What makes for a good story? 

Humans tell stories. Many of us live interesting lives; developing a way to deliver the narrative is to our advantage. Others lead less than adventurous existences, and so stories become transcendent vehicles for our imagination. Epic mythologies and religions are nothing but collections of stories that inspire and transform us.

The ways we tell stories is always changing. 

One of the greatest and most popular storytelling machines, Pixar, is celebrating, as well as helping evolve, the story with it's 'The Art of Storytelling' course. The program is for children and adults who want to wrap their head around what it takes to produce stories ready for the screen.

Overview

General overview of the insight & notes.

Content

The draft & written content of the tactic to go into the 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

Overview

This is from an interview with Jon Youshaei. There is more to this, but his first two points gave good pointers for thumbnails. You could use the whole video as an insight but it's quite the gold mine, so I thought taking out a specific niche part might be better.

Here's my notes on them:

1. Limit your lamborghinis (thumbnail design)
   • mr beast started with 6 thumbnail designs (see them at 1:09). he started with one that had 6 lamborghinis, but eventually went for one with just one lamborghini
   • he said the one with 6 lambos was more
   • you want the reader to be able to comprehend it and process it with their brain turned off
   • simplicity is key
   • some tips from jon:
     • the 18% test: shrink your canvas to 18% to see if your thumbnail is easily comprehensible at the size that most viewers will actually see it at
     • tries to have only 3 elements, just like mr beast (he used the $1 vs $1,000,000 hotel room video as an example)
2. Look off YouTube to succeed on YouTube
   • if all you do is study from other youtubers, then you’re losing out on so many ideas that could set you apart
   • mr beast’s thumbnail idea for “Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,000” was actually inspired by Severance (see imgs at 3:02)
   • some tips from jon:
     • jon says he pays attention to tv shows, billboard, and movie posters
     • he studies traditional media
     • on every hollywood set, there’s a director of photography whose entire job is to create a stunning shot that tells a story
     • or graphic designers, who spend their careers to create billboards and posters to catch your attention on the highway

Content

The draft & written content of the tactic to go into the newsletter.

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.

Overview

General overview of the insight & notes.

Content

The draft & written content of the tactic to go into the newsletter.

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.

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

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

In both situations, the companies acted fast:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may even value confusing products less.

How to apply this:

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

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

For conversion: clarity > cleverness.

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

A thumbnail really can make or break a video. 

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

Here are ways top creators do that:

Big Numbers

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

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

Reactions

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

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

Ask a question

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

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

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

Don't be the best, be the only.

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

You need to find fresh market space.

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

Normalize the weird

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

Now these are massive categories. 

Here's what you need to normalize the weird:

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

Weird the normal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next audit their:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guaranteed.

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

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

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

Here's what we do:

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

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

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

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

• Larger can
• Lower cost
• Better taste

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

• Smaller can
• More expensive
• Tastes awful

But that’s exactly what Red Bull did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

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

Purchase Rate = Desire - (Labor + Confusion) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big driver for both were free tools: 

Taplio

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

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

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

Pefect Keto

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

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

Create your own

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

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

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

Yet it's what every startup is chasing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanna go deeper?

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

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

Grab your $300 off →

(Or reply to this newsletter with questions)

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

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

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

"Emotional Resonance" maps. 

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

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

Here are 3 arcs that Patrick shared:

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

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

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

Four factors to find a great market with latent demand:

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

Let's dive into each: 

Pain

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

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

Share the dream of their life without that pain. 

Purchasing Power

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

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

Easy to Target

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

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

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

Growing

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

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

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

Most social media advice for early-stage startups:

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

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

Here's how:

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

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

Added benefit of this strategy:

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some tactical recommendations to increase visibility on X:

1. Optimize tweets for maximum engagement.

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

2. Build quality relationships with followers.

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

3. Leverage user factors to boost twitter presence.

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

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

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

Let's build off the last one. 

Which of these orange circles is larger?

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

Why is simple: Our perceptions are completely relative.

Here are 3 ways to do that:

#1. Change your competitive set

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

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

#2 Create a "decoy" product

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

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

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

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

Money has zero intrinsic value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#10 is a key step.

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

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

Learn more about our Story Systems

Now the average is ~0.35%.

A 222x decrease!

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

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

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

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

Here are some ad types that currently help with that:

1. Customer reactions

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

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

2. Customer testimonials

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

3. Unboxing

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

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

4. Product walkthrough

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wes breaks this down in 3 phase:

Phase 1: Build your straight line path

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

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

Phase 2: Create Product Bumpers

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

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

Phase 3: Create Conversational Bumpers

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

Conversational bumpers are to bring them back into the product.

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

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

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

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

The premise is:

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

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

I think this works so well because:

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

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

Copywriting is one of the most important skills.

Whether you're writing:

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

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

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

There are 3 fundamental elements to a potential viral content idea.

Most people when they create content stop after the first two:

Topic + Format + Creative Concept = Viral Content Idea

Let's dive into each and how they fit together:

#1. Topic

What are you writing or talking about? A person, a concept, a framework, an observation?

And, what emotion or outcome are you trying to achieve?

• Entertain
• Educate
• Inspire
• Surprise

#2. Format

How will you present this topic. This includes whether it's a text-only post, a video, a carousel, a podcast, or an image.

This also includes how you structure it, such as:

• X vs Y (comparing ideas)
• Analytical (deep-dive or teardown of something)
• Actionable (step-by-step breakdown on something)
• Present / Future (how things will be different)
• Interview
• Story

#3. Creative concept

The sky's the limit here. This can take the form of gamification, concept mashups, hair-brained ideas, gamification, or absurdism.

This is the realm of MrBeast. $1 to $1B yachts. Being hunted by an assassin. And putting someone alone in a circle for 100 days.

Most people don't add the creative concept. "5 tips to increase sales" is a topic with a common format. Nothing creative about it; therefore, unlikely to go viral.

An example

Billie Eilish (Topic) + Interview (Format) + Ask questions while she eats insanely spicy wings (Creative Concept) = Billie Eilish Freaks Out While Eating Spicy Wings

And 50,000,000 views. Exponentially higher than other videos on Billie Eilish.

You can't create the best ideas in a vacuum.

And everything you need to know about your customers and their needs, desires, and fears are on display somewhere online. Here's the S.C.A.R.F. method for finding them:

Social

Browse LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (wherever your audience is)

Search for posts about your niche, topic, competitors, industry, and products.

• Read comments and pull out benefits and objections
• Write down 10 words creators use to describe problems

Competitors

Find 3 competitors and go through their website and social media accounts.

• Write down 5 powerful pieces of copy they use
• Scan product pages for unique selling ppints
• Use SEMrush to see their Google Ads
• Find their ads and click through the funnels

Affiliates

Affiliates are incentivized to learn how to pitch products.

Use Goole and SEO tools like SEMrush and ahrefs to find affiliates in your niche (or that mention your product or a competitor's product)

• If they talk about your product, note how they pitch it or how they review it.
• If not, see how they talk about competitors.

Reviews

If you have reviews for your product, export them into two lists:

• List 1: 1-3 stars, find objections
• List 2: 4-5  stars, find benefits

Visit competitor's and do the same.

Forums

Find relevant subreddits and forums (find them with google).

• Track most popular topics. Note objections, pain points, benefits.
• Focus on their desired lifestyle/outcome, the stories they tell, and the words they use to describe things.

Monthly: $49
Annual: $490

^ every startup product ever. 

It's simple, clean, and they save 17% by doing annual. And you guarantee 10 months of revenue and hopefully reduce churn. Win-win.‍

But, is it the right choice? 

Probably not.

You don't see this trends as often with established companies.

Daniel says the trick is to price your annual plan at slightly more than your average LTV for monthly users.

So, if your average monthly user stays around for 4 months ($49 each), price your annual plan at 5 months ($245).

Daniel did this at Codecademy, and claims it was their best tactic at increasing LTV and reducing churn.‍

Takeaway: Consider running this pricing experiment if your average monthly retention is less than 12 months. 

Another, counter-intuitive benefit

More mature companies have figured this out. Meaning you can estimate the average retention for mature software products. Examples that Daniel shares:

• Netflix: Only offers monthly plans. Their average user likely stays around for over 12 months (guilty). Spotify is the same.
• Headspace: $12.99/mo vs $69.99/yr. Ratio of 5.39, so their monthly users likely stay around for ~4 months.
• Calm: $14.99/mo vs $69.99/yr. Ratio of 4.67, so their monthly users likely stay around for ~3-4 months.

Build this into your competitor analysis process!

And check out Daniel's full write up here.

We decide with emotions.

Logic is often what we use to convince ourselves that our emotional decision is the right one, or to justify a past emotional decision.

Rory Sutherland shares a prime example in his book Alchemy. One of his clients was sending out physical letters asking for donations. Like all good marketers they A/B tested several different variations to see which brought in the most money:

1. Control. The regular letter asking for donations. 
2. Donation matching. They highlighted that the government would match their donations, effectively doubling the impact of their donation.
3. Heavier paper. They put the letters on higher quality, thicker paper.
4. Hand delivered. They highlighted that a volunteer hand-delivered to their door.
5. Horizontal opening. They used a special envelope that opened on the end, not on the typical long side of the envelope.

Variations 3 through 5 seem rather weird and extraneous to the whole point. And logically, the variation that highlighted the donation matching should do the best, right? You tell people that a $10 donation is actually $20, isn't that more motivating?

Wrong.

Variation #2 (donation matching) did worse than control. Variations 3 through 5 all beat the control, and the best was variation #5 (horizontal opening).

But if you asked those people why they donated, they'd probably say "it's a worthy cause, blah blah blah" and not "the weird envelope got my attention."

This is what Rory calls psycho-logical—logical in the context of human psychology. 

An ad example

We used this principle 6 years ago for a client of ours that sold powerful computers for machine learning/AI purposes. We made an ad variation that made no sense:

You wouldn't assume sloppily adding dog ears and nose onto a $10,000+ work computer would make it more likely that someone would purchase it.

Yet, this became one of their best-performing ads at the time.

It stopped the scroll and made them look a little closer. And no one else had done it. 

So be a little crazy with your ideas.

When you're starting a business, choosing a product, or even a topic for your personal content, you de-risk it by first identifying your unfair advantages.

A combination of unique assets and attributes that make you more likely to succeed.

The 5 ways you can have an "unfair advantage" are:

#1. Valuable Assets

Having money is an obvious unfair advantage. You can either fund your business, or at least work on it without stressing about paying rent.

Most don't have this one, obviously. A great way to start a business without a lot of money is by doing consulting or running an agency (like we did with Bell Curve).

#2. Knowledge and Education

95% of startup founders have a bachelor's degree or higher. 47% have a Master's or higher.

A degree can also be a disadvantage if you spent 4 years and $200,000 to get a degree that's not relevant to building a business. 

But, in general, knowing more is better. So learn learn learn. 

#3. Location and Timing

There's a billionaire who owns an island near me that made his money from working in telecommunications at the perfect time. He saw that mobile phones were coming and correctly predicted that telecom companies would need to place towers on top of a lot of random hills.

He quietly bought up a ton of these key properties. And then sold/leased them to telecom companies for insane amounts of money.

Study trends. Predict what will be needed if the trend continues. 

#4. Interpersonal Skills

85% of financial success comes from the ability to communicate effectively. Only 15% comes from technical skills or knowledge. 

Charisma can be learned: Give people your full attention. Work on projecting confidence. Genuinely care about others well-being.

#5. Prestige and Social Connections

Prestige is people's interpretation of your skills and status. A product launched by Bill Gates or Elon Musk is more likely to succeed just because a lot of people know and trust them.

Social connections are both "who you know" (do you know a bunch of rich investors, influencers, or potential high value first customers?), as well as your friend circle. Are you surrounded by other motivated, successful people, or are you surrounded by people who laugh at your ambition?

Choose your circles wisely. 

–––

Other examples of Unfair Advantages in the wild:

• Ali Abdaal was in Cambridge Medical School (a prestigious university) so had an unfair advantage making YouTube videos on how to get into medical school.
  
• Lex Fridman was an PhD AI researcher at MIT when he started his podcast, giving him access to some of the top AI researchers—including Elon Musk.
• Marc Andreessen went to the University of Illinois for computer science right after the US government dumped a ton of funding into specific universities for the development of the early Internet. Which then led to him creating Netscape. 
• And we have a big network of both founders and marketers, making it easy for us to launch a free matchmaking service for companies hiring agencies/freelancers.

Find your unfair advantage (or create one) and exploit it. 

A lot of startup landing pages are extremely confusing—particularly software. 

Way too often I hit a website and have no clue what they sell—even if I stick around and read all the features and benefits on the homepage.

Confused people bounce and never return.

A landing page needs to answer these questions to be successful:

1. What is the product?

What does it do and how does it solve a problem they have? Be extremely obvious.

Don't use fluffy filler words. Explain it like you would to grandma or nephew at Thanksgiving.

2. Is it right for me? Am I the target audience?

A tool that helps you "be more productive" is completely different if it's for a single parent, a corporate executive, or a solo creator.

Be clear whose problem the product solves—they'll feel more confident buying.

3. Is it legit? 

Or does it look like a phishing/scam site to get your credit card info?

Invest a little in design. 80/20 is fine. Question 4 also helps

4. Who else is using it? (Social proof)

People are more likely to buy if people and companies they respect are also customers. "Oh if Airbnb and Microsoft say it's good, it must be!"

And if you add links to tweets from real accounts, it'll be verifiably legit.

5. How much?

Tell them how much it’s gonna cost them. 

It's a waste of everyone's time if someone expects to pay $50/mo and gets quoted $5,000/mo after a 30-minute sales demo.

Bonus: Find clever ways to position it so that the price seems like a deal.

6. Where can I get help?

You can't anticipate every question, and no one reads every sentence on the page or FAQ.

Make it easy and obvious to contact you so you can answer their questions.

This also makes it seem more legit and that support is readily available. Use common questions to fix the copy on your landing page so fewer people ask it.

7. How do I take action?

What is the next step that you want the person to take? It should be obvious. 

Bonus: Match the CTA to the "temperature" of the lead.

If they're coming in cold, don't ask them to buy immediately. Get them on a newsletter or free trial. If this is a landing page for a retargeting campaign or email, drive to a sale.

Product-led growth has been all the rage for the past few years. The concepts are simple:

• Have a great product 
• Make sure the product gets better when others use it too
• Let people customize their experience 

When you have those elements, a product grows itself and becomes hard to leave.

Individuals will often start using it and then invite their coworkers until eventually everyone in the company is hooked.

Think tools like Slack, Dropbox, Figma, Airtable, Miro, Canva, Superhuman, and Zapier.

Part of PLG is nailing the invitation email so that coworkers more readily sign up too.

Here's Elena Verna's breakdown of Slack's invitation email. Use it as a template:

1. Only 1 in 2000 startups raise money
2. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to scale than founding teams of 2+.
3. The average age of a successful startup founder is around 45. 

We love surprising facts. They trigger a surge of dopamine. And we're dopamine fiends.

In fact, surprising facts are how Snapple was able to boost sales in 2002. They put weird facts under the lids of their drinks. It was a smart campaign for a few reasons:

1. Variable reward. Slot machines are addicting because we never know what's coming next. Sometimes it's a win. And it's different every time. The ever changing facts under the lids kept people guessing and wanting more.
   
   
2. Social currency. Sharing interesting facts makes us look cool, smart, or interesting to our peers. So people were incentivized to share the stats, and talk about Snapple.
   
   
3. Ritual. As discussed in a newsletter a few weeks ago, having a ritual around your product can increase people's satisfaction with using it. Much like reading fortune cookies after a meal at a Chinese restaurant, people opened the lid of a Snapple, and read the stat to their friends. 

Surprising stats are also effective hooks in social posts. For example:

If you hit people with a surprising fact, they'll instantly be hooked. And even the best content will be ignored if it fails to hook people.

If you're growing your personal audience, and want to go deeper on how to create content that makes you unignorable, join the Un-ignorable Challenge.

Enrollment closes in 2 days. Join 241 entrepreneurs learning to grow their audience.

A lot of "strategies" are filled with fluff and buzzwords. Or they focus purely on the goals (like 20% more revenue) without focusing on the how or the why.

Richard Rumelt outlines 3 key elements to a good strategy: 

1. Diagnosis: This isn't merely identifying a problem; it's understanding the nuances and underlying structures that are causing it. It's also identifying what the competitors are doing, and not doing.
   
   
2. Guiding policy: The unique approach you'll take to solve that problem. This isn't just a set of goals, but a framework that informs your decisions on the actions you'll take to achieve them.
   
   
3. Coherent actions: The specific steps to implement your guiding policy. Random tactics won't cut it. They have to fit together to support your strategy.

Let's use an example from the world's largest company, Apple, when Steve Jobs became CEO again in 1997 when it was on the brink of bankruptcy:

1. Diagnosis: In 1997, Apple had dozens of products. Nearly none of them were profitable or clear what problem they solved. The core issue was that their product line was way too complicated, confusing, and expensive to service.
   
   
2. Guiding policy: Jobs decided Apple would focus on a small number of products and make them exceptional. The goal was to reestablish Apple as a brand that stood for quality, innovation, and a superior user experience. And to be patient and wait for the next big technological opportunity before adding more products.
   
   
3. Coherent actions: Jobs famously cut down Apple's product line from dozens of items to just four. He then waited years before capitalizing on the next big opportunity: the iPod (and iTunes). Then the iPhone. Then the iPad. Then the Watch.

Their strategy was not "get profitable through customer-centric excellence." Instead, it was specific. And it continues to guide their decisions today, over 25 years later. 

Although Apple no longer has just 4 products, Apple is still slow to release new products. VR headsets have existed for years. But they didn't want to act on it until they felt they could deliver an exceptional product experience. 

This is why at our agency, Bell Curve, we focus so much on strategy. A well thought out strategy, can make all the difference. Tactics are what you layer on top.

Landing page copy has to be punchy and interesting so it doesn't bore people. 

But that also means it might not tell people everything they need to know to make their buying decision. (Here are examples from REI and HubSpot.)

Which is why SEO expert, Tim, recommends creating a buyer's guide. As he says:

"A detailed buying guide holds the hand of whoever is in charge of solving that problem and putting forward a case for product/service purchase."

Here's the overarching template he suggests:

1. Intro to the core issues
2. Questions to help the user self funnel (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
3. Diagnose the position they're in (if X and Y, do Z)
4. Introduce the features/benefits the different buckets need
5. The prices associated with the different buckets
6. Where your solution sits in comparison to the buckets
7. Best use cases for your solution
8. Wrap things up

A buyer's guide walks people through all the things a sales person might. It just does it at a larger scale, and helps people hesitant to hop on a call.

Here's Tim's full template.

TikTok has quickly become one of the first ad channels to contend with Google and Meta.

How is it different? Well, the ad management is relatively simple, and broad targeting often does best.

But it all comes down to amazing ad creative.

Here are 4 best practices:

1. Lead with a hook

Even the first frame counts. 25% of users watch beyond the first 5 seconds.

• Open your video with action and exciting audio to maximize engagement
• Display an enticing headline (e.g., "This app will change your life! 🤯" )
• Show an unusual or provocative visual to create intrigue

2. Sell with stories

Authenticity is what resonates. It cannot feel like an ad. 

People buy on TikTok when you tell them a believable story that sells the lifestyle benefits your product provides in a relatable context. 

3. Keep your ads short, fast, and lean

~60% of videos with the highest clickthrough rates get their message across in the first three seconds and keep their ad length within a 30-second sweet spot.

Stitch together 1-2 second quick cuts with different camera angles and speeds. Cut out pauses and lulls as much as possible.

4. Take big swings, then iterate on what works

You won't learn much by running 10 ads that are all roughly the same. 

Test a high volume of wildly different “big swing” ad creatives to find what resonates with your audience.

Scrap the losers. Focus on the winners. Throw in big swings every few weeks.

---

For 4 more best practices, and 8 ad examples/formulas, and a lot more, check out the rest of our TikTok Ads guide.

Ways that ads/marketing campaigns fail:

1. It turns people off from the product.
2. It's not compelling–people don't care.
3. People care, but forget about it quickly.
4. People care and remember the content, but they can't remember what it was for.

We've all had that last one—the hilarious ad that you can't remember what it was selling.

And an ad wins when: People care, and they remember the product/brand (then buy).

There are three main categories of ads as described by Ariyh:

1. Functional: Descriptions of the product. Ex: 100% organic cotton socks.
   
   
2. Emotional: Trigger emotions not necessarily tied to product features. Ex: "Because your family matters” with a photo of a child and parent, by Wells Fargo.
   
   
3. Metaphorical: Relevant parallels between products and different objects or scenarios. Ex: “Leave the noise behind” with a photo of a screaming child, by Bose headphones.

Two key findings from an August 2022 study analyzing recall of different ad types:

• People remember both metaphorical and emotional ads better than functional ads, but remember brand details best when the ads are metaphorical.
  
  
• A week after seeing the ads, people were 24% more likely to recognize a snippet of a metaphorical or emotional ad, compared to a functional ad.  

Of course, an ad, particularly a video ad can be several:

A mix of metaphorical and emotional to grab their attention and build up (what you can do and why it matters. Then finish with functional (technical specs etc).

But in general, don't just focus on the functional benefits. Make people care.

One of my friends has a $10M sock business, Outway. And I'm madly jealous of one his greatest hacks.

Whenever he meets another founder, he gives them a pack of free socks. If he really wants to wow them, he custom designs socks for their company first.

This rocks because:

1. It's a delightful surprise.
2. It's a thing they'll likely use.
3. They'll think of his nice gesture every time they wear the socks.
4. And it doesn't cost him much.

Here are a three other freebie strategies:

#1. Gift it at a key decision moment

For the past 30 years, Gillette has sent millions of free shaving kits to men to celebrate their 18th birthday—right when many men start needing to shave for the rest of their life. 

Hook them early, and they'll buy replacement blades for decades.

#2. SMS-based raffles

Ship raffle tickets with your orders. Text out the winning number once a week.

Encourages frequent orders. And it's a great excuse to collect phone numbers.

#3. Go a little over the top (if your product has high customer life-time values)

Airtable used to give out Airtable-branded Airpods with their startup program, and to people working at target companies.

For one, it's an over the top gift that someone will appreciate for years. 

For another, people who work in startup "open concept" offices will definitely wear them.

Lastly, no one sees branded, colourful Airpods so it leads to conversations about Airtable.

We've all seen the viral posts like:

• "Top 20 Free AI Tools that feel illegal to know"
• “I’ll teach you more in 10 slides than a $75,000 MBA” (then is super generic)
• "TED talks are free education, but 99% of people don't know which ones to watch"
• Or just a funny meme about the latest thing Elon said 

Do they do well? Yes, often they do.

But it depends on how you define the term "well." If all you want is attention (views, likes, comments, reposts, maybe even "followers"), then yeah, sure, they work.

But if you're trying to get more leads and customers, then I don't think that Elon meme is gonna convince anyone to drop $10k/mo on your consulting, nor subscribe to your $500/mo SaaS product. 

So don't create content to get attention. Instead, create it to build intention (to buy).

To do that:

1. Focus on building trust. Leaning into overused viral templates is a sure-fire way to slowly erode trust and respect from the most engaged and discerning people. 
   
   
2. Look really good at what you do. If you sell email marketing services, you better consistently demonstrate how much you know about email marketing, and how your work has helped others. Don't talk about free AI tools 80% of the time. Demonstrate your expertise and brag a little about your work (and your customers' success).
   
   
3. Prioritize leads, DMs, and replies—not likes, comments, followers, subscribers. The highest engagement posts are often the worst at driving leads. The best posts for driving leads, often have mediocre engagement. Resist the dopamine.
   
   
4. Really crack your content's "job to be done." What painful problem are you trying to help someone solve? Figure that out and be the best at helping them solve it.

This is easier said than done—in fact, we've created an entire 4-week cohort course about this very topic called Un-ignorable—so far we've trained 1,253 students including folks like Zain Kahn, Amanda Natividad, Eric Partaker, and many others.

If you want to learn how to create content that helps you become an un-ignorable expert, for the next 37.5 hours we're offering $300 in discounts and bonuses to 139 people. 

You can learn more and grab the offer here.

It's the last cohort we're doing for ~6 months.

Sure, we can all slap a form in our footer to get more newsletter subscribers.

In our experience, that doesn't do very much.

Neither does the one at the bottom of your 20-minute blog article. 

Here are 2 that have worked for us:

#1. Pop-ups/Modals

Beware: Don't do this 👇. Especially not immediately.

Everything about that makes me sad.

Instead, have they been on the page for 5 minutes and have they made it 40%+ or more down the page?

Great, then they've gotten value—pop up a modal and pitch the value they'll get.

Better yet, use a lead magnet related to the piece of content they're reading.

#2. Gated content

Throwing a form in your blog's sidebar is unlikely to move the needle. Adding it into the middle of the content can definitely do better—but both feel like old banner ads.

So we gloss over them.

Instead, for long-form, in-depth articles, like our playbooks, we would gate the second half of the playbook. If they were invested, they'd subscribe.

Don't just add a form and assume people will use it.

We all get too many emails—give people a reason to add more to their inbox.

The average person gets ~120 emails per day. Founders and decision makers get even more thanks to being bombarded with cold emails.

Getting someone to read your cold email is an uphill climb—and not deleting it is Everest. 

To do it right, you need to bait interest and then hook it.
↳ An enticing subject line = the bait
↳ A great opening line = the hook 

Unless you're Elon Musk, launching into your experience and credentials aren't enough to get someone interested when they're desperately just trying to hit inbox zero.

It’s like someone walking up to you at a party and saying "yeah, I went to Harvard."

A much better hook: Start your cold email with a five-minute favor.

The five-minute favor is a concept introduced by Wharton psychologist Adam Grant in his book Give and Take. It's simple:

Spend five minutes every day doing something that helps others. Just five minutes. Don’t expect anything in return.

Examples:

• Share something they’re working on with your audience.
• Write a review of their book or podcast.
• Donate to a cause they support.
• Engage with their social posts.
• Fill out one of their surveys.
• Make an introduction.

Help them out, then casually mention the favor in your cold email opener. They'll be far more likely to respond—particularly in a positive manner. 

Growth marketing is increasingly about community building, and less about clever hacks.

Apply a community mindset to your cold outreach, and it'll become much warmer.

This is for the scrappy folks in the crowd. The "do things that don't scale" people.

Being active in communities is a great way to build up your initial user base and network. 

BUT! You don't want to just pitch yourself. No one likes that. And is often grounds to be kicked out of the community.

So instead, you want to be active in relevant convos and provide value. But constantly monitoring Slack communities, Reddits, and social media is a huge pain.  

Use these tricks to do it faster:

#1. Slack: Join communities that your target audience use.

Under Preferences, set up notifications for keywords related to your product—you'll get pinged whenever you should weigh in.

#2. Upwork: Use the paid tool Earlybrd.io to track job descriptions with keywords related to the problem your product solves, e.g., “custom Shopify site.”

Get alerts about relevant jobs as they’re posted—then apply and pitch your product.

#3. X/Twitter: Bookmarking search results is the move.

Go to the search page and enter “min_faves:200 [keyword]” then sort by Latest.

You’ll find tweets related to your keyword with at least 200 likes

(Use “min_retweets:200 [keyword]” for retweets instead.)

#4. Quora/Reddit: Use the paid tool Syften to track keywords.

It’ll send Slack or email notifications as these get mentioned. It'll also work for Slack, Upwork, Twitter, ProductHunt, and various others.

–––

Just remember: Being helpful and kind is the priority. Provide value first, and just make it known what you do and how you can help them more.

Rituals turn mundane tasks into experiences. 

When customers follow a series of prescribed actions for a product they tend to:

• Enjoy the experience more
• Enjoy the product more
• Pay more to have it 

But rituals can't be random gestures. They need to be systematic and repetitive. It has to feel natural to how people actually use the product, and enhance the experience.

Some familiar ritual examples:

• Oreo: Twist, lick, and dunk cookies in milk.
• Corona: Press a fresh lime wedge into the bottle.
• Champagne: Pop the cork, cheer, and pour into flutes. 

Why rituals work:‍

Rituals increase people's involvement with a product in a unique and memorable way.

• A ritual instructs people on the "right way" to use it.
• A mini version of the IKEA Effect, the ritual makes customers feel like they had something to do in the creation of the product experience, therefore increasing its value and appeal.
• It gets them in the right mindset for using the product.

They also turn a mundane moment into an experience. They're not just opening up a bottle of sparkling wine, they're celebrating a win.

Steps to implement:

Elements of a great ritual:

• Easy to do: If it's hard, people won't do it.
• Tied to an emotion: Like celebration for champagne. Relaxing for Corona + Lime.
• Have a trigger: Celebration for champagne. KitKat increased sales by creating the ritual for KitKat + coffee—drinking coffee is a very common trigger.
• Add to the experience: Let's face it, Corona is kinda meh. The lime adds to it. 

Once you have an idea for your ritual and you've found an emotion or context to tie it to, test it on a small scale. 

Then associate the ritual (lime in a corona) with the target emotion (relaxing) by showing it in a context that evokes that emotion (someone on a beach in Mexico on vacation).

If you've done it right, your ritual will grow organically and become inherent to the
product experience.

Most founders/marketers completely wing their growth strategy.

Here are 3 ways to use research to find opportunities in the market: 

#1. Audience Whitespace

Of people interested in your product/category, who isn't being being served? For example:

#2. Channel Whitespace

Where are customers spending time and competitors are not?

For marketing channels, Charlie says to find the intersection of:

1. Where your potential customers hang out
2. Where there's the least competition
3. Where competitors are already seeing results
4. Where your content/voice makes sense

#3. Positioning Whitespace

What are your customers:

1. Searching for (search trend analysis) and
2. Asking for (social listening)

That competitors are not focusing on. For example:

Take time to study these 3 whitespaces to find opportunities—and if you're willing to invest, tools like SimilarWeb have a ton of data to parse through.

Warren Buffet's net worth is $117,000,000,000 and his company's investment portfolio gains on average 19.8% per year.

His own company's stock costs $548,984.95 each—wild.

He's famous for his "buy and hold" strategy—resisting selling in the best and worst of times.

Besides insane willpower, one of his greatest strengths are his expertly written shareholder letters.

In them he convinces and assures his shareholders to continue to hold their shares. To believe in him and his strategy even through the worst crashes and recessions.

His tactic for writing compelling letters, as John Harrison wrote:

Or as Jeremy wrote:

Write marketing copy, newsletters, emails, and messages as if to a sister, a best friend, or your mom/dad. And not for a state of the union or to a supreme court judge.

Google has bots that crawl the internet clicking on links. It does this periodically, and it uses sitemaps that website owners submit to help it find pages—particularly new ones.

We all know that a page that gets a lot of external links (ones from different sites) have a huge effect on SEO (hence why people play the backlinking game). 

But you wouldn't assume that adjusting internal links (ones pointing to other pages on your site) to drastically influence your SEO rankings.

But according to the 3 SEO experts above, it is one of the biggest levers you can pull. Ethan Smith's agency says it can increase search impressions by 10 to 50% within 50 days.

Here's 7 tips for internal linking: 

#1. Don't just link to a page once, do it 7+ times. If you want a page to be found via search, link to it from multiple pages. Graphite says there an inflection point at 7+.‍

#2. A link from the homepage is the most important. Have your homepage link to all of your most important pages. 

#3. Create an HTML sitemap page that links to every page. Link to this page from the homepage. Here are some examples of HTML sitemaps.

#4. Add site-wide navigational links in the header, footer, or sidebar.

#5. Don't just rely on footer links. Google gives more weighting to links in the main content area of a page than it does a footer as they're more likely to be clicked. 

#6. Use contextual "anchor text." Don't say "Join our marketing community by clicking here." Instead say "Join our marketing community."

#7. Make sure you don't have any broken links. Find broken links using audit tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Semrush.

If you invest in SEO at all, then spend some time adjusting your internal linking.

A group of 11 young women arrive in Italy for vacation, only to find that the villa they reserved via Booking.com doesn’t actually exist.

Alix Earle, a TikTok influencer with more than 5 million followers, laments about the scam to her audience. 

But it’s not Booking that responds to make it right—it’s Airbnb. They save the day by putting them up in a nearby villa straight out of White Lotus:

Alix’s videos documenting the saga got more than 20 million combined views on TikTok. One social media expert estimates the earned media value for Airbnb at around $100,000.

All for what probably cost a few thousand dollars to compensate the host.

Booking did eventually respond... with a boilerplate comment asking Alix to reach out on another social media platform for support. (Yikes.)

Maybe it’s no surprise Alix’s videos have inspired other users to create videos sharing their negative experiences with Booking.

The moral of the story: "Social listening" can really work. Look for opportunities to swing in and be the savior.

ConvertKit founder, Nathan Barry, did this when their competitor, Gumroad, jacked up their prices suddenly. They even offered to handle migrations for people for free.

We've figured it out. The one growth hack to rule them all:

A great product that solves a painful problem or fulfills a need.

I know that's incredibly difficult to achieve, but that's truly the thing that matters.

All of the 400+ tactics we've shared in this newsletter over the past several years are useless if it's trying to grow something that is not useful.

In fact, a truly amazing product, service, or piece of content will grow despite poor marketing execution. But these tactics are what you layer on top of a great foundation of a sound product, a sound brand, and a sound strategy.

OR to get initial users for your product to help you determine if it does solve a painful problem or fulfill a need.

And that's why ultimately we prefer the term "growth" over "marketing."

Because growth is cross-disciplinary. If changing your product in a way that makes it more useful is the best way to get more users, then that's what you should do. 

If people aren't buying or retaining then continuing to throw people at a "meh" product is not going to magically make it all better.

I know this isn't our normal actionable advice. But I've felt funny sharing tactic after tactic when the above is what we firmly believe. It's the ethos of what we do at Demand Curve and at our agency, Bell Curve.

The foundation is the most important. So make sure to build a strong one.

The easiest way to get invited to be on more podcasts?

Be an amazing podcast guest.

If you wow both podcast hosts and listeners:

1. Hosts will recommend you to their friend's podcasts.
2. Hosts of others podcasts will invite you on.
3. Listeners will tell hosts of other podcasts to invite you on.

Obviously a big part of it is charisma, which is hard, but here are some tips from Jay Clouse that anyone can implement:

#1. Weave examples and data into stories

Don't just spout facts and ideas.

Make it tangible and engaging by weaving them into entertaining stories.

#2. It's not just about you

People often listen to a podcast because they like the host. Listeners care about their perspective.

So pause to let the host cut in. Ask for their opinion.

Make it feel like it's two smart friends having an intellectual conversation. Not a TED talk.

#3.  Do your homework

Listen to the show beforehand. See how conversations normally go and the types of questions the host normally talks about, or the things they naturally gravitate toward.

And ask the host questions about the audience to understand what they care about.

#4. Talk up the show

Make the host look good. Reference another one of their episodes or talk them or the podcast up a bit.

They'll appreciate, and they're fans will appreciate it.

BONUS #5: Be pleasant, friendly, and helpful throughout

• Make it easy to book time with you.
• Hang around after the recording and get to know the host.
• Suggest some of your friends/contacts that might be good for the show.

Make the host and listeners like you and you'll be asked to go on more podcasts, and likely get more out of the appearance.

Which of these stands out the most? 🐶🐱🐭🐹🐰🦊🐻🍉🐼🐻‍❄️🐨🐯🦁🐮🐷🐸🐵

What about? desk, chair, bed, table, chipmunk, dresser, stool, couch

What about in this image?

I imagine most of you will say the 🍉, chipmunk, and the pink shoes (I know at least one of you won't—yeah, I see you)

In 1933, German Psychiatrist, Hedwig Von Restorff, discovered that when presenting someone with a bunch of pieces of information from a single category (animals), and one that isn't (fruit), people recall the "odd one out" (🍉) much better.

That makes intuitive sense, right? As Seth Godin points out, you'll notice and remember the purple cow in the pasture way better than the brown or white ones. 

So what does this mean for marketers?

Easy, you can be clever with design. Make the thing you want people to notice and remember be visually different than the rest.

That can be your product or brand, a feature, a price option, or an ad.

Ways you can do this:

1. For physical products in stores, be like a tube of Pringles instead of another bag of potato chips.
2. For brands, choose an entirely different aesthetic than competitors, like Liquid Death's heavy metal vibe.
3. For price options, make the tier you really want people to buy visually different than the other options.
4. Comparisons, have your product compared to competitors and make them all black and white (drab) and yours in full color (exciting and noticeable).

Be as creative as you can be with this. 

Most brands play it safe and do what everyone else does. But the wild and creative stuff will make you stand out and be remembered.

Stories are powerful.

They capture our attention, and carry with them powerful lessons with enough context to help us envision how they're relevant to our lives and how to apply them.

Compare these two pieces of copy:

The first focuses on the what.

The second is a simple story that illustrates why someone should use the tutoring service. 

But imagine instead the story was:

‍"Little Johnny, a 10-year-old boy in New Hampshire, liked to ride bikes, collect pennies in his stomach, and crush cans of Liquid Death.

Oh which reminds me, I don't really like the UX of Liquid Death. I can't close the can and throw it into my bag after opening it!

Anyway, did I mention Little Johnny was not doing so well in Math class? Well, his parents Suzy and Bob, an engineer and a doctor, are deeply ashamed...blah blah tutoring blah blah he's doing well now!"

Snore, right?

Wes Kao (founder of Maven and altMBA) says to find your story's MVB (Minimum Viable Backstory). Find the perfect amount of context to set the stage—and cut the rest.

For example, that camping trip where you almost got eaten by a bear:

So tell stories in your copywriting, but cut out excess context. Your audience will be more captivated. And your message won't get lost in a sea of irrelevant details.

People hate paying for shipping. In fact, 48% of US shoppers abandon shopping carts due to the shipping costs.

The classic workaround is to offer free shipping at a threshold like $75, which pushes people to add a few more things to the cart.

BUT, if it's someone's first purchase, maybe they don't want to make a $75 risk instead of a $25 risk. So here are some other options:

1. Offer free shipping for first-time purchases

Particularly if they're buying a "sample pack." This will let them make a test purchase to see if they like it. Then a $75+ order in the future is less risky.

Of course, you'll definitely get people trying to game this by creating new accounts each time—so it's not an ideal solution.

2. Offer a "free shipping" subscription

According to a recent study, a flat-rate subscription for free shipping can boost revenue per customer by 34%. The obvious example of this is Amazon Prime.

Each order will be lower value on average, but subscribers will order more often. Over the course of a year, this nets out to more revenue.

But, you can only really do this if you have a variety of products (like Amazon) or you sell consumable products they need to keep replenishing.

3. Just bake in the price of shipping

If your product costs a decent amount, and they order relatively infrequently, just bake shipping into the cost. If I bought a mattress from Casper and they charged me $100 to ship it, I'd be quite annoyed.

Charge me $100 more for the mattress and I will likely think the bed is more comfortable—thanks to its increased perceived value.

Humans are not logical. Quite the opposite. Clever marketers know this and leverage it.

This is why marketing and behavioral sciences expert, Rory Sutherland, says to focus on "perceived value" over actual value.

Here's how you do that:

#1. Specificity

A painkiller that's for "back pain" can be more effective at relieving back pain than a generic painkiller, even if it has the exact same ingredients.

It's more effective because we believe it will be. The classic placebo effect.

#2. Cost

An expensive painkiller is more effective—again even if the ingredients are identical. (Waber et al. – 2008)

Same goes for the taste of wine. That $100 bottle will taste better than the $10 bottle—even if they're the same wine with different labels.

#3. Packaging and presentation

There's a reason why Apple invests heavily into its packaging and unboxing experience—a premium package subconsciously signals that the contents are premium.

And a glass of wine will taste better in France on your honeymoon, than from a bag on a couch by yourself on a Tuesday night.

#4. Exclusivity and scarcity

If there's something you can't have, your perceived value of it often increases. There's nothing inherently more valuable about a First Edition Charizard Pokemon card besides the fact that you don't have one, and very few others do.

This is why "limited editions" and "this is the lowest price it'll ever be" are effective.

#5. Brand storytelling

The brand TOMS used to donate a pair for every pair bought. This story of social impact increased the perceived value beyond just the physical shoe.

Many people paid more to get the good feeling of having "done the right thing" even if the shoe itself was no better..

#6. Social proof

If you're a soccer/football fan, and you know this ice cream flavour is Lionel Messi's favorite, you're going to desire it more. You'd probably even pay extra.

Or, if you know that it's the number one selling car in the world, clearly it must be pretty good and you'll be willing to pay more for it than an average-selling car.

Takeaway

This isn't about tricking people—perceived value is still value.

If someone is more satisfied after purchasing shoes because they feel good about someone in need getting a new pair of shoes, then you've enhanced their experience of shoes on a completely other level.

Or if their back pain goes away, or their wine tastes better, then the increased cost or the slight "trickery" still led to a better outcome.

Just make sure that the claims you're making are true!

Social ads (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) have a big advantage over Search, Display, and YouTube Ads.

The ads come packed with social proof—likes and comments. The more positive engagement you have on them, the better the ads will perform.

A really good ad for a good product will accumulate organic engagement—but this can take a while. And if you’ve set up your campaign targeting to exclude current customers, the chances of getting positive reviews from happy customers is slim to none.

One workaround: ask satisfied customers to like your ads and leave testimonials as comments. Here’s how:

#1. Automate an email to go out after purchase, e.g., a few days or two weeks. Adjust the timeframe based on when someone is going to be most excited about your product.

For example, if you sell a product that gives immediate benefits, like a cell phone case, they'll be most excited in the first week. But for project management software, it's gonna take them a lot longer to fall in love with it—so trigger it after a "magic moment."

#2 In your email, ask whether customers enjoy your product.

Provide two clickable options: yes or no.

Clicking “yes” sends them to a page asking them to like your ad and leave a comment. Encourage participation by offering an incentive like a coupon or store credit.

If using Facebook, here's how to grab the URL of the ad:

Clicking “no” should lead to a one-question survey asking for feedback.  

(Might as well do some customer research in the process so you can improve your product.

Important: Do this with your best-performing ads. Incentivized engagement won't turn a "meh" ad into a "WOW" ad. So start with a "WOW" ad and amplify it.

If you're older than 30, you probably remember late-night informercials for knives and exercise equipment. 

"You might pay $100. You might even pay $200! But we're selling it for just $39.99 for the next 20 minutes.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! If you order in the next 10 minutes, we'll give you a second knife, and a knife sharpener worth $20 for free." 

Here's how that worked:

1. They price anchored you at $100 or even $200.
2. $39.99 seems cheap in comparison—what a deal.
3. But they "quantity anchored" you at 1 being 39.99. Now they offer 2 for the same price!
4. Oh wait, AND a $20 knife sharpener too? I'd be crazy to not order several. 
5. For good measure, they added time pressure to get you to order right away—at 1 AM while your partner is asleep and not there to talk sense into you.

These were really effective.

We can use similar sales tactics, just in a less obvious and cringe way. 

Here's what Alex Hormozi recommends for creating effective "bonus offers" on sales calls:

Psychologically, if there’s all these bonuses, the buyer will think: “Well, the core offer has to be more valuable than all these bonuses."

And if you assign a price point to the bonuses that exceed that of the core offer, it’ll become a no-brainer—like an extra $40 knife and a $20 knife sharpener.

Everyone loves to say, "Let's run an A/B test!"

But it's actually not the right move in many cases—particularly for startups. Make sure you can answer “yes” to these 7 questions before and after running an experiment:

Before

#1. Is your hypothesis testable?

Testable: “If we change our landing page header, our CTR will increase.”

Not testable: “If we change our landing page header, site visitors will like it better.”

That’s subjective and not measurable.

#2. Have stakeholders committed to abiding by the results?

We tend to reject outcomes that contradict our beliefs (called the Semmelweis Reflex, for gross reasons). That can be a problem if an experiment’s results are at odds with HIPPOs: highest-paid people’s opinions.

So ask: Are the HIPP actually willing to change it?

#3. Is the test doable?

Be realistic about the amount of time and resources it’ll take to reach statistical significance. If you don't have high volume, it probably isn't. Use this calculator to find out

#4. How can we make sure results are reliable?

Pay attention to Twyman's Law: Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong.

Be very skeptical of the results, particularly if they're surprising.

After

#5. Are there clear cause and effect?

People shop more when it’s cold in the UK. That doesn’t mean they shop more because it’s cold. It probably has more to do with the holidays.

Correlation is not causation. Drill into the deeper reason.

#6. Have we gotten the most value out of it?

Your results could affect your market, product roadmap, future experiments, and entire growth strategy. One way to increase experiment value is to share your findings with your entire team.

#7. Are our experiments truly driving decision making at our company?

Are you just doing them to checking them off of a to-do list? Or is it actually something that's driving decision making? If not, they’re not worth the resources you’re putting into them.

And as a handy reference, here's a graphic!

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If you've never seen it, the Will It Blend? YouTube channel is one of the viral greats. For years they'd use their blenders to rip apart different everyday objects:

But what exactly makes a campaign like this spread and get 293,926,912 views? And for a boring old blender company, Blendtec, no less.

Jonah Berger (professor at the Wharton School) outlines in his book, Contagious, that we share content because of:

1. Social currency. Sharing it makes us look smart, cool, or interesting to our peers. For example: the ridiculousness of a blender tearing up a brand new iPad.
2. Triggers. A stimulus in our environment prompts us to talk about it. For example: a friend busts out their blender to make a smoothie—or mentions their breakfast.
3. Emotion. When we care, we share. Activating emotions like anger, excitement, amusement, and awe drive action more than happiness, sadness, and contentment. For example, the amusement and awe we get watching marbles get pulverized.
4. Public. Can others see that people are using or engaging with the product? It's hard to emulate the behavior of others if we can’t see it. For example, we see the millions of views on the videos.
5. Practical value. We believe it to be legitimately useful to someone—even better if it's niche and we can think of "just the right person this'll help." For example, knowing that this blender is more than enough to grind up your smoothie.
6. Story. What broader narrative can this be wrapped in? Embed ideas and products into stories that people want to tell. Make your message so integral to the narrative that they can’t tell the story without it. Like the blender that's able to rip apart a crowbar.

Contrast this instead to Blendtec making videos that simply talked about the tech specs (5 speeds, 1hp motor, etc) and showed it effortlessly make a mango smoothie.

BORING! Who cares, right?

If you want people to talk about your product, infuse your marketing campaigns with these elements to drastically increase the chance of it going viral (and driving sales).

YouTube is arguably the best social channel to grow a presence on. It's massive, it builds a ton of affinity, you generate ad revenue, and videos can get views for years (unlike a tweet).

If you don't know Ali Abdaal, he has over 4.5M subscribers on YouTube—and generated $4.6M in revenue and $2M in profit in 2022.

One of the main ways he's generated that revenue is by teaching people to grow on YouTube, here are his top 15 lessons after 6 years posting regularly:

We recently ran a market research survey for one of our clients.

We used Survey Monkey to pay for respondents from their network, who were selected based on specific demographic (age, location) and firmographic (job) criteria, given the client's limited existing audience.

Honestly, the answers were pretty bad—most were unusable.

This outcome isn't entirely surprising, given that survey participants are typically paid per completed survey—they're incentivized to race through them as quickly as possible. Same goes for incentivizing people with $25 Amazon gift cards

To address the issue, we decided to do something unusual: We added a skill testing math question at the beginning of the survey. Nothing hard, just simple addition of two 2-digit numbers.

As we expected, this caused a huge drop-off at the start. But the quality of the remaining responses improved dramatically – they were well-thought-out and highly useful. 

The working theory is that the question:

1. Weeded out those only interested in answering as fast as possible, or
2. Forced participants to briefly pause and reflect, setting a more thoughtful tone for the rest of the survey.

Either way, it significantly improved the results of the survey.

If you run incentivized surveys, consider adding some mental friction to the process.

We're naturally attracted to and influenced by people who are similar to us, or a have a shared identity that we value.

For example, if I meet someone online who is from my hometown in Canada, or is from Ireland (because I have an Irish passport), or went through YC, or studied at the same university, or has an aussie shepherd—it immediately makes me feel closer to them.

This phenomenon is called the Unity Principle. Here are four ways to leverage it:

#1. Share personal stories to build affinity‍

The founder of a fitness startup can share a personal story of struggling with their weight.

The personal story creates a sense of shared identity (past struggle with weight). Other people with similar weight control issues can see themselves in the founder's story, feel a sense of unity, and are therefore more likely to trust the exercise program and sign up for it. 

Just make sure the story is true.

#2. Highlight a cause you care about

Patagonia talks a lot about their cultural values like environmental activism, transparency,  and community:

If you value those things too, you're more likely to purchase a Patagonia jacket instead of a North Face jacket because you feel a sense of kinship with the brand.

#3. Loyalty programs or "group name"

Raise up and label your best customers with loyalty programs and special perks. 

Even better if you give members a special name. Like how Lady Gaga fans are called Little Monsters, or how Ship30for30 cohort members are called "shippers." If you give people a label they'll feel more connected to each other—and to you.

#4. Lean into geographical/cultural unity

Ryan Reynolds goes by the handle VancityReynolds on social media. "Vancity" is the nickname for Vancouver. 

I'm confident that due to this, Vancouverites (and Canadians broadly) have a stronger affinity for him because he proudly wears his Vancouver-ness. An easy way to get millions of people on his side without upsetting anyone in the process. 

To learn more about the Unity Principle and more pre-suasive techniques, Katelyn Bourgoin created a great free, email course on how to Pre-sell with Pre-suasion.

Nearly six years ago, before Substack, we had a client at our agency who helped creators offer premium, members-only content on their WordPress sites. 

Their budget was limited, and the total market was relatively small: WordPress creators who monetized their audience with memberships. So ads and content were not a good fit.

We opted to grow their business using cold email.

But as you know, almost all cold emails are terrible and instantly deleted.

You know when they're not? When they:

1. Look like regular emails from people you know
2. Talk about solving a huge pain point you actually have

For #1, we wrote in a casual tone. For #2, we did our homework. 

We paid for scrapers and virtual assistants to go through lists of WordPress sites that sold memberships and label them based on the tool they were using. We did research into the top objections people had about each tool—likely their biggest headaches as creators.

In our emails, we called out those headaches and highlighted how our client's tool would relieve them. 

Another common objection was the headache of migrating. So we offered to do it for free.

Our response rate was nearly 80%. And we booked tons of sales demos.

To make cold emails work, do your homework, and speak to your prospects' biggest headaches that you know they have.

If you’re struggling to prioritize the content you create, you probably don’t have a well-defined content center of gravity. That's the core element that the rest of your content strategy is built around.

Defining your center of gravity (COG) helps inform the direction of your strategy.

Below are a few different COGs, plus companies built around them.

Keywords (SEO): Companies create content around the keywords their audience searches for. That typically includes blogs, white papers, and FAQs.

This is the most traditional COG—which also means a lot of people think of it as the default content strategy. But growth agency CEO Ethan Smith advises holding off on SEO unless you have 1,000+ visits a day from non-SEO sources and 1,000+ referring domains. Otherwise, reaching SEO success is a slow grind. 

Example: HubSpot has written content about nearly every possible keyword related to sales or marketing.

Use-case content: Think customer stories, webinars, templates, and other formats homing in on user pain points.

The goal is to provide solutions to those pain points with your content. This strategy is often informed by speaking to customers and determining common problems.

Example: Besides creating guides and templates, the productivity software company Scribe also runs a Slack group to understand user needs. 

Podcast: Repurposing content is the name of the game with a podcast as your COG.

Using this strategy, you might turn interview transcripts into blog posts or newsletters, and publish short audio/video clips on social media. You leverage smart things said on the pod. 

Example: The media company Testimonial Hero doesn’t rely on full-time writers to create content. It repurposes snippets from its podcast as YouTube videos and LinkedIn ads.

–––

These aren’t the only possible COGs out there. Find a core format that's ideal for your product/industry, and use that to inform how you build and distribute your content.

Runners end races with a sprint finish, getting faster as they approach the finish line. The chance of them quitting plummets.

This is an example of the goal gradient effect. We become more invested in completing a task when we think the end is getting closer.

It’s yet another reason why reducing uncertainty during the checkout process is so important. If a shopper doesn’t know how long it’ll take to complete a purchase, they’ll miss that final sprint-to-the-finish-line burst of investment. 

And be more likely to abandon their shopping cart.

The easiest way to leverage this effect is to display a progress indicator during your signup or checkout process, such as the percentage of steps completed, the number of steps left, or a checklist. That way, shoppers know exactly how long until they can sit back and celebrate their new purchase.

Here are two examples, from Adobe and HelloFresh (I think HelloFresh's specificity is better):

You can also use encouraging copy before and during the signup/checkout process to let users know how close they are to finishing. For instance:

• “Signing up will only take three minutes.”
• “You’re halfway done.”
• “Almost there! Just one more question…”
• “Last step: Where should we send X?”

If you're on Shopify, you can use an app like iCart for this.

There’s a reason Skittles wants us to taste the rainbow instead of seeing it.

Skittles’ famous slogan “Taste the rainbow” is a great example of using a sensory experience to make you want some sugary treats right away.

Imagine instead of encouraging you to taste the rainbow, Skittles said “See the rainbow.” 

You probably wouldn’t be as tempted to impulse-buy a bag.

The reason? In ads, some senses are more likely than others to drive faster conversions. That’s according to a study led by researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of Washington.

• Proximal senses like touch and taste lead to earlier purchases.
• Distal senses like sight and sound lead to more delayed purchases.

In one of the study’s experiments, participants saw fictional restaurant reviews that emphasized either: 1) taste/touch, or 2) sound/vision. The taste/touch participants were significantly more likely to book reservations closer to the present date.

In another experiment, participants read ad copy for a festival that highlighted either taste (“You will taste the amazing flavors…”) or sound (“You will listen to the amazing sounds…”).

People who read the taste version had higher interest in attending the festival that weekend, whereas sound folks were more likely to be interested in going to the festival…next year.

Takeaway: If you want your ads to drive immediate sales, create a touch- or taste-based sensory world in them. Either with words or imagery.