Managed to dodge a call yesterday because guy kept pushing for "let's do a call"
I told him I will never ever do calls except with family
And we could send voice messages and video bubbles instead, so we did
10/10 win and everybody liked that
Anyhow, in a little over a week we will see the release of The Last Human Game.
There will never be another AAA game at the scale of GTA 6 with no AI assistance. People will look back at an all-human game with a billion dollar budget and wonder how they did it, like the Pyramids
@MattSwulinski@trypagetear I'd lean more writing than strategy. Anyone can make up a strategy (this has always been true) and test it out, but very few can write in a way that persuades AND stays true to brand voice
Marketing has two roles everyone wants to hire right now.
Head of Content and Head of Growth.
One knows what's worth saying. The other knows where to say it.
Put them in a room and each will say the other has the easy job.
(I'm the growth one. Content has the easy job.)
Have used Typefully for a looooong time. SUper stoked for their team. They built an insanely beautiful product in a space with not tons of beautiful design/functionality.
Also HUGE that @stanleybystan acquired them - that's the best team a product like this could fall into the hands of.
A very rare double win on this one
We sold Typefully!
It's now part of Stan, the team behind Stanley (@stanleybystan), a Personal Head of Content.
Hard to believe it's been 6 years since @frankdilo and I started it as a tiny side project and an excuse to learn React.
With an amazing small team, it grew to 10k paying customers publishing 400k+ posts every month.
As with any online business, it's been a roller coaster, and our lives changed a lot along the way.
The thing I'm proudest of is the craft.
Even as many competitors came along, we kept our edge on polish. People kept recommending Typefully as the best UX in the space, and that's how we got this far organically, with almost no marketing.
Huge thanks to @tomchris, @rajatkapoor, and Gaile for caring about it as much as we did, and to all our past teammates who helped us get here.
And thank you to everyone who uses Typefully, many of you since day one. Your feedback helped us make it as good as it is.
Closing a chapter is always bittersweet, but it felt like the right time. We clicked with Stan's founders right away, over a shared vision and a love for well-made products, so I know Typefully is in great hands.
Frank and I have been building things together for over 12 years, and this is the first time we've sold a business without knowing what's next. It's such a fun and crazy time to build that picking the right thing is almost overwhelming. I'm sure many founders and makers can relate.
So we'll take it easy for a bit and recharge. I'm excited to finally have some bandwidth for other things, like cars and racing. But knowing us, I doubt we'll stay still for long ✌️
I grew a company from 0 to $4M in a year
I've also led marketing at 3 multimillion-dollar companies
9 principles I still stand by:
1. The first minute of any marketing/sales convo belongs to THEIR problem, not your product
2. If they can't explain you to their boss, the deal is gonna die
3. Silence after a call is a next-step problem, you've gotta have your game plan for advancing them locked and loaded
4. Price surprises at the end create distrust you can't talk your way out of
5. Questions that kill your deals belong on your homepage - this is an excellent copy source
6. Proof screen + full feature tour is an unbeatable combo near the top of your page
7. Write the recap in their words, within an hour of the convo
8. Cheap buyers who want the full product are a support cost, not a win
9. Doing nothing is your real competitor on most mid-market deals
I run paid 1:1 calls with founders
some observations:
1. almost every "marketing problem" starts as a "what do we actually sell" problem
2. the founder can explain the product for 10 minutes but almost never can do it in one sentence
3. the best founders already know the answer to whatever problem - they just need verification or a last layering of good planning
4. most of them have changed their headline more times than they've talked to a buyer this month
5. their verified buyers and their "target ICP" are very often quite different people
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P.S. if you want to book a 60-min session to crack distribution / solve marketing problems for your biz just DM me. Happy to help out.
Paste this before you write your next product update:
"Write one product update post a marketer can steal the structure from.
I only care about a post people finish and save.
Facts I already have (paste notes):
- What shipped: [feature or change]
- Who it is for: [buyer]
- The pain or old way: [verbatim]
- The new method in one line: [method]
- One proof (count, reply, or demo): [fact]
- One question to ask the crowd (optional): [question]
- Link for the reply, not the post: [url]
Rules:
1. Open with the pain, the era, or the change. Do not open with the company name
2. Put the method in one plain sentence before any feature list
3. If you list features, max 3 bullets, each under 12 words
4. Quote our real copy word for word. No paraphrasing
5. Never invent a metric, date, or feature. If it's missing, write 'not in sources'
6. End with one clear ask or one free next step, not a summary
7. Keep the whole post under 220 words
Output the post ready to paste into X."
Run it once on your changelog