At one point in my life, I semi-joined a cult, entirely by accident.
I was stuck,
not stuck, like glued to a floor,
figuratively stuck, unable to find my purpose in life.
I was a software engineer, a job I was distinctly average at and had no real passion for.
So, I attended an NLP conference (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), to get more efficient at both setting goals, and achieving those goals.
Sidenote: One of the great powers NLP gives you is the ability to read someone’s body and eye movement to know if their lying or telling the truth. …
Here is the truth about scaling a company; you need to win at distribution.
That means you need to figure out long-term how to grow through a small number of platforms.
a. Google
b. Social Media Platforms
c. Virality (word of mouth, engineered, incentivized)
Some industries may have other platforms that are unique to them, e.g. TripAdvisor for travel, but the above are the most common.
Distribution is a hard thing to master. Luckily on the GrowthTLDR podcast, we speak about it a lot. …
One of the best ways to always be learning is from speaking with brilliant people. Luckily I get to do this a lot on the GrowthTLDR podcast, where we talk to experts in growth, across the entire product-led funnel.
What makes growth successful in any company are the leaders responsible for it and the teams they build.
We spoke with some of the smartest minds on building successful teams to get their take on how to build high-performance growth teams for your company.
1. The number one job of a leader is to hire and retain talent
When changing from an individual contributor to leading a team, the most significant lesson you’ll have is…
In under five years, online membership service Patreon has attracted two million patrons supporting 100,000 ‘creators’ to the tune of $350m.
That’s impressive growth, and you can bet they’ve learned a lot during that time.
On the Growth TLDR Podcast we were lucky enough to sit down with Tal Raviv, a product manager a Patreon, to talk about his experience managing a high-performance growth team, actual experiments they’ve run and so much more.
Here are five of my favorite takeaways from the episode that can help all of us do better at growth.
1. Growth Teams Focus on Long-Term Growth…
Every month I send out the best three growth articles sent from my network along with some comments on what I found useful about them. If you’re interested, you can subscribe at the end of this post.
The content is a reflection of the growth challenge I’m currently trying to solve.
For June I spent a lot of time thinking, talking and mulling over the acquisition of new users.
Often challenges around acquisition can be harder to solve than those you encounter in-funnel. …
Over the past 16 months, at HubSpot, I’ve spent a lot of time working on two problems.
- “How do we scale user growth for our freemium products?”
- “How do we convert those free users into paying customers?”
There are a lot of examples of where companies adopt a freemium model, manage to scale their free user growth, but are unable to turn those users into an acceptable level of profit — Trello and Evernote are examples of companies who had that problem. But this isn’t the most common reason businesses abandon a freemium model.
The most common reason businesses pivot…
Growth at scale is hard. Doing it over an extended period is even harder!
You’ll encounter channel saturation. Take online advertising, back in 1994 an online display ad in Hotwired’s magazine could get a click-through rate of 44%. Today the average click-through rate of a Facebook Ad is 1.8%. As more companies and marketers start to leverage a channel for growth, the results for everyone start to diminish.
There is also the problem channels you’re reliant on for growth could start to stagnate or lose their audience. Twitter is a prime example of a platform who’s growth has stagnated. The…
Do you know that in the late 1990s publishers saw click through rates of between 1–2 percent? The CPM costs for these was between $35 — $40. Today those click through rates have declined to between 0.10–0.20 percent and CPM costs are less than $2–3, that’s less than a tenth of what they were worth 10 years ago.
Over the years we’ve collectively said — “Fuck You Ads”.
The problem with all forms of marketing is it has to account for “attention economics” — we each have a finite amount of attention to give out. That attention has never been…
To improve in anything, you should do it until your head explodes
In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming you needed to practice a specific task for 10,000 hours to become an expert in it. At the start of 2013 one of my personal goals was to get better at public speaking. To make a dent in that 10,000 hours I set myself the head spinning goal of speaking 20 times in 2013. After recently speaking at the Content Marketing show I achieved that goal. Here are some of the things I learned about speaking over the course of the last 10 months.
It’s…
The Art of Balance is knowing there is no such thing as balance
Throughout your life there will be times when life becomes totally unbalanced. In fact, more often than not, you will deliberately make it this way. Your life balance is a constant power struggle between work, relationships and health. How you divide your time between these areas will often determine how successful you’ll be.
When I made the move to marketing almost 5 years ago, I had pretty aggressive career goals. I had a lot of catching up to do. I wasted time in a career that didn’t suit me. I did the whole 5 year plan thing and got myself…
Kieran Flanagan
VP Marketing @hubspot. Lover of inbound marketing. Highly motivated marketing geek high on data crack.
