I'll repeat: Don't be the best, be the only.

Otherwise, it'll be a bloody battle.

If you doexactly what other's are doing, it'll be a hard fight and margins will evaporate, particularly if they're wealthier and more connected than you are. 

You need to focus on having a unique offering. (2 weeks ago, I talked about one of the ways to do that with Contrarian Value.)

But once you have a strategy in mind, how can you tell if it's any good?

In No Bullsh*t Strategy, Alex details a few ways. Let's focus on two:

#1. Remove all subjective language.

A strategy should be completely objective:

• Not a strategy: "The world's best tasting yogurt"
• Strategy: "Replicate ice cream flavors in yogurt"

The first is all subjective and provides no clarity. What flavors do we make? How do we know it's the best? Who judges that? Why would someone choose us?

The second is a legitimate strategy that provides clarity of action and differentiates you from all your competitors who focus on fruit flavors like strawberry and blueberry.

#2. The Opposite's Game

Would the opposite of this strategy also make logical sense?

• If yes. Then it's probably a decent strategy.
• If no. Probably not. You're probably focused on being "better."

 The purpose of a strategy is to have a strong alternative to other offers on the market.

• “Low-cost option” vs “premium” ✅
• "Portable" vs "stationary" ✅
• “Win the most cases” vs “lose the most” ❌
• “Punctual” vs “most late” ❌

As Alex says: "Anything that everyone would want to do is not a good strategy." 

And once again: "Don't be the best, be the only."

2023 has been a hard year for fundraising.  

Investors (and employees) look for proof that your company is likely to succeed and, thus, is worth investing time or money into.

NfX calls this the Ladder of Proof. The higher up the ladder, the more attractive you are to an investor. And the red rungs are more critical than the others.

Go through this from bottom to the top. Be brutally honest with yourself:

• What can you check off?
• What are you missing?

Work your way up the ladder.

Last week, we had our kookiest sponsorship:

1. I loved it. It was creative, funny, and I figured it would probably work.
2. I hated it. I was afraid people might think I made a mistake 😅.

I decided to add the small PS and to run with it. I'm glad I did:

It's really scary to experiment.

We don't want to: waste money, look dumb, or fail. 99% of the time, we take the safe, logical option. 

As Rory Sutherland says: "You'll never be fired for being logical," but, "the fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors."

So be like Nate, be illogical.

If you confuse, you lose.

It's honestly horrifying how many home pages, landing pages, and product pages use confusing aspirational language that don't tell you what they sell or why you should care.‍

Here are some example rewrites:

The right one is better because:

1. It no longer sounds like corporate speak (all-in-one? visual communication solution?)
2. It describes the specific benefit of the product clearly.

The right one is better because:

• It no longer uses vague phrasing.
• It describes the specific benefit of your product.

The right one is better because:

• It doesn't talk in self-congratulatory terms. It talks in terms of benefits to the visitor.
• It clarifies the specific outcome of using the product.

Two videos (and their responses) went viral on TikTok lately that led to crazy brand exposure. Then their stories went viral on X/Twitter:

1. Car fire Stanley mug. A woman recorded a video of her completely destroyed car, but her Stanley mug was basically untouched. Within 24 hours, the founder of Stanley recorded a 30-second selfie video in response. This video got 38M views.
2. Amanda's tweet got 30M impressions as well.
3. North Face helicopter delivery. Another woman on a hike in New Zealand complained about her "waterproof" North Face jacket and got 11M views. 5 days later, North Face posted a video of flying a helicopter to her on the mountain to deliver a new jacket. North Face got around 4M views for this video.
4. Amanda's tweet got 19M impressions.

In both situations, the companies acted fast:

• Stanley did an off the cuff response to an amplify a positive mention.
• North Face did costly and staged response to make up for a negative mention. 

And Amanda, got nearly 50M impressions on her posts. Her tweet promoting her newsletter got nearly 700k impressions on the Stanley tweet.

Act fast, as either the brand, or the "reporter." Waiting two weeks, two months, or two years will hit way less hard than 2 hours.

Take a look at Apple’s site in 1997 compared to 2023:

They're not the only ones. Nearly every brand made this shift from busy to simple.

Simplicity beats complexity—that’s the idea behind processing fluency.

In short: we prefer things that are easy to read and understand (“fluent information”). Understanding something effortlessly helps us act quickly and confidently.

On the flip side, if you confuse, you lose.

If something is hard to understand, you're less likely to complete a task or make a decision. It takes extra brain power.

And when you're confused you feel like you need to examine something closely. Making it more likely you second guess yourself and not buy that weird product you saw on TikTok.

You may even value confusing products less.

How to apply this:

Make things as simple and clear as possible—particularly for conversion events (purchase, sign up, book a call).

• Keep navbars small (less than 7 links). If more, use dropdowns.
• Keep your writing at an 8th-grade level (reading level of the average American).
• Hold off on displaying popups until they're engaged. Wait a few minutes. 
• Reduce the number of fields in your checkout form. Use a single “Full Name” field. Don't ask for company name, website, phone number, job title etc etc. And use city and state auto-detection based on zip code.
  
• Get users to create an account after purchase, not before. Don't get in their way.

For conversion: clarity > cleverness.

MrBeast gets ~100,000,000 views per YouTube video. He doesn't make a video unless he can think of the perfect thumbnail and title for it.

A thumbnail really can make or break a video. 

The same concepts for a "hooky" thumbnail apply to ad creatives, social posts, and blog article thumbnails. Basically anything visual meant to hook people's attention. 

Here are ways top creators do that:

Big Numbers

Big numbers are unnatural. Unnatural events trigger curiosity. Particularly when it’s money.

Don’t make it too round, or it’ll feel fake. Write out the whole number to make it bigger.

Reactions

Dramatic faces attract attention. People click because they want to see what provoked it.

Your reactions need to seem genuine. Use a still from your footage, not a posed shot.

Ask a question

Asking a question in your thumbnail opens a loop that can only be closed by watching.

Use the video title to tease the answer you pose in your thumbnail.

For 9 more to hook with a thumbnail, dive into this carousel.

Don't be the best, be the only.

If you compete with all your competitors directly, you're playing on hard mode. You and your competitors will battle over the same features, and ultimately, price.

You need to find fresh market space.

To do that, you need to either normalize the weird, or weird the normal:

Normalize the weird

Juice shots, bone broth, staying in stranger's homes, and riding in stranger's cars—all pretty weird ideas when they first came out.

Now these are massive categories. 

Here's what you need to normalize the weird:

• Make the weird thing safe and familiar: "Your stay in Airbnb is 100% insured."
  
• Push into an existing category that people understand. Pick the right one:
• Juice shots' category shouldn't be “juice” as they'd be massively overpriced. But, as a supplement, they're a fresh alternative.

Weird the normal

If you sell a normal thing, tweak it a bit to make it weird:

• Put your water in a can and give it death metal vibes (Liquid Death).
• Put a giant cooling system on your mattress (EightSleep).
• Put your chips in a tube (Pringles).

All boring and mundane things twisted in some sort of way to make them more interesting.

Normalizing the weird is harder and riskier, but if you can do it right, it can really hit.

In short: You gotta be weird. You chose whether you make it more or less weird.

What works for others is more likely to work for you. So it's time to audit your competitors.

The goal is not to steal directly from your competitor's, it's to learn from their success.

And I don't mean your direct competitors. As I said above, you don't want to risk looking too similar to them. Instead, you want to look at other companies that:

1. Target the same audience. Affluent parents. 20-year-old college guys. Hard-core programmers. You have to sell to each of them in completely different ways.
2. Monetize in a similar way. Freemium SaaS, a high-ticket services, and physical. You have to sell each of them in completely differently ways.

They do not need to sell the same thing as you. Instead, you want to see how they're capturing and converting the attention of your audience.

Go to Crunchbase and find companies that fit this bill—preferably ones that are larger and older than your startup as they're hopefully more sophisticated.

Next audit their:

1. Ads
2. Onboarding
3. A/B Tests
4. Content
5. Tech stack
6. Their social media

Read our Growth Guide for a step-by-step instruction on how to do the audit.

Why is all this competitive analysis work worth it? Four reasons:

1. You learn how your audience's attention is already captured and converted.
2. You learn common growth patterns and adopt them as your starting point.
3. You find great ideas you’ve overlooked.
4. You learn what the norms are, particularly for competitors’ ads and landing pages, so you can break them to stand out from everyone else—to rise above the noise.

That last point is key. I'll repeat it a lot.

If there's a form on the Internet, it will be filled out by a bot.

Guaranteed.

And emailing these can hurt the deliverability of all your emails long term.

Double opt-in helps ensure a human clicked it, and hopefully a human who wants it.

BUT not everyone who actually wants the emails will read the confirmation email and click it. Even in the best of cases we're talking ~70% of people. Even if say 10% are spam, then that means 20% of people who want your emails won't get them.

Here's what we do:

• We use an email validation tool (Kickbox) to check if each email is deliverable, low quality, spam, invalid, and more. We only subscribe if marked "deliverable."
• We have an automated "win back" email sequence to people who haven't opened emails recently. If they don't open/click, they're removed.
• If a handful of emails bounce in a row, removed.
• We periodically go through and remove low-quality looking, or clearly test emails.
• We're also quick to remove if yahoo, hotmail, or aol.
• We make it easy to unsubscribe in every email so if someone got it and they don't want it, they can remove themselves.
• We let people configure which emails they receive from us.

We've run this newsletter for nearly 4 years, and our open rates are consistently 40-45%—which is considered very healthy.

It could be even higher with double opt-in, but we're willing to risk it for the biscuit with the strategy above.

In the book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland talked about how one might compete against Coke. You might logically try to compete by doing:

• Larger can
• Lower cost
• Better taste

And you’d be laughed out of the room if you suggested:

• Smaller can
• More expensive
• Tastes awful

But that’s exactly what Red Bull did.

They created a new category that was completely unique at the time: energy drink.

Red Bull’s small size, increased cost, and weird taste were critical to its success:

1. For you to believe its potency you have to put it in a small can so people think that it’s so potent that it’s unsafe to drink a normal-sized can.
2. For you to value it, the "potent ingredients" must make it cost more than a soft drink.
3. And for you to believe it has those potent ingredients, it should have a weird medicinal taste (like Buckley’s “It tastes awful, but it works.”)

As Alex M H Smith says in his book, No Bullsh*t Strategy, the best way to compete is with "Contrarian Value"—find what all your competitors are fighting over and purposefully underperform on it so you can overperform in other ways.

Xbox and Playstation are in a brutal battle to be the fastest console.

To compete, Nintendo created the underpowered Switch allowing it to be played both at home and on the go. And it's now the 3rd most sold console in history.

When all the other soft drinks are battling over taste. Red Bull made theirs taste awful.

Ask yourself:

• What are your competitors battling over?
• What do you already suck at?
• What would happen if you sucked at it even more?

To grow you need a website that converts visitors into purchasers:

Purchase Rate = Desire - (Labor + Confusion) 

To increase the purchase rate, increase the visitor's desire to purchase while decreasing their labor (effort) and confusion:

1. Increase desire — Entice visitors with how much value you provide. Create intrigue.
   
2. Decrease labor — Reduce the work your visitors have to perform so they don't get tired or annoyed. Be concise and ensure every word and element is of value.
   
3. Decrease confusion — Don't confuse visitors with obscure or verbose messaging. Ensure every sentence can be easily understood. And make it self-evident which action they should take next (e.g. sign up or purchase). And ensure your action elements (e.g. buttons) are unmissable.

This means don't get overly fancy with your pages.

It's not an art piece.
It's not a statement.
It's a tool to convert attention into intention into action. 

A lot can be accomplished with this simple, tried-and-true page structure:

By "Features" I don't mean just saying "easy-to-use!"

Instead translate features into the value they'll get from using it. And proactively handle any objections they might have. 

For a detailed breakdown of how to create each of these sections, read out Landing Pages section of our comprehensive Growth Guide.

Taplio scaled to $1M in ARR in 9 months. They then got acquired by Lemlist.

They did it with a small team and no sales people.

Perfect Keto, a former client of ours, grew to 8-figures in revenue in under 2 years with a team of less than 10 people.

A big driver for both were free tools: 

Taplio

Taplio launched 12 free tools that drove a ton of growth.

For example, when carousels were becoming popular on LinkedIn, people were manually repurposing screenshots of tweets. So they created a free Tweet -> Carousel generator. 

On that page they pitched to product, then added a watermark that'd only be hidden if you become a paid member of Taplio

Pefect Keto

Perfect Keto sells supplements for people on the keto diet. They started producing a ton of SEO-content about keto diets right as the trend of keto diets was on the up.

One of the biggest drivers of traffic, sales, subscribers, and domain authority (at least at the time) was a free ketogenic diet calculator.

Create your own

To take advantage on this strategy, the sweet spot is:

• It's related to what you sell
• Would-be or current customers would need to do it. Bonus if it's frequently.
• A lot of people are searching for it (do keyword research)
• It's trending upwards (keto diets in 2017 or linkedin carousels in 2022)

Product-Market Fit is a tiny piece of the puzzle.

Yet it's what every startup is chasing. 

Of course, creating a product that solves a painful and unsolved problem is critical. But it's way more complicated than that.

We like to use the 5 Fits Framework (adapted from Brian Balfour's Four Fits):

1. Product – WHAT you sell. What problem does it solve? How unique is that? And, how well does it solve it?
2. Market – WHO you're selling to. Do they have that problem? How painful is it?
3. Model – HOW you charge (monthly, one-time, per unit), and how MUCH you charge.
4. Channel – WHERE you're marketing and selling it.
5. Brand – The perception, identity, and reputation of the company/people selling it.

All five of these need to be in sync for a company to take off. Examples:

• A Rolex-equivalent watch wouldn't work if sold by My Little Pony.
• You couldn't sell a kids toy for a $10,000 monthly subscription.
• You'd go bust if you paid for LinkedIn Ads to sell Fidget Spinners.

A great product that solves your painful problem just doesn't work if:

1. It's sold by a brand that you don't trust to make it.
2. It costs either way too much or way too little.
3. If it's marketed or sold where you aren't spending time.
4. And various other permutations of how these fit together.

So as you're building a great product, consider how it all fits together. 

Wanna go deeper?

If you wanna go deeper into Five Fits, growth strategy, brand strategy, onboarding, landing pages, as well as setting up marketing channels like ads, cold emails, and SEO—we're offering $300 off our Growth Program in our Black Friday/Cyber Monday promo. 

It's for early-stage founders that need to get their startup ready to go grow. We'll teach you the 80/20's of growth for your startup. And show you step-by-step how to do it.

Grab your $300 off →

(Or reply to this newsletter with questions)

A lot of movies, books, and TV shows follow a typical arc: The "Hero's Journey."

Here's what that looks like (using Stars Wars Episode 4 as an example):

This 12 step storytelling framework is overkill in most marketing. But, you can capture its essence with a helpful framework:

"Emotional Resonance" maps. 

We buy with emotion and justify with logic. Stories tap into emotions, which tap into wallets.

When you script an ad, webinar, sales pitch, fundraising pitch, marketing email, or social post, map out the emotion you want people to feel as they consume it. 

Here are 3 arcs that Patrick shared:

You could have a bad product, mediocre offer and no ability to persuade people and still sell a ton if you have a ton of demand for your product.

(Masks and toilet paper were a great example of this during peak COVID) 

You need to find a market that's desperate for a solution. Typically this boil down to seeking improved health, increased wealth, or improved relationships. 

Four factors to find a great market with latent demand:

1. Pain
2. Purchasing power
3. Easy to target / easy to find your audience
4. It’s growing

Let's dive into each: 

Pain

They have to desperately need what you’re offering. It can’t be a nice-to-have.

How much you charge is proportional to the pain someone has and your ability to relieve it.

Share the dream of their life without that pain. 

Purchasing Power

If you target students, they cannot pay you $1200 for a course.

Target venture capitalists and they could cough up ten grand if you can make them more.

Easy to Target

But, if you can't get your offer in front of venture capitalists easily, then what's the point? 

You need to be able to consistently be able to get in front of a lot of your audience.

Where do they spend time? What mailing lists are they apart of? Social media groups? Communities/forums? What YouTube channels do they watch?  

Growing

Find a market that’s growing. You'll grow as it does.

Don’t go into the newspaper or radio business. You'll be fighting a downward trend. 

In short, an increasingly painful problem for people with money who are easy to reach.

Most social media advice for early-stage startups:

"Focus on one account, maybe the founder. Or just do something else, like ads." 

Well, Oliver, the 21-year-old college student and founder of tabs, did the complete opposite—and achieved months with $500,000 worth of sales of "sex chocolate" as a result. 

Here's how:

• They have at least 30 creators they work with.
• Each with their own tabs-branded TikTok account. Seriously, 30+ accounts.
• They each post 1-3 videos every day.
• They're all less than 10 seconds.
• Over a third of the accounts have > 10,000,000 total views.
• They feel like customer reviews, not ads.

Each of the 30 creators has their own unique link in the bio so they can track purchases. Assumably, they're all being paid per conversion—so the upfront cost for tabs is minimal.

Added benefit of this strategy:

Now, when tabs run ads on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, they have a ton of organic-feeling, proven-to-work ad creatives to use. 

PS: They're clients of ours at Ad Labs. We're running their ads now ;0

Tanay Jaipuria spent years working on Facebook’s algorithm to help make users’ feeds more relevant and engaging.

So when Twitter/X open-sourced its recommendation algorithm a few months ago, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a peek under the hood.

There was another algorithm update since his original article, so we've weaved in other analyses as well.

Here are some tactical recommendations to increase visibility on X:

1. Optimize tweets for maximum engagement.

• Include images and videos (including GIFs) for a 2x boost in ranking. Having 3 or 4 images can boost it even further.
• Post in the same language as your followers to avoid a 90% penalty.
• Tweet about trending topics. These are promoted in the "For You" tab.
• Avoid using multiple hashtags, which can result in a 40% penalty.
• Eliminate misspellings/unknown words to prevent a 95% penalty
• Ask questions. Replies to tweets are one of the biggest boosters.
• Don't link off platform. These get penalized.
• Avoid controversial (blacklisted) topics.
• Don't be offensive.

2. Build quality relationships with followers.

• Reply to people who comment. An author replying is worth 2x someone else replying.
  
• But, you can be penalized for engaging with low quality commenters—so don't engage with ones in the "show more" or with low quality / offensive profiles.
• Collaborate with users and influencers in the same niche.
• Share targeted, valuable content tailored to your audience’s interests.
• Showcase your personality and brand voice to humanize your presence and make your tweets more relatable.

3. Leverage user factors to boost twitter presence.

• Consider subscribing to Twitter Blue for a 4x boost for people who follow you and a 2x boost for people who don't follow you.
• Maintain a healthy followers-to-following ratio. You should follow no more than 60% of your number of followers.
• Improve your "TweepCred" score, similar to Google’s PageRank, by posting high-quality content, engaging with followers, and maintaining a positive reputation.
• Consider offering a premium subscription. Twitter/X makes money when people subscribe, so they're incentivized to boost you.

Combine the above factors with high-quality content and consistent posting, and you'll give your tweets a better chance of being seen and engaged by your target audience.

For deeper analyses check out Tanay's article, and NFT_GOD's tweets which are more recent (1 and 2). 

Let's build off the last one. 

Which of these orange circles is larger?

Almost everyone says the one on the right—when in fact they're the same size.

Why is simple: Our perceptions are completely relative.

Here are 3 ways to do that:

#1. Change your competitive set

If you don't choose who you're compared to, people will do it for you.

Seedlip naturally would have been compared to a $2 bottle of Schweppe's Tonic Water. So instead, they used premium branding to be compared to the cost of a bottle of gin.

#2 Create a "decoy" product

Make your core product seem cheap by comparing it to a premium option.

The Atlantic famously did this with its pricing. The $100 plan is to make the $59.99 (another classic pricing hack) seem more reasonable.

#3 Highlight the cost of NOT using your product (the alternatives) 

Durex doesn't compare itself to Trojan. Instead, it compares it to the cost of a baby:

Money has zero intrinsic value.

Money has value because we all believe the same story that it is valuable. In a zombie apocalypse, your $20 bill becomes valuable as a heat source—and your credit card useless.

Van Gogh and Monet paintings are worth millions only because enough people believe the stories that the artist and society created around them. Countless paintings were made with similar aesthetic value, but are forgotten by history.

Your product's value is the same—it depends on the story you tell.

You need to craft compelling narratives that position you as the obvious choice—across the full customer journey.

As April Dunford says, you need to become "Obviously Awesome."

Do that, and instead of selling a $5 soft drink, you're selling a $35 "non-alcoholic spirit."

Here are April's 12 steps to becoming obviously awesome:

1. Identify your most eager customers and what they love.
2. Assemble diverse folks across your team to help define the story.
3. Have an open mind. Try not to succumb to confirmation bias.
4. Identify REAL alternatives to using your product (like sleep for Netflix).
5. List your product's superior, verifiable features (2x suction, not "user-friendly").
6. Determine your features' value to customers.
7. Pinpoint customer segments most likely to care.
8. Pick a market segment that isn't dominated and dominate it. That could be:
   
9. An entire market (chips)
10. A subset (potato-free or baked chips)
11. A new market ("dehydrated superfood")
12. Connect your product to a current trend (ex: Millennials reducing alcohol consumption)
13. Create a document for the team to reference
    
14. Name and description of product
15. Market and market segment
16. Alternatives to your product
17. Product’s unique and superior features
18. Tangible value it adds to customers
19. The characteristics of ideal customer
20. Weave the narrative into your marketing and sales collateral
21. Track and adjust if necessary. 

Your unique story is hard to get right, but if you do it can do wonders.‍

#10 is a key step.

You need a system that the whole team can use to tell that story. 

We can help you craft that story, and the system to tell it—for hooks, ads, landing pages, emails, and more.

Learn more about our Story Systems