The PROBLEMS with ThisWeekinStartup growth (and how to solve them the italian way)

Dear Jason, this is Daniel, your new favorite Italian with a growth hacking treat for your ThisWeekinStartups podcast.

Two, actually. Woke up this morning with them, thought to give you something to get the week started well.

1. EASY MODE: A simple and quick-to-implement way to get more TWiST\Jason’s Twitter followers to be exposed to podcast episodes they may have missed. The more they see and enjoy, the more they’ll follow and potentially bring in more followers by sharing. Also, more exposure to sponsors, better metrics to show them, more reasons for them to pay more.
2. HARD MODE: A more elaborated way to give sponsors and interviewees more exposure overtime (so they get more value from being on the program and you can charge sponsors more while having more influential personalities on the show allured by the greater reach and prestige of the channel) by improving the experience for TWiST followers and becoming the #1 resource for all things This Week in Startups.

The problems with TWiST Growth

The great opportunity you guys have is the huge, increasing run of episodes you’re having with great content shared by some of the greatest people in tech.

There’s a fact: the greatest rarely write about what they do. They are too busy doing it and killing at it.

Think growth hacking: the best people at it aren’t spending much time writing about it. They are growing companies (e.g one of the best, Andrew Chen had a great blog but publicly stopped writing as he joined Uber) or they are building their own.

They may occasionally but the rest of the time, people just read what c-d-z players write to share it on Twitter, get some followers, do some content marketing to get people to notice them, their average blogs and products.

You are having on the show people that if they wrote what they say on Medium and are popular enough to promote it with a couple of tweets, they’d insta-get tons of recommendations and views.

An example: Why one of Chris Sacca’s rules when investing is choosing people who had crappy jobs or Chamath’s trillion dollar advice to UofWaterloo students (applicable to all founders): read the Affordable Care Act cause dozen of billion dollar med tech companies will be made out of it. All taken from past TWiST.

The problems with TWiSt growth are these:

1. discoverability: how do people even know that it exists? When they do become aware of it existence, out of 619 ep., how do they find the best interviews so they can get massive value quickly, get addicted to it knowing I have a list to go through like crystal meth?

You were on the show when Chamath spoke of the importance of getting users to experience as quickly as possible their Ah-a, magic moment.

In the podcast business is all about overwhelming your listeners with so much value, making them come back for more.

2. usability: even if you give a list with the “Best of…” who has the time to listen to the top 10% of them when an episode is rarely less than a hour long — some of the best (Sacca’s) are 2 hours long — and the number of them are increasing by 2 a week?).

Discoverability hacked with the first simple and quick-to-implement growth hack

1. First step: add a rating system to the TWiST site (SquareSpace plugin for that? Found this in 0.2 secs: http://rating-widget.com/get/rating/squarespace/)

• It doesn’t matter how many people will rate them, the ratings will most likely be polarized (if it’s good, I’ll want to rate it with a high rating, if it’s not, I’ll probably forget about it, if it sucks big time or offend me, I’ll rate it badly)
• An alternative could be ranking them by youtube views (+ wistia views, the more views, the better the episodes) but the results will tend to be skewed by the popularity of the people interviewed (if Dorsey is on the show, it will probably attract more people than Adam Nash; people will probably like it because it’s Dorsey but Adam Nash will be rated lower, even if the quality of his ep is great (Adam delivers big time), just based on the fact he’s not as popular. If you need a crawler for the data and the ranking, any decent CS student can build it.
• If you want to get deeper into it, you could crawl the Twitter and analyze how many retweets, likes, replies the tweets announcing any ep. were able to get. It’s not hard if you know how to do it.

2. Second step: ask people to rate them.

• If you like, give them something for it, like a chance to win an Amazon Echo/Moccamaster like you are doing to people sharing the Inside Daily Breafing.
• To get the sponsors more exposure you can ask them for prizes for a contest (e.g. a year of free Squarespace/Wistia/InVision etc) and then ask your followers to “rate to win” free SquareSpace/etc
• You are giving them more exposure to people that may not see the ep. and their commericial break but they will see the request/shares by people in their network tweeting to win (“Just rated a @Twistartups to win @Squarespace free http://xxx” linking to a page with info about the contest, the sponsor and why Jason loves it so much and endorses it)
• You give them a limited window of opportunity (before the next episode air) so they’ll want to check out the ep. (hopefully, and not just vote for the prize), rate and share they have shared in order to win the “sponsor name here” before the next episode airs/in the next 48 hours (countdown included to add urgency)
• I don’t want to get too much deeper into the growth hacking of the growth hacking, but even if you don’t give anything and let the most enthusiast to vote (it may give better data) you are engaging them, the more time they spend on the site, the more they do, they more likely they’ll stick around and all that.

3. Third step: you post links to the best episodes on Twitter over and over again. They say 5% of the people see a tweet in the noisy flow of the Twitter timeline. What about the 95%/majority of them who don’t see it?

• You can set a Buffer app to do that automatically with a few lines of code: you give them the tweets you want to keep promoting (with the links to the “Best of TWiST”) and you let it blast them to your followers over and over to those hundreds of followers.
• Here you can see how it can be done: http://www.programmingformarketers.com/twitter-share-bot/
• It’s an upgraded version of the ICYMI you are already doing.

PLEASE.

Don’t just focus on promoting the new episodes. Give your new followers a second chance to enjoy and find the best ones. Some (me) are already doing it and it’s a hit and miss. Make it easier for everybody.

It also provides an incentive to your guests to spill the beans and provide as much value as possible (to get them as high as possible on the “Best of” shortlist and get more exposure by being there — they may even share it and promote it hard with their followers to get more ratings, still more views for you) and more leverage with the sponsors (their sponsored episodes will be promoted over and over again and you could ask more money if you have some big name on the show that will attract more votes/views — like “the ep. with Dorsey will be our SuperBowl, an all time best everybody will talk about forever, what’s your bid”)

Usability, the second problem, is a bit harder to crack

Even if I have the best fucking list of all times, it’s a pain in the ass to go through so many episodes (I don’t think anybody can listen to more than 2/3 a day ). So much content gets lost in the medium and its limits limit the content from reaching as many people as possible.

One option is to have notes

I mean good ones, telling me in 5–10 minutes what I’d know if I watched the whole ep, not teasing ones that just piss me off cause I now want to watch the ep but I don’t have the time.

I get that in some way you cannibalize the podcast: if I read the notes, I don’t listen to the podcast.

But if I get the tons of value I can’t get if I just listen to one-hour long episodes, I’ll more likely to stick around and love you even more. The more you give, the easier to get, the more they’ll want.

Another nugget I got from your show, from Josh Elman this time: at Twitter they found that if people visited Twitter at least 7 times in a month, then it was likely they were going to be visiting Twitter in the next month, and the next month, and the next month.

How many conveniently value-packed notes will you have to feed your users to get them to come back? One won’t really do the trick. The more will be likely the better. But if you don’t have them and rely on hour longs episode to do the trick, it will be impossible to deliver as much value.

To avoid too much cannibalization, you can release the notes a week or more later. To read the whole archive of notes you may ask to pay a small yearly fee (like for the Daily Inside Digest) or to “pay with a Tweet” for each noted episode they want to read (Tweet: “There’s one God: Jason Christ. I’m knocking to the door of your TWiST heaven. Deem me worthy”).

This isn’t just about TWiST, though. What about the hours of videos you have from the LAUNCH conferences and all those insightful shared?

If video/podcasts is the future, this is the curse of videos/podcasts/lengthy shit. It’s lengthy. There are great videos on Youtube with great people from great conferences people pay serious money to listen to that only hundreds of views. The content is great but it it’s impossible to go through all of them.

The overall UX just sucks. Nobody has the time for all of them.

The #1 angel investor in the world should care about this

This is about becoming more than just a bi-weekly podcast or a conference, it’s about having a platform with the best content from the best guys in the tech industry/industries delivered in the most-time efficient way to founders.

It will also make your sponsors happier: if I hang out to your pages over and over again, I’ll be exposed more and more to their ads and you’ll track the clicks better than just saying “Go to Squarespace.com/twist” and counting them how many actually listened and didn’t just search Squarespace 20 minutes later and clicked on the first Google result.

You’ll get to monetize your episodes more and for longer (if my LTV for you is watching/listening to 100 episodes, 220 hours I’ll see the sponsors 220 times — If I hang out on your site every day, I’ll see them more)

You can add the rating + Twitter blasting to notes as well. It may wise: the quicker the onboarding process is (i.e. you promise and deliver massive value, I have to stick around for more), the better. If you have to listen to an hour long episode to get the goods, you have way more time to get lost and never get as much value. The notes of past episodes could be how you get people listening to TWiST eps week in week out. I bet some would.

Actually, I believe that most people start following the show after finding a very good interview with a big name somebody (if it’s not so good, they probably don’t listen to it in the first place or they stop after a while). Hence, the need to get any potential new listener to experience the best ones first (notes, videos, audios)

Who’ll write thos notes

Two options:

• First option — Hustlers like myself, to get your attention and prove nobody is fucking with your time. If I’m taking the time to do what I’m doing, investing hours into it I’m probably serious about what I’d be doing with 5 minutes of your attention.

I haven’t been writing the notes for all the TWiST episodes that you have released in 2016 cause it’s a hobby of mine. It’s done out of calculated, relentless desperation cause I believe in giving value first.

The more somebody is willing to do to get to you, the more likely you’ll be dealing with people with the 2 most important traits you look in founders: resilience and relentlessness.

You can say or write somewhere:

“Don’t email me your idea, I don’t look for ideas. I look for people desperate enough to succeed. The ultimate risk takers, willing to go all in to go big or go to the funeral home.

If you value my attention, if my help (and money) is so important to you and all you are willing to do to get it is spending 5 minutes to send me an email like thousands other people, what does it really say about it.

What does it say about you.

It doesn’t matter how good your startup is or you think you are.

If you don’t understand I get tons of emails and I won’t probably see yours if you just send it like that, you are probably not smart enough to be the home run I’m looking for.

If you like your 1 out 1000 chance of me looking at it and you are so comfortable with failing 999 times, you are probably not the risk taker I’m looking to bet on.

If you take failure so easily, you won’t probably be the winner I’m looking to put my money, time and reputation on.

Prove you are worthy.

Prove you desperation.”

It could also be a great filter and source for the best founders to invest on.

The more people will be willing to do, the more you’ll get for nothing and plus, you’ll know they don’t give up.

They don’t ask to enter the game before it gets tough: they are the tough getting going for a chance to play the game

Nothing is owed to them and they know it.

Second option — Crowdsource them.

Have more people taking notes working together. Wikipedia style. Some may even do it for nothing.

Others may want to do it for the exposure a platform like this could give them. Quora style. Or again, they get to access to Jason’s inner circle and have more chances to get his attention/benefits at his conferences/networking opportunities/whatever.

You are the #1 angel of the world, after all.

Tweet me at @danperyo and feel free to tell me if you found this post useful or not.