My day job is growing startups.

I've worked with a few hundred by now.

Here's how to grow your podcast, newsletter, blog, YouTube, and Twitter.

Hope this helps! A thread:

Growth marketing, a timeline:

2015: "We need to go viral."

2017: "Well, we raised $25m of VC. Let's dump it on Facebook ads."

2021: "Wow. We should have been focusing on content and building a great product."
How to grow a podcast:

• Be YouTube-first; do video
• Split eps into 8min YouTube clips with SEO’d titles
• Get guests that are searched for on YouTube
• Consider not publishing bad eps
• Exchange eps with other shows
• Niche is fine, but be widely accessible
How to grow a YouTube channel:

• Describe the video's value in the first five seconds
• Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds
• With YT algo, 1 amazing video > 10 good videos
• Quick cuts don't give people time to ask if they're bored

—Mr. Beast
Some tips for growing newsletters:

• Plug it at the end of a tweet thread.
• Swap plugs with other newsletters.
• Send a sample issue upon signup to excite people for future issues.
• Consider twice-monthly over weekly. My poll revealed people are fatigued with newsletters.
Two major SEO factors I look for:

1. The click-through rate of your page title.
2. Searchers not needing to return to Google after clicking your page. How?

• Write for depth
• Link to more topics they might want instead
• Start w/ a summary to show they're at the right place
Getting content ideas:

• Buzzsumo shows competitors' big content. Write about those topics
• Google Trends shows breakout topics in your industry. Cover them
• Search Reddit for good content that didn't go big. *Credit* (!) your source, remix the insights, and push it broader
Here's a LOOSE idea of which customer acquisition channels to prioritize based on your business model.

This isn't set in stone—try many channels over time.
Getting Twitter followers:

• Learn copywriting—punch + clarity
• Respond to big accounts quickly w/ insights
• Write for retweets: focus on insights + stories
• People retweet novelty, inspiration, tribal affiliation
• Bio should say why ppl should follow. See mine: @julian
To see how competitors are running acquisition:

• View their Google Ads via Ahrefs
• View their popular blog posts via Buzzsumo
• View their Facebook ads via the Facebook Ads Library
• All of these also reveal which landing pages they're using
If you want more content on startup marketing, give me a follow. I post threads 2x/week like this.

You can see past threads here: @julian

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.