100 things to know about marketing, growth and product strategy

A summary of Marco Montemagno’s best videos about entrepreneurship and growth

Marco Montemagno is a digital entrepreneur and broadcaster. He created and sold the biggest blogs network in Italy (Blogosfere), worked for Sky TV, hosted plenty of interviews with CEOs (eg: Steve Ballmer and Jeff Bezos) and big names in the tech/video industry (eg: Marquest Brownlee), wrote a book, founded a new startup (4books, similar to Blinkist, but in Italian), and regularly speaks at conferences. Most of all, he has a YouTube channel with 360K subscribers where he posts daily videos about business, entrepreneurship, media, advertising, the job market, startups and so on. Marco is a great storyteller, and the videos are good to watch, I recommend them. However, they are all in Italian…which is a pity, as the concepts he talks about would fit well a global audience (as a matter of fact, he often talks about UK or USA). Of course this is part of his strategy to create his community, but then…just like he decided to offer summaries in Italian for English business books, I decided to provide summaries in English of some of his Italian videos.

Table of contents:

• 10 magic sentences to convince anybody
• 11 techniques to remember what you read
• How not to do influencer marketing
• How to price your product/service
• 10 errors to avoid at a job interview
• 4 suggestions to improve your public speaking in real life
• Don’t send a CV
• How to be more successful on YouTube
• 10 ways to make money that you wouldn’t expect
• How to earn someone’s trust
• Nespresso’s strategy to becoming the Apple of coffee
• How did Luxottica conquer the world?
• Twitch is conquering the world
• Who is earning from the World Cup? (and how much?)
• Obama’s millionaire business

Marco’s peculiar way of counting with the fingers. Try it…it’s not easy…

10 magic sentences to convince anybody

1. Assume something, rather than asking. At the end of a talk, say “I’m going to stop here, what are your questions” rather than saying “Anybody has questions?”.
2. Similar to the one above, instead of asking “Can I ask your phone number?” say “What is the best phone number I can use to find you”. This way, you’re already assuming that of course the other person will give you a number, and they’ll find it more difficult to deny you.
3. Leverage on the fact that people love to think they are open minded, innovators, etc. Formulate a question like “Do you think you are open minded enough to evaluate this opportunity?”
4. “What do you really know about XYZ”?
5. “How would you feel if tomorrow there was a fire at your house?”. Try to put the other person in the proper context to talk about something.
6. “Imagine XYZ”. “Imagine” is a powerful word.
7. The strategy of 3 options, propose 2 bad options and one that sounds very appealing. Eg: at the restaurant, the sommelier asks “how do you want to drink tonight? 3 options: Water? The usual wine? I’ve got a new wine that I think you might like…want to try it?”
8. “Don’t worry”
9. “Before you take a decision, let’s summarise the advantages…”. Saying this at the end of a presentation/pitch is an attempt to make you move from the “no” that you might already have in your head, to a “maybe”.Getting a “yes” from a “maybe” is easier.
10. Use courtesy. If at the end of a tough negotiation you ask something like “Can I just ask for a courtesy? I’d just like payments to be on time, to optimise the process.” you add a friendly touch to a discussion that might have been not friendly at all up to that point.

If you liked this, you might be interested in Phil Jones’ book “Exactly What to Say”.

11 techniques to remember what you read

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1. Write down notes, on the side of the page that you’re reading (directly on the book, not somewhere else), and especially annotate important concepts.
2. Write down the main concepts at the end of each chapter, and at the beginning/end of the book.
3. Find your own best time to learn. Might be early morning, at night, after your daily work out…
4. If you have a presentation the next day, rehash the night before.
5. Linked to the previous one, don’t really study the night before, it’s just meant to be a quick repetition of stuff you’ve already studied.
6. Repeat out loud.
7. Linked to the previous one, record your voice and re-listen to it, so that it’s an additional rehash.
8. Completely eliminate distractions. Put your phone away, not just in silent mode.
9. If you need to study and learn a long topic, divide it in many smaller blocks, and study/repeat/learn block by block to make it easier to digest.
10. Study the same content in different places.
11. Palace of memory: visually put different topics or themes in different floors/rooms of your house. When you need to present, imagine you’re entering home and “see” concepts around your rooms, in the right order.

How not to do influencer marketing

If you’re a company and want to have some influencer (on YouTube, Instagram, whatever) promote your product, do not make the following mistakes:

1. Don’t send everyone a standard email. You won’t be sending hundreds probably, so invest a bit of time to personalise it (simple things like their name, a reference to the specific YouTube channel or blog, and of course something that shows that what know which kind of content that person produces and for which kind of audience).
2. Don’t ask to use specific hashtags, sentence, style, tone, publish time etc. The people you’re contacting know their audience better than you do, and will use whatever works best for their community. In other words, don’t contact an influencer telling him/her what to do….contact them to be told what to do.
3. This should go without saying, but…contact only people that are relevant for your contact (a bald influencer is not the best to promote a shampoo…how much credibility would he have?).
4. Money: if an influencer has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, offering €500 is ridiculous and will immediately make your mail end up in the trash bin. How much would you spend for a TV or newspaper ad? Consider that those media might very well make less views than a popular web influencer. And, if you’re an influencer, and you’re ok to be paid peanuts, you’ll become a monkey.

How to price your product/service

1. People usually use a few different very basic (and bad) strategies:
   A) cost + a margin (but how do you compete with companies like Amazon that operate at a loss to get all the market?)
   B) just align to competitors
2. Price is “emotional”: people buy crazy stuff at crazy prices (a magnetic/floating bed at $1.2M)
3. Price depends on expectations: if something is promoted as the best possible thing, but has a cheap price, people are not going to trust it.
4. You decide the price, not the market. Competitors might be cheaper, but their services can be different or just worse, so you don’t have to necessarily align to their prices.
5. Price changes according to whether you sell in self-service mode (buy on website), or door-to-door with plenty of salesmen, configuration training etc.
6. Don’t expect that if people pay more they will cause you more trouble…quite the opposite actually. People that are used to pay a lot, usually do it for many things, you’re just one more provider for them. People with a tighter budget will try to squeeze everything possible out of you, to get more value from their investment, as it costed more to them in proportion.
7. If something is more expensive, people tend to value it more in their head, respect it and treat it (and therefore you) better.
8. Give the product a price, and find the right customers for it. If people don’t buy it, they’re not seeing enough value for their investment.

10 errors to avoid at a job interview

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You can be a phenomenon, but maybe that job is not the job for you, at least from the interviewer’s point of view. Don’t make it personal or give it too much importance. People have cognitive bias. If you remind your interviewer someone that their partner cheated on them with, there’s nothing to do. That said, here are some suggestions:

1. Don’t arrive unprepared. Know the context: who you’re going to talk to, info about the company etc.
2. Don’t underestimate soft skills like communication. A research has demonstrated that people that are good with interpersonal skills are more likely to get the job than someone that’s stronger technically but weaker on that aspect.
3. Don’t be rude or unsympathetic, with anybody (the doorman, the receptionist etc….you never know who will listen to them if they say something about you).
4. Don’t be lazy, and go to the interview with a “sample something” that you created specifically for that company (a sample post, ad etc.). Show the interviewer that you invested time into it, because you do care about that job. This is something that most other candidates won’t do.
5. Don’t focus on your past, the company wants to know what you can do for them in the future, what benefits they would get if they hire you.
6. Nobody wants to work with people that are always complaining about something. So, don’t complain or say bad things about your past jobs and people you worked with.
7. Communication, and especially the way you write, is important. Write well, be concise and organised.
8. Listen to the question until the very end, don’t start thinking about your answer half way through the question if you don’t want to risk misunderstanding it.
9. An interview is not a monologue, take the chance to ask (intelligent) questions yourself: you’ll learn more about the job/company and ear the interviewer’s trust.
10. Goes without saying…but be a good person, someone that can be trusted.

4 suggestions to improve your public speaking in real life

Public speaking is fundamental if you want people to listen to you and understand what you say. It should be taught in school from a young age. So:

1. Public speaking is not optional, it must be one of your priorities, you must study it seriously.
2. Don’t believe to those that say “believe in yourself”. Believing is not enough…again, you must study.
3. If you’re being interviewed and recorded, don’t turn to the camera when you start answering, just keep looking at your interviewing, if will feel much more natural. Try not to be too tense, but the commonplace of imaging your audience as they sit on the toilet doesn’t really work, so don’t even try it.
4. Every context has its own rules: talking on TV or on the beach has different rules (what to wear, how to gesticulate, your tone, the terms you use etc.).

Don’t send a CV

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They say the CV was invented by Leonardo Da Vinci. It was not really used in the past, but our (his) generation grew up with the idea that when you’re looking for a CV, you send plenty of mails with your CV attached. The problem is this approach is wrong. You must “attract” a job, do something creative and impress your potential employer . Examples:

1. Organise a flash mob outside of the creative/ad agency where you’d like to work.
2. Want to work at Facebook? Attend a FB event, or an event where you can meet people (recruiters, engineers etc.) that already work there, and introduce yourself, talk with them…maybe they’re looking for somebody and might give you a call later for an interview.
3. Create nice ads/content, and use FB advertisement to target those people that work in the companies you like, so that you make sure they see it.

Sending a CV is easy, everybody does it, but it’s like playing roulette. Differentiate.

How to be more successful on YouTube

Video done in collaboration with Favij, Italy’s most famous YouTuber with 4.6M subscribers.

Premise: starting now from scratch is super hard, as YouTube is already filled by high-quality videos and channels for every niche.

1. Collaborate with people that add something to your skills, that are complementary (for a video games channel, you might be great at mounting the videos and creating the script, but not actually at playing). Just choose people that don’t have the same audience, so that there is no conflict of course. Don’t just look at how many subscribers they have.
2. Always find a story to tell, with context, a start, and end etc. These videos are more meaningful and engaging, and hook people.
3. Be creating, but also very rigorous with planning (consistency is key: one video every day or every X days, at the same time).
4. A top camera/equipment don’t determine success. Good timing and catching the trend is better than video quality. Starting when something is already a trend (eg: doing videos on Fortnite months after Fortnite exploded) is too late. Anticipate trends, don’t follow them (but of course it’s easier said than done).
5. Continuity and consistency. If your videos are complex, and you can’t do a video a day, that’s ok. Even if it’s one video a week, be consistent with that schedule. Time of the day is also important, because your fan base will start expecting your videos at a certain day/time like it was a TV show.
6. Continuity also about marketing your content.
7. Create a calendar for your future episodes. Maybe pick a day in the week when you just do research and plan the content that you’ll record/publish during the rest of the week.
8. Create an archive of videos for special occasions (eg: the death of a famous person is the typical example), and it that occasion happens, you’ll have a video that’s almost ready to publish already.
9. You can spend money to advertise your videos, and it can have a good return, provided that your content is great. Money spent on bad content won’t grant you a following in any case.
10. To sum up: technique is important, but being good at creating new content, and doing it with a strict approach, is better.

10 ways to make money that you wouldn’t expect

1. Cinemas make more money by selling popcorn (1275% markup!) or similar items, than they do with the movie tickets.
2. McDonald’s real business was not much about selling hamburgers, but rather buying real estate properties and renting it to the franchisers.
3. Tesla is selling cars as a way to promote the idea of electric cars, but they are basically in the business of producing and selling innovative batteries.
4. Disney earns more from its amusement parks than from its movies. Same for Star Trek, they earn more from the gadgets and toys than the movie. The actual content is what pulls the real money from the merchandising around it.
5. The same is for some sportsmen and celebrities: in 2011 Tiger Woods was making 90% of his revenues not by playing golf, but through sponsorships.
6. Airline companies ear more by selling miles to banks than by selling tickets.
7. Gas stations make more from selling stuff (snacks, drinks etc.) than they do by selling gas.
8. Firefox in the past was earning a lot from Google, by setting Google as the default search engine on their browser.
9. Clash Royale (a mobile game) made 1B$ in a year with in-app purchases, selling virtual items.
10. ??? I think he actually skipped one :)

How to earn someone’s trust

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Without trust, people won’t buy your product (whatever that is). How to earn it? Some simple suggestions:

1. Think about why your customer should actually buy your product, or open your mails, or invest time in listening to and understanding your project. What is their problem, that you think you can solve?
2. Don’t judge and offer respect, which can also mean to give choices. If you want to meet someone to talk about a project, give them a choice of where/when/how to meet.
3. Don’t try to manipulate people with tricks, but focus on building a healthy and honest relationship around facts.
4. If you’re writing a mail to someone to propose something, open with a honest appreciation about some characteristic or fact about the other person. Don’t be a arse-licker though.

Nespresso’s strategy to becoming the Apple of coffee

Nespresso started in 1986 by selling bundles with the coffee machine + capsules to restaurants, companies etc…but it wasn’t going well. They were about to close down, when in 1989 things changed and they started to become what they are today. What happened?

1. They chose high-end clients, with the proposition that you could get a high quality coffee, like you were at fancy restaurant, but staying at home. They give you all the tech to do it in a super simple way, and even with the option to customise the flavour. Luxury for an affordable price.
2. They split the sale of the machines from the capsules. The machine is sold once, anywhere, and the margin goes to the machine manufacturer. But the real business is done on the capsules, sold repeatedly and directly by Nespresso.
3. By selling the capsules directly, Nespresso could control the image/communication/experience, and also have higher margins.
4. 20 years ago it was not easy to convince people to basically sign up for a “coffee subscription”, and therefore they had to invest in testimonials such as George Clooney. But they also invested at tech events, because they wanted to get early-adopters that could then talk about them on their blogs (it was the period of the blogs explosion, the predecessors of today’s influencers)

Couple more things:

1. Changing the distribution model (from sending huge pallets to malls to sending small packages directly to the final customer) was a challenge.
2. They protected their technology with a huge number (around 1700?) of patents. In 2012 some patents expired and in fact from that moment on many other companies (more than 200 nowadays) started selling compatible capsules.

Lesson: same product, but different business model, can drastically change the result.

How did Luxottica conquer the world?

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Luxottica is the world leader for glasses frames, with almost 9,000 sun and optical stores in more than 150 countries, it made €9B revenues in 2017 with a profit of €1B, has 85K+ employees and produces around 90M of glasses a year. It collaborates with fashion brands such as Burberry, Bulgari, Chanel, Dolce e Gabbana, Armani, Miu Miu, Prada, Ralph Loren, Versace and Ray — Ban. It was founded by Leonardo del Vecchio in 1961, in the small town of Agordo (Italy) — today its headquarters are in Milan. How did they do all this?

1. They are a “vertical integrated business”. Like Apple, they do everything: design, production, logistics, distribution, retail (online and offline) etc. They have total control of the final experience.
2. They started collaborating, from late ’80s, with a number of big fashion brands like Bulgari, Prada, Valentino, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Vogue, Chanel and many more. (btw, 4% of the revenues come from Prada)
3. They bought/acquired a number of popular brands.
4. They bought a number of distribution chains (Salmoiraghi e Viganò in Italy, but many others).
5. From a communication point of view, they rode the wave of the process that saw glasses becoming less of a medical aid, and more of a fashion object. Today the glasses we wear can even define our identity.

(It helps that the glasses industry is huge: 70% of adults end up needed them)

Twitch is conquering the world

Twitch has a gazillion of total and daily users, and everyone would like to put their hands on this. How did it start? Justin Kan initially created JustinTV, which streamed what he did 24x7 through an action cam on his forehead (including a joke organised by someone that sent the police to his home). After a while though it was starting to become difficult to be interesting and engaging, and so JustinTV became a platform that others could use to stream their own videos. Btw, in 2005–2007 live streaming was technically complex, so they developed a lot of technologies.

Justin saw that a lot of people were using his platform to stream themselves while playing videogames, and decided to go vertical with that and launch Twitch, which Amazon later acquired for around $1B.

The Twitch’s community is interesting: a streamer can have thousands of followers, and the chat on the side of the stream becomes impossible to follow. A follower can donate to the streamer or pay for a subscription, and the more they pay, the more visible their comments will be on the chat, and therefore the higher the chances for the streamer to read them and reply or mention them, which brings visibility and some popularity to the follower as well.

Twitch is different from YouTube, because on YT you can schedule a video a day for 30 days, and be away without your users realising it. On Twitch that’s not possible, and if you’re away for long your users will start looking for other streamers to follow. Being a popular streamer is difficult, as your much be decent at playing, but also be engaging, funny and good at improvising because it’s all live.

Who is earning from the World Cup? (and how much?)

1. Dixons, to buy a new big screen.
2. Take aways (Deliveroo, Just Eat) and pubs, because it’s better to watch a game while eating and drinking.
3. (Online) betting, and it doesn’t really matter if your country’s team is playing or not.
4. iTV, as ads prices go up.
5. Adidas, Nike, etc. because people want to emulate their idols.
6. Travel agencies, as people travel to go and see the games in person.
7. The football teams of course, around $400M to be shared amongst them.
8. Russia, as the hosting country. They spend around $12B for the infrastructures, but it’s estimated that they might get back $30B and hundreds of thousands of jobs (in the long run, and to be seen if true of course).
9. FIFA, with around $6B: $3B from rights to publish/stream the matches, marketing rights (sponsors that market their products), $570M from tickets, licensing rights for gadgets, hospitality etc.

Obama’s millionaire business

Michelle and Barack Obama signed a production deal with Netflix worth more than $100M. This raised the question of how does a former US President earn money, in general?

1. Pension, of around $200K per year.
2. Books: most writers sell small quantities of copies, but a famous person like a former President can sell millions. The Obamas signed a deal with Penguin worth around $65M. Barack declared that with previous books he had earner around $5M already.
3. Speeches: CNN estimated that from 2001 and 2015 the Obamas brought home around $140M from speaking fees. The current value of a single speech at a conference or company event he is invited to is probably around $1M.

Other possibilities (not done by Obama)

1. Consulting: huge network, massive experience at the highest levels, and therefore very high consulting value.
2. Being hired as a professor from a top university (could be hundreds of thousands of dollars per year)
3. Sponsorship of luxury companies and products (say, Rolex)

Why is Obama so appealing for many sponsors?

1. His popularity is cross-generation: he’s known by old and young people. He has already a large community/fanbase.
2. He’s a good storyteller, and considered inspirational by many.

Who am I / what do I do? This is an unusual article for me, I typically write about software development or something related to it (I proudly work as a Solutions Architect in the Mobile Team @ ASOS.com [iOS app | Android app], which is the biggest online-only retailer in the UK and, let’s be real, the best tech and fashion company in the world — my LinkedIn profile is here). However I worked in the startup world in the past, and still have an interest in this kind of stuff, hence why I watch and read plenty of content about entrepreneurship, marketing etc. :)