The clearest sign of finding product-market fit is feeling "pull" from the market.

But what does "pull" look like?

👇 Read on 👇

If you want to get better at writing, do yourself a favor and subscribe to this free email series by @david_perell. I read every issue and take something away each time. Often, something game-changing. And it’s

How do you prioritize a roadmap?

First, take a step back and remember that a business is just a group of people solving problems for other people in exchange for money. Your job is to (1) figure out the problems, and (2) solve them in the most efficient way possible. Thread 👇

1/ Step 1: Figure out the problems -- get the ground truth:
* Talk to customers
* Talk to employees who talk to customers (CX, sales)
* Observe your customer's behavior, through data and user research
* Use the product yourself
* Look into what caused users to churn

2/ Step 2: Solve problems in the most efficient way possible -- least work for most impact:
* Develop hypotheses around what you believe will solve the problems
* Ideate solutions to these hypotheses (see link)
* Put these ideas into a spreadsheet

3/ Rate each idea from 1-5 across two attributes: (1) Impact: How impactful it'll be in solving the problem, and (2) Effort: How much work it'll take to execute. Guesstimate -- what matters most is relative differences.
* Sort the spreadsheet by ratio of Impact / Effort, discuss

4/ How do you estimate Impact?
Every decision is somewhere along this spectrum:
Gut <--------------------> Complete data
Knowing this, use all of the data at your disposal (quant, qual), plus your team's experience, to inform the estimate. You are smart people, trust yourselves.

Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task

As taught to us by Oceans 11 👇

Mission: Rob the Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM Grand casinos, and get back at rival Terry Benedict.

Vision: Great wealth and revenge

Strategy: Get into the vault that all three casinos share
1. Get into casino cage
2. Get through doors w/ code that changes every 12h
3. Get into an elevator that requires fingerprints+vocal verification
4. Get past two guards with uzis
5. Break into

Goal: Walk out with

I'm excited to share a new growth framework that @danhockenmaier and I have been developing (with help from the amazing @reforge crew)

I've been finding myself coming back to this framework often when talking to founders about growth.

Thread

1/ As a startup, it's essential that you, and your team, have a clear understanding of how your business is likely to grow. We call this building a Growth Model. With this, you'll know which growth investments to make right away, which to avoid, and which to double-down on.

2/ Our advice is to think about your business like a high-performance race car. The same four components that help a car drive faster also help your business grow:

1. ⚙️ The (Growth) Engine: Self-sustaining growth loops that drive most of your growth (e.g. virality, perf marketing, content, sales)

2. 💥 Turbo boosts: One-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last (e.g. PR, events, Super Bowl ads)

3. 💧 Lubricants: Optimizations that make the growth engine run more efficiently (e.g. improved conversion, a stronger brand, higher customer retention).

4. ⛽ Fuel: The input that your engine requires to run (e.g. capital, content, users).

A thread on employee equity in early stage startups -- what are the compensation norms? What every early employee should ask? Some thoughts on whether the structure is fair.

Read on >>

1) First, there are NO NORMS! Hah. I have literally seen everything from giving early employees no equity to giving employee #1s near co-founder level of shares.

But what is more common than not?

2) In the Silicon Valley, if you're hiring your 1st employee, & you've raised NO $$ & are paying very little (e.g $0-$10k / yr or thereabouts), your first employee is basically a co-founder.

And the equity tranche for employee 1 should be closer to a co-founder level.

3) For ex, a friend of mine gave his employee #1 10% (vesting over 4 yrs of course) of the business. This employee was only getting his housing paid for. And this was 10 yrs ago, so it was during the bust.

4) On the flip side, if you have raised some $$ & are paying employee #1 near mkt rate, typically I see around here ppl get 1-5% (w/ vesting).

Caveat - near mkt rate doesn't mean compared to Google or FB salary rates. I mean compared to "normal big cos"

This is a very long thread. @SamtLeslie asked to give the playbook for service companies so here it is. Follow it and you’ll get to 5M+ in a few years.

This is pure operations playbook.

No leadership, financial or HR discussion. Enjoy.

Industry:
Doesn’t matter much. @sweatystartup has an awesome list of service industries on his website that will get the job done.

Trades:
If you are under 3M and in multiple trades you’re doing it wrong. I was there and it was a mess.

Businesses under 3M don’t have good system, managers, effective onboarding, training, hiring practices, or pricing methods. If you did then you’d be bigger.

Trades cont:
Multiple trades doubles that mess. Get your first business figured out then work on another.

I would recommend earliest 4M to add a second trade, if at all. Any earlier you’re splitting focus and treading water.

Focus Focus Focus.

Software:
If you’re using anything besides Servicetitan then please stop and go get Servicetitan. No other software even close to their capabilities.

It is 50% more expensive than other programs on the market while making you 100% better than any competitor not using it.

I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)

First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?

I earn $40,000+ per month as a solo creator.

If I had to start over, here's what I'd do: 🧵

1.) Start an weekly newsletter

If you have experience in a particular industry or niche, start there and position yourself as an expert.

If you don't have experience, pick something you're obsessed with and position yourself as a curious learner.

2.) Study, study, study

Whether you're starting from zero or already have experience in your niche, become one of the most knowledgeable people IN THE WORLD on that subject.

The better you know a subject, the more unique, insightful, and compelling your work.

So read – a LOT.

3.) Go HARD on Twitter

There's still a lot of opportunity on Twitter – especially with Threads.

Turn on notifications for big accounts in your niche and become visible (and appreciated) by being an early value-add in their replies.

Tweet daily and publish 1-2 threads per week.

4.) Repurpose your best threads

There's a huge arbitrage opportunity for turning your best threads into carousels on LinkedIn and Instagram.

You can use Tweetpik or go the extra mile and use a design template from @canva.