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

But what does "pull" look like?

👇 Read on 👇

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

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.

I helped a startup grow from $3M to $24M in 8 months.

The secret? Be a little delusional.

Here are 14 lessons I learned about growing a rocketship:

Before going further, always remember:

• It's always a team effort.
• Retention is key to growth.
• It's rare a product grows without marketing.

Okay, let's go:

1/ Find out your wedge and double down.

Wedge: It is simply a strategy to win a large market by initially capturing (1) a tiny part of a larger market or (2) a large part of a small adjacent market.

Our wedge was our unique point-of-view.

Our POV gave the AHA! moment.

2/ It's never one person game.

You need 3 kinds of players: a visionary, executor and processor.

I was the executor, my boss a visionary & my other two key teammates were amazing at processing and making it work.

Lesson:Find a great combination that feels like magic.

3/ Category creation and innovation do pay off.

Our product created its category and innovated its field.

It was a unique sub-category & take on learning.

The timing was right in this case.

Category drives POV & growth.

People who want to switch on growth for their startups or marketing professionals ask me what to read to get their thinking up. Here's a thread of some books and blogs I read

When you read these, it's important to focus on the principles and not the exact strategy. Copying and pasting what someone else has done is not a guarantee that it'll work

Books:

1. Nir Eyal - Hooked: How to build habit-forming products.

Nir writes about the psychology of human behaviour with digital and physical products and shares real-life examples of how you can engage, nudge and encourage your customers to keep using your product

2. Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Ryan writes how boring simple advertising is and what growth hackers need to do/take advantage of to be truly unique and to switch things up

3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.

Gabriel and Justin focus on channels you can lever to acquire and retain customers. This book is a guide if you have no clue how to approach customer acquisition. It's an inexhaustive list tbh

TODAY I WILL BE SHOWING YOU HOW TO CONVERT YOUR PHYSICAL SKILL TO A DIGITAL PRODUCT. part A

People ask me one question over and over: What is a digital product? And why should an entrepreneur focus on digital products instead of just their physical counterparts?

What Is a Product?

A product is any item that you can sell to someone else in exchange for cash or barter. It could be a piece of produce, an electronic gadget, or a comfy couch.
Until the Internet altered commerce for the better, a product was always a physical object or item.

The virtual world has opened up a new category of products (which will get into later).
The point, however, is that a product is something you sell. Most often, you ask. for money in exchange for the product. That’s how you earn a living.

What Is a Digital Product?

A digital product is any product you sell online that doesn’t have a physical form or substance. You can’t hold a website theme in your hand, smell an e-book, or taste a software program — Uber eats does come close though ; ).

Why Are Digital Products Preferable to Physical Products?

You might wonder why you would offer digital products instead of creating your own physical product. After all, physical products dominated commerce for hundreds of thousands of years.

I scaled my last SaaS startup to $2M/yr in <18 months with 0 paid ads.

Steal the 6 step blueprint I used:

Many startups over-rely on paid advertising.

I can tell you 1st hand, this is risky.

• Platform policies change
• Costs increase overnight
• Your audience gets ad fatigue

Which is why, you should consider organic marketing…

Organic marketing attracts customers...

But in a different way.

Paid ads = lead generation
Organic marketing = lead nurturing

You nurture people from social media followers,

Into community leaders, brand ambassadors, and loyal customers.

These 6 steps will show you how:

1) Create consistently

Organic marketing starts with consistency.

• Post daily
• Test ideas

Do your best to provide content your audience finds valuable.

And make sure it feels native to each platform.

At this point, your focus is daily action, not performance.

2) Leverage analytics

Leverage analytics to see what’s working.

Recommended metrics to measure:

• Likes
• Shares
• Profile visits
• Followers/ subs

Here’s what each will tell you…

One thing I'm always most excited about as an investor:

Watching CEO interviews.

Over the years, I’ve watched over 100s of them.

Here’s 25 traits I’ve seen in the very best leaders.

You can swipe these into your own framework to evaluate management teams:

1. They don’t rely on external motivation

Not status or money.

Instead, they seem to be driven an inner fire.

Sometimes it’s to make the world a better place.

Other times, it’s to prove themselves right.

And that's why they can keep going even after they're already rich AF.

2. They're not human

They don't see the world like 99% of us

Whether it’s creating a culture that’s a sports team vs a family...

Or thinking of everything from first principles…

They have a different modus operandi.

This helps them see solutions that 99% of us muggles miss.

3. They enjoy founder-company fit

The great leaders are great because:

They’re in a company that plays to their unique personality.

The stars have to align for a great leader to be made.

The product + business model + personality of the leader must match.

4. They give lots of freedom and autonomy

They know how to unleash the potential in their team

They know how to paint an exciting vision…

And then give their team the space to roam free.

They understand that people flourish when you give them room to explore and experiment.