Marketing isn’t a scam

Marketing makes change happen. Marketing makes your creations known

I'll share some tactics & frameworks I use

How to get lucky in marketing in 2021:

I built communities that created 83m new customers in 2020 with this marketing framework

I'm curious your thoughts

A startup marketing manifesto:

Connect the disconnected

1. Find people who want to pursue a goal (ex: new immigrants in the US, learn tennis etc)
2. Accelerate them

This will do more for your business than you can imagine

Customers need to feel lucky. Like the chosen ones

Lucky to be a part of the community. Lucky to buy the product. Lucky to be a part of your story

If you nail the “luckiness” feeling, you can drive your marketing costs to zero

How to jumpstart & structure community:

- Masterclass for X
- Clubhouse for X
- Q&A platforms
- Small virtual events
- Gaming events
- Text your community’s leader
- etc.

Have a design aesthetic. Own it

Make sure your niche is in love with it

Daring design aesthetics pay dividends

Mental models are the secret to making the best out of the world around you

But there is a million of them...

A guide to my favorite mental models:

Marketing

Luck Surface Area:

“When you do something you’re excited about you will naturally pull others into your orbit.

The more people with whom you share your passion, the more who will be pulled into your orbit.”

Orbits are powerful in marketing, business or life

Sales

Hunting whales vs flies:

5 types of sales prospects

1) Whales
2) Elephants
3) Deers
4) Rabbits
5) Flies

How can you hunt 1,000 whales, 10,000 elephants, 100,000 deers, 1,000,000 rabbits or 10,000,000 flies?

Who do you want to hunt? Why?

(no animals were harmed writing that last tweet)

It's time for a non-hunting mental model for this

Any one have ideas?

Military

Winning Hearts and Minds:

“In which one side seeks to prevail not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to sway supporters of the other side.”

Key: if you speak to people's hearts and the minds, you are speaking to human nature

When I was 17, I was in a school shooting. It was traumatic

I'm convinced that overcoming fear is the secret to winning at startups, business and life:

Here's some tips and lessons on overcoming FEAR:

The greatest productivity tip of all time:

It isn't to drink coffee or get 8 hours of sleep or use Notion

It is conquering your fears. Period.

Life is too short for fears

"Adjusted for the subjective increase in how fast time passes, life is half over by 23 or 24. Don't waste time."
h/t @samaltman

Time is ticking

Beat your "amygdala"

Amygdala = the part of your brain that registers all your fear

When you have an experience that creates fear, it gets "coded" into your brain

For the rest of your life, your amygdala, is tainted with your past experience

Arm wrestle your amygdala and win

Rejection sucks. But it's one of the most useful ways to refine your craft

Mindset shift: use fear to learn & motivate, not run away & demotivate

Here’s the story of how I (almost) lost everything building and selling my last company Islands to WeWork

I’ve never told this story publicly. Sharing it on Twitter because sharing is caring

Here we go…...

In June 2016, I was having tea in SF and realized “group chat is the new social network”

My thinking: everything would be verticalized

You’d have group chats around finance, around gaming, around work etc.

People want fluid, spontaneous communities/groups, not newsfeeds

I had previously sold a company. I created a short slide pitch deck

I raised $2m from some of the world’s best investors on an idea. From first pitch to money in the bank in 45 days

We had no product. No prototype. No users. Just a crazy idea

SF is sometimes magical like that. It was a privilege

We were off to the races

We built the product. We decided to focus on colleges

The idea: open up Islands on your campus, see group chats around you, form communities and create relationships

It was like Slack for communities. Focused on college

Anyone else love a useful how-to?

I put together a mega-thread of mega-valuable how-tos that can transform your startup, career or life

All you have to do is read these 10 how-tos:

How to write a cold email:

- Be short
- Humanize it. Record a 60s selfie video
- Write a cold DM instead of a cold email if possible
- Never follow up by saying “just following up”

How to write copy that isn’t boring (and that sells):

- Don’t write copy, write stories
- Can be long or short, but must take you for a ride
- Focus entire story on the problem the customer has
- Share credibility
- Use inviting, warm words
- Create a clear call-to-action

How to come up with compelling startup ideas:

- Framework #1: X for Y (Robinhood for Canada)
- Framework #2: Anti-incumbent (Anti-Spotify, Anti-Amazon)
- Framework #3: Unbundling of X (Reddit, Facebook etc)
- Framework #4: Ask your community, they’ll tell you

How to sell a company:

- Spend 5% of your energy building allies at incumbents
- Get them excited about what you’re doing
- Make them feel invested and jealous
- Get them to ask if you’d be open to selling
- Profit $$

I've seen this strategy work for $10k-10B size deals

How To Promote Your Stuff On The Internet: A Thread

After all the recent online events/conventions, I realised that there are a lot of people who don't understand how to maximise their promotion potential, so here's a quick, basic thread on how to do that!! 1/13

1. POST YOUR LINKS EVERYWHERE. People are lazy and want to do things as easily as possible. Put your shop/website/patreon link in your Twitter bio, in your pinned tweet, in your IG bio, make links easy to find on your site, put your links everywhere, please oh my god. 2/13

If you're making a post talking about your shop, put a link to your shop in the tweet (or in the tweet below if you're worried about algorithms). Say "shop link below!". Make it as easy as possible to find your shop! The majority of people will not go looking for the link!! 3/13

2. POST YOUR EMAIL EVERYWHERE. Someone looking to hire you isn't always going to want to DM you, and if they can't easily find a way to contact you, they'll just skip you. Put it in your bio!! Put it in your pinned tweet!!! Put it in the header of your website!!! 4/13

3. Related: make a website. If you don't want to make a portfolio website, then make an Instagram or Tumblr where your work is clearly on display. People are lazy. People don't want to scroll through memes to find your work to see if they want to hire you or buy from you. 5/13

Why digital advertising is broken and how we’re fixing it: (thread)

1/ Attention is a scarce asset. Yet, today’s advertising platforms are built on a model of interruption, forcing brands between you and your intention.

2/ Though ads are everywhere, people don’t trust them. Study after study shows, when you pay to reach people in an interruptive way, less than 5% pay attention.

3/ In today’s interruption-based ad model, the more money you spend, the more people you annoy. Advertisers are trying to solve this problem by spending more money and showing more ads but that only makes it worse.

4/ Ads interrupt us everywhere, leading to more people tuning them out. This is not a content problem. This is not a targeting problem. It’s a context problem.

Marketing 101

How to build a brand strategy from 0-1: a guide for startups

// 🧵

Reminder: brand strategy should be done WITH your Head of product and Head of Ops vs presented to them.

This creates buy-in and alignment on why this is important from day 1.

Brand strategy is NOT a marketing plan.

Brand strategy is WHY you will win.

Marketing plan is HOW: levers you will pull to hit your goals.

Step 1: Review Competitive Landscape

Do tear downs.
Understand leading value props.
Interview users of your competition to understand what’s working, what’s not.

Know who the players are and where they play vs where you will play.

Step 1b: Create your “ONLY” statement

Complete this sentence

We are the only brand that does x, y and/ or z.

Are you better, faster, cheaper? What makes you different and how would you say that efficiently.