If you want to achieve anything great, it needs to become your one true priority. The only thing on your mind. Nobody accidentally got rich from business. Nobody accidentally built a great physique. They were obsessed with it for multiple years until it became their default.
A feature I wish maps and nav apps had: “kill 10 minutes”. I’m often early and sometimes I just want to drive around for an extra 10 mins. Or I want to go the long way and add some time because I know I’ll be early. I obviously can just sit there early, or drive some more myself, but would be nice to know that I could add a quick 10 (or whatever) minute loop and end up back on time.
SEO is no longer only about rankings or traffic.
It is about being visible where people search and ask questions.
We shared our thinking in this PR. https://t.co/88dRHofsFD via @ein_news
Fast, lift, sprint, stretch, and meditate.
Build, sell, write, create, invest, and own.
Read, reflect, love, seek truth, and ignore society.
Make these habits. Say no to ETH else.
Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media.
Relax.
Victory is assured.
@naval
this is how I start generating keywords to focus on across the entire ai search ecosystem
- once I comb through for relevancy, I get the data
- tie to expected value based on conv % and ltv
- prioritize based on (business impact)x(difficulty)
A startup called Terranova is literally lifting cities to fight floods. Instead of billion-dollar seawalls, their robots inject recycled wood slurry underground to raise land levels; cheaper, greener, and smarter
#ClimateTech#Innovation#Sustainability
https://t.co/pzowBQICTI
Everything I learned about strategy in building HubSpot:
Watch the competition, but never follow it: I got this line from Arnoldo Hax, my strategy professor at Sloan, and repeated it so many times that it is ingrained in HubSpot’s DNA. It is relatively obvious at this point that HubSpot competes with https://t.co/rQ0PCbRLBo (a formidable competitor). We very carefully watched them, but tried not to “follow” them—see next lesson.
When everyone is zigging, you should zag: Regardless of what you think of Peter Thiel’s politics, he wrote a really good book on startups called Zero To One. In it, he talks about how you need to be right about something that everyone thinks you are wrong about for a long time. This type of “zagging” worked for HubSpot three times. First, we decided to focus on SMB (more M than S, btw) and stuck with it when everyone and their brother thought we should move to the enterprise. Second, we decided we would move from a marketing application company to a CRM platform company, competing with Salesforce, when everyone and their sister told us we were crazy to try because they were too hard to compete with. Third, we decided we would “build” (craft!) our CRM in-house as opposed to acquiring our way there when everyone and their cousin told us that we needed to follow ye olde CRM M&A franken-playbook.
Don’t trash talk: I somewhat recently watched the U.S. Open tennis finals. In the remarks after the matches, I always appreciate how respectful the players are toward their opponents and how they express it. I feel the same way about Salesforce; they are a very good company that is hard to compete with, and no good comes in “poking the bear.” [h/t to my co-founder Dharmesh for coming up with the “poke the bear” analogy and many other brilliant things]
Creating a category is harder than it looks: HubSpot created the “inbound marketing” category. Pulling that off involved writing about zillion blog articles, giving a jillion speeches, writing a book, running a conference, etc. We invested way more energy in creating the inbound marketing category in the early years than we did in marketing the HubSpot product. …So, when we wanted to go into the sales category, we thought we could just re-run the same playbook for “inbound sales.” Failed. When we went into CRM, we thought we’d create a new category called CMR, “customer managed relationship” software. Failed. When we released our CMS, we thought we’d create a new category called COS, “content optimization system.” Failed. In retrospect, we caught lightning in a bottle with “inbound marketing.”
Either you are eaten by a platform or become a platform: In the early days of HubSpot, we used to pitch the company as “https://t.co/rQ0PCbRLBo is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing.” Under our breath, we’d always say “until https://t.co/rQ0PCbRLBo wants to become the https://t.co/rQ0PCbRLBo of marketing.” Well, one day they did. They picked up Exact Target, Pardot, Radian6 and Buddy Media all within a few months and built themselves a very large Marketing Cloud business. We decided at that point that we ought to pivot from being a marketing app to a CRM platform ourselves, lest we be eaten. This turned out to be a very good call in hindsight. [h/t Steve Fradette, co-founder of Toast]