Follow me to learn tactics and strategies to scale your startup. CMO @smartasset, a 🦄.
Joined August 2008
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6 years ago I joined a 20-person startup.
I wanted to quit after my first week, but didn't.
Now our company is worth over $1B and has 200+ employees.
Here's what I've learned about succeeding at a startup:
Brian Bourque retweeted
Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design a product for a million people
“How do you make something for a million people? I don’t know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Don’t stop improving it until that person loves it, and you’re not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on.”
Video source: @StanfordGSB
Self-Reliance (1840) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Brian Bourque retweeted
"If you have a ten-year plan and know how to get there, you have to ask why can't you get there in six months?" -- Peter Thiel
Important insights here, among them recognizing the strategic value of seemingly small choices:
Change how you talk about something, and it can change how people think about you.
Before Wynter was Wynter, it was called Copytesting. What it did was it enabled you to test your website copy. We talked about copy optimization.
Every problem is either a mouse problem or an elephant problem.
The problem is that for most organizations, optimizing copy is a mouse problem.
It's the domain of copywriters (mostly people without power and budget) and lower level marketers. The VP does not care. The CEO does not spend her time thinking about it. It's very tactical.
However it's close cousin messaging is strategic. The VP himself participates in messaging workshops. The CEO cares and contributes. There's budget because it's a central piece of a company's go to market strategy.
By changing the frame of what you focus on you can move up the value chain.
Great insights are often like glimpses in the corner of your eye.
Look in many directions to see what’s in front of you.
👀
"Selling real people real things that they really want will always work."
h/t @scottintheworld
My dad told me that having kids would be the hardest thing I ever do.
It’s also the best thing I’ll ever do.
Happy Birthday to my beautiful son Ezra…
Put your best people on the biggest opportunities, not the biggest problems.
Your best people want to move mountains.
Let them.
Great contributors are attracted to opportunity...
Not fixing someone else's mistakes.
There is no comparison between marketers that are paid for results vs those with vague, unmeasured ideas.
The best have both great ideas and a way to measure them.
Build momentum by avoiding complexity:
• Small team
• Simple thesis
• Simple product
• Simple tech stack
• Clear decision structure
• A few high value features
• 2-3 customer acquisition tactics
PS - this tweet could have been a thread but I spared you.
If you appreciate brevity, follow me for more tweets that shouldn't be threads.
(And if you found this useful please share with others by retweeting)
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