle of herd animals.

If the first review is negative, you’ll get fewer sales, fewer reviews, and more negative reviews. This effect can last for 3 years or more.

And the opposite happens if the first review is positive.

Here are some recommendations:

• Launch products to a select group of customers mostly likely to rate it highly.
• Launch on new marketplaces (like Amazon or Walmart) the same way.
• Reach out to early customers that you think are happy and incentivize them to write a review about it.
• If you get a negative review early, do everything you can to correct it.

Order matters

Sales are up to 84% higher if the first review is 5-star versus 1-star, and we rarely read more than 10 reviews before deciding.

Takeaway: Display at least one positive review first before displaying others. Never display a negative review first.

4.3 is better than 4.9 (if it’s your own website)

Oddly, sales peak between 4.0 and 4.5 stars and dip down at 4.5 to 5.0. At really high ratings, we become skeptical and assume the results are manipulated (the study focused on specific retail websites and not a marketplace like Amazon).

Takeaway: Don’t delete or hide all reviews lower than 5.

Reply to all reviews

Replying to reviews has various benefits:

• It can make an upset customer change their mind and increase their rating (and maybe even stay a customer).
• It signals to people that you care about customers.
• And a study showed it increased the number of reviews by 12% and increased the average rating by 0.12 stars.

So make sure to reply to all of them!

–––

Use these 10 research-backed ways to get the most out of customer reviews.

Check our Growth Vault for 84 other CRO tactics (and 373 growth tactics).

Fundamentally, there are only 4 high-level ways to drive growth.

This image from MKT1 summarizes it perfectly:

A startup can do a million things to grow (we’ve covered over 455 of them here), but given extremely limited resources, you should find the highest leverage place to apply pressure to grow now.

Understanding these 4 primary levers helps you prioritize. Let’s dive into each:

1. Get more $$$ from your current slice of pie

• Charge more money from existing customers (make sure to increase perceived value too).
• Sell more products to existing customers (upsell/cross-sell)
• For SaaS, increase revenue per customer by adding new features and tiers, increase the number of seats they use, or increase product usage.
• Reduce churn so revenue can grow over time. The SaaS Quick Ratio is a handy metric for determining whether your growth and churn are healthy.

2. Capture the same pie more efficiently

You’re always getting new customers, but you can do it better. You can generate more revenue with the same or less cost and effort.

There are really only two fundamental ways to do this:

• Increase conversion rates with better funnels (copy, landing pages, lead magnets, sales, etc).
• Lower acquisition costs with better creatives, targeting, lead quality, (and conversion rates ;0)

Note: Check our Growth Vault for 84+ tactics to increase conversions

3. Capture more of the same pie

You’re growing within the same market segment but can get MORE leads:

• Double down on what’s working, but always experiment with creative ideas.
• Watch out for diminishing returns (increasing acquisition costs), especially on ads, if you’ve been going after the same market for a while and keep increasing budgets. That’s especially true if it’s a niche market.
• If you’re steadily growing, don’t wait until you cap out before expanding the pie because it takes longer than you think.
• Set up a different growth engine (content or sales instead of ads)

Note: No matter how good you are, you will never get the whole pie, sorry!

4. Expand the pie (or test new pies entirely)

• Go after new markets/segments (industries, company sizes, geos, verticals).
  • If you’re very early stage, this is just trying to find product-market fit.
• Depending on the new segment, you can either use the same growth engine (ads) or you need to set up another one (i.e., outbound or content).
• Create new content, messaging, and funnels tailored to the new “pie”.
• Always run small tests before going all in. Make sure to prioritize your tests using the RICE/DRICE frameworks.
• Double down if you have similar or higher conversion rates with this new market or segment.

How to use it

Every few months, pick one of these to prioritize and go hard on it. What matters most will depend on your current circumstances (and likely stage). For example:

• A very early-stage company is either focusing hard on one market/segment or testing several to find product-market fit.
• A startup with PMF will likely want to improve conversion rates with well-optimized funnels, great onboarding, and strong retention.
• Then they'll want to focus on capturing more of the same pie by ramping up their current growth engine (ads) or setting up a second (outbound).
• Then they might want to get more from their current customers by charging more and upselling and cross-selling.
• Then, they might want to expand markets/segments as they reach saturation in their current ones.

To dive deeper into this concept, check out the rest of MKT1's great article.

How people/companies normally create an article or post:

They randomly pick a topic out of the air and start writing, not really knowing where it's gonna end up. The structure kinda just happens as they write.

They hit publish, and that topic is “done.”

Right?

Unfortunately, four things make that the wrong way to do it:

• People need to hear the same message numerous times in numerous ways for the message to sink in.
• You can’t guarantee that everyone will see a given post, article, or newsletter.
• Companies only have so many core ideas to communicate.
• Generating ideas and creating content is a slog if done haphazardly.

Finding ways to share the same idea in dozens of ways is critical.

How they should create content:

1. Use a system to generate ideas (like listing out all your customers' problems)
2. Turn each idea into numerous, clearly-defined posts

To achieve #1 and #2, you need to understand the 10 fundamental types of posts you can create. Using them you can turn a single topic into dozens of pieces of unique-feeling content.

The 10 types of posts

The easiest way to illustrate this is with a visual with examples baked in:

Here’s a high-res version to save for future use.

An example using a single topic

Let’s come up with a post for each type for "writing strong hooks:"

1. Actionable: "How to write a fear-based hook"
2. Observation: "The best creators' hooks don't feel like hooks"
3. X vs Y: "When you use a hook vs When you don't"
4. Motivation: "How a powerful hook got me featured in Forbes"
5. Analytical: "Hooks from LinkedIn's Top 30 Creators"
6. Listicle: "10 books for writing hooks"
7. Contrarian: "Most hooks are clickbait"
8. Testimonial/Client win: "How my client grew to 50k followers"
9. Personal story: "How obsessing over my hooks changed my business"
10. Meme: idk some meme about hooks

These are just off-the-cuff ideas. You could approach each one quite differently:

• There are endless memes.
• You can share multiple client stories over time.
• You can share various frameworks on writing hooks.
• You can analyze specific people’s hooks.

In short, you could easily generate over 100+ post ideas about writing hooks using these 10 post types as a guide.

And that’s just for the content idea of “writing hooks,” which could be a subtopic within broader topics like creating ads, copywriting, or audience building.

Plug these into your content creation system, and it will be much easier to generate a ton of great post ideas. Read the full article for examples and frameworks.

With ads and landing pages, you have seconds to:

• Communicate what you sell
• Why it matters to them
• Make them feel something

Energizing emotions such as excitement, amusement, and awe drive action—clicking, buying, sharing, or engaging. Ads that make you feel something are also a lot more memorable.

The Mullet (aka The Smile) is a simple and effective way to check those boxes in a single, powerful headline.

• Business in front: Put the factual business message upfront.
  • “Follow me on LinkedIn.”
  • “People swear by it.”
  • “Please enjoy responsibly.”
• Party in the back: Make them smile with a joke on the business message.
  • “Or I’ll keep following you in person.”
  • “And at it.”
  • “The Internet never forgets”

Got it?

Nah, of course not. Let’s dive into some examples (all from Dan Nelken’s post):

The Mullet is a powerful way to quickly get the important message across and leave them with a smile on their face. People who see your mullet will:

• “Get” what you sell
• Feel positively towards you (which is rare for an ad)
• Remember you (so they think of you after a Trigger Event)
• And most importantly, more likely to take action

Dan even uses this technique for his copywriting newsletter 🤣:

Experiment using The Mullet in your next ad or landing page header.

And if you need help figuring out your value props and writing a header and subheader for your site, check out our popular Above the Fold Playbook.

How many of you would, at least on occasion, like to be out of the relationship you’re in?

That’s the powerful opening line for an ad (here’s the video) from MasterClass for their course with renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel:

It’s a powerful ad that doesn’t feel intrusive or overly promotional. It’s emotional and thought provoking. It’s filled with credibility building and social proof.

Here’s the line-by-line analysis (click here or the image for a high-res version):

Key learnings:

• For longer videos like this, use various cuts to keep people engaged
• Use a strong hook to get people interested, then use another hook halfway to keep their attention (ex: ”Would you say, coming out of your childhood…”)
• Layer credibility and social proof throughout the video to add weight to what you’re saying
• Use social proof/testimonials to pitch the product instead of doing it directly
• Sell the benefits, not the features
• Leave the CTA subtle in the video and use the ad itself to do the pitch.

Want ad inspiration from top startups? Check out our Ad 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.

The typical company hires an SEO agency that pumps out low-quality content at high rates. Or they hire meh contract writers to write fairly meh content that are thinly veiled sales letters. Or they write surface-level and basic stuff.

And the typical person spends less than 30 minutes writing a LinkedIn post and wonders why it flops.

Which brings us to the first commandment of content marketing:

Thou shalt write for extremely high quality. 

Until you've earned a reputation for quality in the reader's mind, they don't read closely. Instead:

• They skim.
• They don't fully appreciate your arguments.
• They assume you're just trying to sell to them (instead of educate).

The ultimate “hook” is the author's reputation. In other words, the “from line” is more important than the subject line. The author more than the title. The podcast more than the episode title. The YouTuber more than the thumbnail.

You want to train people to see your name (or brand) and associate it with being worth the time investment to stop and read it.

Because most content is not.

You can do that by not shying away from great, in-depth content.

People don't have short attention spans for content: They finish three-hour Joe Rogan episodes and binge fourteen hours of Netflix.

They have short consideration spans: they must be hooked quickly. To do so, ensure your first minute is incredible.

Extreme quality stems from four factors:

• Engagement — Are you hooking readers with your intros? Are you exciting them about what they're about to learn? Are you effectively conveying how valuable the material is? Does it spread out hits of dopamine? Does it break up lots of text with images?
• Concision — Are you conveying your points without fluff?
• Depth — Are you offering a thorough analysis that exceeds the self-evident parts of the material? Are you giving them access to knowledge or data they wouldn’t normally have access to?
• Novelty — Are you sharing counter-intuitive thoughts that readers wouldn't have pieced together on their own? That's how you trigger dopamine hits.

Yes! All of this matters for SEO as well. A huge factor in SEO is whether someone clicked a link in Google and terminated their search on your post. It has to be good if the person stopped trying to find other resources to answer the question.

The criteria for different content types

Search-driven (SEO) content should fulfill these criteria:

• You have something comprehensive and actionable to say about the topic that can resolve someone’s query.
• Potential customers search Google or YouTube for this topic.
• The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product.

Sharing-driven (social) content should fulfill these criteria:

• You have something novel and surprising to say about the topic.
• The novelty resonates emotionally or intellectually, which prompts sharing.
• The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product or cement you in their mind as an expert in that topic.

And both types of content benefit if you go over the top. It makes it noteworthy, shareworthy, “bookmarkable,” and “linkable” (in other blogs and newsletters). The best backlink strategy is making content that people organically link to—also known as the Skyscraper Technique.

In short: quality is king

The world doesn’t need more content. But it desperately needs better content.

Across almost every industry or niche, there is opportunity to become a respected name by writing in-depth, quality content.

Train people to associate your name with quality, and you’ll have their attention.

What’s next?

This is an edited opening of our Content Marketing guide. Continue reading here.

Here are some additional resources:

• I enjoyed this podcast episode on Lenny Rachitsky’s writing process (writer of a 7-figure, 650,000-subscriber newsletter).
• My guide to writing hooks.
• My cofounder's guide to Writing Better (read by hundreds of thousands)
• Go through the 64 content marketing insights shared in this newsletter.

You don’t need “link building” trickery to rank in Google.

Here’s a startup whose only SEO strategy was to consistently publish perfectly optimized blog posts a few times per week:

They started with zero authority, zero backlinks, and a new domain.

So what makes a blog post “perfectly optimized?”

It's a blend of art, science, and choosing the right keywords. 

Let’s dive in.

The anatomy of a perfect blog post:

Before we do, an important message:

A perfect blog post is optimized as much for humans as it is machines. You need to make it engaging, thought provoking, and thorough. It needs to solve the person’s problem and sustain their interest throughout the process as time on site and “terminated user’s search” are strong SEO signals.

#1. SEO Metadata 

No, this is not for SEO ranking. It’s to improve clickthrough rates when your post shows up on Google. Treat it like ad copy—it must be compelling.

• Title: Craft a compelling title with your target keywords. Though not a direct ranking factor, it's bolded in search results and should include a CTA.
• Description: Treat it like ad copy, hook their interest so they click.
• URL: Ensure it matches your target keywords. Avoid duplicate page structures and refrain from including years in URLs.

For example, if you’re targeting “blog post checklist” do “/blog-post-checklist”

Resources to help: 

• Above the Fold Playbook (teaches header + subheader writing)
• 10 Ways to Hook People
• All our copywriting tactics

#2. Schema markup

• Implement schema types like Article, BlogPosting, and Breadcrumbs so your content displays on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If yours doesn’t, someone else’s will.

#3. Original images

• Every image should have a descriptive Alt attribute for SEO visibility and accessibility. Don’t just lazily say “image of UI.” Describe the key elements as if someone can’t see them.
• Break up or replace large amounts of text with visuals.
• Stock photos, no thank you.

#4. Content length:

• Aim for a minimum of 700 words, adjusting based on:
  • Competition: If competitors are at 1,000 words, make a more thorough article that’s 1,500+ words.
  • Query specificity: A shorter article is probably sufficient if the keyword is super specific. If it’s broad, like “brand marketing,” then a very broad and thorough article is likely required.

Don’t just add random nonsense like AI blog post writers seem to do. Instead, add contextually relevant sections and examples to round it out.

#5. Table of contents with anchor links:

• For longer articles (1,000+ words), add a table of contents to make it easy to jump to what they care about.
• Use anchor links throughout the content for easy navigation. Google indexes these, enhancing user experience (UX) and providing valuable data.

#6. Heading structure:

• Use only one H1—the title of the article, ideally with the target keyword.
• Add supporting text under each heading to add context.
• Use H2s, H3s, and H4s appropriately.
• Make headings compelling. You have to keep them interested.

#7. Internal links:

Internal links are extremely important. Many SEO experts say they’re more important than backlinks.

• Ensure every page has internal links leading to and from it. This aids in crawl efficiency and contextual relevance.
• If you have a long article targeting a high-level keyword ( ), each section in that article could link to another dedicated blog article (ex: top brand marketing examples, what is brand marketing).
• Aim for posts to have upwards of 7+ internal links by cross-linking related articles.

#8. HTML elements:

• Use lists, tables, and accordions to capture featured snippets. It also makes the article more legible and delightful of readers, increasing time on site and chance they terminate their search with your article (and maybe subscribe).

 #9. YouTube embed:

• Ideally, pair each blog post with a complementary YouTube video. Embedding videos act as backlinks and enhance visibility on both Google and YouTube.
  • Shopify grew their YouTube to 230k subscribers in 18 months with this strategy.

#10. Clear, compelling CTA 

• Add clear CTAs throughout the article to turn readers into leads. This can lead to better interaction metrics and conversions.
• Add contextually relevant lead magnets (email courses/PDFs) to each article.
• Add popup modals that trigger based on time on the page (a few minutes) or scroll depth (>50%).

To practice what we preach, here’s a helpful visual to go with it.

Use this checklist when creating blog posts and it’ll resonate with readers and search engines alike.

Thanks to our friends at Contact Studios for help with this one.

If it’s helpful, we collaborated with them to create 4 free blog post templates. They’ve used them to generate millions in organic traffic in the past 8 months.

Zero pressure, of course. You can easily write articles without them, but they’re a nice starting point.

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).