📝 33 Quick Thoughts From The Past Months 🧠

In no particular order!

• It's a gloomy period, you’re not alone, sales cycles 2x longer, deals 2x smaller

• Over-nurture existing customers. Easier to make business and impact from existing clients than perpetually chasing Net New

• Net New? Cherish every lead, email, MQL. They're people with true pains and JTBD, not just numbers. Remind yourself this

• It's usually still harder to sell a product than build a product

• Got problems? Sales solves (almost) everything

• Willingness to pay/willingness to use = almost always your riskiest assumptions (esp. now that everyone's building)

• Attribution is so broken (multi-device + cookie policies make it 🤕) even though your models are telling you otherwise

• This playbook: content> promote on paid> grab email> nurture> turn into SQL then close, is becoming too expensive

• Paid channels = exploding costs (even with real time bidding)

• Is organic reach dead-ish on all SoMe platforms?

• SEO never dies (even though we announce it’s death every 6 months)

• Email marketing never dies (Lindy Effect)

• Stop changing strat/tactics every 6 months coz it’s not paying off yet. You’re not giving them enough time to perform

• Consistently create content that’s authentic & not too polished (real). this drastically counter the GenAI content wave. Go punk or go home

• In-person channels making a huge comeback, massive appetite

• Channels I’m excited about (communities, substacks, founder-led content, livestreams for b2c, physical events, offline marketing)

• Long-termism wins

• Deep work = a competitive advantage

• Basic human psychology still and always applies. We are driven by fear + hope + comfort

• GenAI is turning content into a commodity… user experience and ‘Good taste’ are everything

• Audience/community, capital, data, scale are the only moats left

• Convenience decides almost everything your clients/prospects do

• People’s attention spans are not dying (long form content never did so good), you’re just bad at captivating it

• Keep running 5 second tests

• Flip your wow…how many steps/time/actions do you require users to do before they get the WOW! of your product/service? Reduce it by 90%

• We need much more Via Negativa = “the art of what not to do” = not what I can ADD to improve something (features, campaigns, tasks) but rather what I can REMOVE (remind weekly)

• The pareto principle (80/20 power law) is a fractal law = also a 64/4 rule: 4% gets you 64% of results and so forth. Find that 4%

• Most founders, marketers, product owners (bit less) and commercial people are still not financially literate enough beyond CAC and CLTV (margins, ebitda, contributions to overhead, capex, etc etc)

• GenAI is not just hype, you just don't get it (https://lnkd.in/eqmSEPem)

• Customer journeys = messy messy messy

• Start running synthetic customer data with (Synthetic Users)

• The higher you go the less you know. Can't run a business if you don’t spend time in the trenches/details and even more time talking to customers (weekly)

What a time to be alive