In college, I took a self-defense class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next semester, I took a kickboxing class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next and final semester, I took an Isshin-Ryū Karate class, taught by Sensei Flagg. It was the exact same class each time. The administrators just couldn’
An unordered, ongoing list of tips and answers to questions about consulting, based on my experience as a startup marketing consultant since 2013. Updated regularly. What does a consultant actually do? I’m a developer, and If I ever wanted to be a consultant I have no idea what I’
In the 1960s the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture on The Law of Gravitation. One commenter, who claimed to be present for this lecture, said: “[The lecture] was spellbinding, and I would say that fully half of the people there were not physics majors. They just wanted to hear
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply with
One of the many stupid things I did in my first year as a consultant was booking the cheapest everything and paying out-of-pocket when traveling for business. My first business trip to San Francisco, in 2014, was to meet with Scalyr, and it included a cheap room in someone’s
As the all-natural eating movement went mainstream in the 90’s, food and beverage companies rushed to slap the “All Natural” label on their products to meet market demand. For many of those companies, the change involved nothing more than updating the packaging. It worked. Neither the public nor the
What do these words have in common? * Fast, quick * Easy, effortless * Modern * Best, top * Simple * Powerful * Beautiful * Flexible You’ve probably seen them used to describe software products. Maybe you use them to describe your own product. They seem like great descriptors, because you know they’re truthful, and what’
Your year was better than you think. Our negative memories have a stronger affect on us than positive memories. As a result, we overlook all the great things we achieved, miss opportunities to improve, and start the new year with either hopeless pessimism or unrealistic optimism. This is an easy
If you want enterprise customers, then users are just half your audience. The other half are buyers — executives with budget authority. Many startups focus on the users and forget about the buyers, then struggle to sell. Free trials, free and low-cost tiers, and open-sourcing are for making users want your
TL;DR - Your first marketing hire should probably be a director-level person who can be made accountable for generating a sales pipelines, with experience at a company 2-5x your size. In this article you’ll learn to hire a great first marketer for your startup. It’s based on
After finding an issue related to an analytics product, I wrote an email to their support team asking for help. I described the observed issue, gave context, and speculated a cause. I hit send and went on with my da—wait, I just thought of another possible factor, and I