The Growth Vault

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

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

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

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

This is useful for two reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this all means:

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

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

Some benchmarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You want to dig into:

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

A few examples:

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

And you can do this by

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

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

“Our tool saves you 5 hours per week!”

– Nearly every SaaS tool

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

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

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

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

Zapier lets folks easily connect apps without code. 

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

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

Rule of thumb

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

Does the time savings result in lower costs?

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

Does that time savings result in higher revenue?

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

Does the saved time impact their life meaningfully?

• More time to spend with your family

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

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

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

Let’s dive into ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT:

#1. Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

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

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

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

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

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

Typical ZMOT moments:

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

Important aspects during ZMOT:

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

#2. First Moment of Truth (FMOT)

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

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

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

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

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

Typical FMOT moments:

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

Important aspects during FMOT:

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

#3. Second Moment of Truth (SMOT)

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

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

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

Typical SMOT moments:

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

Important aspects during SMOT:

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

Of course it’s not always this clean

There are various other ways this could go down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which would you choose:

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

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

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

This is the general principle behind compounding Growth Loops:

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

Another classic example is ads:

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

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

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

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

This image summarizes this tactic perfectly:

Whenever you write copy, whether it's for:

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

Always anticipate and address people's biggest objections.

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

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

Examples of big companies we all know:

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

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

Then, handle their biggest objections upfront.

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

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

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

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

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

All I did was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‍

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

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

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

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

So, they positioned themselves to be the complete opposite:

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

Much like Liquid Death did to the water industry.

Yet, the cleverest part of this strategy?

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

They found their enemy and satirized them.

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

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

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

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

But it's also incredibly motivating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprisingly, TikTok actually already does this.

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

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

Here's what Growth Design suggests instead:

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

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

Instead, they should do this:

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

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

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

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

What can be learned from the humble baby carrot:

#1. Create a new experience for an existing product

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

This shift allowed for 4 interesting benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few great reasons to find repeatable formats:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether it’s a:

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

Or even a quirky travel story including French witches.

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

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

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

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

Most company's "strategies" are either purely:

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

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

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

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

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

‍

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

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

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

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

Here are the 5 stages:

In summary:

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

Churn kills growth.

Combating churn is a mix of:

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

This tactic is for #4. 

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

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

Early Bird & Night Owl Chests‍

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audit your funnel to maximize Psych before conversion steps.

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

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

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

Nobody does this better than MrBeast. Examples:

Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,00 

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

$10,000 Every Day You Survive Prison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the the whole interview!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some scrappy ways to reach those thresholds:

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

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

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

Learning how to hook people is critical.

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

No company encourages and promotes UGC better than Barkbox.

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

This works so well because:

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

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

Another company that does this is online furniture store Article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is powerful for a few reasons:

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

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

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

March: 8k subscribers.

November: 1.8 million subscribers.

Today: 2.75 million subscribers.

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

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

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

The key ingredient here is authenticity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Phone-ception 📲

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

(Note this also eye catching due to the dynamism)

2. Text Interrupt

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

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

3. Fake Podcast

Create a fake podcast setup and talk about your product:

In summary: get creative with your creative.

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

Education and information products have a few huge disadvantages:

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

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

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

Her "Price Hike" strategy:

 This is smart for a variety of reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Ariyh, researchers found that:

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

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

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

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

How it works 

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

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

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

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

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

An army was created

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did this by taking advantage of SEO content. 

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

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

They did a combination of two things:

1. Create videos for already ranking content

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

2. Create videos and articles targeting specific keywords/topics

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

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

Why this works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, do whatever you can to keep them.

Do that by offering flexibility. Let subscribers:

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

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

If you overwhelm someone you may lose them forever.

The typical SaaS playbooks:

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

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

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

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

Here's Elena illustration of these concepts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOFU and BOFU

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

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

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

Couple examples from recent students:

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

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

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

Otherwise, it'll be a bloody battle.

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

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

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

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

#1. Remove all subjective language.

A strategy should be completely objective:

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

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

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

#2. The Opposite's Game

Would the opposite of this strategy also make logical sense?

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

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

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

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

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

2023 has been a hard year for fundraising.  

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

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

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

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

Work your way up the ladder.

Last week, we had our kookiest sponsorship:

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

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

It's really scary to experiment.

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

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

So be like Nate, be illogical.

If you confuse, you lose.

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

Here are some example rewrites:

The right one is better because:

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

The right one is better because:

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

The right one is better because:

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