In online marketing today, you have hundreds of channels to choose from. Within each, there are thousands of tactics that you could use. If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to tackle a dozen or more of these channels and tactics at any given time. If you try to do too much with your marketing strategy, it quickly becomes difficult to keep the clarity and conviction you need to simplify, focus, and drive key results. When you get back to basics, marketing is simple. Marketing means getting people in your store—and once they’re there, getting more of them to buy. Online, this means the ..read more

In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution Reduce sales ramp time by 30-50% via sales enablement Double headcount every 6-9 months Double down on marketing to widen our lead flow to lower cost per acq. long-term They raised $65 million dollars with that plan. Mixpanel started the year with five sales reps and aimed to have 33 by the end of the year. If Mixpanel stayed on track, it would have had 100 sales reps by 2016. Instead, the company laid-off 18 people at the begin ..read more

2016 has been a year where knowledge has become freely available for anyone interested in knowing about all things SaaS. That’s because the people who are working in the SaaS industry or investing in these businesses are sharing much more of the details about all aspects of growing and scaling a SaaS business. Here are key trends from the top articles I’ve shared in my newsletter this year: SaaS is more crowded than ever, but you can still grow fast It’s all about the customer Self-funded SaaS is being created for every niche Technical knowledge about SaaS businesses is widely available for fr ..read more

Most people approach content marketing like a black box. Ideas go in one end. Hours and days are spent doing something creative. And content comes out the other end. In a survey I ran of 2,203 companies, I was shocked to find that only 35% had a documented content marketing strategy. People measure and analyze all other aspects of marketing, but they don’t take that mindset and apply it to the actual practice of content creation. They think that because it’s harder to produce high-quality content, it’s too difficult to reliably reproduce. But your blog’s repeat visitors will only grow if you c ..read more

When raising money, most founders start by creating a pitch deck. Investors see countless versions of these pitch decks every day. Between cold emails, warm introductions, founders I know and incubators I help, I personally get ten to twenty a day. Every single one of these businesses is unique. Yet most of their decks look and sound the same. With titles like “The Problem” “The Opportunity” “Market Size” and “Team” these decks aren’t differentiated. Even the charts look similar from deck to deck. The reason they all seem the same? They followed the popular standard pitch deck format. I don ..read more

Two tweets about raising money was all it took to get 81 email responses and 53 customer development calls with founders. I haven’t had this big of a reaction to an idea and I’ve done this type of research on product ideas for the last 13 years! That’s when I realized that fundraising may be startup founders’ biggest pain point. In the interviews, my business partner and I asked founders about their fundraising process and problems. During our conversation, we gave each founder detailed advice on how to improve their chances of success with fundraising. What we heard shocked us. Startup found ..read more

A ..read more

A ..read more