Category: Business
-
Podcasting to Get Out of My Bubble
I didn’t want to do a podcast. I’m not a radio personality type of guy, and it wasn’t appealing to me. Recently I started to feel too much in my own world, like I wasn’t meeting enough people and expanding my horizons. Since my product is WordPress based, I mostly go to WordPress conferences, and…
-
My New Site: The Product Business
I have a problem, maybe you can relate. Writing on my personal blog doesn’t make money, and doesn’t get many readers, so it’s last on my todo list. That means I hardly ever publish on it. I’m still passionate about products, so I did some soul-searching and decided to move my business writing to a…
-
The Real Prize
I was driving to work today thinking about all the things I have planned for this year, and I couldn’t wait to get started. I am so energized by my work right now, and so excited about all the possibilities. Sometimes I wish it would all just be done in an instant, or that I…
-
Strong Arming Your Growth, Paid Acquisition With Free Content, & Other MicroConf Takeaways
MicroConf (Growth) just finished, and it was excellent. Here are my most important takeaways. 1. Strong Arming Your Growth Ankur Nagpal of Teachable shared how he grew his company to $10M ARR using non-scalable tactics. They set a goal to grow 30% each month, and focused on how they could achieve that. For example, when…
-
Aim Big, Miss Big
In the movie The Patriot, there is a scene where Mel Gibson’s character is teaching a couple young boys how to shoot. He famously says “Aim small, miss small.” If you focus your aim on a small part of your target, you have a better chance of hitting it. A common mistake when making products…
-
When Marketing is a Waste of Time
Sometimes marketing is a waste of time. I mean marketing in the traditional sense: buying ads, booth space at a conference, or creating content. This usually happens early in the product development stage, before you’ve hit product market fit. You create something, and you are eager to get users or sales, so you launch. It’s…
-
The Process Takes Time
Art can’t be hurried. It must be allowed to take its course. It must be given its space – and can’t be rushed or checked off a to-do list on the way to something else. – The Perennial Seller There’s a process that takes place when you create, whether it’s writing, developing software, or making…
-
The Best Things I Read in 2017
I’ve consumed a lot of content this year, including hundreds of articles and podcasts, and several books. I haven’t read as many books as I’d like, which is something I’m trying to improve. However, I realized that there was a lot of really impactful stuff I ran across, and I wanted to share it with…
-
Backwards Marketing
Many times we create things without thinking about marketing until we’re done. We launch, then we shift our focus to SEO, content marketing, social media, and ads. Sometimes that works, but only if we’ve painstakingly created a product that everyone loves. What usually happens is we create an MVP, then when it doesn’t immediately succeed,…
-
The WordPress Product Market is Saturated
I wrote an article for Post Status about a month ago, it was just published to their blog. In it, I discuss how the WordPress product market is a lot different than it used to be. People started making real money building for the platform around 2008, when there was high growth and low competition.…