Marketing is the ultimate meta skill.

Lifehack: Most people are awful at marketing.

THREAD: The top 0.1% of marketing mental models.

Compressing a 6-year career into the best 8 ideas:

1. Contrast Is A Drug

• Rolls Royce stopped exhibiting at car shows

• They started exhibiting at private aircraft shows

• "If you've been looking at jets all afternoon, a £300,000 car is an impulse buy. It's like putting the sweets next to the counter" - @rorysutherland

2. The Best Content Involves A Red Pill

• "If you want to build a good podcast, following, or blog - you've gotta create your red pill"

• Hand society something they're not hearing anywhere

• Society says blue pill. Your content says red pill.

(@finnscave via @ShaanVP)

• The irony is that the red pill metaphor is itself a red pill - once you see it, you can never unsee it.

• The best content creators on the internet all have their own red pill, which makes their content so enticing.

E.g. @jockowillink's red pill:

• Society's Blue Pill: Writing is a boring activity from school

• @david_perell's Red Pill: Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career

THREAD: The top 0.1% of ideas I’ve stumbled upon on the internet.

The rabbit holes (without the distractions).

1. Directional Arrows of Progress

“Study the undeniable arrows of progress.” - @wolfejosh

• The future is kinda like a crossword puzzle.

• Nobody is going to spell out for you - but clues exist.

• Wolfe uses the trend line of history as clues for the future.

• E.g. Look at this directional arrow of progress

• Every time the computer gets more powerful, smaller and closer to our bodies.

• Wolfe used this trend line to bet that Brain-Machine interfaces will be huge and started funding companies in the space.

2. The Cobra Effect

”When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to become a measure” - @G_S_Bhogal

• British colonialists tried to reduce the snake population in India.

• They offered bounties for dead cobras with cash given out to the killers

• The incentives back-fired...

• The local population started breeding cobras & killing them.

• When the government discovered this, the reward program was scrapped.

• The cobra breeders then released their $0 snakes into the street, making the problem much worse.

THREAD: 15 of the most useful razors and rules I've found.

Rules of thumb that simplify decisions.

Bezos' Razors:

• If unsure what action to take, let your 80-year-old self make it.

• If unsure who to work with, pick the person that has the best chances of breaking you out of a 3rd world prison.

Skinner's Law:

• If procrastinating on an item, you only have 2 options:

1. Make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it.

2. Make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.

Luck Razor:

• If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.

I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix.

In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.

Bragging Razor:

• If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it’s half what they claim.

• If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it’s double what they claim.

The map is not the terrain.

Josh Waitzkin might be the most INTERESTING person alive.

He doesn't have Twitter. And he barely uses the internet.

I've compiled my favorite 5 MENTAL MODELS of his below.

THREAD...

WAITZKIN MODEL 1 - DEPTH OVER WIDTH

His life so far:

1. Chess prodigy + National champ

2. 2x world champion in Tai Chi push hands

3. The 1st black belt in Jiu-Jitsu under Marcelo Garcia (GOAT)

4. He's now in an unknown ocean town mastering surfing + advising elite investors

The Waitzkin paradox:

He's achieved more WIDTH across disciplines in 43 years than most could in 100 lives

How?

His obsession with DEPTH over WIDTH.

His life is the testimony to deep work and singular focus.

He spends 5-10 years of his life dedicated to each craft

Even when he approaches a new discipline, he goes for DEPTH within the DEPTH

E.g. Chess

Most just play countless games

Instead, Josh insists on having only 3 pieces on the board - King & Pawn vs King

He drills micro positions until he understands them from first principles

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times” - Bruce Lee

Waitzkin's theory is that once you've understood one thing so deeply in the discipline - you understand the principles

You can then copy & paste them

We've used "seller financing" on two self storage deals in the past year.

And it raised our cash on cash return by 20%+.

And lowered the amount of capital we needed by $500k.

Here's a THREAD about a deal of mine and how this magical debt structure can work.

👇👇

My method is simple. In the late stages of negotiation I submit two offers:

One at a lower price.

And one at the exact price the seller wants but with him holding back 10-20% of the purchase price in the form of a 2nd mortgage (with a second position to your bank loan).

Contrary to popular belief seller financing rarely includes the seller holding back 70-80% and acting as your bank.

Two reasons:

#1 most have some debt on the property.

#2 most want most of their money now.

Have you heard the saying:

"you name the price and i'll name the terms?"

This is a case of that situation exactly.

Lets paint a picture here:

Last week I was negotiating with a seller on a property in a small western PA town.

Not many interested buyers so I knew I had some leverage.

His asking price was $4.5MM. I wanted to pay $4.2M.

After a week or two and a lot of back and forth I found his lowest number.

How to scale your business in 30 days

(If you are making below $1M in revenue)

//THREAD//

**disclaimer**

This thread has nothing to do with marketing OR sales.

There are way better threads and more qualified individuals who can help you.

This is for those who are strong at marketing and sales but weak at the operations side of things.

**disclaimer cont.**

This thread is mostly going to benefit the CEOs.

The visionaries.

Your strength is crafting the vision for the company, selling that vision, and continuously innovating your vision.

Read through this though so you understand what you need.

Craft your vision for the future of your business.

If you have not already done this for 2021, answer the questions on this Google Doc and then come back to this

Find an integrator

You have no business working IN your business.

Find someone who will.

Someone who can take your ideas and put them into action is the most valuable asset you can have when looking to scale.

An integrator will help double your business at a minimum.

I promised threads about recruiting for the next week. Here's the first one on referrals. In growth/marketing speak: referrals are your organic growth, inbound is your brand, and outbound/sourcing is your ad spend. You want to growth-hack your referrals. Here's how. 1/n

2/ Referrals (people on your team referring candidates into your recruiting pipeline) is great because it scales with your org size. They also convert higher since one of their friends is trying to convince them to join, plus they are generally not interviewing at many companies.

3/ The main disadvantage is that they tend to re-enforce your current team makeup. So if you have a diverse team, referrals will continue that diversity, but if you do not, you'll be entrenching your existing makeups which can have some real cons.

4/ A common tool for incentivizing referrals is the referral bonus (the coolest version of which is in equity IMO, although $ works well too), but I think you can do a lot more by leveraging process (referral parties) and culture (creating real pride about your referral culture).

5/ Referral parties are about making a game out of referrals by (virtually) locking 2+ teams in a room for 60 minutes and asking them them to go all out putting together a referral list. Here's how to do it.

1/ One of the best things I did in 2020 was to join a growth marketing program called @growclass

I’d seen it hover around online, I saw some friends talking about it. But I thought, wow, that looks great but it’s too expensive for me at the moment.

[continue thread ...]

2/ Then I kept coming back and getting more nervous because the more I looked at it the more I wanted to join.

It finally came to a point where I felt an irresistible urge to join the program. And I remember I was on the landing page 10 minutes before the program closed.

3/ And I immediately thought to myself: “I need to learn how to make people interested in career coaching feel like Growclass made me feel just now”.

4/ Then I tried to think about it as an investment. “If Growclass helps me gain 10 more students over the next 12 months, it will pay for itself.”

5/ Well things have changed significantly since then.

I was inspired by others to raise my prices significantly. Now my prices are triple what they were when I first started (and waaaay undercharging).

But the copywriting and website tear downs have made a big change for me.

1/

Bruce Greenwald EPV valuation:

Get a cup of coffee.

Today I will help you understand the Earnings power value framework and how you can implement it in your valuation analysis.

@contrarianEPS @10kdiver
@FI_InvestIndia @Dinesh_Sairam

2/

Before proceeding, let me tell u a thing. We make two assumptions when using this approach. Those are

1. Current profits are sustainable.

2. No growth (More about this later)

Let's get started.

3/

Imagine, you have 50 lakhs of cash. You invested 30 lakhs into bonds, gold, real estate, and crypto. You plan to invest the balance of 20 lakhs into a business.

4/

An owner of a food business in your town planning to sell his biz for 15 lakhs as he was about to retire. You thought to buy that biz.

Looking at the accounts, you have understood that the biz is making 2 lakhs profits yearly.

5/

As an investor, you demand a minimum of 10% yield from the biz.

Why? Simple. The risk-free govt bond yield is trading at 6%. Since you are taking some risks, you demand an additional 4% return.