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:

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

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone

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

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

Life is crazy. Today is a good day to stop and reflect

10 simple questions that CHANGED my life

(startup life, personal life)

Here they are:

Q: Can you really control that?

Smart people know what they can and cannot control

If you're living in the past, you're nostalgic
If you're living in the future, you're anxious
If you're living in the present, you're at peace

Q: Did you start today with a victory?

Starting every day with a victory sets you up to win

I don't care what it is:

- Make your bed
- Make a wonderful coffee
- Hug your wife or children

No such thing as a small win. It's a win!

You'll win more, if you start winning early

Q: What are you optimizing for?

#MFSA
1. Money
2. Freedom
3. Stability
4. Ability

The world rewards those who are focused

Perfectly prioritize

Are you being optimistic?

Guaranteed: more luck when you're optimistic

Marketing, Content, & Audience

Clubhouse highlights from @Julian, @shl, @mkobach, & @tobydoyhowell:

When building an audience, optimize for 3 things:

Volume
➡ How many followers?

Affinity
➡ How much do they prefer your tweet to the same one from someone else?

Recursive power
➡ How influential are your followers toward your goals?

Here's how to do marketing:

People follow to be entertained.

Entertain people & remind them that you exist.

You'll be top of mind when they want to sell an e-book or are frustrated by a slow check-out.

Don't make marketing more complicated than it is.

Forget funnels.

@mkobach just wants @Fast to be present to more people & knows 2M > 1M.

@tobydoyhowell just wants people to see MB everywhere & realize that the Brew is inevitable

Fact: people are more relatable than brands

Building your company around a personal brand(s) is a competitive advantage.

@Fast encourages & even helps people to build their personal brands

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

The best marketing affects a human's behavior.

It leverages psychology to impact people's perceptions and decisions.

Understand it and you'll influence consumer's buying decisions.

Use these 12 psychology tips to influence your audience 🧵

1. Theory of reciprocity

As humans, we’re more likely to do something for someone after they’ve done something for us.

When you consistently provide value to your audience -- they’re more likely to reciprocate by supporting you.

This builds brand advocates.

2. Too many choices

Too many choices means too much confusion.

This affects a consumer's ability to make a decision and demotivates them from doing so.

Reduce your options.

Increase your conversion rate.

3. Decoy Effect

Perspective influences decisions.

With the decoy effect, you alter the consumer’s perspective by making the highest ticket item look like a deal.

Ex:

Small Popcorn: $3
Medium Popcorn: $6.50
Large Popcorn: $7

The large feels like a great deal.

4. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

This phenomenon is when you see something for the first time then feel like you start seeing it everywhere.

Once you become aware of something you start to look for it unconsciously.

This then convinces you that it really is everywhere.

1 - Why do I care about new customers when my industry obsesses with catering to best customers via omnichannel theory?

Good question!

It goes back almost 30 years.

2 - Ok, I was working at Lands' End in 1991. One of your Circulation Managers had a challenge. She had two segments of customers she mailed, and one she didn't. She knew how the mailed segments performed, but needed an estimate for the segment she didn't mail.

3 - Estimating segment performance for an un-mailed segment was easy ... I had done this work at the Garst Seed Company in the late 1980s. So I performed the exercise for her.

4 - And my results were accurate enough that I was asked to analyze other issues.

We had a division that mailed 2 catalogs in a quarter. What would happen to the two catalogs if a third catalog was mailed?

I recommended a strategy ... an A/B test.

5 - Say the first catalog generated $5,000,000 in sales and the second catalog generated $5,000,000 in sales. What would happen to the 2 catalogs if a 3rd catalog was mailed, and how much would the 3rd catalog generate?