If you want to grow a business quickly, the first step is to destroy it. When Howard Schultz bought Starbucks, it was a small, local coffee chain in Seattle that didn’t even have Espresso drinks. As soon he bought it, Schultz proceeded to destroy the business. On a trip to Milan, Italy he noticed coffee bars on practically every corner. In Italy, coffee bars were not like other drink shops, … [Read more...]
Essays
Greatest Hits (Sorted by Theme)
Learn how to...
- Risk Management - Apply Antifragility to make Entrepreneurship the Safest 21st Century Career and Surround yourself with a community that will foster success
- Writing and Reading - Read 60 Books a Year and 67 Recommendations on Where to Start
- Habits and Rituals - Build Daily Habits and a Weekly Review to Enable Doing Your Best Work
- Focus - Decide What to Focus on and Why It's Essential That You Do
- Systems - Leverage Systems to Be 10x More Effective, and Discover Frameworks that Yield Disproportionately Large Results
- Marketing - Grow your business 527% in 18 Months and sell 5000 Books in Four Weeks As a First Time Author
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How to Prioritize like a Billionaire
“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” - Dwight Eisenhower In Justin Mares’ and Gabriel Weinberg’s book Traction Marketing, they offer a method for evaluating potential marketing opportunities called a bullseye analysis. A bullseye analysis is an expected value calculator for marketing channels and initiatives. The way it works is you enter some guesstimates for different … [Read more...]
7 Essays That Will Help You Succeed In Internet Business
Communities can maintain themselves based on intimate acquaintance up to groups of about 150 people, often referred to as Dunbar’s number. However, once a group passes this number, social dynamics change. You can’t run a thousand-person business the same way you run a one hundred-person business. You can’t run a one hundred-person business the same way you run a ten-person business. And you … [Read more...]
A Simple Marketing Campaign Checklist
Tl;dr: There are five marketing questions you must answer before you launch a marketing campaign: I’ve put together a brief worksheet that you can download by entering your email below. One commonality I’ve noted when talking with, working with and observing successful investors is that they all have a checklist. It’s always very short, no more than half a dozen things. … [Read more...]
Speed of Implementation and The Law of Shitty Click Throughs
My favorite movie on marketing is You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The movie teaches one of the most valuable marketing lessons I've learned: what happens when speed of implementation meets the law of shitty click throughs. All you need to know about the movie is this: in 1998, people were excited to get email. Marketers who were using email marketing in 1998 often saw 90% … [Read more...]
The 70% Rule: How to Move Fast and Break Things (and why you should)
“Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough” — Mark Zuckerberg Zuckerberg’s line is the most well-known example of a common piece of advice on how to get ahead at work or how to get ahead in life more generally: “move fast.” There is a tradeoff: move fast and break things or move slow and don’t break things. There is no move fast and don’t break things. If the answer is … [Read more...]
Why Product Market Fit is Overrated (and what to focus on instead)
Two years ago, I was looking for a new project. I had read all the books on product market fit and finding your niche. I had grown a B2B eCommerce by over 500% in the last two years, so I was at least competent at marketing. Great, I thought, marketing is the product then. I understood the importance of operating in fast growing markets, that a small market which was rapidly … [Read more...]
Jesus Marketing: How I Sold 5000 Books in Four Weeks As a First Time Author (With Less Than 700 Email Subscribers)
In January of 2015, I wrote an article on How and Why I’m writing a book in 2015. In July of the same year, I released that book, The End of Jobs. Here’s a brief breakdown of what happened in the first six months of the book's life: 5000 copies sold in the first month (Over 30,000 copies in circulation within six months) #1 Amazon Best Seller in the Kindle Business and Money Category. … [Read more...]
Case Study: Growing a B2B eCommerce Business 527% in 18 Months
The Portable Bar Company is a B2B eCommerce company that sells portable bars (go figure) to business in the hospitality industry like event rental companies, hotels, and catering companies. I worked with The Portable Bar Company for 18 months beginning at the end of 2012 when the business had been in existence for a little over a year and was doing a steady but underwhelming level of sales given … [Read more...]