Writing Emails to Professor; Important tips & Samples for your consideration

Every year, Profs get several emails from students & difficult to accept all. You want to ensure yours is concise & deserve a response. This thread will provide insight & some samples you can use.

1/n

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.

Marketing 101

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

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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.

SaaS Marketing: Getting your first 10 and 1000 paying customers

So you've identified a problem and built a SaaS product. What's next?

Finding customers of course!

Thread 👇

👉 What is SaaS marketing?

Marketing is the set of activities you perform or strategies you execute that help build awareness of the problem you solve and the solution you provide in the minds of your target audience.

Lol, that's a boring definition.

Marketing is when you tweet, when you post on LinkedIn, when you wear your company's branded t-shirt before going on a podcast or video, when you run Google or Facebook ads, or if you write an article answering the specific pain points and questions faced by your target audience.

In the context of SaaS marketing, what you need to understand deeply are

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Lifetime value (LTV)

If you are selling a $50/mo SaaS product, should you spend time or money equivalent to $300 to acquire 1 customer?

It depends on LTV:CAC ratio.

If your average customer stays with you for 1 year, then $300 is a perfectly fine CAC.

Marketing experts have figured out that having a 3:1 ratio of your LTV:CAC is perfect, but in the early days you just need to know whether you are spending less than you are earning.