Growth Newsletter #156

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether it’s a:

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

Or even a quirky travel story including French witches.

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

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

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

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

Most company's "strategies" are either purely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the 5 stages:

In summary:

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