Marketing is the ultimate meta skill.

Lifehack: Most people are awful at marketing.

More from George Mack

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.

George Mack
@george__mack

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.

George Mack
@george__mack

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.

George Mack
@george__mack

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.

George Mack
@george__mack

I get DM's from founders with the same specific problems.

Here's a public list of marketing tools I recommend:

↓

1. Twemex

Twitter Advanced search on steroids.

Whenever you visit someone's account, see their most popular Tweets of all time in order.

H/T @Julian for this

https://t.co/8P2YJ3Jrf0

2. Good UI

Historical log of successful and failed A/B tests from the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Google

3. Blisk

See how your website looks across every device.

Got an Android user complaining how your website looks but you only have an iPhone? Use Blisk.

4. Really Good Emails

Struggling with email ideas?

Library of thousands of quality emails to get inspo from.

More from Marketing

George Mack
@george__mack

Vedika Bhaia
@VedikaBhaia

I took Ogilvy's course on Behavioural Economics and Comsumer psychology.

Here are the 10 important theory's I learned from it which you'd be a fool to miss out on:

Loss aversion theory:

The negative psychological impact we feel from losing something is about twice as strong as the positive impact of gaining the same thing.

Finding ₹100$ would makes us happy
Losing ₹100$ would makes us 2X unhappy

Sentence Framing:

The way you frame your sentences is very important. Make them forget about the negative thing by reiterating something which might be positive. We have a stronger bias for things that sound positive.

10% chance of death Vs 90% chance of survival

Goal Gradient Hypothesis:

Humans are hardwired for instant gratification.
as people get closer to the reward, they speed their behavior. So, reward people sooner instead of later

eg: Don't make a goal of reading 52 books a year, make it 1 chapter per day.

Mental Anchoring:

It's the phenomenon where our decisions are heavily based on the 1st piece of information we receive, regardless of whether the information is relevant or not.

Make the first piece of information powerful.

$Alex Garcia \U0001f50d$

Alex Garcia 🔍
@alexgarcia_atx

50 Marketing Threads That Will Teach You More Than Any Marketing Class 🧵

50. Fastest-growing companies use growth loops

What was the common denominator in the fastest growing companies like Dropbox, Netflix, Yelp, and Instagram?

Growth loops.

Not funnels.

Here are 6 examples of growth loops that will help you acquire and retain users \U0001f9f5 pic.twitter.com/Wu4i8ReQ62
— Alex Garcia \U0001f50d (@alexgarcia_atx) May 9, 2021

49. 7 Proven growth hacking strategies (pt.1)

I've studied hundreds of growth-hacking strategies.

These 7 are proven to work \U0001f9f5
— Alex Garcia \U0001f50d (@alexgarcia_atx) May 7, 2021

48. Steal These 7 growth hacks (pt.2)

How did Facebook, Zapier, and Tinder drive growth early on?

Growth-Hacking.

PayPal growth-hacked its way to 5M users in 3 months.

Tinder used sororities and frats to 3x their user base.

Steal these 7 growth-hacking strategies that led to millions of users\U0001f9f5
— Alex Garcia \U0001f50d (@alexgarcia_atx) May 7, 2021

47. 15 Lessons to write viral Twitter threads

Twitter threads are the new blogs.

Over the last 5 weeks, I've 32x my Twitter following posting a thread a day.

These 15 learnings will help your threads go viral \U0001f9f5
— Alex Garcia \U0001f50d (@alexgarcia_atx) May 6, 2021