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

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'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).

1/ "Inflation is dead!"

"We can print as much money as we want!"

"Don’t worry about it, there will never be any inflation!"

Time to take a closer look. 👇

2/ First, a few definitions:

Inflation measures how much more expensive a basket of goods and services has become over a certain period, usually a year.

Looking at the US and Europe the numbers don’t look too bad.

But wait there is more ;)

3/ As Winston Churchill once said:

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.”

Over the past decades the government changed the way how to measure inflation several times to give you the expression there is nothing to worry about.

4/ If we calculate inflation the same way as in the 80ies or 90ies, it is at least double the amount!

5/ But there is more....

The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. It reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation.

STEP BY-STEP

How to make a $10k/mon agency in less than 3 months

Thread:

The easiest way to start an online business is to make a service-based agency.

Let's get right into it.

1. You need to have some skills.

VALUE THAT YOU CAN PROVIDE TO YOUR CLIENTS SO THEY PAY YOU EVERY MONTH.

YOU NEED TO TARGET RETAINER BASED SERVICES TO GET TO $10k/mon fast.

Now, what can you charge a retainer for?

Not web design.
Not logo design/branding.

Try to sell a service which they need every month.

- Lead generation
- Email Marketing
- High ticket sales
- Cold email

Choose one and watch 25 hours of content about it on youtube dot com

Then buy a good course if you can

MARKET RESEARCH:

Don't sell anything to anyone

SEE WHAT'S WORKING

Cold email 50 people asking for a call
Pay 3 of them $20/hr and get to know all their pain points and problems

198 engineering seats were available for every 1 lakh people in India. Of all states, Tamil Nadu has the highest per capita seats with 705 for 1 Lakh Tamil Nadu citizens.

However, based on the Employability Test report by SHL, it seems that the states with the highest per capita seats also produce the most unemployable engineers (software engineers shown in this map)

THREAD: How to grow your startup through referrals, and word of mouth.

(Actionable tactics from working with 400+ startups)

Here's the truth: Your startup most likely won't make a video and go viral like Dollar Shave Club.

So instead of trying to "go viral," focus on acquiring customers through fans who already love your product.

There are 3 ways to grow through your current customers:

1. Product-led growth: Your product is built for sharing.

2. Word of mouth: Users proactively recommend your product to friends.

3. Referrals: You create an incentivized reward program.

Let's dive into each 👇

Product-led growth.

It's powerful: You don't have to artificially incentivize users to refer—you simply empower them & get out of their way.

E.g. To pay someone with PayPal, the payment recipient needs to first join PayPal—they're incentivized to sign up to receive their cash.

Product-led growth is possible when ppl use your app to:

• Transact or collaborate w/ others (PayPal, Dropbox, Zoom, Slack). These products are only effective when others use them with you.

• Create content intended to be shared w/ others (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Cameo)