Nothing turns people off more than pitching something completely irrelevant to them.

To avoid that, you must be selective about who, what, and when you pitch. Bad examples:

• The instant pop-up modal on all pages pushing them to book a demo.
• A 5 email sequence to everyone on your list promoting an expensive product.

Here's one way to do it better: Infer by past behavior. If they've:

• Visited relevant product pages.
• Clicked on relevant links in your emails.
• Read relevant content.
• Or came from a specific website.

You can infer things about them and what they might be interested in. 

For example, when we promote new cohorts of Un-ignorable (next coming mid-April!) , we focus on people who have joined the waitlist, visited the landing page, clicked an email related to Un-ignorable, or read our LinkedIn Organic Playbook.

Not everyone wants to build a personal audience, and that's okay. We don’t need to keep bugging people who aren’t interested.

But here's a better way: Ask people directly.

A few weeks ago, I added a question before News & Links asking people whether they're a founder, freelancer, or have a full-time role. This then links to a survey page where we ask more questions. Their answers are automatically saved in our email tool.

(We hide the section if you've already answered the question.) 

People are also given this survey right after subscribing, both on the thank you page and in the welcome email.

Several thousand people have already filled it out. Now, we can customize our drip emails, promo emails, and page content to what they actually care about.

Takeaway: Gather data from users and personalize their experience. We use RightMessage.

~50% of emails are spam. And 75% of emails are opened via Gmail.

Google and Yahoo are rolling out stricter requirements from email senders to combat the never-ending wave of spam. 

Here's the 80/20 of what you need to know:

#1. It was originally targeted for Febuary 2024, but it has been delayed to June 2024.

#2. If you send > 5,000 emails to Gmail users in a day, you need to meet these 3 criteria:

• Add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication to your DNS records for your mail server. This is technical, check out this article for help.
• Have one-click unsubscribe buttons and process them within 2 business days.
  
• Maintain a spam rate of 0.1% or less. A "spam" happens when a user marks a message as spam. If you send an email to 5,000 people, 6 people marking it as spam is enough to upset Google. For reference, we get 1 to 3 out of ~90,000.

#3. Email deliverability is serious. Every sub that doesn't get your emails is a lost potential customer and revenue.

The average open rate for business emails is ~20%. Our newsletter hovers around 45-50% for 90,000+ subscribers because we take it very seriously.

Read "Give single opt-in a chance" from a previous newsletter for a breakdown of everything we do to keep our open rates high (beyond the technical stuff above).

Which would you choose:

1. Initiative A: Gives you 500 new users this week but nothing afterward.
2. Initiative B: Gives you 20 new users in week one, 22 in week 2, etc (growing 10% WoW) for every week going forward.

Initiative B will take 14 weeks to reach 500 new users.

But after 1 year, you’ll have 28,208 new users and grow by ~2600 per week. By the end of year 2, you have 4,035,039 new users (assuming a constant 10% growth rate).

This is the general principle behind compounding Growth Loops:

In short, the output of a marketing initiative feeds back into the input. Examples:

Another classic example is ads:

1. You spend money to run ads
2. You profitably acquire new customers
3. You use said profit to acquire more customers. If you need help running ads, we’ve built an ad agency specifically designed for startups.

In short, your primary marketing efforts should not be one-off tactics. Instead, they should be initiatives that can compound. Here are examples that do not compound:

• Launching on Product Hunt: You get an influx of users. You… can’t launch on Product Hunt again.
• Timed-limited Promos: You get a big influx of customers and revenue. You can’t just run another promo.
• Press coverage: You get featured in Forbes. You get a big spike in traffic. It disappears a couple of days later. You can’t be featured all the time.

The things that don’t scale can be great ways to launch or get initial users and attention. But what truly scales a company are compounding growth loops.

This image summarizes this tactic perfectly:

Whenever you write copy, whether it's for:

• An ad
• Your homepage
• A sales email
• A pitch deck

Always anticipate and address people's biggest objections.

Your offer and product should be bold and interesting. But people naturally think it's too good to be true. We’ve all been disappointed by false promises. 

Or they're going to misunderstand and misinterpret. If you don't handle their objections, they will likely come to the wrong conclusion, leave, and never return because they've already ruled you out.

Examples of big companies we all know:

Of course, to handle objections, you need to know what they are, so:

• Ask your sales team.
• Talk to your customers. What questions do they ask? What hesitations do they have?
• See what they talk and complain about on Reddit, Quora, and social posts.

Then, handle their biggest objections upfront.

To learn more about creating landing pages that convert, check out our Landing Page guide and our Above the Fold Playbook.

1. The best way to do outreach is to know the person personally. You know them and they know you.
2. The second best way is to know a lot about the person already. You can reference small details or commonalities.
3. The third best way is to do a lot of research into the person to find commonalities.
4. The fourth best is weak personalization from easy-to-grab details from Clearbit.

The way most do it? They buy a list and blast it with zero personalization or research. It's a numbers game with terrible conversion rates.

This is often the case with sales calls, too. The salesperson follows a script without personalizing anything to you or your business.

Here's a new way to research people using Arc browser's AI feature called "Browse for me:”

All I did was:

1. Download the Arc Search app
2. Type in "who is neal o'grady"
3. Then tap the "Browse for me" button

Within 3 seconds, it summarized my career, education, notable highlights, and links to learn more.

You can get Arc to perform any search for you, not just for people.

It's not perfect. And some of the details are out of date. But for 3 seconds, it's pretty good.

If you send an outreach message or hop on a sales call with someone, you'll have a much better chance if you understand who you're talking to first. It only takes a few minutes.

$1,400,000,000 is spent on Amazon every day.

They're one of the most heavily tested and optimized product page and checkout experiences.

First, let's analyze the smart stuff they do on a product page mobile view:

Quite a lot. And this doesn't even include one-tap checkout.

Here's an overview of the lesser-known things on there:

• Social proof: We value what others value. High, plentiful reviews. Amazon Choice. And 2k+ monthly purchases signal it's a desired, de-risked item.
• Small price in red: A price in a small font is interpreted as cheaper than a large font (the Numerical Stroop Effect). Red is also interpreted as cheaper, particularly by men.
• Requires effort: A small amount of effort towards something increases the likelihood of completion. Requiring a simple tap for the 20% off coupon likely increases conversion rates.
• Fitt's Law: In the image below, you'll see Amazon used to have the Sub/One-time toggle on the left-hand side. Fitt's Law dictates that large and close objects are interacted with more often. As most people are right-handed, putting important tappable elements on a mobile screen's right and bottom edges is key.

Note, for that reason, they may keep the Heart button on the left-hand side to discourage its use. They want people to buy now, not add it to their wishlist. But it's always nice to have the fallback action available.

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Talking about what you're not is as important as talking about what you are, especially if you're challenging the status quo.

BRLO is a challenger startup in the alcohol-free beer category. It can't compete with massive beer brands' multibillion-dollar media spend, so it knew it had to get creative.

People are growing tired of perfect yet wholly inauthentic portrayals of men, who have dominated beer advertisements for decades.

(This sentiment away from "perfect" towards "authentic" is everywhere.)

So, they positioned themselves to be the complete opposite:

An authentic, full-bodied, and juicy beer leaning into Berlin's alternative reputation.

Much like Liquid Death did to the water industry.

Yet, the cleverest part of this strategy?

They stole fame from one of the most famous, inauthentic ads of the moment by Calvin Klein and satirized it. Here's a snippet of the comparison:

They found their enemy and satirized them.

Check out Will Poskett's post for the entire video.

Fun fact: Will is an alumnus of our audience-building course, Un-ignorable ;0

We're a bootstrapped, lean company. We love other bootstrapped, lean companies.

This insight is a kick in the pants for startups looking to run profitable ads.

But it's also incredibly motivating.

Here are the biggest drivers of profitable ads (from analyzing up to 28,000 brands):‍

1. A huge brand – up to 20x multiple on ROI‍

Yep, that's not what any of us wanted to hear. Here's the data:

The bigger you are, the more effective your ads, thanks to existing awareness and affinity. Often, you're just reminding people to buy or that you are selling something new they should get.

Sadly, we can't control that one, but we can control this one:

2. Great creative – up to 12x multiple on ROI

Here, you can see the difference in performance across creative campaigns for two established brands:

And if you look at all the other ways that influence ad profitability, focusing on great creative is really the best way (since you can't control your brand size or budget):

The magic doesn't come from button pressing and knob twisting in an ads dashboard. It comes from great ads that are noticeable, memorable, and cause an emotional response that drives action.

It's 12:35AM, you've swiped your 420th TikTok/reel, and you know you should go to bed, but you can't stop. Often, it takes some external jolt to get you to stop finally.

You then think, "Ugh, I need to delete it from my phone.”

If your app is never-ending and potentially addictive (Duolingo, Tinder, games, social media)

1. First of all, congratulations, that's hard to achieve.
2. Add in graceful exit points. This keeps users from getting so burnt out that they stop returning and increases overall satisfaction with your product.

Surprisingly, TikTok actually already does this.

If you watch too long, they have a video that tells you to take a break. But it misses the mark for a few reasons:

1. It looks like all the other videos.
2. It's too easy to skip.
3. It doesn't use data against me.

Here's what Growth Design suggests instead:

Being told I've watched 293 videos would get me to put the phone down. And I'd be extremely appreciative that THEY took the initiative.

Duolingo could add one as well. After you hit your goal for the day, they currently dump you back into the lesson tree, where you see the weeks of effort ahead of you. You feel like you've barely progressed and are less satisfied with your efforts.

Instead, they should do this:

Give your users a graceful exit. They'll appreciate you for it.

Check out Growth Design's case studies for both TikTok and Duolingo.

Baby carrots now account for 80% of all carrot consumption.

(For those who don't know, baby carrots are simply a sweeter variety of carrots that are chopped up into shorter pieces and have rounded edges.)

What can be learned from the humble baby carrot:

#1. Create a new experience for an existing product

• A full-sized carrot: A vegetable you cook.
• A baby carrot: A healthy snack food—at home or on the go.

This shift allowed for 4 interesting benefits:

1. Convenience as a value prop. Making carrots "grab and go."
2. Reframe from vegetable to snack. Are carrots the healthiest vegetable? Unlikely. Are they healthier than a chocolate bar? Absolutely.
3. New usage occasions. Instead of just in soups, now carrots can go in veggies trays, kid's lunches, and in the backpack for a snack in the park.
4. New distribution opportunities. As a grab-and-go snack, it makes sense for them to be in gas stations—a place that will never have a vegetable aisle.

#2. Push into the new category, don't fight it

Instead of leaning into the health value prop (carrots good—junk food bad), they found that treating baby carrots as a part of the junk food category, rather than in opposition to it, led to 10% more sales.

People already know they're healthier than candy and chocolate.

People need to be convinced that they're delicious, addictive, and indulgent, and can satisfy their junk food craving.

Look closely at most successful creators and you'll notice something. For example, let's take a look at MrBeast's YouTube channel:

Just in his last 20 videos, you can see a few repeat formats:

1. $1 vs $XXXXXXXX [thing]
2. [something] vs [adjective] [something else]
3. I [verb] X [thing]
4. World's [superlative] [thing]
5. Somebody surviving something and winning money

You'll also notice his thumbnails have recurring elements. And the videos themselves follow a certain structural pattern.

There are a few great reasons to find repeatable formats:

1. If you like $1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel, you'll probably like $1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht. Which in itself is smart because:
   1. It's easy for the YouTube algorithm to know what to recommend next.
   2. It's easy for your audience to decide what they should watch next. It's de-risked that they're going to like it.
2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Hence, the 5,000 Marvel movies. Every piece of content is an investment. You de-risk the investment by repeating what worked in the past.
3. It's less effort. This newsletter has a repeat format: Intro → sponsors → 3 growth tactics → news → something fun → outro. I'm not reinventing the wheel each time. I know what a "growth tactic" looks like. I like to say it's more like "filling in the blanks."

Get creative and find your repeatable content formats. Then, you can be creative within those boundaries.

Note: This concept also applies to ads :). If you find something that works, keep experimenting with that idea.

Americans (mostly men) spent $26,000,000,000 for Valentine's Day last year, and only 52% was for their partner. The rest was for their family, friends, coworkers, and kids.

It's one of the biggest gift-giving days of the year and is a huge opportunity for DTC brands.

You should test some ads using copy and creative targeted to Valentine's Day. Here are some example ad openers using a few of our hook types: 

#1. Credibility: 12,166 boyfriends have already bought X for their partner.

• Leverages the social proof of how many have bought from you.
• It also triggers an "Oh damn, I'm behind.”
• Depending on the product, you can try variations other than boyfriend or partner.

#2. Fear: There's only 2 more days until Valentine's Day.

#3 Counter-Narrative: Valentine's Day is BS. But your love isn't. Treat your partner anyway.

• Gets attention with the opener.
• Calls out the growing sentiment that people think Valentine's Day is overly consumeristic or fake but reframes the day as a positive.

#4 Celebration + Curiosity: It's Jack and Jill's 25th anniversary! Here's what Jack got her for their special day.

• Ad creative could show a couple with Jill looking excitedly down at the gift she's getting, but you can't see what it is. Piques the curiosity. Here's a quirky AI example:

#5 Identity: Still looking for the perfect gift to show your love? 

• Speaks to the situation they're in using a Barnum-style question.

#6. Surprise: 48% of Valentine's Day gifts aren't for partners. Treat your mom for Valentine's

• Surprising fact gets their attention. 
• Make it seem socially normal to buy for someone other than a partner.
• It reminds them of a specific person they could buy for. 

#7. Value: 10 Valentine's Day gifts that will WOW her (him/them).

• The ad sends to a piece of content where your product is the first on the list. 

As always, get creative with your Valentine's Day experiments.

"This reminds me of that time I was in a witch’s coven in France."

7 years ago in Thailand, I learned the power of a strong hook from a quirky German man.

He had spent the past year backpacking around Asia when I met him. His most profound skill was finding the perfect one-liner to hook you into one of his travel stories.

One that makes you immediately stop and say: “Wait, what? Go on...”

His line about a French witch’s coven is a perfect example. The actual story is just of him and 3 ladies at a music festival in France deciding to call their group a “witch’s coven.”

There are infinite ways he could have introduced the story where I'd halfheartedly listen to another story about partying. But this opener got me extremely invested in the story.

A hook is the opening to anything you want people to pay attention to

Whether it’s a:

• Ad
• Social post
• YouTube video
• Cold email/DM
• Fundraising pitch
• Newsletter tactic 😜

Or even a quirky travel story including French witches.

People are gone if you don’t intrigue them immediately.

Because hooks are so important, I've compiled various free resources as I've grown my LinkedIn audience to 58,000 followers. Here they are:

1. The Hook Vault. We used Readwise's list of top Twitter thread creators and analyzed the top 4 hooks from the top 100 creators. We'll expand this as time goes on.
2. Un-ignorable Hooks Email Course. After analyzing hundreds of hooks, patterns emerged. In this course, I teach the 11 fundamental ways to hook someone.
3. Breakdown of the top 26 hooks on Twitter. Each hook is color-coded to show the smart thing each creator did to hook you.
4. An analysis of the top 20 female creator's hook. Due to the total lack of gender diversity of the top 100 creators, I created one for the top 20 women.
5. An analysis of 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image too.

We've taught 1596 founders how to build their personal audience. The lesson on hooks is a favorite of every cohort. All of the lesson contents (and more) are in the resources above!

Most company's "strategies" are either purely:

Mark (aka Strategy Friend) defines a strategy as "an informed opinion about how to win." 

Your strategy is supposed to tell you exactly what your team needs to do in grow. Yet, according to Mark, most strategies look like this:

They're missing the key insight to the real cause of the problem and a strategy to help solve the problem. Instead, they just jump straight into tactics with no clear vision.

"Tactics are simply the activities that make a strategy happen."

Here are two examples of what a good strategy looks like:

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You may know the Ladder of Product Awareness, where you tailor the message to where the person is at in the buying journey based on whether they:

• Experience the problem
• Want to solve the problem
• Are aware that solutions exist (products)
• Know which solution is best

The Stages of Market Sophistication are instead based on the maturity of the market that your product exists in, which is a factor of:

• Awareness of your product/category—is it a fork or a Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle?
• Number of existing competitors.
• Sophistication of existing competitors.

Here are the 5 stages:

In summary:

1. "The Only:" Explain what you are and why that's good.
2. "The Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 1.
3. "How It Works:" Focus on HOW your product achieves the benefits.
4. "The Even Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 3.
5. "Who It's For:" Focus on how the product aligns with their identity and lifestyle.

Churn kills growth.

Combating churn is a mix of:

1. Selling to the right person in the first place.
   
2. Having a great product that solves an ongoing problem.
3. Wowing them with great onboarding so they start using it.
4. Keeping them hooked on your product.

This tactic is for #4. 

Duolingo is the best at gamification. They've turned what is one of the most boring and gruelling things to do (learn a language) and made it fun and addicting.

They do a ton right but this is about their Early Bird and Night Owl chests:

Early Bird & Night Owl Chests‍

If you complete a lesson before Noon, you'll get a Early Bird chest giving you an 2x boost to XP from lessons for 15 minutes. BUT you can't open it until 6PM. You get a push notification when it's ready to open. 

Then between 6PM and Midnight if you complete a lesson, you get a Night Owl chest (same reward) that you can only open the next morning (again with a push notification).

For this to work, Duolingo had to gamify in others ways first:

• Gaining XP let's you compete with friends & strangers. And people get super competitive about this.
• Every day you do a lesson you add to your streak. There are people with a streak of several years—my own record is ~500 days.

Meaning the reward is meaningful to them, and it costs Duolingo nothing to give. 

And the chests encourage using the app TWICE per day, not just once—and gives them an excuse to give you a push notification in a non-annoying way.

Takeaway: A hooked user that uses your product multiple times per day is very unlikely to churn any time soon. Get creative with incentivizing frequent use.

Psych Energy (coined by former Head of Growth at Airtable, Darius Contractor) is your visitor's emotional energy level as they go through your funnel.

• 0 Psych = "f*** this"
• 50 Psych = neutral/indifferent
• 100 Psych = "I'm in love"

Every positive interaction adds to their Psych. Every negative interaction subtracts from it.

The amount they have when they hit your site depends on HOW they get there. Branded search, assume > 50. Cold email link click, assume < 50.

It also depends on how they feel about your brand in general from previous interactions (directly or indirectly). A brand with a great reputation and positive word of mouth will lead to more people having > 50 Psych when they hit. 

Things that add to their Psych (and increase conversions):

• Nice design.
• Positive reputation.
• Clear, concise copy.
• Fun, humour, and ease of use.
• Bonuses and surprises

Things that subtract from their Psych  (and decrease conversions):

• Bad design or reputation
• Vague copy
• Confusing UI or UX
• Slow loading pages
• Form fields

In short: Build up their Psych high enough before you deplete it by asking them to do things like entering email, card info, address, add a profile image, etc.

Audit your funnel to maximize Psych before conversion steps.

Last week I shared Jenny Hoyo's structure for her 10-million view YouTube Shorts. 

Viral videos immediately open a loop that viewers desperately want to close.

But your video needs to have a built-in "retention mechanism" to keep them engaged throughout the entire video so they don't just skip to the end to close the loop.

Nobody does this better than MrBeast. Examples:

Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,00 

Instead of just watching the contestant sit in boredom in an empty house with limited food, MrBeast does things like break the house in half, hire a marching band to play music all night, and hire creepy clowns to stand outside and stare in through the windows.

$10,000 Every Day You Survive Prison

Every day the contestant is in the room, he's forced to give up one of the items in the room, making it progressively harder to be there. It's engaging to watch his suffering amplify. 

MrBeast takes it up another level by hiding a $100,000 check in his guitar. You keep watching just to see if he finds it.

$1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel Room!

Comparing hotel rooms at different prices levels has a natural retention mechanism as we're all curious to see them ramp up to $1,000,000, and pick our favorites.

If you plan to make videos, including video ads, study MrBeast's videos. Ask yourself:

• Why is he doing this?
• Why am I still watching?

Basically everything in his videos are intentional retention and engagement mechanisms.

Jenny Hoyos is 18 and has 1,029,345,221 views on her YouTube videos—averaging about 10M views per Short.

She's watched nearly every top creators' Shorts to reverse engineer the structure of a viral YouTube Short. Here's what she's landed on:

Here's an example she gives of the first three parts:

Note: The word illegally is quite hyperbolic, so tailor this to your audience's sophistication.

And here's an example from her video $5 Mother's Day Gift:

This format can be applied to other kinds of short-form video. Whether it's a reel, TikTok, an ad for Instagram, or a promo video.

Check out the the whole interview!

Someone with a small audience has to WOW you to get you to hit Follow.

Someone with a huge audience can post a platitude and you’ll say, "damn, that's so TRUE," and you'll likely hit Follow without much thought.

Social proof is a powerful motivator, and the lack of it is a powerful demotivator. This is particularly true on social media where your audience size is public.

That's why growth is so hard at first: No one wants to be the first one to a party.

You need to reach certain psychological thresholds to be taken seriously:

1. 1,000: This is where people go: “okay, they're not completely new.”
2. 5,000: “Not a complete nobody.”
3. 10,000. “Hmm, maybe they do have something to say.”
4. 50,000. “Oh okay, this is a creator on the rise.”
5. 100,000. “They're legit.”
6. 500,000 or even 1M+. “How do I not already know this person?”

Here are some scrappy ways to reach those thresholds:

• Get every friend you have to follow you if you're <100. 
• Follow and DM people who engage with your posts to thank them or start a conversation. They'll often follow.
• Meaningfully comment on other people's posts who are at a similar stage. Start a convo. Then eventually follow them/send a connection request and DM them.
• Comment on other people's comments big creator's posts. Again, start a convo and follow/connection request + DM.
• Leverage relationships you have with people with large audiences than you. See if they'd be willing to engage with some of your posts or to tag you in one of their own.
• If on LinkedIn, use tools like WeConnect or Lemlist to automate 20-30 connection requests per day with people in your target audience and who share communities with you (went to the same university or live in same city).

These are hacky. But that's sadly what you gotta do early on.

And I highly recommend going through our free Hook Vault—we compiled 400 of the top hooks from the top 100 creators on Twitter (based on Readwise's data).

Learning how to hook people is critical.