My 9 Page Google Cover Letter (included a Haiku)
I just got a message from someone in HR.
No lie, my initial reaction was, “oh shit… oh shit… oh shit, what did I do?”
But he told me he was messaging to say, “I saw your Google IO talk and Udacity course. It’s cool that you were able to accomplish so much in your first 6 months at Google.”
And that got me thinking.
See, I almost didn’t get this job. After my initial interview I was told, “We’re going to pass. You don’t have enough public advocacy experience for this role.”
But after 3 weeks, they called back.
And this time I was ready. With a 9 page cover letter.
Yes. NINE pages.
My goal was to “poke the bear”. Nothing had changed in the three weeks since my last attempt at the position.
I needed to prove I knew the principles behind building an online presence.
I needed to separate myself from the other people applying for this role. People with more impressive resumes. People with Phd’s from Ivy League schools. People whose fan bases weren’t blood-related to them.
I wanted people to look at the cover letter and think, “Oh Gawd. This is going to be cringe-worthy. Let’s gather around, read this shit, and laugh at this Carter Morgan dude.”
Even more, I needed attention. My goal was to drop a knowledge bomb, but who’s got time to read a 9-page cover letter?
So I made it look like a horrible 90's sales page.
I wanted people to look at the cover letter and think, “Oh Gawd. This is going to be cringe-worthy. Let’s all gather around, read this shit, and laugh at this Carter Morgan dude.”
Because I knew, if I could just get enough people to check out the cover letter, I would get the job.
Check it out below.
How to Rock the OTHER 30% of being a GCP Developer Programs Engineer
<majestic photo of myself>
Carter Morgan
Seattle, WA
Aug 11, 2015
11:56 AM
Dear friend,
If you want to learn how to reach, engage, and energize ANY market — and how this applies to Developer Programs Engineers (DPEs) — read on!
There’s a lot that goes into the non-technical side of being a DPE. And while the DPE role is 70% technical, that *other* 30% is where DPEs can have the biggest impact to Google’s bottom line.
Unfortunately, before this letter, there wasn’t a resource that taught the three key elements of succeeding online.
Luckily, I’ll break it down for you. Right here, in this guide, you’ll find the three key subjects you need to know:
- how to grow an online business,
- human psychology, and
- how to write great content.
Why are these so important? Good question! These three keys are so important because — however we want to spin it — ultimately, we’re selling ideas to people. Every time we make a blog post, engage users on stackoverflow, put code on github, or whatever else… the end goal is to sell them on Google Cloud Platform.
And we’re not alone. We’re competing with Amazon’s AWS. We’re competing with Microsoft Azure. We’re competing with many other competitors. Understanding the content in this guide is going to make GCP the #1 cloud provider that *people* use in the future.
Which brings me to the number one, most important quality a DPE needs for success…
You’ve Got to be Passionate about Engaging People!
Why is that so important? Because people are complex, emotional, and selfish! And, that’s just the *normal* ones. If you’re not driven to find out what makes people tick, you’re going to fail. There are just too many competitors out there for some half-assed attempt at grabbing their attention to work.
So, without further ado…
How to Grow Your Audience, Gain Attention, and Promote GCP
Look, growing an audience is simple:
- Look at what everyone else is doing, and
- Do the opposite.
Seriously.
Most people either try to compete, head-to-head, with a market leader in their field OR they try to be everything to everyone. We wont do that. Nope!
Instead, our aim should be to…
Niche Down, Dominate, and Expand!
Niche-ing down is a matter of finding a profitable segment of our audience and serving their interests in a new and original way. A great example of this concept — called positioning — is 7-Up.
When 7-Up wanted to gain market share against market leaders Coke and Pepsi, did 7-up compete with them, head-to-head?
No!
They started positioning themselves as the un-Cola and saw massive growth. All because they started catering to an underserved market.
How can Cloud Platform DPEs do something similar? This starts with answering a few questions. How are we *different* from Azure and AWS? How can we use those difference to better serve our customer base? The answers to these questions should direct our evangelizing to areas where DPEs can have maximal impact.
Once we’ve asked those questions and found our niche, the next step is to…
Deliver Remarkable Content So Good it Sells Itself
Imagine you were trying to get married.
Would you just randomly ask every person you saw to be your spouse?
No! You’d start a relationship with someone special and get to know them better over time. Only after you had established a solid foundation would you pop the question. And, if you did a good enough job of being a partner, they said “yes” and start telling all of their friends about it.
And, that’s exactly how online business operates now.
For the most part, we’re only selling the idea that Google Cloud Platform is the solution to our niched-down audience’s problems. But, we still have to build a relationship with our audience before asking them to marry us. If we just went up to random people and said, “GCP is teh best! Will you use it?” they’d ignore us.
Instead of getting ignored, we’ll use what’s called Permission Marketing to establish a relationship with each member of our audience.
But we’ve got one small problem.
Our Audience is Complex, Selfish, and Emotional
People are busy.
They’ve got a million things going on in their lives.
If we want their attention, we’ve got to solve *their* problems and make *their* lives. Once we do this we can get permission to influence our audience. When we’re posting answers to stackoverflow, pushing code to github, or whatever else we might do to engage our audience… it’s important to remember why you’re doing it.
First things first, though: before you can “sell” to an audience, you need to grow one. One of the best ways to grow your audience is by guest posting on other sites that cater to a similar audience. This allows you to borrow credibility from the site you’re posting on and to add some of their fanbase to your own.
There’s a lot more to this subject, but I’m trying to save space. Feel free to ask me about it in person, if you’re interested in digging deeper.
Ok, now that we understand how to grow an audience, we need to learn how to motivate it to take action. Which leads us to…
3 Principles Motivating Your Complex, Selfish, and Emotional Audience
People are motivated by 5 core human drives.
Everything we write, sell, or advertise has to address one of those core drives. Why is this so important? Because our audience *isn’t* reading our blog or using our platform because of the actual services it provides them — called the features.
Nope!
Our audience is *only* using our service because of the benefits it proves to them. Selfish, right?
Getting back to core human drives, those drives are acquisition, bonding, security, knowledge, and stimulation. Let’s see an example of one of these — the drive to acquire — in action…
Say our customer was looking into GCP because she wanted to scale her business, make more money, become more famous in her field. These are all benefits of our product and they feed directly into the drive to acquire power and money. On the other hand, the features of GCP (for example, per minute pricing on all of your instances) only helps our customer accomplish these benefits. By themselves, features are nowhere near powerful enough to persuade someone.
Now, that was an example of just one core drive, but any half-decent marketer will target more than one core drive at a time. What does that mean for a DPE? Simply this: when we engage our audience we have to approach them from different slants, addressing different core drives.
Maybe you make one blog post titled, “How Snapchat Became so Popular (and you can too).” Maybe you make another post titled, “What Every Cloud Programmer Needs to Know to Remain Relevant in 2015.” These titles play to core drives (and, obviously, the content should match that spin).
Onward! It times to understand how our audience makes decisions.
People Base Decisions on Social Proof
People are social animals. On top of that, we’re also cognitive misers — we only have limited mental resources for making decisions. But there are thousands upon thousands of decision we have to make everyday. Instead of actively thinking about these choices, most of them are processed peripherally. Instead of actively analyzing options, people use heuristics to simplify decision making.
Guess what the most important of these heuristics is? Did you guess social proof? I’m not surprised — I mean, your smart enough to work at Google! Anyway, it’s true: We make our decision based on what everyone else is doing. That’s why it’s so easy for a market leader to remain a market leader.
When we see celebrities, thousands of users, or a friend using a product, it social proofs it for us. It let’s us know, without putting in much thought, that it’s ok to be sold on something. DPEs can leverage this principle by using guest posts and case studies (both of which act as recommendations from a trusted source).
When it comes to case studies, the *more similar* a case study is to our audience, the *more powerful* it’s going to be. The earlier article examples (“How Snapchat Became So Popular…”) was an example of a case study that would speak to a very particular audience.
Social proof is a very powerful heuristic, but another powerful motivator is the fear of missing out. Let’s check it out…
Loss Aversion is a Powerful Motivator
Do you think someone would be more motivate to gain $3000 or to not lose $300?
Logic says, the $3000 would be, I dunno, ~11x more appealing.
Well, here’s a case where logic fails us. People are *emotional* not logical — and people hate to lose what is already theirs. It starts when we’re children. “Mine!” is something every parent has heard their toddler say. As we get older we don’t get *any* better at sharing. Adults are just better at hiding the impulse.
Knowing that our audience is motivated by loss aversion, a clever DPE will start using that principle to get his content in front of an audience. Take a second and think about all of the times you see ads like this: “Limited Time Only!” “Seats to this conference are going quickly. Don’t miss out!” “Claim your pdf before time runs out.”
These are all principles of loss aversion at work.
Writing Remarkable Content that Sells Itself
I’ll be honest…
My hands are tired!
I wouldn’t have written this much but I needed to prove to you just how much I know about this subject. I needed to *show* you that I’d done enough research to become an authority on marketing.
Honestly, we’ve only scratched the surface.
But there’s a lesson here…
We Only Listen to People who Know More than Us
No one cares what you have to say, if you’re not perceived to be an expert. That’s why stackoverflow and open-source commits are so important for DPEs. They credential you as an authority in your field — someone who provides knowledge and value. But that’s just a small part of something much bigger…
DPEs *have* to become experts.
And, becoming an expert isn’t difficult. You find something uber-specifc. You learn everything there is to know about it. And then, you expand from there.
Here’s a real life example: I decided to study everything I could about long-form internet copy for selling online information products.
Do you see how specific that is?!
Speaking of long-form internet copy, a DPE should be forced to use it. Long-form is just a way to overcome not having enough credibility. For instance, Rob Pike could just post haikus on his blog and people would take his word for it.
Can you imagine that? Please, send this to him, in case he needs inspiration:
“Exponentially,
Less is More. I won’t explain
because I’m Rob Pike.”
- Rob Pike
Anyway, there’s an important concept to remember when writing long-form:
People Interested in your Product will Read EVERY Word
Let’s talk about marriage again.
Imagine you had to pick, sight unseen, someone to marry.
Now, imagine that the only information you had to describe them was *one* blog post…
How much information would you want in that post? You’d want every single possible detail!
And, if the person in that letter seemed ideal, you’d read and re-read every single word. That is the power of long-form internet copy: You set it up in such a way that people who need details can have them, but the people who like to skip can do that, too.
How is that possible?
You do that by…
Using Headlines as a Roadmap to Outline Main Points
Headline writing is an art.
It is not enough to copy other headlines that have worked before.
Why?
Because if everybody is saying the same old thing, the audience is going to start tuning out.
How you pick headlines depends on how saturated a market is. If you’re first to a market, you can just say something simple, like “Farm Out Work to Remote Computers.” If you’re first, you don’t have to get cute.
Eventually, a market will enter the second stage of saturation and you have to start differentiating claims: “Farm Out Work to Remote Computers [1000x More] Cheaply”. This trend will keep going until the claims become unbelievable and our audience starts getting skeptical. This is the third stage of saturation.
In the third stage of market saturation, our claims are no longer effective. So marketers start talking about features of the products instead of benefits. I touched on the differences between features and benefits earlier, so I won’t go into them here. But, you’ll see claims like, “New Technology, XYZ, Allows Us to Farm Work Better”. Like before, after some time, marketers will start making bold claims about these features to differentiate themselves. And, inevitably, these claims will reach the limits and the market will enter the final stage of saturation.
In the final stage of market saturation, the audience is skeptical of *any* claim. They’ve been burned too many times before by outrageous claims.
And that’s when it’s time to get specific.
Niche Down and Talk to a SPECIFIC Audience
“Local Small Business uses GCP for Great Gains!”
“Large Corporations: GCP can serve your needs better than anyone else”
And so on and so forth.
Do you recall how, earlier, we talked about the importance of niche-ing down?
Or how we talked about the importance of becoming an trusted expert in that nice?
Well, here’s the final reason why that’s so important: We’re in an oversaturated market.
There are plenty of competing services! In order to grow our market — and keep it satisfied — we’ve got to get specific!
A DPE should focus on one specific niche and *dominate* it.
All the while, every DPE should develop their own voice. A voice that’s *unique* enough to be listened to. It’s OK to be polarizing. In fact, it’s better than OK to polarizing. Have something remarkable to say and then SHOUT it out in a unique, interesting way.
Speaking of shouting out your message. Here’s one final one for you…
Don’t Miss Out on a Great Hire
That wraps up this letter!
And, while I’d love to go more in-depth about branding, about effective headlines, about building engaged audiences, and more…
I know that you’re busy looking over boring applicants with Phd's from Stanford and MIT.
I’m joking, I’m joking!
In all seriousness, though: say “Yes!” to *this* applicant.
Why?
Because I’m a super passionate, engaging techie that’s already studying this stuff — like his life depends on it! What I don’t have in actual open source or community engagement experience, I’ll make up for with hard work, knowledge, and enthusiasm.
I promise to give 100% dedication to being the *best* DPE you’ve ever seen.
Sincerely,
Carter “70% Go, 30% Marketing” Morgan
P.S. There’s so much more that goes into the other 30% of being a DPE.
For now, focus on these three things:
- Grow your audience by adding Value,
- Get Permission to “Sell” by understanding what motivates them, and
- Capitalize on that Permission by writing Remarkable Content.
If you keep doing that, you’ll be fine.
Wrap Up
Interestingly enough, I think I’ve made good on the promises of my cover letter.
I’ve also realize that while I’m very aware of what I do well, I had no idea about the specifics of my current role.
Looking back on this cover letter was a lot of fun.
Hopefully, you got a lot out of it, too.
So, whether you loved it or hated it, leave a comment and let me know below.
