Product marketing review on Factorial HR is here [the company of 1,000+ employees and $220M total funding amount develops software solutions that automate HR processes].

***

💚I am introducing a series of ~7-min videos of mine — for those I picked several Barcelona-born startups — to show how product teams can get more out of demand generation.

🎯 This review is on TravelPerk. This is a travel platform that provides travel and expense management services for business travelers. Total funding amount constitutes of $426.8M (according to Crunchbase).

⚠ Disclaimer: data I am sharing is publicly available. So I do not spread any confidential info here.

💣 My offer: drop in comments or DM the link to your website if you are a startup. I will record my marketing ideas for your product too.

P.S. Video starts with me speaking a few words in Spanish 🙂

#startups #software #marketing #barcelona #spain

💚I am introducing a series of ~7-min videos of mine — for those I picked several Barcelona-born startups — to show how product teams can get more out of demand generation.

🎯 First comes Factorial. These guys develop software solutions that automate HR processes. The company of 1,000+ employees enjoy $220M total funding amount.

⚠ Disclaimer: I haven’t been engaged with Factorial in any ways.

Also, data I am sharing is publicly available. So I do not spread any confidential info here.

💣 My CTA:

* if you are from Factorial

* if you are Factorial competitor (!)

* or if you are some other startup from Barcelona (or elsewhere) -

>>❗ drop in comments or DM the link to your website and I will suggest demand gen ideas for your startup too! <<

P.S. Video starts with me speaking a few words in Spanish 🙂

Recently I talked with a 40-year-old woman who had her breast removed because of cancer.

“I now regret that I opted for a total mastectomy,” she told me. “I had a 0.5-inch lump and other disease attributes proving this was stage l cancer.

Nobody told me I could have a breast-conserving surgery instead of a traumatic (and psychologically devastating!) one. I just went to my doctor and asked him to cut it off. He did. And here I am.”

Would you recommend to that woman that she has traditional surgery — the only choice available in the 1960s — over a newer, less invasive one with equal rates of recurrence and survival?

Now, you feel sorry for that woman. You think she would have it done differently had she known her options.

Unfortunately, ignorance plays a big role in health-related decisions. And in many others.

As a marketer, I see the same pattern of ill-informed decision-making in marketing.

Surprisingly, a lot of big (based on size and revenue) software houses avoid going digital when it comes to attracting clients.

They have thousands of people working for them, they have skyrocketing ambitions, they have money to invest.

But they stick to old-fashioned ways of getting clients, through referrals and onsite consultants, and neglect other methods that are mainstream for smaller companies today.

You’ll find that some 10k+ employee software enterprises — Epam and Globant, to name just a couple — don’t use inbound marketing.

Their PPC advertising budget is almost nonexistent.

They are barely represented in popular software listings (someone from their team has just created a company profile, no client reviews yet).

They grow and find clients another way, they say.

This at the same time that 50+, 100+, and 1,000+ employee software firms are competing like crazy for Google search queries.

Accenture and Cognizant — the biggest of the big — are among the exceptions.

Accenture invests over $200k in search ads monthly.

Actually, they have been doing it for more than five years, which suggests the company has a good reason for doing so.

It looks like nobody told digital transformation tycoons they could use digital means to speak to their million-dollar prospects.

If so, how different is their decision-making — despite all their money and extended staff — from that of the unhappy woman?

***

If you are a Midsize or an Enterprise Software Company and you need help with a digital strategy, contact me at irina@kraftblick.com.

The last weekend I opened the Keyword Planner and entered “blockchain development company.” Then I looked through the Historical Metrics section and saw that it was empty.

I tried similar keywords — “blockchain development” and “blockchain.”

Nothing too.

Then I typed “mobile development” and “web development.” There was some data, however.

Did Google block blockchain?

I decided to check if there were PPC ads in the US related to blockchain.

Yes, there were ads. Hmm…

I contacted Google Ads’ live chat support.

Irina: I’m entering the following keywords into the Keyword Planner.

blockchain development company

blockchain development

blockchain

But as for historical metrics, I don’t get any data for them and any other keywords related to blockchain. Why is that so?

Yet, Keyword Planner works fine for non-blockchain keywords.

kanna: Once try Block and chain separately

Irina: this is one word

I need this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

by the way “block chain development” doesn’t work as well

kanna: As per the update received the term Blockchain is not supported as per Google policies hence the keyword Ideas are not showing

Irina: but I still see blockchain ads in Google

The support specialist didn’t know which way to jump and suggested to contact me later.

Today I got an official response from Google.

Keyword Planner will show you historical statistics such as search volume data for these keywords so you can decide whether to add them to your campaigns.

As per Google ad policies we do not accept that kind of keywords, so that is the reason we are not able to show up results. However you can use them if you would like to target.

Guys who work with blockchain, get ready!

Most likely, this is now the last breath of blockchain. Further, your work with Google may become even more complicated.

By the way, other software niches are fine. You can continue getting leads from PPC as you used to.

Will Google Ban Blockchain? was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It looks boring, I agree. But the story I will tell you about it is interesting.

The representative of China domain name registration center informed Kraftblick team that some Chinese company requested “kraftblick” as their internet keyword along with China domain names — kraftblick.cn, kraftblick.com.cn, kraftblick.net.cn, kraftblick.org.cn.

Now, these China domain center is very concerned about our well-being and wonders if this Chinese brand is a part of us.

Our response was as simple as that.

Things got spicier.

A few days later we received a message from this Chinese company. They said they would register domains no matter what.

China domain representative got back to us one week later.

His email was long and poorly formatted as it was before.

Here I state his main points:

• They got in touch with the company claiming Chinese versions of Kraftblick domain. The latter INSISTED on these names (were they supposed to abandon it?)
• Our company hasn’t registered “kraftblick” internet keyword and China domains so that anyone can obtain them by registration.
• To avoid this conflict, we may want to register these China domain names and internet keyword.
• (Now the most interesting chapter begins. Keep reading.) They are willing to send us an application form with a price list to help us with registration.

We realized it was a trick.

But I asked them to send us the application form with a pricing list anyway.

Next day (how nimble of them!) I received the application form template.

My first question was,

What the hell is this “internet keyword?” Why does it cost $140/year?

I googled.

All Google search results refer to “Chinese domain scams.”

Interestingly, some of them dated by as early as 2010. Now it’s almost 2018.

Eight years of scam, wow! Few non-scammy startups survive for that long.

Let’s dig deeper into the application form.

For registering and owning Kraftblick Chinese domains, they asked around $40 per year.

But yearly payment wasn’t the option. Registration periods assumed 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years.

How do you feel about paying $40 per year per domain? Is it cheap? Is it expensive?

Let’s ask GoDaddy, a world’s largest domain name provider.

GoDaddy charges only $6.99 per year.

I decided to send another email asking what’s the point of paying them if GoDaddy is cheaper?

Since then I got no feedback.

Do you think I should follow up on them? :)

A lot of our brilliant ideas didn’t work. Many processes we were building failed.

But we keep testing different lead generation techniques for software companies, and this is how we find gold.

I’m happy to share our knowledge. Talk to me at irina@kraftblick.com.

… I was standing in front of my team members asking, “What went wrong, so we missed the deadline? How was that possible?”

Before I went to Berlin for one week, everything was OK with our editorial plan. We decided to finish two article drafts by the time I was back so that we would have material to do massive content promotion.

When I returned to the office, I took part in daily meetings of our content board, but my mind was busy with some pre-sale activities. Besides, I was sure we kept up with the schedule.

Suddenly, our content editor reported that we were late. She said something like, “Guys we are VERY late! We still have no articles finished!”

Reflexion aside, we buckled down and agreed to work as hard as we could to get articles done in two days. No matter what. And we did.

We missed the deadline for almost two weeks but managed to catch up with it in two days. Wasn’t that strange?

I was asleep that night when a thought stroke me.

One of our content writers just got back from vacation. Tomorrow is Friday, and he is already halfway through his second article this week. Why wasn’t the team of several writers able to deliver two articles in two weeks?

Next day I called everybody (not just content writers) for a group talk. I felt that something more fundamental contributed to our misstep. If that was true, we all needed to know what IT was and how to deal with IT in the future.

I started with the questions. “What went wrong, so we missed the deadline? How was that possible?”

Content guys shouted.

“Topics were hard to research.”

“We spent too much time on figuring out a buyer persona, and it devastated us.”

I had a confronting question,

“How did Roman submitted one and a half articles already provided he just came from vacation?”

Hmm…

“Roman, what did you have to do this week?” we all asked.

“I was researching and writing all the time.”

“And what about you, Anna? What did you do last week?” I wondered.

“Everything but writing,” she responded.

???

Anna clarified, “At the beginning of the week I had a plan. But then our CEO came to me with a task and told that it was urgent. I spent half a day on it.

The other day Alex, our SEO specialist, asked me to write a company description for a SaaS directory. He also said it’s urgent. I helped him too.”

“And I was writing ad copies for three full working days,” another content marketer added. “Our PPC guy asked me about it.”

Turned out, all out content writers suddenly got new tasks with the Urgent label.

If there were two urgent tasks in a row, content writers chose the one to work on based on either job seniority of the assignor or his/her persistence.

Changes in everybody’s plans went unnoticed because all new tasks were urgent (apparently, so urgent that no one judged their urgency), all assignors were seniors, and these tasks seemed to be quick to complete.

As a result, our weekly content plan was abandoned.

We realized that urgent tasks weren’t specific to content only. We needed to stick to our weekly plans while maintaining necessary flexibility.

So this was what we agreed on:

1. We do weekly planning carefully.

We specify actions with deliverables for each project every Monday.

Then we estimate hours indicating how much it will take each action to be completed.

In the end, we see how much every team member is loaded with work for the upcoming week.

Ideally, a person should have 30–35 planned hours of work per week to save room for urgent tasks.

2. Every day we revise a weekly plan, make edits to it if reality changes and pick daily tasks based on what’s in the plan only.

If new tasks are important, they will have to be added to the plan first.

3. We confront each new task with a question, “What will happen if we don’t do it?”

You may be surprised, but the consequences of not doing a bunch of tasks will lead to NOTHING. Neither good nor bad.

Weird, right? But it’s true.

Is this awkward bitterness of missed deadlines familiar to you? How did YOU manage to avoid them?

A lot of our brilliant ideas didn’t work. Many processes we were building failed.

But we keep testing different lead generation techniques for software companies, and this is how we find gold.

I’m happy to share our knowledge. Talk to me at irina@kraftblick.com.

Google AdWords advertisers, ALARM!

Some unknown scammers are collecting your Google credentials to get access to your AdWords account!

You can easily be fooled by how well they are mimicking an official AdWords website.

This is how they do it.

1. You enter some search query in Google. We typed “Google AdWords” when we first noticed this fraudulent behavior Saturday, September 30 at 3 pm ET.

Notice that official AdWords website shows up AFTER a weird AdWords ad copy! The way it’s written gives an impression that scammers aren’t English speakers at all.

2. If you click on the ad, you’ll land on a page that looks like Googe sign in page. But look at the page URL, it’s a fake one!

3. Here scammers want you to leave them your login details — email and password.

More to that, they even ask you to enter your security phone number (so they will steal it too!).

4. Sadly, if you followed these steps and gave away your Google credentials for nothing, you’ll see this confirmation page in the end.

Now scammers will be able to access your AdWords account, create campaigns and waste your money. Or they can steal your sensitive data. When they get in, they are on their own and they can do absolutely what they want.

Prevent scammers from accessing your AdWords account (steps to follow):

• Always access Google AdWords (and other Google services, such as Google Analytics and others) from their official websites.

Pay attention to the page URLs you are landing on! Remember, that scammers are highly flexible. Sooner or later Googe will fix this issue, but cheaters may change URLs they use to trick you.

• Use password protection tools, such as LastPass.

LastPass will autofill signup pages with your corresponding email and password only when it recognizes a page URL. Scammers may create new sign up pages resembling an official Google signup page, but their URLs will be different. Lastpass won’t work in this case.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to go to LastPass, retrieve your login details and enter them manually, but nonworking LastPass will at least make you suspicious.

• Stay vigilant all the time.

No matter what scammers will come up with next time, remember that there will always be someone who will want your private data — logins and passwords primarily. So be extra cautious when you enter your access details online.

Be safe!

Originally published at kraftblick.com on October 1, 2017.

How Scammers Break Into Your AdWords Accounts With The Help of AdWords Ads was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I suggested scheduling a talk, he refused it and went straight to the pricing and guarantees finish line.

Guarantees? Seriously? After two 30-word emails?

It made me puzzled.

Why would anybody choose a marketing partner as if they shopped in Dollar Tree?

Marketing is the cornerstone of company’s growth. After all, it’s not data entry you delegate and forget.

Though, it’s not common knowledge. You probably know marketing directors and business owners who have unrealistic expectations of how much it costs to get leads.

We work primarily with software companies. Almost all software niches are highly competitive. As a result, leads may cost from a few dozens to a few hundred dollars.

There’s nothing but the math behind it.

Keep Reading Only If You Care about Lead Cost

(otherwise, skip my boring calculations)

For SaaS, it’s all about the lifetime value of a customer. If a product is good enough as founders say it is, they will have a paying customer for at least one year.

Say, the average monthly subscription is $100. Then, revenue per customer will be $1,200/year.

If you are ready to invest ⅓ of potential customer revenue into acquiring a new client ($400 in this case), $40 per lead resulting from 10% industry average trial-to-customer conversion rate will be the cost you can afford.

For custom software development, average contract value is the king. Some firms are busy with making small WordPress $1,000 fixes, while other dev shops close $70K deals.

The logic of lead cost calculations is the same as with SaaS. The only big difference here is that in custom software development high-value contracts come at a price.

With company’s ability to sign $70K contacts, a customer worth $7K, or 1/10 of the revenue he brings, is a profitable one. $700 per lead is a justified price if you can convert one out of ten leads.

Yet, math isn’t always the foundation of someone’s expectations.

The fundamental problem of some CEOs and founders is that:

1. They want to attract more enterprise clients AND
2. They think four or five figure marketing investments are too high just because the number LOOKS high.

The mismatch between expectations and capabilities may be a sign that a company isn’t ready for enterprise customers.

Even if they get an enterprise lead, high chances are they will fail at closing it.

Due to their inability to appreciate the ‘give before you get’ principle (it works in finance too!), they won’t put a lot of efforts into the pre-sale stage. Enterprise leads will leave and give their enterprise contracts to someone else.

It’s sad, I know. But it’s true.

Now it’s time for a short story.

Reality Nobody Wants To Live In

Once I was approached by a firm of Salesforce consultants who wanted to get more clients from the UK.

Specialists of such a qualification are very demanded, and their hourly rates hit the sky. So does the competition between agencies offering Salesforce services in the UK.

Despite this, the firm had a ridiculously small marketing budget that correlated neither with the competition rate nor with the potential profit.

My hypothesis was that they were spoilt by referrals (word of mouth clients) coming at no cost. They felt sad about investing into something they usually obtained for free, even though referrals were hard to scale.

The only thing we were left to do it to discourage this firm from spending marketing dollars. Why waste money if it doesn’t do any good?

I have met a bunch of companies who entered bloody battle with their competitors with bare hands. Eventually, they gave up saying that [name any online marketing channel] is dead.

Do I Guarantee Success?

That was the second question this CEO asked.

My answer is simple,

I would love to guarantee success, but I can’t.

And no marketer can do that unless he or she is a fraud, a beginner or demands business share (which you will likely deny). Also, for some niches and traffic channels cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model is indeed working, but there are few of them.

Imagine that before applying to some university, a high school graduate asks a dean,

“Do you guarantee that after graduating from your university my life will be successful?”

University degree is a strong predictor of a life success. But high education doesn’t assume it by default.

My main point here is that marketing success is a result of many game players. We can make an impact on some of them (strategy, tactics, processes), while others are either controlled by a client (the quality of a product/service, a pricing model, a target audience, etc.) or by external forces (demand, competition, seasonality, etc.).

We work hard to help. In most cases, the best we can go with is historical data and educated guess. Experience in promoting software products and services is our backup.

At some point, we decided not to work with the prospects who refused to schedule a talk. This proved to be a hell of a strategy! I like to think that Kraftblick won’t be the one to disappoint them.

Need more leads for your software company?

We are here to help. Drop me a line at irina@kraftblick.com

Behind The Scenes of Software Marketing: Guarantees, Math, and Educated Guess was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Myriads of factors affect the outcome of the plan. Publish a post early in the morning and views statistics may be the opposite of what you would expect from the article posted later in the day.

The more you try, the better combination of parameters you come up with to reward your efforts. Until many attempts are made, wild luck will be the one to predetermine the ending of the story.

That’s why I decided to dedicate this article to a failure rather than a victory.

Most of the time it is difficult to say for sure whether one particular endeavor gets traction. You can replicate many things, but success is not one of them.

At the same time there are predefined fatalities that can certainly wreck you.

You don’t hear much from potential advocates of those failures because they are either ashamed of revealing embarrassing numbers or they are no longer in the position of sharing their discoveries (they were fired or went bust).

I’m not ashamed of my failures.

As Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

So I’ll proceed with Kraftblick failure story.

Attempt #1

They say “The shoemaker’s children always go barefoot”. It’s hard to admit but we are that shoemaker.

A couple of years ago we have created AdWords advertising campaigns for our own brand for the first time.

We launched our ads at the end of August, 2014 and got ready for a flood of leads.

To our surprise, we have found out that we needed to pay around $10 per user’s click to be displayed on 2–3 position in Google paid search results.

It didn’t make sense to us for two reasons.

1. Our clients from B2C industries payed $1-$3 per click in AdWords.

It was simply painful to spend 10x more than they did. Even though Kraftblick didn’t belong to B2C. How messed up our thinking was!

2. We had been working with small clients and their small advertising budgets.

One lead from PPC advertising would cost us $350 assuming $7 cost-per-click (we managed to decrease it from the original point) and 2% website conversion rate.

No adequate lifetime value of a customer with $200 monthly advertising budget was able to cover such expenses.

In a few days we quit AdWords for the first time.

Attempt #2

The next time we decided to go with AdWords for our brand was the end of July, 2015. One year after the attempt #1.

We knew that nothing was changed in competition intensity between advertisers in AdWords, but it was us who changed.

Our team gained loads of valuable experience over the year, reconsidered company’s positioning and also readjusted pricing.

We were ready to handle $10 click cost in AdWords.

After re-launching our updated Google paid campaigns for the second time, we faced something we didn’t expect.

The click on the same keyword — adwords services — now cost $20.

Advertising prices doubled in AdWords in just a year!

We weren’t prepared for that at all. We got scared and quit AdWords for the second time a short time after.

Attempt #3

We grew older and revised our math.

The problem with our calculations was that we actually did better with AdWords than our pessimistic scenario suggested.

Sometimes one lead came out of 30–40 visitors instead of 50 as we planned.

Other times, lead-to-sale ratio was much higher than 10%.

We should have been more persistent.

We should have run AdWords campaigns for longer than a few weeks before jumping into the conclusions.

So we decided to try AdWords for the third time.

We checked Keyword Planner in AdWords and that’s what we saw.

Out attempt #3 never happened.

The competition went crazy for AdWords services in Google.

By that time we have already managed to make AdWords profitable for a bunch of B2B companies. The irony was that it was too late to get profit from AdWords for ourselves.

Failure Interpretation

I want you to interpret our failure correctly.

I do NOT discourage anyone to advertise with AdWords. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be in that business anymore.

Instead, get away with this:

• Experiment with marketing channels long enough to get statistically valid outcome.

Don’t leave halfway.

• Keep pessimistic math in mind, but try no matter what.

It’s very likely that in reality your numbers will be different than industry average. If your order and customer lifetime values are high enough, this will back you up.

• Do not apply marketing rules from B2C to B2B.

In B2C you get results and modify the strategy quickly because traffic volume is coming instantly and in significant portions to analyze it. In B2B you take your time before traffic accumulates (often for several months) before making a big decision.

When I finished writing this article, I was told to make corrections and show the world that I’m not a loser. I refused to do that.

Kraftblick team came up with many brilliant strategies. Some of them didn’t play out, but there were also many ideas that worked surprisingly well.

“I’ve had my ups and downs, my fair share of bumpy roads and heavy winds. That’s what made me what I am today”. Remember Van Damme in Volvo commercial?

There are not so many people around who know AdWords better than I do. But as I said, I am not ashamed of my failures.

***

Join Our Digital Marketing Lab!

My team and I deal with marketing every single day. We’ve discovered a number of secrets and little-known facts and we can’t help sharing them. Visit Kraftblick blog and say ‘hi’ to us. See you there!

If you like this article, you may also like:

3 Little-Known Reasons Why Achieving True Success Really Is That Hard

Tired of Fighting Fears? Make Them The Source of Your Superpower!

The Surprisingly Simple Advice You Will Never Follow, or How To Predict The Future

That’s The Biology That Turns Decision Makers into Quitters

100% Proven Lead Generation Idea: Catch Prospects in Their Moment of Change

Nobody Teaches Us How To Live This Damn Life

I Was Blindfolded and Stupid, But Maybe You Are Too

I Am Finally Ready To Reveal This Particular Skeleton in My Closet was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember those lists with success mantra you often spot in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur? You know, something like The 7 Habits You Need to Be Successful.

These success tips are usually very easy to grasp — and to write about!.

Like the one about taking a cold shower in the morning. Wow! You are probably already doing this without knowing that you are on a solid way of turning into another Warren Buffett.

Get down to Earth. The route to becoming an accomplished person will be long and most likely indirect.

They Got It All Wrong

I clearly remember the day when my mother and I went to town to visit her sister, a big fan of gardening. We did it every summer for many years and my favorite, and the only occupation there was reading.

I devoured Gulliver’s Travels, all parts of The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote and tons of women’s fiction novels from my aunt’s bookcase.

That day I sit in the chair with a new book and my aunt told me impatiently:

“You spend so much time on reading. You will lose your mind over your books.”

According to her, reading was a waste of time. A fad compared to a serious business like gardening.

I was 13, and her words got me upset.

Twelve years later I co-founded a digital agency after I quit my work at one local IT company. I terminated my contract exactly because I wanted to go on my own and I was ready to take a risk.

It’s been three years since my partner and I set up the agency. No matter the hardships, many people in my environment believe that my current outcome is predisposed by genes or whatever stars were shining when I was born.

Books went out of sight in a string of events.

We Are Missing The Point

Quick success is unnatural.

It is a dream of many to become a billionaire before 30, but generally, things don’t work this way.

Take Leonardo da Vinci. This great man mastered many disciplines including art, architecture, science, music, mathematics, anatomy.

He contributed to the appearance of many inventions like helicopter, parachute, the flying machine, and the anatomy of human body.

Most of us lack ambitions of da Vinci. We spend all our lives getting the hand of one or two domains of knowledge, and we want to make it rather quick.

What are we doing wrong?

#1: We Put All Eggs in One Basket

It is much harder to win the competition being the man of one skill.

There is always someone who knows more, is better equipped or has time advantage.

The combination of different disciplines is what makes the difference. That’s the junction from where the specialty of a company or an individual arises.

My agency partner Eugene spent some time studying lean management principles invented by Toyota. After that, our team embraced Agile — a pro-lean approach extremely popular in software development.

Even though engineering and marketing seem unrelated, we crossed boundaries between two disciplines and found a better way to serve startups facing a great deal of uncertainty.

One more example.

Just recently I spotted a digital agency focusing on cannabis marketing. I’ve met many marketers with experience tuned for healthcare, technology, manufacturing, consumer goods, but never for dope.

Think of it — search engine optimization for marijuana.

Guys found quite a niche to focus on. I’ve never thought of such specialization before.

#2: We Neglect Time Constraints

You don’t become proficient in physics or Roman history overnight.

Malcolm Gladwell offered the world the 10,000-hour rule:

You need to have practiced, to have apprenticed, for 10,000 hours before you get good.

10K hours are 250 forty-hour working weeks assuming you are not engaged in gossips and intrigues most of the time.

It means you have to dedicate almost five years to becoming a master in just one field!

Multiply that by two or three to explore other fields of knowledge and distinguish yourself from the men of one skill.

This data backs up the idea that we can’t make a true contribution to the world with little effort applied.

It is simply not possible to become da Vinci with not giving a damn.

#3: We Underestimate the Power of Hobbies

I’m a big neuroscience buff. The curiosity about how healthy and disordered brain works led me to complete related courses on Coursera, attend healthcare conferences and launch a website for Parkinson’s disease patients in Russian.

The notion that I can use my general interest in a human body for corporate purposes hit me after I read the book of Ichak Adizes “Corporate lifestyles: How and why corporations grow and die and what to do about it.”

I was excited to realize that company’s life cycle has so much in common with the one of a living organism.

With this new perspective, occasional bumps that every entrepreneur experiences from time to time came to be perceived less painful.

If the system gets a disease, there should be a cure.

By the way, did you know that billionaire Warren Buffett plays the ukulele, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo makes honey and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton enjoys mystery novels?

We can’t know for sure, but it might be hobbies that made these people as great as they are.

If you are on your way to success or just taking it, remember to choose several disciplines to master, appreciate what different hobbies are enriching you with and take your time.

Big success comes from constant learning. The deeper you dig, the more diamonds you grab.

Stick to it.

My team and I deal with marketing every day. We’ve discovered a number of secrets and we can’t help sharing them. Visit Kraftblick blog and say ‘hi’!

3 Little-Known Reasons Why Achieving True Success Really Is That Hard was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.