Marketing is the ultimate meta skill.

Lifehack: Most people are awful at marketing.

Flying is accidentally the best ever environment for DEEP work and reflection.

Writers like @rickygervais do their best work on airplanes.

Here's 6 reasons why.

THREAD...

What looks like a bug - can often be a feature.

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

The restrictions we face on airplanes is what makes the experience so liberating.

AIRPLANE FEATURE 1 - HIGH EXIT COSTS

You can't find any escapes.

If you try to escape, you face death.

Negative incentives are built into the system.

"Incentives are a super power." - Charlie Munger

AIRPLANE ADVANTAGE 2 - NO INPUTS

There's no newsfeeds to refresh. No emails to reply to.

It's like knowing your heroin dealer is in a coma.

Boredom is built into the system.

Your monkey mind can't access dopamine - so it starts creating its own.

It is a distraction-free environment:

1. No socialising - You don't know anyone. No small talk.

2. No sound inputs - The engine acts as white noise.

3. No visual inputs - The seating structure means you see barely anybody.

If I had to give a lecture series on marketing, here's 11 points I'd include:

1. Data is like protein:

It’s valuable - but it shouldn’t be your *only* input.

If all your decisions are guided by A/B tests, you’ll eventually end up with a porn site.

2. The infinite ROI skill stack:

A. Understand how people work - Lindy.

B. Understand platforms + culture - Ever-changing.

Live in the barbell.

3. The best marketers are open source for the *first time ever*

• You can visit ad libraries
• You can sign up to newsletters
• You can see the copy on their website

There's no centralised database like Github - but it's there for the resourceful

4. Copy or reverse-engineer

A. If you want to do good marketing, just copy the greats.

B. If you want to do great marketing, reverse engineer the principles behind great marketing.

Warning: You will then be copied.

5. Think with headlines first

Mr. Beast has full time staff who's sole job is to write headlines for YouTube videos.

If the headline is good, they then make the video.

This is the inverse of making the headline fit the story.

Think of distribution before creation.

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.

4 Learning phases:

1. Unconscious incompetence - "I don't know how bad I am"

2. Conscious incompetence - "This sucks. I know how bad I am"

3. Conscious competence - "I can do this if I focus"

4. Unconscious competence - "I don't remember the last 10 minutes of driving my car"

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 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

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.

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.