BC STARTUP
Saved by @ThomassRichards

People who want to switch on growth for their startups or marketing professionals ask me what to read to get their thinking up. Here's a thread of some books and blogs I read

 When you read these, it's important to focus on the principles and not the exact strategy. Copying and pasting what someone else has done is not a guarantee that it'll work
Books:

1. Nir Eyal - Hooked: How to build habit-forming products.

Nir writes about the psychology of human behaviour with digital and physical products and shares real-life examples of how you can engage, nudge and encourage your customers to keep using your product
2. Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Ryan writes how boring simple advertising is and what growth hackers need to do/take advantage of to be truly unique and to switch things up
3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.

Gabriel and Justin focus on channels you can lever to acquire and retain customers. This book is a guide if you have no clue how to approach customer acquisition. It's an inexhaustive list tbh
4. Seth Godin - Permission Marketing

The OG Seth Godin writes about how to market to potential customers by taking permission. People now know when they're being sold stuff and your marketing tactics are probably boring and not working
5. Seth Godin -All Marketers Are Liars

Seth writes again about how marketers can craft stories that appeal to different groups of people. Stories are important and people often tell themselves stories before they buy products or in this case, sign up for your startup
You should actually just read everything Seth Godin has written. Books and blog here

https://t.co/AcyDXS4W1d
The Growth Handbook from Intercom. Intercom brings together leaders from the world's largest companies sharing advice on how to grow your business. An absolute great read

https://t.co/bKVPiMF6IN
Now, to a list of Blogs. There's not a lot of Africa-focused stuff as you might have seen in this list. Again, focus on principles and adapt them to your situations, not copy and paste.
1. My Blog. I write strategy, answer questions, go in-depth on channels. There's easily 20 blog posts here. I hope to do at least 12 this year starting today :)

https://t.co/8FVsQoKRCf
2. Hiten Shah. Hiten is the founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and Quicksprout. He writes a lot about the SaaS business so if you're building a subscription service, you should read Hiten

https://t.co/KSVxd40uRE
3. Andrew Chen. Andrew is ex-VP of Growth at Uber. Andrew writes about network effects, building teams and a lot about cycles of growth

https://t.co/8QdX2TpT82
Andrew's most-awesome article for me is this. Even though I don't like this hacker term :)

https://t.co/Zu75T80pBG
OKDork by Noah Kagan. Noah is Chief Sumo at Sumo Group, led growth at Mint and worked at Facebook and Intel.

Noah writes a lot of actionable advice for growing waitlists, building brands, outreach and partnerships, etc.

https://t.co/G1KZEF3pDQ
My favourite social media scheduling tool, Buffer, has an amazing resource. They've got books, blog posts, video tutorials and a ton of stuff if you need to get better at social media and digital marketing. An absolutely insightful read every time

https://t.co/fh0oJMBkCK
VC Firm First Round has Review. The best thing about Review is that it's written together with people actually doing marketing stuff every day of their lives. Here's the PR & marketing category

https://t.co/UGPUAPLB2e
Elizabeth Yin, GP at Hustle Fund and ex-500Startups partner writes building startups, marketing funnels all of that good stuff for people who want to build technology companies

https://t.co/q5CbmDYgPw
Growth Hackers' Growth Studies.

Community for growth people put together these growth studies from companies like Stripe, Tinder and AirBnB. Again, the principles matter the most.

https://t.co/itX2ene5N8
A random interesting article about Chamath, who used simple growth tactics to explode Facebook's userbase and achieve higher retention. Anyone building anything social should actually just copy and paste this :)

https://t.co/v17DxE6Oa2
I like reading NFX because they're always posting secrets lmao

https://t.co/lyz0ywD39E
Almost forgot Brian Balfour who was ex-VP of Growth at Hubspot. Imagine building stuff for marketing people and capturing them best.

https://t.co/SCeVi85orW
Connie Chan, Silicon Valley's China whisperer writes about e-commerce and social in China and SE Asia. I think that's the future of technology anyways so read Connie if you want to predict the future of Instagram

https://t.co/dCMs5cUb6U
Yemi Johnson, former hotelsng COO. Yemi never write since 2019 but we forgive him. Read anything anybody from marketing at hotelsng writes sha. That's an industry rule-of-thumb. I don't make these rules.

https://t.co/RRZq0cmV0f
Nneka Ngene writes teardowns of some of your favourite Nigerian startups here. She's done Paystack, Kuda, Piggyvest and a ton of stuff on marketing channels. I can't seem to find her handle

https://t.co/vXsoe3ltvP
@ebose__ writes stuff on SaaS, Conversion Rate Optimisation and SEO

https://t.co/IwHcAlkb7K
You should absolutely subscribe to @oluremi_x's newsletter. If you've heard of Naturalgirlwigs, she did that

https://t.co/z6C0YjmSNs
There's a growth community for Africans on Telegram. You can message @pheekayo our supreme leader for the link
After reading all these things sha, the best way to learn is by doing the work and making mistakes. Goodluck everyone :)

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Everyone rowing in one direction.

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Barrett O'Neill
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We've been told having a job is safer than entrepreneurship.

But that's a lie.

10 reasons to bet on yourself:

More value capture:

As an employee or an owner, income is a function of value creation.

The only difference?

Some (or most) of an employee's value flows upstream to ownership.

Owners capture ALL of the value they create, and even more from their team's output.

Income diversification:

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- economy
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Low downside:

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10 years ago, Netflix spent $0 on original content.

This year:

Netflix: $11B
Apple: $6B
Disney: $1B
+ amazon, hulu HBO etc.
=
$20B+

Here's a crazy startup idea to take a swing at this $20B+ content piñata. 👇 Here's a quick business plan 🤔

The idea ---> @ycombinator for Content

Let's give it a made up name : Zeta Studios

It is a new accelerator model for getting shows & movies made.

= give engineer duos money ($120k), coaching, & give them 3 months to get ready for a Demo Day in front of a room of investors.

Zeta = give storytelling duos money ($120k), coaching, & 3 mo to get a sizzle reel ready for Demo Day w/ buyers from netflix, amazon etc.

Why now? ---> This wouldn't work 10 years ago.

Demand for content has skyrocketed, but supply has not kept up.

You have infinite niches (action, comedy, reality, etc)

I mean there's a f*cking hit show about cleaning your house!

People are CHUGGING content of every flavor.

Plus areas like india, indonesia, africa etc. now have 2B+ new internet users streaming video

There's no such thing as "too much content"

The same way YC is replacing university for the most ambitious engineers. Let's replace film school for the best creatives.
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An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.


These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)


and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.


They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!


They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
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@franciscodeasis https://t.co/OuQaBRFPu7
Unfortunately the "This work includes the identification of viral sequences in bat samples, and has resulted in the isolation of three bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are now used as reagents to test therapeutics and vaccines." were BEFORE the


chimeric infectious clone grants were there.https://t.co/DAArwFkz6v is in 2017, Rs4231.
https://t.co/UgXygDjYbW is in 2016, RsSHC014 and RsWIV16.
https://t.co/krO69CsJ94 is in 2013, RsWIV1. notice that this is before the beginning of the project

starting in 2016. Also remember that they told about only 3 isolates/live viruses. RsSHC014 is a live infectious clone that is just as alive as those other "Isolates".

P.D. somehow is able to use funds that he have yet recieved yet, and send results and sequences from late 2019 back in time into 2015,2013 and 2016!

https://t.co/4wC7k1Lh54 Ref 3: Why ALL your pangolin samples were PCR negative? to avoid deep sequencing and accidentally reveal Paguma Larvata and Oryctolagus Cuniculus?
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HORANADU ANNAPOORNESHWARI, CHIKMAGALUR (KAR)
#bharatmandir

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Maharshi Agastya is believed to have done pratishtha here.

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Taking pity, Devi appeared as Annapoorna and relieved everyone.
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Shiva went everywhere and asked for food but the skull was never full. He finally came here and Maa Annapoorna filled the skull with grains and reversed Shiva’s curse.

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