BC STARTUPS

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Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad 2 years, 11 months ago 493 views

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I just interviewed the man who invented Amazon Prime.

He started a business worth $40 billion today and served on Amazon's board for 15 yrs.

Here are lessons from Bing Gordon that'll save you years of mistakes:

When you have a business idea, take action now before it dies.

• Write 1 paragraph about the idea

• Write a 4 slide business plan

• Write your 1st line of code

When you start a job, ask your boss 2 questions:

1) Who is the best boss you've ever had and what does that mean for me?

2) What does top 10% performance look like?

Hold yourself accountable for high achievement.

If you're a cab driver, drive the most miles

if you're a fisherman, get on the best boat.

How to succeed

• Be a learning machine.
• Find a way to maintain high energy

In college, you don't take classes for content.

You take classes for great professors.

Same with your job.

Pick a company for a great boss.

The best interview question:

"What's your strategy for learning?"

How to set goals:

1) Clear and unambiguous

2) Stretch, but not impossible

3) Under your personal control

4) Time sensitive + context relevant

Don't invite someone to be on your board that you wouldn't pay to have dinner with.

When pitching your startup, your goal is to share 1 insight to investors that they didn't know before.

If you want to help the next generation of business builders, retweet the first tweet below!

https://t.co/IfjYJJnl48

I just interviewed the man who invented Amazon Prime.

He started a business worth $40 billion today and served on Amazon's board for 15 yrs.

Here are lessons from Bing Gordon that'll save you years of mistakes: pic.twitter.com/NatY4K3zlK
— Chris Hladczuk (@chrishlad) May 14, 2021

for more top-secret insights, follow me @chrishlad

if you really like this, check out my newsletter where I share frameworks, systems for success and wild business stories:

https://t.co/VxEW9G1YnK

More from Chris Hladczuk

Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad

Frameworks are useless...

Unless you use them to solve specific problems.

Here are 10 frameworks that'll solve problems for you:

How to choose your next project:

If a project is successful, it should make the rest of your career look like a footnote.

@sama

How to write:

Your creativity is a backed-up pipe of waste water.

And the waste water must be emptied before you get to clear water.

The path to clear water (or great writing) is through bad first drafts.

@julian

How to build a network:

• ATTRACT interesting people to you with your content

• SEARCH for interesting people with your DMs

• STRENGTHEN relationships with Zoom

@chrishlad

How to send the perfect cold email:

• SHORT = keep it under 5 lines

• SPECIFIC to the person + their work

• SPACING = no one reads big blocks of text

@chrishlad

Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad

If you build a great product and no one knows, did it happen?

@mkobach
@JunaeBrown
@AmandaMGoetz
@JuiceboxCA
@KyleTibbitts
@jenalyson
@tobydoyhowell
@ThatChristinaG
@markritson
@TheCoolestCool

10 LESSONS from 10 of the BEST Marketers👇🧵

1/ Understand Culture First

"Marketing is effective when it’s a reflection of culture. Have to understand culture and society to understand marketing"

@mkobach

2/ Four Keys

• Make your audience feel like they know u— inside look into lifestyle or clear buyer persona

• Create shareable content—audience promos for u

• Authenticity

• Interactive strategies since everything is digital. Create EXPERIENCES

@JunaeBrown

3/ Pillars of Content

Every piece of content have 3 things:

- PURPOSE
- GOAL
- DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY

@AmandaMGoetz

4/ Clear Value Prop

"If you can’t describe in one tweet why someone should follow your brand on social, you can bet the average social user can’t find the reason either."

@JuiceboxCA

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Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad

I devoured 50 years of Warren Buffett shareholder letters.

The result?

12 timeless principles from the greatest investor in the world.

Here are the golden nuggets🧵

The Orangutan Effect

"If you sit down with an orangutan and carefully explain to it one of your cherished ideas, you may leave behind a puzzled primate, but will exit thinking more clearly yourself."

Teaching others actually teaches yourself.

2022

The Faulty Premise Framework

“A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse - not a remarkable mathematician.”

Beware your comparison set.

Are you judging crappy relative performance or absolute results?

1985

Pick the Right Business Boat

The business boat you get into is more important than how effectively you row.

“When a brilliant management team tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, the reputation of the business usually stays intact.”

1985

A Rising Tide Doesn't Lift All Bonuses

"Good performance should be rewarded whether Berkshire stock rises or falls.
Average performance should earn no special rewards even if our stock soars."

Judge for individual performance or risk free riding on group success.

1986

Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad

Improve by comparing small.

“To improve, compare little things

• marketing strategies
• exercise technique
• writing tactics

To be miserable, compare big things

• career path
• marriage
• net worth

Comparison is a teacher only when applied narrowly.”

@JamesClear

Chris Hladczuk
@chrishlad

There are over 30 million podcast episodes.

and you don't have time to listen to them.

So let me save you time with 7 that will make you smarter today🧵

My First Million with @ShaanVP + @theSamParr

Best Episode: #171 How to Generate Millions from Paid Events

Sam made $100k in 8 weeks hosting paid events with without any previous audience.

He gives a play by play to print money.

The @tferriss Show (the OG)

Best Episode: #341 with @nickkokonas

The most important concept in the damn world is asymmetric risk.

This episode was my first exposure to it.

Been a huge Kokonas fan ever since

20VC with @HarryStebbings

Best Episode: Jan. 4th, What happened in 2020? What can we expect looking forward to 2021?

He got Bill Gurley and Howard Marks... for the same episode.

Need I say anything else?

The @naval Podcast

Best Episode: First 25 episodes which are 2-5 minutes each

Ok, I'm cheating here

but when Naval breaks down the most popular twitter thread of all time: "How to Get Rich wIthout Getting Lucky"

...you stop and listen

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Shahed Khan
@_shahedk

8 things startups can do early on to optimize for focus & productivity:

1. Synchronous meetings only for p0 and p1 items

All meetings should be 25 minutes by default with the ability to extend by 15 minutes if necessary.

Each meeting should have a clear agenda that outlines its context, asks, action items, etc.

Meetings should be brief & impactful

2. Asynchronous for everything else

- Stand ups
- Project demos / updates
- Design / Eng handoffs
- Documentation walkthrough

A simple flowchart for meetings:

3. Strive for 90% focused work / 10% meeting & sync time

- No meetings on Tues & Thurs
- Encourage turning off Slack & distracting notifications
- Track your time to better understand your distractions
- Buy your team a copy of Deep Work & Getting Things Done

4. No recurring meetings

Recurring meetings are a productivity killer. Try to avoid them when possible.

Instead, assess whether a follow-up meeting is needed at the end of each meeting.

Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics

We found 6 startups that are growing way faster than everyone else.

We figured out their unconventional growth tactics.

This thread walks you through how to repeat them for yourself.

1/6 Experiment with timing.

Here's a clever example:

@brooklinen "leaked" a time-bounded discount and had one of their *best* revenue days of the year.

Great startups experiment not only with copy/creative, but also framing.

2/6 Get people to FEEL the problem your startup solves.

Here’s how Muzzle (notification hiding tool) uses their site to visualize the problem:

• Shows cringey notifications
• Makes them super vulgar
• Points out how Muzzle puts an end to this during Zoom calls

3/6 Poach potential customers from competitors:

• Create landing pages that compare you against them
• Address customers' biggest objections
• Show your product in action

Then, when people search for you versus your competitors, you'll show up on the Google results page.

4/6 Improve your attribution.

It's often unclear what drives a purchase.

So try this:

• Add a post-purchase survey asking customers how they found you
• Remove friction—limit choices. Make it super easy to quickly select the right one

Attribution helps you double down.

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$Corey Haines \U0001f4a1$

Corey Haines 💡...
@coreyhainesco

A couple months ago, I got an email out of the blue from someone I had never met or heard about.

Today, that person co-hosted a webinar with me that had over 470+ registered and 130+ live

👇 Quick lesson on how to successfully pitch partnerships and co-marketing opportunities

How did he get in contact with me?

He sent a cold email, but not just any email. It was clearly personal, relevant, and conversational.

Lesson: Notice the language he used and how he tied it back to previous webinars.

Not only was it well written, but I could also easily judge if he'd be a good fit based on the article he wrote and linked to.

It's SUPER well-written and proved that he knew what he was talking about.

Lesson: Make your "ask" as easy as possible to consider.

There were three things that made the webinar a big success:

1. Tyler sent the webinar to his email list and did a lot of promotion.

2. He prepared ahead of time and put a lot of work into the deck, even incorporating some Baremetrics assets and references.

3. He had fun

Super appreciate all the work @TylerHakes put into today's "SEO for SaaS"

If you missed it, here's the recording:

Sergio Mattei
@matteing

Makers, we need to talk.

We have a culture problem, and it's starting to bite back.

Our launch-and-dump culture on @ProductHunt is harmful, and it's hurting our goals as a community.

👇

Let's get started with a bit of backstory...

I was told today about an event that shed light on a recent change to the PH ranking algorithm

A maker on Ramadan Makers launched a product, reached a decent amount of upvotes. They never made it to the homepage.

Quite frankly, this is fine. We really don't expect ALL maker products to reach the homepage, considering PH should probably have a quality bar.

However, looking at the homepage just showed a different picture: products from bigger companies with only 12 upvotes, featured.

This is a problem: it is probably now a little harder for indie or products from creators to get featured on the homepage, which sadly is a huge problem for most rising and new makers on the scene right now.

But there's a bigger problem, and it's a culture one.

Makers nowadays have a very harmful culture when it comes to launching on Product Hunt.

This is the usual product lifecycle nowadays:

1. Launch on PH, Twitter
2. Gain attention and "internet points"

This causes issues.

Pat Walls
@thepatwalls

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz:

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Here are some weapons associated with him:

TRISHULA: the 3 pointed blades denote creation, maintenance, and destruction or the 3 Kalas – Past, Present and Future. They also represent 3 Gunas – Sattva, Rajas and Tamas).
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This feeds into the ignorant anti-Black American stereotype of “Black Americans don’t have any culture/history/mythology” or whatever. That our stories are still both being used while simultaneously erased in 2018 is wild to me. It’s gonna clean up come award season. 🤦🏾‍♀️

And now, if black filmmakers WANTED to make a film about The Greenbook, guess what it can’t be called🙃. Just like if someone wanted to make a film about the actual Detroit riots, guess what it can’t be called? Then those filmmakers would run into...

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3. A Hospital Consultant and ex Gymnast.

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4. A Physician, Doctor, or hospital consultant.

A “Hospital Consultant”, would probably mean a senior doctor, in the UK at least.

5. Hollie changes her Twitter picture and bio so often, it’s hard to keep up with her qualifications.

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Fire is, of course, one of the greatest discovery of mankind. Our control over the fire dramatically changed the entire human habits; earlier it was used to cook food, protection from animals and to stay warm.

Among the many applications of fire, one is Yajna (यज्ञ, yajña); also called as Havana (हवन) or Agnihotra (अग्निहोत्र).
Yajna is elaborately described in Yajurveda. In Yajurveda, Yajna is the greatest among all works (Karman). One can purify his /her soul by performing Yajna.

In Vedic culture, it is thought that the holy fire is the mediator between Gods and us; when the offerings are made to Yajna with chanting mantras, it directly reaches the Gods, who bless the people with rains, food, health, and good luck.

According to Apastamba Sutra, the definition of Yajna is Vedic sacrifice; an act by which we surrender something for gods e.g. grains (Anna), pulse, milk and milk product (ghee, butter, curd) fruits, plant juice (soma), etc.

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2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less. https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n

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