How to Grow: Start with media, focus on one customer, stop LinkedIn Influencing
Your next growth idea, delivered weekly
Note: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly How to Grow newsletter. Every Sunday, I share non-mainstream ideas about growing businesses to give you inspiration for the week ahead.
October 11, 2020
Here are your weekly non-mainstream ideas about growing your business online.
Reply with ideas, reactions, and GIFs!
1
Build a media company first
“If you’re planning to start a business in 2020, start a media-first company. Build an audience by creating a lot of free educational, high-quality content about your niche. Test your ideas and build your product on the side.”
- Sergey Faldin on Medium
Businesses are built backwards: Build product, find customers, find scalable customer acquisition channels. That’s expensive, risky, and stressful... really stressful.
Instead, build a media company that serves your target customer. Don’t think of this as content marketing. Don’t think about your future product. Focus exclusively on building a media company that your target customer will love. Scale that, make it profitable, and use it as your scaled acquisition channel for any product you want to build. (In other words, get paid to build your scaled acquisition channel.)
Here’s how I’d do it:
Free email newsletter that my target customers “have” to subscribe to. Why not paid? Maximize reach. How would you make money? Likely with ads. Why email and not social media? No platform risk.
Then, paid “tiny products”, maybe a paid subscription tier. Scale this to at least $100k annual revenue. Not software? Nope, still too risky and expensive.
Eventually, maybe, probably, software.
2
Think of your customer as ONE person (not a persona)
“Think dynamically - in trajectories - not statically in categories. And when thinking categorically, categorize trajectories.”
- tweets from Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp
This week I read a book called The End of Average.
It’s an interesting book, but the application isn’t immediately obvious for entrepreneurs and marketers.
The book’s thesis: When you look at any group of humans, finding the “average” of any trait or group of traits tells you nothing about the individuals in that group. Analyze people as individuals, then aggregate what you find… instead of vice-versa.
My takeaways for marketers:
Spend time understanding a few customers extremely deeply. Learn each’s needs, jobs-to-be-done, competitors, etc. See where the major overlaps are. This will be more productive than having a general sense of the average persona.
When possible, market with a single (great) customer in mind. It’s really easy to create bland marketing and average products when you’re thinking about marketing to developers in general rather than Greg the engineer specifically.
3
Don’t do this
LinkedIn Influencers are obnoxious.
As you might imagine, I stopped spending time on LinkedIn long ago. But a friend sent me this, and I loved it. If you want to “build a personal brand” or “grow an audience”… do it being genuinely helpful.
4
On my mind
There’s a lot of talk in the hacker community about “Micro SaaS”: Bootstrapped, profitable, niche software companies like Carrd.
I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Micro SaaS in the coming years. It’s cheaper and easier to build a software company than ever before. Distribution is highly fragmented, meaning hyper-targeted small companies can saturate niche markets. And tiny companies, especially those started as side projects, might have a sustainable cost advantage over incumbent operators.
Is Micro SaaS the next big low-end disruptive innovation?
That’s all for this week. As always, reply with thoughts, ideas and GIFs!
Rob