This week, I sat down with Akhil Reddy, Founder & CEO of Thera, for a behind-the-scenes look at how they're building an ecosystem of apps to run a modern business. And how they’re doing so by challenging industry norms, focusing on the segment everyone else forgets - SMBs. Proving that deliberately staying focused on this forgotten segment can be both more profitable and defensible when executed with discipline.

This conversation and episode is a deeper look into the debate between integration and segmentation of products, and Akhil gives a unique perspective, that I believe is helping them win.

While most B2B SaaS companies use SMBs as a stepping stone to enterprise, Thera proves that deliberately staying focused on "forgotten" SMBs can be both more profitable and defensible when executed with discipline.

So without further ado, this is the story of how Thera went from Zero to One 🚀.

Thera At a Glance

When Akhil founded Thera, he noticed a pattern: financial operations platforms started serving smaller businesses, but then inevitably moved upstream to chase lucrative enterprise deals. This pattern happens in most B2B categories.

But there’s a fundamental problem with it.

It leaves SMBs with increasingly complex, fragmented, and expensive tools designed for much larger companies.

So Akhil set out to change this by recognizing a broader market opportunity:

“Fintech is entering a bundling era, and there are few, if any, all-in-one platforms like ours. When I was at Amazon, I thought deeply about the reasons for their success. Amazon won due to three main reasons: (i) affordable prices, (ii) selection, and (iii) convenience. We’re bringing this same ethos to Thera.”

Akhil Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO @ Thera

This one-platform approach is a key differentiator for SMBs. With legacy providers either too fragmented or too expensive.

“Unlike other global players, we don’t mark up our FX. We take the Costco approach and pass on wholesale rates.”

Akhil

Thera's Foundation

Thera began with a laser focus on global contractor management – a strategic wedge product that perfectly addressed an emerging market need.

"Many startups now have more contractors than they have full-time employees. Many legacy payrolls have no international capabilities at all."

Akhil

This juxtapositioned insight revealed an opportunity: growing businesses needed global capabilities that existing solutions simply weren't providing.

So Thera leaned into it.

"It's our most robust product. It's also our most popular," Akhil notes. This targeted approach gave them an entry point that solved a pressing problem while establishing a foundation for their broader vision: an integrated financial operating system for modern SMBs, eliminating the traditional fragmentation of 5+ separate tools for payroll, treasury, spend management, payments, and accounting.

And the early days? They looked like your typical founder hustle story - Akhil describes it as "door to door sales, meaning I met people out in New York City."

The YC network provided a few initial customers with a higher risk tolerance for new software. But the focus was always on delivering excellence.

“For our first set of customers, we focused on delivering a white-glove experience and made sure they were incredibly happy. Once we ironed out our experience, we used our initial set of customers as case studies to attract our next.”

Akhil

This point on risk tolerance is critical: When you're a startup, you have no market trust. Finding early adopters with higher risk tolerance - typically other startups who understand your position - is essential for gaining initial traction.

Thera then used this initial traction to build a product that delivers a significantly better experience than legacy providers for SMBs, and at more affordable rates - attracting hundreds of customers and reaching well into seven figures of revenue.

Let's break down how they did it.

💬 Winning the Forgotten Middle

Most startups follow a predictable playbook: start serving other startups & SMBs for initial traction, then inevitably chase the bigger checks of mid-market and enterprise. And it makes sense. Bigger customers typically mean more revenue.

But what also happens is that this gravitational pull toward complexity, bloat, and price increases is created.

This is a problem for SMBs.

The solutions they have used for years slowly get more expensive. And the companies providing these solutions point to all the new features included.

But most of those features are not useful to an SMB. They were built for midmarket and enterprise.

So those SMBs either have to suck up the cost of unused features or look for a new solution.

Thera deliberately broke this pattern.

Their core insight: the real opportunity is in NOT going upmarket.

Choosing to be the solution for the segment that everyone else abandons. And not treating them as a stepping stone. But a destination in and of itself.

"The SMB market has been largely overlooked with the current solutions and many of them are moving upstream towards mid-market & enterprise."

Akhil

Thera identified a massive opportunity in being the company that stays true to SMBs' unique needs rather than following the typical trajectory of moving upmarket.

So while competitors sacrifice SMB experience for enterprise revenue, Thera doubled down on creating the definitive solution for them. Creating a moat that's difficult for enterprise-focused competitors to replicate without completely rebuilding their products and teams.

“Often times with SMBs, you’re selling to the founders. Our value prop of consolidating their finance stack and saving them thousands of dollars a year hits home.”

Akhil

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

1. Building "Hubspot in a world of Salesforces"

This pattern was prevalent in the financial & HR operations market. You have legacy players and startups all focused on enterprise clients.

Leaving SMBs with increasingly ill-fitting solutions - and at higher prices.

"Everyone is building Salesforce, but no one's building Hubspot." Akhil explains.

This analogy perfectly captures their strategic positioning.

While competitors chase larger enterprise deals with bloated software, Thera created an integrated platform specifically designed for how SMBs actually operate.

"Enterprise software isn't going to be particularly well suited for SMBs. There's a lot of bloat in the software - we see that complaint from companies coming from Rippling (or similar solutions) all the time," 

Akhil

A powerful positioning insight that creates a compelling narrative.

Deliberately targeting what Akhil calls the "Unspoken heroes. They're not necessarily venture-backed, they're typically bootstrapped but they're still making millions of dollars in revenue a year."

This focus wasn't immediate - it evolved through experience and testing.

"We started from early-stage startups when we just got going, but now we understand that we match better with later-stage SMBs,"

Akhil

By recognizing patterns in customer success and churn, they identified their sweet spot: companies with enough revenue to need sophisticated financial operations, but not so large that they require enterprise-grade complexity.

Enterprise software is built for scaling complexity, managing bureaucracy, and higher budgets.

SMBs need tools that stay out of their way while enabling growth.

By focusing exclusively on this segment, Thera can make opinionated product and marketing decisions that would be impossible with a broader market approach.

2. Strategic feature discipline to maintain product integrity

Arguably more important than knowing what features to build, is knowing what features not to build.

With every feature you add, you are signalling to the market the type of customer you want using your product.

You have to be very thoughtful.

And often this means ignoring or saying ‘no’ to customer feature requests.

Your users are not always right. They do not know what is best.

They know what is best for them.

But what is best for them, sure makes their lives better, but might cause bloat for all of your other customers.

You need to balance customer feedback with both product taste and direction.

Because not only does every product decision take resources away from other areas. It also has the potential to signal the wrong type of customer.

This is something to avoid like the plague. Having the wrong set of users for your product can kill your business.

If you do attract the wrong users (like 1-person consultancies, when you're built for larger SMBs), you can end up with a customer base that's too fragile to sustain your product.

Thera needed to make sure they were sending the right signals.

Akhil explains their framework:

"If it's as simple as, 'Hey, I want this note added on all our invoices.' Yeah, we'll do that for you. But if it's like, 'Hey, I want this workflow where I'm billing clients the exact amount that I billed this contractor,' then it’s like, 'Well, that feature is probably not very useful for companies outside your segment. So we'll tell them that we can't build that for them."

Akhil

This discipline is what prevents the bloat that kills SMB-focused tools.

Every feature request is evaluated through the lens of: "Does this serve our broader SMB customer base, or is this just enterprise complexity creeping in for the benefit of a few, or a single user?"

This approach requires confidence in your positioning.

And the ability to say no to potentially more money in the short term.

But it's a level of strategic discipline that separates successful, focused companies from those that lose their way chasing every opportunity.

3. Modular by default

SMBs hate being forced into all-or-nothing solutions. It’s the root cause for solutions that are both too expensive and bloated.

It’s why one of Thera's defining principles is being default modular. Unlike traditional "all-in-one" solutions that force customers into a rigid bundle, Thera is built as an open ecosystem of apps that can operate independently or integrate seamlessly.

Each app in the Thera suite, from Payroll to Spend to Docs, is siloed by default.

Need just contractor management? Great, start there. Ready to add payroll later? It integrates perfectly - but it's not required.

This isn't just a feature decision - it's a fundamental philosophy that respects how real SMBs adopt technology: gradually, based on burning needs, and not all at once.

This flexibility is fundamentally different from the bundled model, where adopting one feature means inheriting the complexity of the entire platform.

When used together, Thera apps unlock powerful integrated workflows:

• Automatically sync payments and payroll with accounting.

• Route invoices from Thera Payments to Thera Cash.

• Run Payroll from Thera Cash.

But none of it is mandatory. You choose your entry point. You grow on your terms. Dramatically lowering the barrier to adoption while avoiding the bloat that marks competitor products.

This modular design gives Thera a unique advantage:

• Lower barrier to adoption: Start with one need, expand as trust builds.

• Better customer fit: Avoids bloat and complexity of "one-size-fits-all".

• Composable stack: SMBs can build their own finance OS instead of adapting to someone else's.

It's how Thera simultaneously solves the "too simple" and "too complex" problems that plague SMB financial tools while staying nimble, customer-centric, and scalable - all at once.

Turning Service into Market Share

In an industry increasingly dominated by self-service products and automation-first approaches, Thera believes that service quality isn't just a nice-to-have - it's a major competitive advantage.

This wasn't just a philosophical choice but rather a strategic insight born from observing customer behavior and competitor weaknesses.

Most current solutions have terrible customer service.

Legacy players are notorious for slow response times, confusing interfaces, and impersonal interactions.

And the big-name startups prioritized scale and automation over human connection.

Thera saw this as a massive opportunity.

So they built systematic approaches to deliver consistently exceptional experiences that create tangible business value. Balancing high-touch service with scalable systems.

Every aspect of their model is designed to not just satisfy customers but to turn them into vocal advocates who drive word-of-mouth growth.

And they're not just providing a white-glove service; they're building a machine that can deliver white-glove experiences at scale.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

1. Speed as a service

In competitive industries like financial ops, response time isn't just a service metric - it's often the deciding factor in customer acquisition and retention.

Thera recognized that when businesses have financial issues, especially payroll problems, they can't wait days for responses.

"Practically our response times are far, far faster than some of these other solutions,"

Akhil

But this speed isn't accidental - it's the result of deliberate system design.

They've structured their team and processes around rapid response, treating speed as a core product feature rather than just a service goal.

Creating a powerful acquisition channel: "We actually do see many customers coming because of poor customer service from their previous provider."

When competitors take days to respond to critical issues, Thera's rapid resolution becomes a compelling reason to switch.

Transforming customer service from a cost center into a growth engine.

2. Embracing "unscalable" high-touch service

While a lot of SaaS companies, especially those with no previous founder experience, see human interaction as an inefficiency to minimize, Thera treats it as a competitive weapon.

Every customer gets a dedicated CSM and direct access through Slack Connect channels - an approach that seems unscalable but creates incredible business value.

"We give a dedicated CSM to every customer that onboards, and we give them the ability to interact with us via Slack through Slack Connect. Every single customer gets a Slack Connect channel."

Akhil

This level of personal attention creates several strategic advantages:

First, it dramatically improves customer retention by building personal relationships.

Second, it provides continuous product feedback from real usage scenarios.

Third, it creates emotional connections that lead to referrals and testimonials. Turning customers into advocates.

And most importantly, this high-touch approach allows them to understand their customers deeply.

When you're connected to your customers daily, you can anticipate their needs, spot issues before they become problems, and build features that truly matter.

Plus, you start to speak their language. Which makes it easier to build rapport in sales calls and with future customers.

Importing Innovation Across Markets

Thera's breakthrough was recognizing a simple parallel:

What Wise did for consumer remittances, someone could do for business payments.

"B2B payments, in many ways, looks like what consumer remittance looked like ten years ago."

Akhil

And this wasn't just about copy-pasting features; it was about importing an entirely different philosophy about how financial services should work into B2B.

Consumer fintech has proven that customers would choose a better experience and transparent pricing over incumbent relationships.

They'd also shown that technology could dramatically reduce costs while improving service.

And most importantly, they'd demonstrated that users, once they experienced the new way of doing things, wouldn't want to go back to the old way.

And so Thera brought these beliefs into their product.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

1. Exploiting the B2B-consumer innovation lag

Most industries experience innovation in waves.

Consumer applications typically lead the charge. And B2B solutions follow.

This applies to product, marketing, sales, and support. The pattern is consistent.

Consumer products make humorous social media campaigns. A few years later, so do B2B companies like ClickUp.

And almost always it comes with the same criticism: what works in B2C, doesn’t work in B2B. Except a few years later, everyone is doing it.

Akhil recognized that they were on the edge of this pattern and positioned Thera at the forefront of the B2B wave of it.

"The B2B management space, in many ways, looks like what the consumer remittance space looked like ten years ago. To send money abroad, it was extremely slow, extremely expensive. And then you had Wise come in. And Wise was like, it shouldn't be this expensive, and it shouldn't be this difficult."

Akhil

Turns out this wasn't just an observation - it was a blueprint.

They could see exactly where they were heading by looking at where consumer payments had been.

And there’s an underlying reason for this consistent pattern: At the end of the day B2B is still somewhat consumer. You are still selling to people, who just happen to be making decisions for a company (there are nuances however).

And these people become accustomed to consumer trends and innovations in their personal lives. And so start to become comfortable with, and even expect them in their professional ones.

This is exactly what is happening with Thera. Consumer financial systems are sophisticated at the smallest level. B2B buyers want to see the same in them.

2. Pricing. Pricing. Pricing.

Thera didn't just look to Wise’s innovations - they took inspiration from their business model too.

Instead of maximizing margins per transaction, they focused on volume through better pricing.

"Largely, we've taken that playbook and adapted it to contractor management. And typically, contractors will see anywhere from 2-3% more if you use our payroll versus a Deel, Rippling, or Gusto,"

Akhil

This 2-3% difference represents a significant shift in industry economics.

To put this in perspective: for a contractor making $100,000 annually, that's an extra $2,000-$3,000 in their pocket simply by working with companies that use Thera.

But here's the real brilliance in this pricing model: those contractors become one of Thera's most powerful sales channels.

"We actually didn't predict this, but every month we get new clients who just hired a contractor that was previously paid with Thera. They insist that their employer switch to Thera."

Akhil

Think about it - when contractors move between companies (which happens constantly), they bring Thera with them. They've experienced getting an extra 2-3% in their pocket, and they're not going back to the old way.

This creates a viral growth loop that's nearly impossible to replicate without incumbents sacrificing margins. Contractors literally sell the product for Thera by insisting their new employers switch.

A network effect hiding in plain sight.

3. Dogfooding as a product excellence engine

Perhaps the most powerful application of consumer fintech principles is using your own product obsessively.

Consumer fintechs live by this rule - they use their own apps daily and feel every friction point, every moment of joy, and everything in between.

If you can use your own B2B product - you should. Actually, you must.

It builds an intuitive understanding of your customers that just can’t be learned. It has to be experienced. There are many great examples of this, and we’ve spoken about a few previously, lemlist for example.

And Thera is no exception.

"We use Thera to pay all of our Thera employees. And we're distributed across five different countries," Akhil explains.

They're not just dogfooding - they're stress-testing their platform with their own complex international payroll needs. Multiple team members. Multiple countries.

"We'll have regular bug bashes, where everyone goes through the entire workflow of what it would be like to onboard, to run payroll, and all the other typical workflows that you'd expect from financial ops."

Akhil

And unlike a lot of B2B startups, Thera don’t need to simulate these sessions, the Thera team experiences them first hand. Creating an experience that can’t be replicated.

Dogfooding like this creates several advantages:

1. Immediate feedback loop: Problems are discovered by the team before customers even experience them.

2. Deep product understanding: Team members become expert users of their own product. Meaning better support. Higher sales conversion rates. Better marketing copy.

3. Authentic motivation: Everyone has a personal stake in product quality. It affects their lives.

4. Competitive advantage: Edge cases and improvements come from real usage rather than theoretical planning

Thera is quietly building what their competitors overlooked: a cohesive, global, user-centric financial OS for SMBs. By:

• Staying focused to SMBs

• Building with discipline

• Delivering human-level service

• Importing consumer innovation

They’re changing SMB expectations. Where in a world of bloated tools and impersonal product building, Thera is proving that better software and better service can coexist, especially for the businesses that need it most.

For The Zero to One, it's been your host, Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

This week, I sat down with Alyona Mysko, Founder & CEO of Fuelfinance, a finance-as-a-service startup that's rapidly scaling toward $4M ARR and has become the go-to financial solution for growing companies, such as Hampton and Oceans.

I had a lot of fun writing this deep dive. Alyona and the Fuelfinance team are redefining the relationship between finance and fun.

It was awesome to get a chance to dig deeper into their story and share with you the bts on how they got here.

After speaking with Alyona, I had this distinct feeling that Fuelfinance is only at the start of its journey. I’m willing to put myself out there that you’ll hear much more about them as time goes on.

Ps. a big thank you to Alyona for sharing your insights into building the company, and to Yuliya for setting it all up - the work you do is truly awesome.

So, without further ado, this is the story of how Fuelfinance went from Zero to One 🚀

The path to $4M ARR for Fuelfinance

It's 2019, and Alyona Mysko has a vision to "make finance cool again" - a strong stance in a traditional industry dominated by QuickBooks, Xero, and other legacy financial products & systems.

So she launches the first version of Fuelfinance, a financial service for early-stage startups, offering a human touch combined with software to help founders understand their finances.

The early days looked like your typical founder hustle story:

• Reaching out to her network

• Constantly meeting with other founders, and

• Building a product people would actually pay for

Their first customers came from Alyona's and Yaroslav's network of founders they knew or had previously mentored in accelerators.

It was a hit.

The first few users loved Fuelfinance and started to evangelise it, spreading the word in their networks.

"I remember that even with the first two, three customers, we just made them very, very happy. And when they were happy, we asked them if they knew anyone who also needed a similar solution."

Alyona Mysko, CEO & Founder at Fuelfinance

Within a year, Fuelfinance had started to build some traction.

I’m a big believer in momentum. We see it happening all around us. Some nights your favorite NBA player just can’t seem to miss. Every shot. Swoosh. And then some nights, they couldn’t pay for a bucket.

Many studies prove this ‘hot hand’ exists.

And I have a strong belief that this same principle applies to building a business. When you feel momentum - lean in. Lean in hard. Ride your hot hand.

And that’s exactly what Alyona did.

Feeling this traction, she and Yaroslav, previously the CEO of Petcube (YC company), went all in on scaling the business.

This proved crucial.

The combination of Alyona's financial expertise and Yaroslav's product and scaling experience, they soon hit an inflection point. And in 2023, they hit $1M ARR.

“When we hit $1,000,000 in ARR, it was already another stage. We understood some things, and now it was about how we will scale. I never understood why $1M was so important to cross. But now I understand that crossing it is very important.”

Alyona

Today, they are on track for $4M ARR, with over 70 high-ticket, sticky customers.

So, the question still remains: How did Fuelfinance get here?

💭 Be Opinionated: In Product, Marketing, and Positioning

From the jump, Fuelfinance took a distinctive, opinionated approach to finance - something foreign to a traditionally ‘boring’ industry that many founders dread.

When talking to Alyona, one thing was crystal clear: she has a deep conviction that finance not only could be, but actually was, fun and engaging.

I’ve talked a few times about Founder-Market fit in these deep dives (like this Jasper edition), and this is one of the best examples.

Building a startup is a grind. It’s hard. Forces you to go outside of your comfort zone. And punches you in the gut over and over again.

Picking an industry and product/service that (i) genuinely excites you, and (ii) you are an expert in, makes this journey of a lifetime all the more manageable.

It’s not a necessity, but it helps a lot.

Your passion and knowledge come through when you speak to potential customers, investors, or A+ hires. Thus they’re more likely to see it, and believe it.

Imparting this same conviction on others that you feel is critical to get off the ground.

And when you are genuinely excited by it, you impart onto others what I felt after speaking with Alyona. But back to being opinionated.

For Alyona, being opinionated wasn't just a marketing angle - it was a core belief that drove the business:

“Most people think that - 'oh my gosh, finance.' And they always think about accounting, QuickBooks, or other stuff. And I was like, no. That's not it. It's really fun.”

Alyona

And so that’s what Fuelfinance set out to achieve. An opinionated stance on finance.

Making it fun.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

Bold, distinctive content

Fuelfinance’s marketing breaks all the rules in a traditional B2B playbook.

Scroll through their LinkedIn and you'll find bold graphics, bright colors, pop-culture references, jokes, strong stances, and trend-jacking that make you love seeing them on your feed.

"We’ve termed some of our marketing... We call it Beyoncé marketing,".

In many ways, it reminds me of the approach ClickUp takes to B2B marketing. Fun. Different. Takes a stance. Keeps it more human, something you see mostly in B2C.

This wasn't just being different for the sake of it.

Don’t do that.

Different is great, but only if it has substance behind it.

Fuelfinance’s content is super strategic.

Weaving in different types of content for different stages of their funnel:

Top-of-funnel content: Attention-grabbing, sometimes provocative posts that drive followers and awareness.

Middle-of-funnel content: Value-adding templates, cheat sheets, calculators, and knowledge that builds credibility

Bottom-of-funnel content: Case studies and product feature announcements that drive conversions

“When we talk about converting to demo calls, that's definitely about case studies that we post or about new product features that we launch. These two types of posts bring us demos.”

Alyona

The key insight: You can't just post 100% information. No one will be interested in buying from JUST that. My suggestion for a ratio to start testing is 80/20.

80% free value, and 20% more bottom of funnel, still with value hidden inside it though.

Each content type serves a different purpose in their growth engine.

Some to build connection, some to build trust, some to demonstrate expertise, and others to convert.

The results speak for themselves - their LinkedIn is driving 20% of their MQLs, with that number growing every month. But more on this in tactic number 2.

Solution designed with strong opinions

Fuelfinance doesn’t try to be all things to all people.

Their finance-as-a-service approach makes deliberate, opinionated choices about what good financial management looks like for growing companies.

While many finance options either focus on basic tracking tools or full-service CFO replacements, their solution has evolved to fit a specific customer at a specific stage: companies with enough revenue to need financial insights for scaling, but not yet large enough to need enterprise solutions.

This led to a hybrid approach - combining human financial expertise with technology and AI.

Starting with spreadsheet-based deliverables, which then evolved to include a web interface while maintaining the human touch.

As Alyona noted, "switching from G Sheets to a web interface was a huge upgrade - still supporting both."

“We started from early stage startups when we just started, but now we understand that we match better with later stage companies. Those who already have a track record of revenue,” Alyona explained

This refinement came from listening to customers and recognizing patterns in who received the most value from their service:

“When you already have revenue and traction, like $4M+ in annual revenue, you have some understanding about your business. And, usually, you have this goal to scale what works for you. And to understand what to scale, you need some numbers, figures, data-driven approach.”

Alyona

And that’s the gap in the market they chose to fill.

By being opinionated about who they serve and how they serve them, they created a service-software hybrid that resonates deeply with their target customers instead of being only okay for everyone - something that often happens as companies grow and feature bloat creeps in.

Counter-positioning against financial stereotypes

I would say that Alyona deliberately positioned against the stereotypes of financial services, but there’s a slight nuance. It’s not just a branding decision, but a belief decision. Belief against:

• The boring, dry nature of traditional finance solutions

• The complexity of enterprise systems

• The simplicity of basic spreadsheets without insights

This counter-positioning created a clear value proposition: finance that's both powerful and approachable.

"All founders think that finance is something very boring... But that's not it. It's really fun," Alyona emphasized.

Their tagline of “making finance cool again” is more than just words - it's a mission statement that permeates their entire brand and way of operating.

As Alyona shared:

“This was my internal mission to show that it's really fun. And to be in line with this mission, our marketing should be very opinionated. We can't be somewhere in between or with an even tone of voice.”

Alyona

This positioning has allowed them to carve out a distinct market position, taking themselves out of the line of competition.

By challenging assumptions about what finance should be, they’ve become a market of one.

🕵️‍♀️ Become the (founder-led) authority

In the early days of a startup, the founder IS the brand.

This is becoming even more true as B2B categories increase, the number of solutions increases, paid marketing gets more expensive, and buyers are more confused than ever.

You need to cut through the noise.

You, and by extension your business, need to be seen as a subject-matter expert, with authority on your industry.

This is how you become trusted by buyers.

It’s how in crowded markets, you stand out.

So when your buyers are ready to buy, they come straight to you. Often preselling themselves.

The best way to do this is with founder-led content.

Alyona and the team crush it here.

With Alyona’s personal brand, Fuelfinance feels a lot more personal and relatable.

You’re not buying from a soulless enterprise, but from Alyona and her team.

Alyona has become inseparable from the company. Placing herself at the center and building a personal brand that has become a significant growth driver for the business.

Her LinkedIn posts regularly generate hundreds of thousands of impressions, drive demos, and open partnerships for the company.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

Personal brand as demand generation

Alyona doesn't only post about the business - she creates thought leadership content that establishes her as an authority in the startup finance niche.

Her content ranges from financial best practices, insights, cheatsheets & templates to transparent sharing of Fuel's growth journey.

What makes this approach particularly effective is her balance between authenticity, expertise, and product.

Scroll through Alyona’s feed and you’ll see personal stories (with lessons in them), the wins and losses of building Fuelfinance, and a whole lot of graphics, cheatsheets, guides, and videos of Alyona showing her expertise.

But importantly, she also doesn’t shy away from speaking about product. In her words: “But then I started sharing it [Fuelfinance] in a way that gives value: new features and how they can solve REAL problems, insightful/inspiring interviews with clients, events.”

Sharing finance cheatsheets, guides, and insights, builds authority.

Her transparency builds trust.

And her product updates and customer interviews get people interested in the solution.

Together, they generate demand - driving qualified leads directly to the team to close.

Becoming the go-to finance expert for founders

Alyona has strategically positioned herself as a translator between traditional finance and the startup world.

Her background in finance combined with her startup experience gives her unique credibility to bridge this gap.

"We see a low level of financial knowledge, especially between founders. And on another hand, we also understand that bringing this value to this audience means they want to work with us later. Because we were the first content who explained to them how to do things in finance."

Alyona

Her approach goes beyond typical thought leadership.

She wants to become a trusted advisor that founders turn to, even before they are customers (i.e. to go to her LinkedIn and their more in-depth content and resources)

So when a founder has a finance question, they go to Alyona.

And when they’re ready to buy a financial solution, Alyona has created a natural path to Fuelfinance.

Doing it through:

• Simplified explanations of complex financial concepts

• Frameworks that make finance accessible to non-finance founders

• Templates and cheat sheets that provide immediate value

• Content targeted specifically to founder pain points

By solving founders' problems with free content, she builds the trust that eventually leads them to become customers when their problems become more complex.

Authority through community presence

Alyona doesn't just publish content to build her brand - she shows up where her ICPs are.

Whether it's communities, events, or relevant social spaces, her presence reinforces both her and the Fuelfinance brand.

A key insight here is her focus on niche, targeted events rather than just the major conferences that everyone knows about and goes to:

"We are focusing on not very popular conferences... some affiliate summit, summit for architectural companies."

This targeted approach ensures they're connecting with the right audience rather than getting lost in the noise of major events.

She also leverages strategic relationships with notable founders to amplify her message (more on this below).

By showing up consistently in these spaces and connecting with influential founders, Alyona creates a halo effect that elevates both her personal and the company’s brand.

🏘️ Community & Partnerships as a Distribution Engine

As we spoke about earlier, Fuelfinance had the typical startup origins - with the first few customers coming from their immediate network.

But for every startup, this network inevitably runs out.

The difficulty is though that referrals are usually one of the best ways to acquire customers - they have built-in trust, convert at higher rates, and usually cost a lot less to acquire (or often even free).

The problem comes with scaling this.

It’s even more challenging for a higher ticket solution to predictably scale referral mechanisms as they grow.

Fuelfinance, however, has tried to keep this referral feeling through robust strategic partnerships and a community growth engine.

Systematically building relationships, turning what for most companies would be ad-hoc connections, into a structured growth machine.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

Leveraging high-profile founder networks

One of Fuelfinance’s most effective growth drivers has been its strategic relationships with well-known founders and creators:

"We're building a FUEL Ambassadors community of the most innovative founders and creators. Austin Rief (Morning Brew), Joe Speiser, Sam Parr (The Hustle & Hampton), Ian Myers (Oceans) and others have already said yes."

Alyona

Through excellent service, Fuelfinance turned customers into evangelists:

"We have one customer called lemon.io. This was one of our first customers when we just started building our product… Their founder, Alex… He's a member of Hampton community. And he actually knows many of these guys because he's in this community. And he was so happy with our service that he actually started to share it within Hampton and with his friends."

Alyona

This creates a powerful flywheel effect:

1. Provide exceptional service to a customer

2. That customer shares with their network

3. High-profile customers bring in more customers

4. The cycle continues

But it relies on one key component. You actually have to deliver an exceptional service. Good doesn’t get referrals.

Alyona explained how these connections compound: "Everyone knows everyone. So Sam knows Austin. Austin then introduced Alex. So that's how it all started."

It’s a common theme I see doing these deep dives.

Founders know other founders.

And it’s intuitive.

Think about your circles, there’s typically a common interest or theme between you and everyone in them:

• Where you went to school

• Sports clubs

• Hobbies

It’s also a caution to be specific with the type of customers you take on, especially if you have a service element to your business.

If you have one-person consulting shops that might shut down if they don’t sign another client, chances are, they know other people like that, and that’s who they refer.

But if you serve $10M+ founders, they’ll most likely refer other $10M+ founders.

So be careful about taking on too many clients whom you don’t want to work with long term.

The key lesson here is that by focusing intensely on making high-profile & influential customers successful, they created natural evangelists who drove growth through their networks.

Formal partnership development

It’s very rare to see an early-stage startup have a robust and well-functioning partnerships program. But that’s exactly what Fuelfinance have built.

What started as a bunch of informal partnerships has evolved into a structured program with some of the world’s biggest companies, like HubSpot, Brex, and Carta.

To do this, they hired a dedicated Head of Partnerships to systematize this growth channel. He brought in experience from managing partnerships at a $12B startup and really opened the eyes of the team on how systemitised partnerships can be.

Their partnership approach is extremely methodical for a startup of their size:

• Quarterly planning of partnership activities

• Regular newsletters specifically for partners

• Consistent follow-ups and relationship maintenance

• Affiliate programs and formal agreements

As Alyona explained: "It's very structural. We plan the number of activities that we'll do during the quarter. We plan to create content together, or webinars, or products, or events."

She also shared an important insight about the nature of partnerships:

"It's very similar to the sales process. With partners, you always need to actually communicate in different ways. Schedule calls quarterly, follow up with newsletters and updates. It's a very human touch, but there is definitely a science behind it."

Alyona

Much like the product itself, their partnerships program is a beautiful blend between tech (the science) and people (the human touch).

This systematic approach has landed them major partnerships that have created credibility and distribution channels that would typically be out of reach for a company of their size.

Turning crisis into opportunity

One of the most inspiring and aspirational aspects of Fuelfinance’s partnership strategy is how they've managed challenging moments to build meaningful relationships.

Alyona shared a compelling story about how one of their biggest partnerships emerged from when Mercury shut down accounts for Ukrainian founders after the Russian invasion:

"It was the case when Mercury shut down all accounts for Ukraine, especially founders with Ukrainian passports. My cofounder and I wrote a post on LinkedIn. It became viral in several hours. So many media wrote about that, from TechCrunch to BBC."

Alyona

What happened next demonstrates the power of authentic relationship building between two companies:

"A salesperson at Brex commented on this post that they are ready to take all Ukrainian founders.

They got more than 500 applications from this post. They were working nonstop for several weeks. It was a huge help for all Ukrainian founders."

This genuine moment of connection and care eventually evolved into a formal partnership:

"After that, we were like, 'Guys, it seems like we have some fundamental principles that we are following. Let's connect and build something together.' That's how things started with Brex."

Alyona

A testimony to authentic connection around shared values, creating stronger partnerships than typical business development efforts.

🧪 Testing & Experimentation Mindset

Behind Fuel's impressive growth is a relentless commitment to experimentation and data-driven decision making.

Rather than betting everything on a single channel or approach, they've systematically tested their way to success. Committing to at least one new experiment per week.

Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

Hundreds of micro-experiments

When I asked Alyona about any "aha moment" or sudden inflection point in their growth, her answer was refreshingly honest:

"Everyone wants to hear that, but there is no such secret. It's not like in one night everything changed. I think that we made hundreds of different experiments and mistakes. Definitely. I think maybe starting from the middle of 2023 to the middle of 2024, that was twelve months where we did hundreds of different experiments in sales, in marketing, in product."

Alyona

So often I hear new founders looking for a silver bullet. But most of the time it’s just lead bullet after lead bullet that bit-by-bit, compound to make a difference, or until you’re lucky enough that one of the thousand lead bullets you try to shoot, ends up, unintentionally, being the silver one.

Having an experimentation mindset is crucial for finding sustainable growth channels. You need to figure out what works for your business. And the only way to do that is to continuously test.

Coming back to Fuelfinance, these weren't random experiments - they were structured to answer specific questions about growth channels, messaging, and product features.

Using churn analysis to refine their ICP

One of the most important levers to success for any startup is figuring out who the right person to sell to is. You could have the best ice in the world, an Eskimo still wouldn’t buy it.

I can’t stress enough how important finding the right ICP for your business is.

It can be make-or-break.

One of the most powerful insights to come out of Fuelfinance’s experimentation was just this. They figured out who was churning and why.

It led to a pivotal shift in their target customer:

"We had higher-than-expected churn in the first half of the year, mostly because many of our early-stage startup clients hadn’t found their product-market fit. And reality is that you can't help in this case."

Alyona

A common problem I see with new companies serving other startups - startups go out of business.

It’s out of your control. But it very much is a risk to your business.

So, rather than continuing to chase early-stage startups, Alyona and the team used this data to refine their ICP:

"That led us to shift focus towards SMBs and later-stage companies... We switched to a new ICP, and it's paying off. We're now making great progress with our churn trajectory."

Alyona

Now their focus is on two specific customer segments:

1. Agencies (legal, marketing, sales) with several million in annual revenue

2. SaaS companies that are Series A or later with ~$4M+ in revenue

This data-driven approach to ICP refinement allowed them to find customers with higher retention rates and larger contract values - transforming their unit economics, and ultimately their growth trajectory.

Systematic scaling of what works

The final piece of the Fuelfinance experimentation puzzle is their methodical process for scaling channels once they've proven effective.

"Now we understand our cost of acquisition. We know how much money we need to spend to acquire one customer and how all the channels work for us. Now we understand from sales and marketing perspective that we have four top channels that work for us. And all four of these channels are scalable."

Alyona

Their validation approach is simple but effective:

"We were testing - okay, if we invest two times more next month in this channel, will it bring us more new revenue? And we saw - yes, it brought us new revenue. So that's why we understood this is something that works. We want to invest more and more in that."

By creating clear metrics for channel scalability, tracking the data, and systematically investing more resources in what works, they can consistently create repeatable growth engines, while maximising their current ones.

As Alyona puts it: "When we get another fundraising round, I know how we will invest this money to already have return on investment."

As I said in the intro. Alyona left me with the conviction that Fuelfinance’s journey is nowhere close to over.

For The Zero to One, it's been your host, Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

I don’t think I’ve been as excited for a deep dive as I am for this one. “Why?” I hear you all asking at once.

Well this week is extra special because I’ve sat down with the founder of today’s company to get a behind-the-scenes, never-seen-before look at the growth tactics that scaled Oceans to $15M ARR in just 3 years.

I had a ton of fun doing this and can’t wait for you to read it. Not only because I believe this is one of the more practical deep dives I’ve done, but also because it’s a service that will fit a lot of you perfectly, and help you grow your business.

So without further ado, this is the story of how Oceans went from Zero to One.

Oceans’ Growth

It’s late 2021, and after exiting his previous business, Ian Myers decided he wanted to do it again. This time with a few more criteria:

• Didn’t want to have to raise money

• Cash-flowing in 3 months

• Know if the business is viable in 6 months

And so in December 2021, he launched Oceans. A service business helping US startups hire EAs from the best talent in Sri Lanka, a market Ian knew well from working there in the past.

3 months later in Feb 2022, their first cohort of EAs had joined and taken an EA+ training designed to upskill and ready them for the job.

Within 7 months, Oceans was at $2M ARR all from word of mouth. Not a cent was spent on advertising to this point. Customers loved the service and shared it amongst their networks (still Oceans’ biggest growth channel today).

Fast forward to today, and Oceans is at over $15M ARR, having placed over 400 of Sri Lanka’s top talent with over 250 startups, mid-market businesses, and service agencies, including Morning Brew, beehiiv, and True Classic, and is currently placing an additional 30-40 employees per month.

Along the way, they expanded beyond their initial offering of EAs and into other roles in finance, marketing, and operations.

So to not bury the lead, how did Oceans get here?

1. Stack and deliver on your entry wedge

When you’re trying to get a business off the ground, you need something. Something unique enough to appeal to a specific segment of people. Your ICP.

A lot of offshoring companies see their wedge as cheap talent. So they: find cheap overseas talent in a market like India, the Philippines, or LATAM, add a markup, and sell their service.

The problem is that cheap overseas talent is not a wedge anymore. There have been thousands of companies to do it. So why should I care that you do it as well?

So Ian knew he needed something different to find his first customers. Something that would position Oceans as unique.

Price and exceptional talent weren’t enough. Location wasn’t either. And neither was the type of role.

But together, Oceans created an entry wedge that positioned Oceans as one-of-one, in an uber-competitive market like offshoring.

Oceans is like a great YouTube thumbnail - looks almost too good to be true, but then delivers on actually being that good (if not better).

Here’s how Oceans stacked an undeniably great entry wedge:

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

🇱🇰 Using Sri Lanka to spark curiosity

If you’re a founder you’ve probably seen this in your inbox:

• "Top developers from India"

• "Virtual assistants from the Philippines"

• “Marketers from LATAM”

It’s nothing new.

These markets have been used since the dawn of offshoring. So telling me you can hire talent in one of these places doesn’t interest me. I already knew I could. If I want to do it, I’ll just go to your proven competitor.

But Sri Lanka? That’s new.

It’s worthy of people stopping mid-scroll and exploring it some more.

In a sea of sameness, different is powerful.

Powerful enough to spark curiosity and to get questions popping up in potential customers' minds.

Questions they want answered and so they lead to conversations. And if you deliver on the rest of your wedge, those conversations lead to long-term customers (as is the case with Oceans).

The fact that no one uses Sri Lanka for offshore talent makes it interesting enough that people want to learn more about it.

Why is Sri Lanka better than these other countries for offshore talent?

🥅 Delivering on curiosity with Sri Lanka’s talent edge

Having great talent exist in a country isn’t an edge by itself. Every country has great people on its spectrum of talent.

What makes a country great for offshore talent is three things:

1. Ability of top talent

2. Availability of top talent

3. Price of top talent

A talent triangle if you will.

Let’s start with the ability of Sri Lanka’s top talent.

Sri Lanka has a great education system, with a high percentage of STEM degrees.

You also have many Sri Lankans studying at world-renowned universities like the Ivies, Oxford, and Cambridge, and working in developed markets like the US and UK before returning home.

Where Sri Lanka has an extremely professionalized and established workforce with English as the predominant language of business.

So Sri Lanka ticks the quality of talent box. More so than a lot of other offshoring markets.

Okay so there’s great talent in Sri Lanka - but how much of it is available? And can you find them and get them to work for you?

The first thing when looking for the best talent in a country is to recognize that they’re not on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.

Top-percentile talent wants the benefits that come with full-time employment:

• Insurance

• Office culture

• Team events

• Leave

• Normal working hours

• And the safety of full-time employment

This is even more prevalent in smaller, more conservative markets - like Sri Lanka.

And because Sri Lanka has an extremely developed business services industry, the best talent typically convenes not only in FTE, but for a small set of globally recognized companies:

• Ogilvy

• KPMG

• JP Morgan…

So Oceans is able to identify who the top percentile talent is a lot easier than in other markets.

The question becomes how do you make this top talent available to you?

Well you don’t have to, because Oceans solves it all for you.

They hire the talent as full-time employees in Sri Lanka. And give them all the perks and stability of working for an established company, not contracted at a foreign startup.

At over 400 people placed, Oceans is seen as a stable company to work at, with benefits and an established team culture.

This makes it attractive for top talent to work at Oceans - and ultimately with you.

And they aren’t competing with hundreds of other companies all trying to place the same talent, like they would be in the Philippines or LATAM.

Meaning you get uncontested access to this top talent. But with Oceans taking on the risks of full-time employees for you.

The last infinity stone to Sri Lanka’s talent triangle is price.

Unlike more competitive offshore markets, like India, where top talent has gone from an 80% discount to a 20% discount, the top talent in Sri Lanka remains at a substantial discount compared to the US.

Giving Sri Lanka an unbeatable price:availability ratio (with Oceans) for its top talent.

🏆 Retaining customers with innovation and exceptional quality

Sri Lanka’s talent edge isn’t the only angle Oceans leaned into.

The Oceans team believes that delegation is just a fancy word for managing. Which rather than removing workload, just shifts it.

A killer antithesis marketing angle that has proven to deeply resonate with CEOs and founders.

So they introduced the anti-delegation EA+.

While competitors chase experienced EAs who are good task-doers when delegated to, Oceans goes in the opposite direction.

Targeting: Smart & driven services professionals, with strong experience (both locally and internationally) and high potential over direct experience.

And then training them to think beyond delegation and admin tasks. Ie. to be proactive. Taking the onus away from the founder and onto the EA+.

Ultimately providing a higher ROI and business impact for customers.

Beyond the “EA” limit

And it’s working.

With >86% first-time placement success rate.

And only a fraction of that is due to unhappy placements. With the majority of that 14% coming from their customers pivoting, running out of money, closing, and other typical startup problems.

Oceans scaled to $2M ARR with only word of mouth. You can’t do that without an exceptional service that resonates deeply with your ICP.

2. Create distribution moats

There’s no such thing as a new service.

Just new angles and new approaches.

This means your offering becomes a commodity. But it also means you don’t have to validate your business thesis - you know it can work.

What matters is how you get the business out into the market.

Like most startups, Oceans got off the ground by serving other startups in Ian’s network. With a key difference:

Because of the $3k+ price point, his friends wouldn’t stick around if the delivery wasn’t great. It’s not a cost businesses will eat up because their friend is the founder.

So unless Oceans was truly valuable. They would churn.

But even if you can retain all your friends - your network eventually gets exhausted. And this is the point where a lot of businesses are made or break.

You need to find distribution channels that are defensible and can repeatably scale.

You need to build distribution moats.

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

📢 Find validators and distributors

If you’re in a services business and you want to grow with referrals, you need two things:

Validators and distributors.

No one will know about you without distribution and no one will trust you without external validation.

Ian knew early on that he was neither a distributor nor a validator.

So to solve this, Oceans raised $200k, not for cash flow, but to strategically align selected people who could provide validation and/or distribution.

Raising from big names in the crypto and venture communities, an NFL player, and Austin Rief (founder of Morning Brew) to name a few.

Austin gives Oceans an unfair advantage in social reach for things like hiring, case studies, and content distribution.

Oceans built a cap table that had influence and an audience. That was trusted and recognized.

And could say, “Hey, I work with Oceans and they’re great” - and people would listen.

↻ Natural virality triggers

Oceans entered with one role: EA+.

And it wasn’t by luck or circumstance, but rather very intentional.

If you think about an EA, they are part of your correspondence all day, every day. Interacting with everyone that you are interacting with.

They are being introduced to your network, by you - giving them inherent trust with your founder friends and sparking interest in:

• Why you have an EA,and

• How it’s going

It’s a form of PLG. But for a services business. Instead of “Sent with Mailchimp”, it’s sent by Devni.

There’s another benefit to EAs as well.

They’re like a personal trainer. You want to show them off. You want to talk about how much your life has improved with them.

You want others to feel the same way - so you recommend they get one. And of course, because Oceans worked so well for you, you recommend they go straight to Oceans.

And so this natural referral loop is created.

Not everyone needs an EA. But those who have them, love talking about them.

Everyone needs a junior bookkeeper. They just don’t brag to their friends about them (and they’re not involved in their daily correspondence).

3. Find self-selecting flywheels

A lot of offshoring companies, and service companies in general, get stuck at the $1-2M revenue mark.

They don’t know how to go beyond their immediate network.

Oceans on the other hand has scaled to $15M ARR in just three years.

The big difference? Three compounding flywheels that have helped Oceans find their ideal customers, hire the best talent, and attract great fitting customers:

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

🙋‍♂️ The Customer flywheel

Like many startups, Oceans made an early mistake: saying yes to everyone.

We’ve all done it. When you’re a small startup, you want revenue. As much as you can and as soon as possible.

The problem is that this isn’t scaleable, it can break your unit economics, and it leads to you attracting the wrong types of customers.

People’s networks are typically similar to them. So bad clients mostly refer bad clients.

You don’t want one-person consulting shops to be your biggest customer segment, where if they lose one client, they churn and you’re stuck with a full-time employee on your hands.

Saying no as early as possible allows you to fill this referral flywheel with your ideal customers as soon as possible.

For Oceans this was first the founder community. Where they got in and started to spread to other founders. Because, you guessed it, that’s typically who founders are friends with.

As Oceans have grown, they’ve started to get into more customer flywheels. With a bigger focus on mid-market, more traditional companies, such as manufacturers.

This is to break out of the early-stage startup barrier that a lot of service businesses hit when serving other startups.

Underpinning this customer flywheel is the delivery of a great service. Your customer flywheel will end at your first one if you’re not good at what you do.

Or it will continue to grow into the hundreds if you deliver a service like Oceans does.

Like with product building, the best form of marketing is great work.

👩‍🎓 The Talent flywheel

The core of Oceans’ business is people.

If they consistently place underperforming talent, they will run themselves out of business.

But we know the inverse is true for Oceans. They consistently place great talent, which drives their growth (as we discussed above).

So to continue this, the most valuable activity Oceans can do is find and retain great talent.

We spoke earlier about the challenges of finding and hiring great talent, but retaining them is in some ways more challenging

The average offshore retention is ~6 months. People think they can do it. But in reality, it’s lonely to be working in your living room, at 2 am, away from your whole team.

This is where the Oceans model delivers:

• Full-time employment

• Benefits

• Career growth

• Local community

• Events

• Team environment

Great talents love working at Oceans. So they stick around.

They get to do exciting work, with companies like yours, and they still get all the benefits of FTE that contract work avoids.

Beyond sticking around they refer their friends to join. And as with great companies, talented people are typically friends with other talented people.

People who worked at JP Morgan, know other people who worked at JP Morgan - and they tell them how great Oceans is.

So this depth of talent compounds at Oceans.

It becomes self-selecting. Top percentile talent starts to see that other top percentile talent work at Oceans. So they want to as well.

This makes Oceans a great signal for other companies to know that if someone has worked at Oceans then they are really great at what they do.

Which only further reinforces the top talents’ desires to work at Oceans. And so the cycle repeats itself.

To illustrate the success of this, Oceans' biggest source of talent is referrals from their employees.

🎯 The Positioning flywheel

The best way to position yourself within a market is to be different. People remember different.

A great way to do this is with an antithhesis marketing angle (which we spoke about earlier). They’re unique, memorable, and people feel glad to have their worldview confirmed.

So they’re more likely to buy from you.

But what it also does is attract people who see the world the same way as you, and pushes away people who wouldn’t be a match.

Oceans is anti-delegation. A successful match for them doesn’t involve the typical delegation cycle of an EA.

So if a customer wants that, they won’t be happy with Oceans’ service.

But because they are open and push their counter-positioning, Oceans don’t attract people like this.

They attract people who will thrive in their model of approaching delegation as a short-term action to get the EA up to speed to be proactive and drive impact.

This angle has ensured that people who come in as customers have the same expectations as them. And believe that delegation is a talent issue.

This makes customer and talent fit much simpler as the measurements for success are on the same metrics for Oceans, their customers, and their talent.

Making customer support and client success easier and more successful.

Where this angle is even more exceptional is that it highlights Oceans’ confidence in having the best talent who can deliver a great service.

It’s easy for an offshoring company to hide behind a wall of “you need to get better at delegating” when the real problem is that they don’t have the talent to justify their prices.

In saying all of this, if you’re looking to work with awesome talent to help unlock your time and drive business impact, then click this link.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

What’s up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the growth tactics, strategic playbooks, and GTM motions behind your favorite startups and giving you the actionable insights to replicate them.

Welcome to the full deep dive of Figma: Designing a $20B multiplayer experience.

Figma: Capturing the design market through PLG.

The best startup ideas are often those which are on the edge of obvious and complete stupidity-led failure.

Problem is, it’s only a small group of people who see how obvious the idea is:

Typically, only the founders.

And if you’re lucky you might have a few investors and some enthusiastic friends and family see it too.

That is until you build it. Then it becomes so obvious that people can’t believe they hadn’t thought about it. Think of some of the greatest products to be built:

The Macintosh - why would anyone want computers at home?

TV - who has time to watch that?

The internet - no online database would ever replace daily newspapers.

PG has an essay where he discusses the concept of big startup ideas:

Figma is a great example of this.

Today if you need to design a product you go to Figma. No questions asked.

But 10 years ago, designers would have crucified you for suggesting a web-based, multiplayer design tool, that brought the whole team into it.

Blasphemy.

So how did Figma convince a skeptical market of technical users to adopt a product so foreign to their core beliefs?

And do it so convincingly that in only 10 years, almost 90% of the market uses Figma.

And it’s not just popular with the masses, Figma is the design engine for the world’s biggest startups: Slack, Airbnb, Dropbox, Square, Netflix, Uber, and Zoom…

This is the story of how Figma went from Zero to One (and a bit more). 🚀

Figma’s Growth

I have to admit something to you.

I told you a small lie earlier. Figma is actually a bit older than 10.

Figma started 13 years ago.

The lovechild of a Thiel Fellow, Dylan Field, and a CS TA, Evan Wallace. They raised a $3.8M seed round and used the first three years to build “Photoshop in a browser”.

Building in a college hallway. The origins of a great start

Now this might sound like it went against all modern PG-inspired wisdom - Launch quick. Get something out there.

And to some extent it did.

But I would argue that Figma actually did follow this advice.

Firstly, although we take Figma for granted today, it was (and still is) a huge technological feat.

The technology (Web GML) was new and highly technical. Figma wasn’t a product you could spin up overnight.

It took deep expertise and a lot of work.

Secondly, Figma was building a product for highly technical and specific users: designers.

They couldn’t afford to make a bad first impression from a UI/UX pov. Their product needed to inspire confidence in other designers.

Designers needed to believe that they could craft beautiful designs in it.

Bad product design could kill any confidence before they even started.

Thirdly, Dylan was getting the product into the hands of designers as often and as soon as possible.

So while the product wasn’t “live” - he was getting data from one-on-one and informal meetings.

And he was persistent with them. He would go to designers, get their feedback, build it, and go back for more.

That is the essence of ship fast.

Just without the public part.

And lastly, Figma cut a lot of bloat while building.

Photoshop has hundreds of use cases. They narrowed down to one.

Interface design.

As much as this was a product decision, it was also a speed-to-market decision.

The goal at launch isn’t to be everything for everyone, but rather a pain killer for a specific type of person.

The narrower. The better.

Figma even launched without their now highlight feature: Real-time collaboration.

Figma wasn’t waiting for perfect. They were building something good enough to be loved.

And so in December 2015, after a top-up round leading to a post-money valuation of $47.5M, Figma was launched in a closed beta.

And it launched like a rocket breaking through the startup and design worlds.

Taking over 10% of the market before even charging users.

And once they started charging, their growth only accelerated. Capturing ~35% of the design market by 2019 and introducing their enterprise sales team.

One year later they almost doubled to 65% of the market.

And as of today, Figma owns ~90% of the design tool market.

Along the way Figma has also released two separate products that are wildly popular in themselves:

FigJam - a digital whiteboard.

And Dev Mode - an easier way for devs to translate Figma designs into code.

But in 2023 the design world flipped on its head.

Figma accepted an acquisition offer of $20B from Adobe

At the time they were making ~$600M ARR (~33x multiple), with a huge global user base, and negative effective churn.

So although the deal didn’t go through, it still speaks to the truly great business Figma has built.

Today, Figma’s market valuation is probably a little lower as it doesn’t offer the strategic multiples added by Adobe. For context, Dylan lowered it internally to $10B.

So, how did Figma take over design in just 5 short years?

Let’s get into it:

Default Singleplayer to Default Multiplayer

Many of you reading this grew up in the generation of multiplayer, online applications.

Something so intuitive and normalized to us that we often don’t even notice it.

The best example is Word vs Docs. (Something Dylan references himself)

Word was (and still is) designed as a local application first, where the default behavior is single-player.

Meaning I work on my own. Then send my work to someone. Who then reviews. Then sends it back to me. Then I implement. Challenge some things. Then send back…

And this keeps going on.

Now I know you can work together in a Word doc, and many do. But it’s not the out-of-box behavior.

Plus, it’s still intended for all parties to have Word installed locally.

Docs on the other hand makes co-working the default behavior.

First, it’s browser-based, meaning the only limitation to accessing and editing a file someone shared with you is having an internet connection.

No need to download large applications.

Second, the only thing I need to share a doc with someone else?

A link.

No Sharepoint or One Drive set up required with different permissions and payment plans. Just a link.

Before Figma, design was very much single-player.

But what it means to be a designer today has changed.

Not luckily for Figma. But because of Figma.

Figma was the seismic shift that ruptured design and made it collaborative.

Figma took a default single-player sport and made it a team one.

🔬 Why this worked:

3 insights from the tactic.

👯‍♀️ 1. Brought the whole team in

Pre-Figma, design was a bit of a mysterious function that went away and came back a few days later with a finished product.

Feedback was clunky. The process was slow. And most non-designers couldn’t intuitively access it.

Figma wanted to give this intuitive access to people who previously didn’t have it.

And so Figma focused on more than just designers. Rather focusing on the best product. Which meant it became an experience for the whole team, or even, the whole organization.

Without sacrificing the depth required for a highly technical tool, they made design approachable and intuitive to even the most non-technical members.

PMs, Engineers, Marketers, etc. could now easily understand the design process. Leading to better outcomes for everyone.

• PMs could make sure the product was moving in the right direction.

• Engineers had a better understanding of what was required (and could guide on what was technically feasible).

• Marketers now had direct access to materials needed for quick testing.

But also, anyone could now start a design and hand it over to a designer. Who could then work their magic. This time, with a more accurate direction and clearer alignment.

Talking about alignment, what multi-player also did was allow for instant feedback.

This might sound like it can bring a too many cooks in the kitchen challenge.

And it could.

Designers certainly thought so at the beginning of Figma.

But that’s actually a team dynamic issue, not a product issue.

Figma was just an easy target.

High-functioning teams had massive benefits from this instant, multi-player feedback.

Products and designs could be shipped faster. Better. And with fewer issues.

To show this, let’s go back to the PMs.

Say you’re launching a new product. It’s killer (I believe in you).

Your designers deliver awesome work, but you want to tweak some messaging.

Previously, you waited for them to deliver the work. Sent back your feedback. They implemented (maybe after some other work as you might not be top priority anymore). You get it back. And you realize that we need to tweak it again.

So the cycle repeats.

But with Figma, you just tweak it yourself. And you can test as many variations as you want.

Instantly.

And although they received pushback at the beginning about design being a team sport. There’s also something inherently fun about working together, and you get better results.

Designers just needed to see it for themselves.

🫂 2. Improved designers work with each other

Don’t take the previous passage as Figma not focusing on designers. That’s not the case at all.

Figma focused on designers AND. Not instead of.

Figma didn’t just make working as a team easier. But it also made working with other designers a MUCH smoother process.

Remember that PM example of iterated feedback?

(again with the PMs Sheldon? - bear with me)

Now imagine it with a junior designer reporting to their manager instead. Everyday. For all their work.

Figma solved this.

You could just leave comments in the file, in real-time. Or make a small adjustment and explain it in a comment.

Figma removed the tedious back-and-forth of feedback cycles required to help both junior designers and managers grow in their careers.

Faster learning. And also an easier management aspect to a senior designer’s job.

But also consider sharing designs amongst peers.

Although the design tool market has typically always been dominated by a single company (Adobe then Sketch). Not every designer used Sketch, for example.

Now you might be pointing out, and rightly so, that not every designer uses Figma today (although it’s not far from it).

But there’s a key difference. Even if you don’t typically use Figma, I can still just share a link with you, and you can access and potentially even edit it.

But with something like Sketch or the Adobe suite, you would need to have downloaded the expensive software locally.

Figma did the same as Docs did. No downloads. Just vibes. I mean links.

🌍️ 3. Helped standardize design across the org

Since Figma’s launch, there has also been a shift from design as a centralized function in organizations to distributed design teams, within business units or product teams.

Figma enabled this shift and accelerated it.

A big reason design was previously centralized is that it needs to be uniform.

You can’t have marketing looking wildly different from the product.

Or even closer, you can’t have two different product teams, having different look parts of the same product.

In the pre-Figma era it was hard to be uniform across distributed design teams.

Spreading changes in design styles and assets was a lengthy process that was prone to mistakes.

Figma made this process instant.

It was now stored in a central, online, single source of truth. That could be updated, in a design tool, and across a company at the click of a button.

In fact, this became one of Figma’s biggest pay-gated features: design systems (think button styles, color schemes, all the things that are often repeated).

And not only did this become a feature that helped Figma monetize, but it became a key growth lever in their PLG motion.

Building a product that creates Champions

Product-Led Growth. The growth engine on every SaaS founder’s wishlist.

And the core growth driver behind some of the world’s most used and loved startups:

• Notion

• Airtable

• Zoom

• Slack

• Dropbox

• Mailchimp

And notably, Figma.

However, PLG only works when you have a product worth loving. Mid doesn’t cut it.

The next thing you need is people (typically ICs) to spread that product loving, i.e. Champions. If you’re planning to go the PLG route - these will be the people who make or break your startup.

But to turn ICs into Champions, not only do you need to build a product they love, but you need them to believe in you, as founders, a team, and a company.

Figma did just this.

Now why is love so important for PLG and a product like Figma?

PLG relies on your product being shared amongst peers, teams, and organizations - through Champions.

The problem is that sharing can be scary. You’re putting yourself and your reputation on the line.

You need to be sure about the product.

You can’t just like it, you’ve gotta love it!

So how did Figma turn ICs into obsessed Champions?

A three-step framework centered around a core principle.

Proximity to customers.

Let’s get into it!

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🏋 1. Establishing initial credibility

The first thing Figma did to get ICs to love them was establish that initial credibility.

This is especially important with highly technical users like designers. When it comes to their craft, they don’t hand out trust easily.

Because of this, highly technical users often have high bullshit meters.

Meaning you can’t buzzword your way into their reimagined and integrated tech-stack, that completely revolutionizes the way they do work.

Designers care about only one thing:

The actual benefits.

To meet this head-on, Figma’s first GTM hire, Claire Butler, decided Figma’s new marketing strategy would be simple…

Don’t market.

Rather get the Figma team to focus on authenticity.

When you have a product that’s a technical feat and is designed for technical users, then that’s what you should use for your marketing.

So that’s exactly what Figma did.

Figma was, and still is, an amazing technical feat. So they focused on that.

Piquing the interest of both engineers and designers.

To do this, the Figma team started putting out technical content, both on how they built the product:

And design more generally:

Us tech nerds ate it up.

They were ranking in all the right places. Even going number 1 on Hacker News.

Figma is a design tool, for designers, and so who better to write content than their design team.

They started adding to their content portfolio. Creating content on their decision-making for the product.

Why and how they made different design and product decisions.

This made Figma relatable to other designers and gave an insight into the technical expertise of the Figma team.

The idea was if a non-designer could write the content, then it wasn’t deep enough.

Designers needed to respect the craft behind it. Only then would they feel heard and understood - rather than marketed to.

This put quality ahead quantity. Or for the more fancy of you, depth over breadth.

And with every piece of content tried to rank highly on HN, Twitter, and Designer News.

Talking about content. If you’re looking to create GTM content that generates demand, check out Narrative. We’ve worked with some awesome companies and founders like YC and Noah Kagan. Plus we offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with your content - does anyone else do this nowadays?

Now let’s get back to the newsletter.

Then to scale this non-marketing, marketing approach, Figma made the next hire in their marketing team.

A Designer Advocate. A role they invented to talk with users and designers, and, well, advocate for them.

This role became crucial to build this initial credibility, showing care and appreciation for designers. And as they grew, scaled with them. Playing an integral role in Figma’s PLG motion (but more on this next week).

Okay, so Figma now has some street cred.

What next?

🤲 2. Build with your users

Figma’s history of building with its users predates its launch.

Dylan would go to designers when they were still building and ask them to complete tasks and workflows in front of him.

This helped Figma understand the behavior intuitive to designers. And importantly, how to map that to Figma.

He also wanted to get as much feedback as possible. So he would go back to the same designers showing them progress made and how they solved the feedback they previously brought up.

Post-launch, this only amplified.

Especially with the editor.

It was a tool for designers, the editor needed to have an awesome UI/UX.

One story I love which shows the extent they were willing to go to help their customers was with Coda, their first full time user.

After successfully getting them on board, Coda phoned them to say they couldn’t go through with it.

Why?

Their lead engineer couldn’t use the product.

But turns out the problem wasn’t Figma, it was the MacBook being used.

So Evan drove to Palo Alto to fix it.

But this obsession didn’t stop at the Founders. Each person in the Figma team really cared and listened to feedback from users.

They would all do support:

• Talking to users directly

• Jumping on calls

• Meeting in person

• Talking on Twitter

And all these actions snowball trust over time.

The more you prove to your users that they can trust you, the more they will.

Plus, actioning user feedback doesn’t just give users more trust in you.

It also gives them a feeling of ownership.

Users start to feel like they can have an impact on the product and its direction.

They tell you about an annoying UX feature, and the next week it’s fixed.

They tell you about an integration that would massively improve their lives and then it’s also suddenly there.

A bug? Fixed.

A tutorial? Added.

Users start to feel invested in the product. Almost like a team member. But all in their own special category: Champions.

Often though, the common behavior is to focus on the feedback from paid users.

They’re the ones buttering your buns after all.

But Figma listened to free users with the same rigor as its paid ones. This is crucial with a PLG-driven company.

You want free users to also feel this ownership. As free users are most often the gateway into your product spreading. Plus it will leave them thinking, “if they take free users this seriously, imagine the experience for paid ones.”

💌 3. Nurture trust over time

When trying to find your initial distribution, it’s important to remember that people don’t care about you.

This might sound harsh. But it’s true. No one knows you.

So you can’t expect users to come to you.

You have to find them. This is something we spoke about a lot together in our The Hustle deep dive - so go give it a read if you want to go a bit deeper on the concept.

Figma did exactly this going all in on Twitter (X if I have to). Specifically, the design community on the platform, as well as a network of design influencers.

Figma even built an internal scraper to find design influencers to make sure they were engaging with the most influential people.

This tool spotted clusters of design influence, and figured out who was at the center of them.

They then followed and built relationships with those people.

These clusters were different spheres of product design:

• Iconographers

• Graphic designers

• PMs, etc.

Figma was getting both breadth, by covering these different pockets of influence, and depth, by identifying the key people needed for a tipping point within them.

Then to position themselves as experts, Figma shared deeply technical content (as we talked about above), both as Figma, and as individuals.

This gave Figma, and their team, a presence with users. Now with a name and face to connect with.

To get people to stick with them they never hard sold with their socials.

Instead, always focusing on feedback and helpful content relating to Figma.

And in doing so, users were building trust with a variety of different Figma team members.

The next Figma builds trust with its users is to be completely transparent with them.

Which admittedly is easier to do at the start. But is more impactful the bigger you get.

Figma doesn’t hide behind its brand.

Creating personal connections within the design community, and giving them open access.

The thing about transparency is that it requires a tradeoff.

You have to be vulnerable. Which means taking accountability - even when it’s hard.

So when you have a $20B acquisition offer and it’s stopped by regulators, you have to address it. Which Figma did with an open Twitter Space.

It also means that you have to consistently ask for feedback, face-to-face - which for Figma has led to major events that have become essential to the brand.

Config and Little Big Updates.

At Config, users decide what to speak about. And Figma finds the best ways to make those topics happen.

Which leads to deep and useful content for designers.

But Little Big Updates. What an awesome initiative.

Every so often the team fixes small bugs (is anything user related really small though?) that improve the quality of life of users.

Something that used to be 2 clicks? Now only 1.

Every little thing matters when it comes to your users’ experience. Few understand this more than Figma.

Champion-Led Growth (closing the PLG loop)

Figma is used by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Airbnb. Coinbase. Microsoft. Slack. Github. Zoom. Asana. Atlassian. NYT.

Now you might think that for enterprise companies to use Figma they would’ve needed a killer sales team. And they do - just not in the way you’d expect.

Figma didn’t even have a sales team for the first 3 years.

Their sales motions looks a bit different.

It starts at the bottom. With individuals (ICs).

Scaling into companies organically.

And sales? It’s more about unblocking than outbound.

The first step in this growth motion, which we talked about above, was to turn these ICs into Champions. I.e., get them to absolutely love the product and be willing to share it.

This tactic is about how those Champions get Figma to swim upstream and spread.

To the point where most of their leads come from users looking to expand Figma in their company rather than an outbound motion. Leading to a very different sales conversation - because well, the IC already is paying.

So let’s get into how Figma closed its PLG loop in a four-step process.

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

☑️ 1. Make it easy to try and share

When it comes to PLG, a free tier is table stakes.

You need a product that’s easy to try and explore alone. And when there’s an upfront paywall, some sort of sales is required. So you’ve missed the easy and alone boat.

The best PLG motions have you up and running in a few clicks.

Loom - 5 clicks and you’re recording.

Notion - a few clicks and you now have a project database (same with Airtable).

Mailchimp - a signup. a survey. and you’re sending emails.

The less a user needs to do to create an account and start using the product, the better.

(Except for in some rare cases where doing a bit more makes the user feel invested. Think of a baking mix requiring you to put the eggs and milk in).

So Figma made it easy to start designing.

Their free tier also gave you enough features to fall in love with. Build confidence with. And feel comfortable enough to put your neck on the line to try get the rest of your company on board.

To ease this process of getting the rest of your company on board, Figma’s free plan allows free collaboration (to a point).

With unlimited commenters allowed on a file - you only need to pay for editors (and unlimited files).

As we spoke about earlier, Figma set out to make design multiplayer, and not just for designers. So free commenters and viewers were key in Figma’s PLG.

It very tactfully allowed a whole team to get used to Figma, for free. So now, not only do the designers gain confidence in and love the product, but the rest of the team does as well. PMs, engineers, marketing, the lot of us.

This makes spreading into the rest of the company a lot easier.

At the end of the day though, you’re running a business. You need to charge. The hard part is figuring out how and when. Figma didn’t always get it right.

Initially, Figma allowed unlimited files, but only 2 collaborators on the free plan. The problem here was that this was getting in the way of their own growth engine.

It was stopping their Champions from getting Figma in the hands of the rest of their team and company.

So Figma changed their pricing model, allowing unlimited commenters and viewers, and got themselves into more places in an organization.

Increasing Figma’s influence.

This made inbound leads more likely and made all sales conversations higher converting - you go with a lot of weaponry if a big cohort of the company is already using the product.

🫂 2. Give users relatable touchpoints

Design is a highly technical craft. And as with any highly technical craft, there’s a high bar to what the people in it respect and relate to.

Marketing jargon won’t fly.

You need deep expertise.

So to help Champions spread Figma across a company, Figma gave them access to a close touch point. Designer Advocates (DAs). A role uniquely at Figma. Who’s job was, you guessed it, to advocate for designers.

These DAs are often previous Champions themselves. And importantly, designers.

Meaning they can relate to and inherit respect from Figma’s users.

DAs became an important touch point for designers. Someone they could give product feedback to, use as unblockers to spread within a company, and just talk design to. They helped users evangelize the product.

So Figma scaled it across products and regions.

Giving users more direct access to different parts of Figma. And attaches additional relatable names and faces to the company - increasing access and deepening the love.

This is a very niche role, so you might be wondering how Figma finds DAs?

Well, often they don’t. Rather, the DAs find them. Filled by passionate users, Champions of Figma at other companies, or active members of the Figma community.

This, together with their technical expertise, gives users more confidence to spread Figma, knowing that there is a knowledgeable and relatable touch point to ensure their voice is heard.

🏆 3. Give companies a reason to adopt

When you’re swimming upstream, you need to give companies a reason why they should adopt you. And not just let their ICs continue to use you by themselves.

Think about it like this: What is the benefit for the company to change the status quo and get a Team plan?

This is typically an operational unlock that creates efficiencies at scale.

For Notion, it’s collaboration and the creation of a hub - a central source of truth.

For ClickUp? It’s similar, the operational excellence of team collaboration on ClickUp is unmatched (especially now with all their newly shipped features).

And for Figma?

It was design systems.

A central hub for design:

• Templates.

• Asset library.

• Real-time updates.

Meaning if you change the look and feel of, let’s say a button, it can be updated everywhere, in real-time.

This is a huge unlock for efficiency in an organization. Exponentially helping with consistency the more designers you have in your company.

Figma leaned into this.

• Starting a conference called Schema.

• Creating loads of content on design systems and how to do it in Figma.

• Launching designsystems.com.

Design systems became one of the key gated features for Figma’s growth.

It turned a growth blocker (scaling into the organization) into an enabler.

The product became substantially better with design systems. And not just for the individual, but also for the company itself.

This was crucial for securing buy-in beyond designers.

Which leads us to the last step.

🦸‍♀️ 4. Make Champions superheroes

Let’s recap.

Figma now has Champions who love them, a touchpoint for them to access Figma, a product that’s easy to share, and a reason for the organization to adopt it.

All that’s left is supporting Champions in the process of getting companies to adopt it.

So that’s exactly what they did.

Figma set out to make their Champions superheroes. Both in their companies and within the design community.

The DAs and Sales Team would guide and empower Champions through the whole sales process.

Focusing on building human connections throughout the organization. As well as jumping on calls with Champions to arm them with the best practices they needed to get company approval.

This was anything from data on similar companies, case studies, fact sheets, guides.

Anything that a Champion could present to a decision-maker to get them on board.

Typically focused on two aspects:

• Education

• Social proof

Quick side note, if you’re looking to create content that builds demand and closes deals, I run an agency that does exactly that. We help B2B tech companies build content engines that drive business impact: Learn more here.

Back to the action.

If there were any questions from the organization, a DA would happily jump on a call to answer them.

Or even bring on an engineer or designer to help answer them.

This made Champions look good in their companies and helped speed up the sales cycle.

A win-win-win.

But Figma didn’t stop here.

Figma had a platform and they wanted to use it.

So they started helping designers grow in their careers, at their current companies and beyond, by making them thought leaders within the design world.

Getting them to speak at events, posting them on Figma’s socials, or sharing templates/guides on how they use the product in certain ways.

And as Figma grew, so did its Champions. Reinforcing the behavior.

In the end, love drives growth.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host, Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

This is the full and final deep dive of The Hustle series: Your No-BS friend who sold for tens of millions of dollars telling you the news.

The Hustle: An Eight-figure Exit taking the BS out of the news.

The Hustle’s story is like any other. Start a conference. Get the most successful entrepreneurs to speak at it. Make $60k on your first go. Say “screw it” and travel the world. Run it back. Make $150k this time. Then pivot into the next natural thing.

A newsletter.

Like I said, just like any other story.

Okay but in all seriousness. The Hustle is a bit of a stick-it-to-the-man story. In 2016, when Sam Parr decided to pivot Hustle Con into a newsletter business, the ever-knowing big media execs gave it no chance.

But Sam believed the numbers in front of him. Not those suited-up bigwigs.

Sam was gonna scale this thing.

5 years later and he had grown The Hustle to ~2 million subscribers, over $15M in revenue, and sold it to Hubspot for a “mid-eight figure exit”.

Today The Hustle is one of Hubspot’s most important distribution channels and served as their first soiree into owned media at scale.

But this isn’t about Hubspot.

This is the story of how The Hustle went from Zero to One. 🚀

Business model: How The Hustle makes money

The Hustle is predominantly a media business with two distinct phases:

1. Pre-acquisition: Standalone media company.

2. Post-acquisition: Key media enabler for Hubspot.

Pre-acquisition

Simply put, they made the majority of their money from selling ads in their newsletter.

Then in 2019, The Hustle launched Trends. A subscription and premium newsletter helping entrepreneurs find, you guessed it, trending opportunities.

By the time Hubspot acquired The Hustle, Trends had over 15k subscribers, paying ~$299.

Then in 2019, Sam and Shaan Puri (an era-defining business shit-talker and my favorite podcast host, sorry Sam) added the My First Million podcast to The Hustle portfolio (quick side-note, although I’m not too sure of the legal structuring of the podcast, what I do know is that it is now part of the Hubspot media network). The business model was the same here. Good old ads baby.

There was also one other revenue stream, pre-Covid, which was Hustle Con. Conferences where Sam brought in entrepreneurs, including Casey Neistat, and the founders of Grammarly, Casper, and The Athletic, to give brief stories on their journeys.

Post-acquisition

The Hustle went from business to enabler.

Becoming the key media distribution channel for Hubspot. Who acquired the company for “mid-eight figures” - there are reports that say $27M, but Sam has publicly said that all the reports have understated the sale price. So I would guess somewhere around the $45M mark (~3x multiple on revenue).

This marked not only a transition for The Hustle, but for Hubspot as well, whose stock price skyrocketed after their investment into owned media.

From a high-level, The Hustle’s model never changed. Advertising. It’s just now the ads all point in one direction.

The Hustle’s Growth

Before we take a look into The Hustle’s growth, we need to take a step back to look at where it all started. The bright lights of Hustle Con.

Sam launched Hustle Con in 2014, using blogs and email as a way to get people to buy tickets - writing deep dives into the speakers. A great growth hack by the way, stroked egos tend to share a lot more with their audiences.

Pretty quickly, Sam realized that he didn’t want to rely on a business model where some bad weather could kill the whole thing. So he looked at the numbers and realized the newsletter could be huge.

And in April 2016, they went all in on the daily newsletter.

Within 2 months of launching, they had 555,958 unique viewers on their website by hitting the front page of Reddit, and were collecting about 3k emails per week - on par with TheSkimm, Elite Daily, Thrillist, and Business Insider all while posting much less content and without a full-time writer.

From here, there was no looking back. Hitting ~150k within its first year, and growing at 30k subs per month at some points.

The next year it hit 500k subs. And in just over two years from launch, The Hustle had 1 million subscribers and grew to around 1.7M by the time they sold.

And these weren’t vanity metrics either. In 2017, just over one year after launching, The Hustle did ~$500k. With Sam reaching out to every founder who had spoken at a Hustle Con and giving them a discounted price to advertise. This crushed it, making up 100% of their first $30k in revenue.

The Hustle then did $2.2M the next year. $7M the year after that.

And when Covid hit, the business almost doubled again. Hitting $12M in 2020.

The year Hubspot acquired The Hustle, it was on pace to hit $20M.

The growth tactics you can expect today

1. Feeding a starving crowd

2. Fetching users from where they’re are already at

3. Paying to play

Without further ado, let’s get into it:

1. Feeding a starving crowd:

There’s something to be said for building a great product. It’s hard. And we tend to glorify it above all else. Product building is the sword many founders live and die on.

But I’m not sure it’s the right metric to focus on. There’s something much more important: the market you’re entering.

And more specifically: the problem you’re solving in that market.

And even more specific than that: the pain level people feel about not having that problem, in that market, solved.

You can have an awesome product. But if you’re not solving a true pain point, it will likely never succeed.

It’s why it’s better to fall in love with the problem you’re solving. Not the product you’re building. Your job as a founder is not to build a solution. It’s to solve a problem.

The solution is just a vehicle in which you solve it.

It might sound crazy now, but in 2016, there was nothing like The Hustle (well except for Morning Brew - which led to a battle, much like Messi and Ronaldo’s, where everybody got better and won).

Even the idea of a newsletter business didn’t make sense to so-called thought leaders in media.

But they missed that the foundation for a great product was there.

The fact that there was nothing like it was a great thing. It reminds me of this beautiful Paul Graham quote: “Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.”

The obvious problem Sam was solving? There was no news for millennials who cared about business. A gap that with hindsight seems so obvious to solve. The perfect outcome for a great startup.

They had found an audience who were starving. And he served them up the chef’s best dish. A daily newsletter with no bs reporting.

But how did The Hustle actually execute this, and more importantly, how can you:

Find your underserved market

Sam started the Hustle when your choices for business news were the NYT and the WSJ, or Forbes.

Two written for your dad’s dad and the other plagued by your favorite scammer’s favorite (let me just stop here. You get the picture)

There was this chasm for millennials who cared about business and professional growth.

Sam had found an audience who were starving. They wanted news. But news written for them. And they wanted it with:

• Only the most important stories and resources

• No BS and fluff

• No complicated language

The trick here is to find a group of people (ideally some with money). Speak to them. Find out what they’re missing. And get something out there to test it with them.

The Hustle grew out of Hustle Con, an events business Sam was running which brought cool founders to talk about their stories and how they grew their businesses.

He started collecting emails to get people to buy tickets. It was never intended to be the main business. But Sam realized people were loving it and the unit economics checked out. So they started putting more priority into it, until they realized it should be the main business.

Be like them

The thing with finding an underserved market and building for them is that for best results you need to be like them. Or at least have someone on your founding team who is.

Firstly, it’s hard to spot this gap and know if it’s a deep pain if you’re not feeling it yourself. You don’t want to be solving a meh problem.

Secondly, it helps when building your solution. You have a more intuitive understanding of your customers and what the actual root cause is (we went deeper into this in the final Arc episode). You can then use this intuition to guide your product roadmap and serve customers better.

What can also be underappreciated is that if you’re like your users, they tend to like you more. They have an intrinsic belief in you and a desire for you to win.

So if you’re like your users. Show them.

The Hustle was excellent at making readers feel like they were one of them. They crafted this awesome voice which became your no-BS friend who told you about the news.

Their tone was relaxed. Swearing was allowed. Slang was used. And it felt like The Hustle was just another one of your friends. The smart one. But also the funny one. So the one you love to hate to introduce to your parents.

But also who you love to brag about to others…

Build a community (Get them fat)

Communities are hard.

There’s a bunch of work that goes in behind the scenes that you and me, as members, will never see.

It’s a job that never ends.

Until you get it right.

There’s this tipping point with communities. When you no longer have to reply to your own posts with 5 pseudo accounts. And when you no longer have to reply to other members.

Why? Because the rest of the community is doing it for you.

This is the beauty of a community. The members feed each other.

And then they attribute most of this value to you. Even though you’re no longer they driving force. They are.

The excruciating part is getting here.

The Hustle started to bring on Ambassadors (more on this in episode 3). What’s important to know, is that there was a FB group for them (for you younger folk, that’s the dark blue app with an “f” you see on your mom’s phone).

Sam spent hours everyday posting, replying to others, stimulating conversation. Getting the people going.

And he did this for over 18 months. Over a year and a half.

But then self-sustaining bliss and a group who The Hustle can:

• Test product ideas with

• Get the inside scope

• Understand how users feel

• Get real feedback

The Hustle Ambassadors became a key part of its growth (more on this below). With Sam using the insights from them to keep that cult-like feeling around The Hustle. The good kind of cult of course.

2. Fetching users where from where they’re already at:

Within two months of launching The Hustle was growing at a similar pace as some of the world’s biggest media companies: TheSkimm, Business Insider, and Morning Brew. And this was with only 33 pieces of content.

They had 555,958 unique viewers on their blog within these first two months. That is crazy high.

Sam mentioned that the Hustle had a ~3% conversion rate to email subscribers at this stage, which meant the Hustle had grown ~16k subscribers (users for a newsletter) in just two months. And this was on top of the 10k+ subscribers they already had from their HustleCon days.

The thing is finding your first customers (readers for The Hustle) is hard.

So how did they scale so quickly?

First, they found a massive gap in the market, as we discussed above. But knowing there’s a gap isn’t the same as letting others know you filled it.

So The Hustle went to where their users already hung out and brought them back with them.

They didn’t wait for their target audience to stumble across them. Instead, they put themselves right in front of their target audience.

By doing this users didn’t have to change any behaviors to become aware of The Hustle. They removed friction and reduced the steps required for readers to become aware of them.

Finding their landing spot

The first step: Sam had to find where their target audience was already hanging out.

And for the millennial entrepreneurial nerds of 2014-2016, that was Reddit and HackerNews.

Today that would most likely be X, or dare I say, LinkedIn.

Now you might think that they went straight to the typical business-y subreddits. Which they did. But where they got their most success was from thinking about other interests or hobbies their target readers would have.

For example, one of the Hustle’s most successful articles was on r/soylent, a meal replacement. But a meal replacement that was targeted for tech bros coding the night away.

Probably someone with a lot of drive and a desire to achieve more. Just the type of person The Hustle was looking for.

But this time without all the competition of similar thought on r/entrepreneur.

It’s an important lesson that when looking for where your ideal users are already hanging out, it doesn’t have to be completely in line with your product or service. But rather think about the behaviors of your target users and go there.

Winning with depth > quantity

Once The Hustle found their subscribers they needed to get them to their blog, where they ultimately tried to convert them into newsletter subscribers, the core business.

What The Hustle did differently to most was focusing on big bets, weekly posts that required a lot of effort, research, and time to write, instead of just trying to get as many posts as possible out and play the quantity game.

The Hustle posted unique content that engaged users outside of just “business” and because of this stood out. With between 30-50% of articles bringing in substantial readership.

To give you some perspective on just how awesome these early articles were, here are links to a few (that all did over 100k views in a week):

• Soylent: What happened when I went 30 days Without Food

• Part 1: Confessions from the Underground World of Kindle eBooks

• How Pandora's Founder Convinced 50 Early Employees to Work 2 Years Without Pay

• Google Has a Secret Interview Process… And It Landed Me a Job

And it was this type of content the posted on super-targeted subreddits: r/microdosing, r/soylent, r/selfpublishing, like we mentioned above.

But something else that stands out with these articles is their likelihood of being shared. Every one of them leaves you with a “no way” or “wtf”. I.e. they envoke emotion. And this was something Sam and the rest of the team were awesome at.

This depth-over-quantity approach, together with their shareability helped The Hustle grow at a much faster rate per article than other publications.

Hustle the forgotten text

The thing with a tactic like this is it requires a ton of hustle (😉). You’re cranking out high quality pieces of content every week. And for most the time, they were a four person team. With no dedicated writer.

Unless you count Sam’s 3 pen names, each with their own LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

What these 3 pen names were great for was giving legitimacy to The Hustle, but also to provide different perspectives - Sam would write content through the lens of people close to him. Giving readers more faces to feel a connection to.

But that side note aside, The Hustle were bringing in thousands of unique readers per week. They wanted to make sure they kept them.

Their approach? Putting personality into what Sam refers to as the “forgotten text” - popups, 404 pages, welcome emails.

Starting with an iconic popup:

“well while you’re here, we wrote these blogs to get people to our daily newsletter. If you don’t like it, I’ll Venmo you a dollar”

This pop-up, just like the Hustle, didn’t take itself too seriously. People loved that.

And after that, the personality continued with the Hustle’s quirky welcome email:

One that engaged users and got them more likely to not only come back but also to share The Hustle.

Being different and sweating the small details helped the Hustle stand out and convert readers to subscribers, and then into loyal advocates.

3. Paying to play:

A lot of people who start newsletters use ads as an early growth channel. And it makes sense: faster growth, repeatable, and predictable.

But there’s a problem. It’s often a false signal of profitable growth.

You’re trying to brute force your content to people without finding PMF/CMF (Content-Market FIt). Typically this means higher acquisition costs and lower future revenues.

So The Hustle flipped this. Getting to >100k subscribers before investing in paid marketing.

They had found their CMF and could easily calculate the LTV of a customer having monetized for a while by this point.

From here there was no looking back. Going all in on finding channels they could pay to acquire a reader for less than their LTV.

Figure out your unit economics

Facebook and other digital ads completely changed the way marketing was done.

It was a digital tap that you could turn on and keep increasing the pressure.

But underlying all of this was the principle of unit economics. I.e. per unit of what you do, how much profit do you make (if any)? In The Hustle’s case, their unit is subscribers.

Another way to think about it is what it costs to acquire a customer (CAC) vs the money that customer will earn you in their lifetime (LTV).

The great thing about digital ads is that they are extremely measurable. And as long as your LTV is greater than your CAC. You should continue to use that channel to grow.

Because it means that you are acquiring customers profitably (even if you don’t see the revenue immediately).

It’s how newsletters can scale to millions of subscribers in short amounts of time.

And The Hustle was one of the pioneers of this.

Two quick sidenotes:

One: If you’re looking for the exact way to calculate LTV for a newsletter, beehiiv does a great job of breaking it down here.

Two: You might be thinking that what I’m saying doesn’t apply to all businesses, particularly VC-backed startups trying to blitzscale/ winner-take-all markets.

And while you’d be right in that they don’t earn an instant return on their ad spend, the principle of unit economics remains. It just gets pushed down the road. And in some cases, the very act of doing this increases your unit economics as you acquire more users.

Scale with ads

Given you’re reading this newsletter, I’d be willing to bet that you’ve seen this ad before (or at least a variation of it):

And you’ve probably seen it a lot.

Firstly, because it crushed it for The Hustle.

Secondly, repetition is often indistinguishable from the truth.

If you see the same message enough, you will start to accept it as given.

This repetition gave this ad cult-hero status.

It worked so well that The Hustle spent over $10m on it alone.

Assuming a $10 CPM (cost per 1,000 views) that would mean this ad was seen over 1 billion total times.

And that’s not including all the different copies of it you’ve probably seen from other newsletters that crushed it for them as well:

Besides repetition. Why did this ad do so well?

Well from a high-level point of view two things stick out:

• Helps you be seen as smarter at your job (different and, for most people, more important than actually being smarter)

• It’s as easy to do as read The Hustle. No long and complex processes. Anyone can do it. People feel like they’ve found a loophole.

Facebook wasn’t the only channel The Hustle used for paid growth. They also experimented with LinkedIn ads and sponsoring other newsletters (a tactic the Morning Brew helped pioneer).

The key lesson here is to find messaging and a platform that works and then double down on it. It might not be Facebook (or Meta now) for you. But make small bets until you find a hint of gold. Then keep digging until all of it is gone.

Incentivize community

It’s often said that word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

But how the hell do you control this?

Well, sadly you’ll never have 100% control over this.

The best, and first, thing you can do is create a product/service so great that people want to share it.

Once you have something so great people want to share it, that’s when you can step in and give them a little nudge.

The Hustle did this by creating an ambassador program where they rewarded people for sharing The Hustle.

The rewards have changed over time, but the principles behind them have not.

Create rewards that are specific and appealing to your audience. And where the unit economics of them are profitable.

For the Hustle that included:

• Discounts for HustleCon tickets

• Free HustleCon tickets

• Speakers dinner post HustleCon

• Hustle swag

• Flights to SF to hang with them

All things a reader of The Hustle would want.

And because they knew the LTV of a customer, they knew how much they could spend for each referral to make sure it was still profitable. This led to some pretty awesome rewards.

A win-win-win. The Hustle, its ambassadors, and their referees.

On top of this, the team made sure to make every ambassador feel extra special with a handwritten note for anything they had mailed to them.

By the time The Hustle had hit 1.5m subscribers, their ambassadors had accounted for around ~300k of them.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host, Sheldon.

Speak soon and stay awesome!

This is part 3/3 of the Arc series. I’ve really enjoyed doing the breakdowns like this (in a 3 part series). And would appreciate your opinion to know if it works for you - there is a poll below the breakdown that only needs one click to let me know how you feel.

🥇 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

Brand and distribution are only becoming more important for startups.

The best way to get to both?

Build for a community.

Why community over an ICP?

Communities come with inherent connection points. This means if you can break in, you’ll spread quicker, and be more likely to stay given the network effects.

How Arc became the go-to browser in the startup world:

If you consume any business or startup content (a bit of a silly question to ask considering you’re reading this, but alas). You’ve probably heard that you need to build for a specific ICP. “If you target everyone, you target no one.” (even I’ve been guilty of saying this).

Now I’m not saying this is wrong by any means. You don’t want to target everyone. That’s a recipe for disaster. But it’s the ICP part that I (and Arc) want to challenge.

We live in a world where you can spin up a pretty robust app in a few hours (or less).

And the exciting/scary/willievenhaveajobinthefuture part of this is that it’s only getting better. And rapidly. Now all this is just a roundabout way to say that product building is becoming homogenized. Everything is getting more and more similar by the day.

Product is not going to be a strong moat anymore (unless you are pushing the boundaries of technology) when I can screenshot your web app, and get Claude, v0, and Cursor to replicate it in a day.

Okay that’s great, but then what will be important?

I’m glad you asked.

Brand and distribution.

And at the center of this lies community.

Community comes with inherent distribution and if you position it right, a brand that becomes a part of people’s identity.

It is the single best way to get your idea from Zero to One (hmmm, that would be a great name for a newsletter).

Communities beat ICPs because the people in them are connected. Once you’re in, you’re in. And you can bulldoze your way through fast.

And this is exactly what Arc did.

Founders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal went straight to their network of fellow tech nerds to get onboarded with Arc.

There’s this great concept called ACP that I’ve come across from Greg Isenberg. Audience. Community. Product (in this order).

It’s a model Greg has used multiple times to launch 7-figure businesses (without any venture funding). The premise is simple: Your audience is your MVP. It’s the market telling you that people are interested in this topic or problem.

Then you turn that audience into a community (discord, WhatsApp, Skool). And use that community to ideate through problems they need solving and products to solve them.

Take Boring Marketing for example. Greg and the other founders first started a Twitter page The Boring Marketer. Where they just posted unsexy ways people were growing their businesses. Think FB ads, SEO, the real unsexy stuff.

This unsexy page got 10k (now over 38k) followers. They knew there was something here.

So from here they started a community who they could speak to, find out what problems they needed solving, and what products could solve them.

And when they did launch BoringMarketing.com, guess what? Well they had a community of people interested in paying for it.

To bring this back to Arc. Rather than build for an ICP, Arc built for a community. And what they’ve done better than most products is make users feel like this product is for them.

And that’s because it is.

The users it attracts are part of the community that it’s built for. You feel connected to everyone else using Arc because you know in some way they’re like you - getting excited to go through a weekly product release note like the nerds we are.

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

Build for yourself. 👨‍🔬

When I started using Arc I was often left thinking: “I did not know I needed this. But now I can never go back”. In fact that’s one of the ways I would describe Arc as a whole. I didn’t know I even wanted, let alone needed a better browser experience.

But now that I have it. I can’t go back.

And it’s difficult to explain why. I’ve mentioned some of the reasons in parts one & two of this Arc series. For example, the moments of delight, attaching names and faces to the team, the beautiful UI, and the onboarding.

But even know these, I’m still left asking myself how they got all of this right. It feels like this product was built specifically for me.

And it’s that last part that happens when you build for a community that you’re a part of.

You intuitively know what belongs and what doesn’t. Especially for a product like Arc, where you can’t always rely on what your users say, because if you asked a user what they wanted from their browsing experience would’ve probably just thought of ways to improve Chrome rather than something radically different. In other words the faster horse vs car problem.

This is why Arc’s GTM worked so well. Josh and Hursh went to their immediate circle. I.e. the community they were building for and got them on the product. They were people like them.

And I can only imagine they had the same reaction as I did. And so what did they do? Well the same thing everyone I know who uses Arc does - share it with their fellow techies (specifically the type who love tools like Notion and Miro - beautifully designed, open canvas masterpieces).

But this is when Arc stepped in to make this even more powerful:

Dictatorship at the door. Disco on the Dance floor. 🪩

When Arc first launched, you had to sign up on a waitlist to someday get access to the product.

The FOMO was real. Arc was becoming a product that was making a name for itself inside the startup world (remember the above point on community). You were hearing about it at drinks, on Twitter, on Reddit, and even YouTubers were talking about it. Arc was everywhere you cared about.

Now this wasn’t a coincidence.

Part of it was because the first users were part of this community. Friends of the founders. But from everything I’ve seen (and this hasn’t been confirmed by Arc), Arc was highly selective about who they let in from the waitlist.

The founding PM at the hottest SF startup? In.

A designer at Figma? In.

Now this is f*cking smart.

They knew who the key people of influence were in their community and they leveraged this to create more hype around the product. Creating this air of exclusivity around Arc. If you were in, you were part of something bigger than you. And if you weren’t? Well you were dying to get in.

It reminded me of this phrase I recently heard from Greg Isenberg (Do I get all my ideas from Greg? Possibly. Is it sippin’ time baby? Definitely): “You want your community to be a dictatorship at the door, but a disco on the dancefloor.”

You want the bar to get in to be high. It helps your community to be worth being part of. But once you’re in, everyone is just having a good time.

Now even after the product became open to everyone, Arc have still captured this feeling. It almost feels illegal to know about Arc (okay I need to stop fangirling).

But I would be lying if I said that using Arc wasn’t made cooler by the fact that I know everyone in here is getting down to this sick beat, and those outside? Well they don’t even know what they’re missing. They just hear the noise blasting outside.

Provide an option. 💅

Now you might be thinking how can Arc take on Chrome? They’ll lose.

Well they’re not taking on Chrome. They don’t want to beat Chrome. They just want to be different. To provide people an option on how they browse the internet (something we spend most of our waking days doing).

Arc want to give a small subset of Chrome users the option to have a more active web experience. They will always be niche. They know this.

And that’s a beautiful thing about Arc. It will never be copyable by Google. They have counter-positioned themselves so well that Google can’t afford the risk to try to compete (nor does it fit their business model in this case - Arc minimizes the amount of searches needed, but that’s the core Google business model).

Pracitcally what did Arc do and how can you do something similar?

Arc picked a relatively untouched space: Browsers. And not just untouched, but a space which most people would consider boring. On the surface there doesn’t seem like much to do with a browser.

Arc: “Aight bet”.

And completely went past everything we’ve come to believe a browser needs to be. Real first-principles thinking. Radically challenging the incumbents. But not to beat them. Just to take a few of their niche users.

And that’s how Arc became a master in counter-positioning.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

This is episode 2 of the Arc deep-dive. In case you missed it, here’s the first episode: How Arc grows by making a delightful UX.

Again, this is a new format, so I would appreciate feedback on this style of post (there’s a poll below). At the end of the day, I’m building a product for you and want you to have the best experience possible.

Arc (2/3): How Arc has created product evangelists by making users feel like insiders

Making you feel like an insider

You may have noticed by now that I’m a little obsessed with Arc.

That might sound ridiculous considering Arc is a browser. But if you read last week’s deep dive you’ll understand why I’m so obsessed with Arc as a product:

It’s delightful to use.

But obsession doesn’t necessarily mean someone will share a product with their friends. You also need to feel a personal connection with the product.

This connection is vital for fans to become advocates and share your product with the world (or at least their nerdy tech friends, like you and me). And is the reason people post annoying (my girlfriend forced me to say this instead of helpful) posts on LinkedIn telling you why they love Arc.

Creating this personal connection with your users isn’t easy though.

It often requires you to be honest and vulnerable with your audience. Publicly. Everything corporates have previously shied away from.

Arc has built a deep connection with its users led by founder Josh Miller’s efforts in building in public.

The core principle underlying their strategy?

Making you feel like an Arc insider.

One of them.

How they do this revolves around 4 key pillars:

1. Creating content with a personal touch

2. Building not just for you, but with you

3. Release Notes, but make it a series

4. Giving Arc names and faces

Let’s get into it.

1. Creating content with a personal touch

The typical way companies do content marketing is exactly what you’d expect: very corporate.

Not Arc.

Personality and connection are the core of their content efforts. Closer to a creator than a company.

The Arc socials feel like a platform hosting the personalities running the company. This is why it has been so successful.

It’s hard to build a connection with a company.

Think about the companies you feel an affinity towards. They’re typically massive companies that have been around for years, embedding their brand into you. Think Apple.

Or they’re companies where you feel a connection to the founders or the team themselves first and you automatically attribute this to the brand.

There are exceptions for products that you fall in love with the product itself, like many did with Notion, but that is a lot harder to achieve.

What makes Arc so special is that it fits into that rare space of being both a product people fall in love with and a team people want to win.

A powerful combination.

This has all been a bit theoretical to now. Apologies. So let’s make it practical.

Embrace your inner-creator

Nobody cares about typical boring B2B content. We don’t care that you’re announcing a new update (unless you make that fun, but more on that later).

At the end of the day. Companies don’t buy from companies. It’s the people in those companies that buy from each other.

And people want content to feel human.

Why? Because we care about people. Not companies.

So while you didn’t set out to become a creator. Your goal is now the same as any creator when it comes to content: To tell better stories.

Just like Arc as a product gives you moments of joy. So does its content. I feel a part of something bigger than myself. I feel a part of a movement.

The bottom line?

Don’t be bland. Learn how to tell your story through content.

Be vulnerable and open

Watching Arc’s videos and listening to their new podcast, you can’t help but want them to win.

They give you an awesome bts look at the team’s thoughts. With this unique rawness. That gives you belief in the founders. Belief in the team. It doesn’t feel like everything needs to be perfect. And because of this it feels real.

It doesn't feel like corporate selling or like you're being marketed to. But rather that you're part of the journey along with them.

Josh shares these moments of doubt. Of wonder. Unsurety.

And it really brings you in and sparks your emotions. Your desire to see Arc win.

The other part of this is that they show things you wouldn't expect to see from a company. For example:

• Board meetings

• Unfiltered meetings with designers

• Q&As with the founder

And topics you don’t typically see:

• Whether the business will survive or not

• The direction of the business

• Product decisions

• Brand decisions

You get a true view of the company and its culture. Plus you get to see how it plays out in real-time. And people love that.

I love it.

It makes you feel like you're part of something that others aren't. It's exclusive, right? You feel like you're an insider.

You don’t need to be hyper-produced

If you look through Arc’s content you’ll notice very quickly that it isn’t always production grade. A lot of the content is intentionally amateurish.

Yes, they have some very well-produced content with high-quality editing and graphics. But a lot of their videos are not like this.

In some videos it’s just a Zoom call with members of the team. In others, it’s a vlog following Josh around. Typical YouTube content.

It feels like the team is talking directly to you.

And this is super powerful in giving you the feeling of being an insider.

A little trick they also do is show you things like Slack messages or chats between the team members. It makes that make you feel like “Oh, I'm part of this channel”.

Now Arc is a B2C company, so they can get away with being a bit more amateur. It doesn't necessarily work for all companies.

But what does work for all companies is humanizing your messaging and focusing on the art of being a creator rather than a corporation in your content.

2. Building not just for, but with you

I'm a big believer in speaking to your users. You need to stay in touch with what your users want.

Now this doesn't mean completely scrap your strategy and build exactly what users say. You need to find a balance between where you want to go, your mission, your vision and incorporating what your users are telling you they want to see.

Arc does this exceptionally. Making it obvious that they are bringing you along the journey with them.

Josh often speaks to users on Twitter:

• Which feature do you prefer?

• Which design do you prefer?

• How would you build something to achieve xyz?

Not just open-sourcing ideation. But also A/B testing live with his audience. Importantly, this helps keep you in control of your product direction. Where it’s the details your users have a more direct impact on, but they still feel a part of the development

So think about how you can not just build for, but build with your users.

It not only helps with prioritizing your product roadmap, but it's also great for building buy-in from users and loyalty going forward.

Arc also makes sure to recognize their users who were involved in the process. With public thank yous and recognition. A great way to reward this super fandom.

3. Release Notes, but make it a series

A lot of products give you updates on their new features. What almost no one does is create a habit around it.

Arc does weekly Release Notes. Something the community anticipates every week:

Now to do this, you have to be shipping fast. But you also need to be great at storytelling, or else no one will read the updates.

And if you haven't read it before, you're probably thinking, why on earth would I read a product update?

The ones you do get, you ignore. What makes this different?

It’s about story and personality. Arc makes every edition interesting, unique, and personal. And have done this consistently for years - leading to the creation of a habit for its users.

You get this feeling that it's the next episode in a series, rather than some boring technical spec.

And fans love it.

How does Arc tactically do this?

To get off to a good start, Arc make each release visually interesting. Not a boring email, or typical blog post.

But rather Arc uses one of their own features: Easels.

An example Easel

Which is similar to an interactive digital whiteboard.

Almost like a fun website announcing each of these updates. Bringing more joy into using Arc, with:

• Hand-drawn arrows and icons

• Bts of how and why features were built

• Who fixed the bugs and built the features you love

• Video demos

• Tweets from customers and employees

And a whole bunch more - take a look for yourself.

It’s just another example of Arc being intentional with great storytelling, with everything interwoven into the story of feature and product updates.

So, you don't just get the update, you get the why and how it happened.

This also inherently makes it personal. It's not just announcing a feature. It's giving you a quirky story behind it.

Another great thing that the release notes do is create a hub for Arc ecosystem. You don’t need to scroll through all their social medias for new updates, you can come here and deep-dive where it most tickles your fancy.

Hosting the story that is Arc.

4. Giving Arc names and faces

Very often the only people who get the praise for successful products are the founders. But the reality is teams build products that win.

And with Arc, you know that.

Arc intentionally tells you about more than just the founders. Thanking the team members who build the product.

When you listen to Josh talk you immediately get the feeling that he understands that his role isn't to build everything.

He knows that to build a great product, you need great people. And he wants to make sure that those great people get the recognition they deserve.

He is leading a ship, not building every part of it.

This is great for company culture, but it also gives their brand more personality. Because there are more names and faces to associate the brand with.

Giving you a team of people to connect with and not just a single player.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

Today is something a little different. Inspired by Arc itself.

I want to create an experience with the next few editions of the newsletter. So I’ve split up the Arc deep-dive into three episodes, each with one specific growth tactic.

Why?

I want to balance in-depth research into specific companies with bite-sized less than 10-minute reads.

I want to test this out over the next three weeks. I would really appreciate any feedback (there’s a poll at the end of the newsletter) to see if I should stick with this style - at the end of the day, I’m building a product for you.

Arc (1/3): How Arc grows by making user experience joyful

🥇 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

If you’re building in a sea of sameness and relatively undifferentiated products. How users feel when using your product can be the difference between a user choosing you over a competitor.

Think about how you can make not just a great product, but a great experience for users.

How can you invoke joy in the use of your product, and not just the outcome.

Bringing the joy back into product

I can’t overstate how much using and researching Arc for the past few weeks has forced me to fundamentally reconsider the way I look at product.

I have never used a product and become an advocate as quickly as this.

Usually you would expect there to be a killer feature making me completely ditch a staple product like Chrome (something I didn’t even realize I had a pain point with).

But there’s not.

And that’s not to say there aren’t great features. There definitely are (to name a few):

• 5 second previews: Hover over links to get an AI-generated summary of a page.

• Spaces: Swipe to change between custom work spaces (e.g. business and personal)

• Split screen view: Split screens in one window

• Cleans up downloads: Automatically adjusts the name of downloaded files to something relevant

• Easels: Collaborative whiteboard-style page with live links (look at this example of their Release Notes - more on this next week 😉)

But why I fundamentally love Arc is because it’s delightful to use.

Everything about the product is a joy. And for a place where I spend ~8 hours a day, this is actually rather important.

Like most people, I never knew that I wanted/needed a different browser experience.

But now that I’ve had it. I won’t go back.

And I will continue to tell people what they’re missing out on. As I imagine most annoying Arc users, like myself, will do. Bringing more users to Arc.

So practically, how does Arc create this joyful user experience?

• Optimizing for feelings

• Creating magic moments

• Redefining interaction on the user journey: aka the membership team

Optimizing for feelings

The first step Arc takes to create this joyful UX is to really challenge what they’re optimizing for.

And for one of the most used products in a person’s day, it’s important to keep the product human-focused. Arc views this as optimizing for feelings over data. Believing that data often leads to optimizing for the wrong things.

The Arc team was fed up with the endless optimization of everything:

“We believe this mindset has led us to a very specific place: one of efficiency, productivity, and profit… but not a place of humanity. Soul. Or feeling.

And when we take a step back, we think feeling is kind of what matters most in this world.”

To achieve this, Arc put the craft of the product at the forefront of its development. And use data as a secondary source.

Arc is not supposed to only serve your functional needs. But also your emotional ones. Like your favorite cafe where the baristas ask you about your day, the light illuminates the place, the joy of the other people there can be felt, and the slightly worn seats make them all the more comfortable.

Arc is trying to bring humanity back to software. Not at the expense of data. But rather using feelings to guide the nuances missed by data.

Using data as the what and feelings as the why.

Here are 2 ways Arc does this practically:

Rely on their intuition and feelings

Arc is building a product that no one even knew they needed.

If you had asked users what a better browsing experience would be for them, I can imagine they would’ve hit a “better horse vs a car” situation.

Meaning users would suggest things that improve Chrome (the horse) rather than ideate something completely new (the car). Because of this, Arc often has to rely on their own intuition and feelings.

What would they like to feel when using a new feature? How do they feel when using that feature? What could close the gap between the two?

Start with the end emotion in mind

Don’t build aimlessly.

Be clear on what emotion it is you’re trying to invoke with a new product or feature and think about how to get there.

Are you trying to get people to feel joy? Add some magic moments (more on this below).

Are you trying to make people feel less overwhelmed? Build simpler or more recognizable UI.

Creating moments of joy

One thing Arc does better than most products is give its members (the term they use for users) little moments of joy. Be it a little animation, a sound effect, or the ability to create your own theme.

You’re eagerly waiting for the next surprise.

Importantly, these are different for aha moments. Where the core value of your product clicks with a user, they get it, and they activate.

These are moments sprinkled on top that you know you don’t need, but which make using the product fun and delightful. Increasing the chance of you spreading the word of Arc.

The great thing about these moments of joy is that they stack on top of each other and snowball.

Individually you enjoy each one.

But together you fall in love with the product.

Arc has plenty of these moments, some that you see once and leave happier, others that are woven throughout the product and keep bringing you back.

To name a few that I’ve really enjoyed:

The onboarding

Which invokes both sound and sight. Given your eyes a spectacle and your ears a symphony.

I would struggle to capture the experience, so here’s a teaser video (from a few years ago, but the principle is the same).

Just know it will set a new bar for what you expect from future onboardings. So I recommend you try it with caution: Download Arc.

Membership cards

Each member of Arc gets a personalized membership card.

Not only does this make you feel like an insider (more on this next week). But it just gives you a wonderful introduction to the product and makes you feel attached before you begin.

Here’s mine for example: (why thank you Arc for the complement)

Custom themes

For each space you create in Arc, you get the pleasure of choosing the theme for it.

Now you’re probably sighing at me and trying to remind me that you can also do this with Chrome. Which you can. But it’s the way in which you can customize it.

It’s like a mini-game rather than a theme picker.

Giving you a fun introduction to creating your window into the internet.

AI but not in your face

Arc doesn’t look at how they need to bring new AI features into their product. But rather, if AI can make their user experience more enjoyable. What processes and workflows can be enhanced from it?

It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

Adding to the UX rather than creating another piece on top of a puzzle that already fits.

One great example of this is one of their most popular features, the 5 second preview, where you can hover your mouse over a web link and it will summarize it for you.

No need to endlessly click links and return to your search when you don’t find anything.

But the special part about this feature isn’t just its functionality. It’s the interface and experience.

Originally, the feature wasn’t a hit. It gave you AI-generated, but paragraph, summaries of each page.

Instead of scrapping the feature, Arc went back to first principles. What were they trying to achieve?

To make the browsing experience quicker and easier.

And so they prototyped out a new look. Bullet points. Where the bullet icons were related to the sentence.

This small change took it from barely used to one of the most successful feature launches Arc has done. And it wasn’t from a massive feature change, but rather how that feature impacted your experience and gave you a little bit of joy.

Here are a few other examples of how Arc integrates AI into their product:

• Tidy Tab Title: Renames tabs to make them cleaner and easier to find.

• Tidy downloads: Renames downloaded files to something descriptive.

• Browse for me: Creates a custom page for you based on search results. Relevant information as quickly as possible.

The one thing they all have in common?

Giving you small, but magical moments to make your experience using Arc more enjoyable.

Redefining interaction on the user journey: aka the membership team

The world of tech and building product has in many ways unified the way to build teams.

You have product, design, user research, customer success, customer support, engineering, etc. etc.

But what if it didn’t have to be like that?

That’s exactly what Arc asked when building out their team. So rather than create teams with predefined notions of what to do. They created new ones: specifically their Membership Team and their Storytelling Team.

But what does this have to do with UX?

Well, everything really.

Because that’s the way the Membership team is designed.

Traditionally, there are different teams for different touch points in a user’s journey. But not at Arc. They view the relationship with their users members as holistic.

It is the same team that takes you from your first touchpoint to your (hopefully never quite) last.

This continuous relationship with their members builds them extreme loyalty and brand advocacy.

Arc uses this to lean into their community-led product development. Finding:

• Pain points to solve

• Ideas to explore and prototype

• Experiences to improve

And overall giving users a better experience using Arc.

And also bringing them into the Arc-inner circle - but let me not get ahead of myself.

There are still more curtains for me to pull back and look behind. next week I’ll break down how Arc grows by making you feel like an insider.

For The Zero to One, this has been your host Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

AppSumo: Driving growth with Founder-Led Marketing

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

As the barrier to entry for building great products continues to be lowered. Products are starting to look more similar.

Brand will only become more important.

But the reality is that today personal pages get 40x more engagements than company pages on social media.

It’s harder than ever to build a meaningful following for your business page.

Why is this the case though?

People want connection and trust. And it’s hard to connect with a brand you’ve never even heard about. It’s much easier to connect and trust with the face behind the business.

Founder-Led Marketing is a great way to grow both your personal brand but also your business. Positioning yourself as a subject matter expert and creating a social presence that generates inbound demand.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Noah Kagan has become synonymous with entrepreneurship over the last few years.

For both his company AppSumo (a curated marketplace for the best deals on new products), but probably more so for the personal brand he’s built around it.

Noah and AppSumo are one of the best examples of Founder-Led Marketing. With Noah’s personal brand becoming a key growth channel for AppSumo.

It’s tough to put a value on this, but what we do know is that AppSumo now pays Noah $1M/year specifically for this. But my estimate is that the true value of his personal brand is multiples higher than this to AppSumo.

Noah is reaching millions of people every month. Which converts to (probably) hundreds of thousands of qualified visitors for AppSumo.

Noah has become one of the most followed and loved creators in the entrepreneurship space and all this personal brand equity and trust that he’s built gets attributed to AppSumo as well.

Plus it gives potential AppSumo users a friendly and relatable face to attach to the brand, increasing the chance of purchases and referrals.

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

👨‍🔬 1. Aligned ICP

The first step to create a compelling personal brand is to understand who you’re talking to.

There’s a saying, that although is a little overused, is true:

“If you try to speak to everyone. You end up speaking to no one.”

There’s so much noise online today that we’re all on a mission to find what content is worth us consuming. People want highly specific content, that feels like it was made just for them.

The best entrepreneurs and creators understand this.

This part is also crucial when it comes to your business. You can’t be posting cat memes and then think you’ll convert people to use your revenue optimization tool.

Your brand needs to be aligned with your business.

Noah does this excellently.

Noah’s content is very targeted at a specific ICP: The entrepreneur.

To be even more specific, people early on in their entrepreneurial journeys, who typically fit into one of these buckets:

• Want to start a business

• Have a side hustle they want to scale

• Running an early-stage startup

You can see this clearly in his content. Which is often focused on the inspirational side of entrepreneurship:

• Asking millionaires how they got rich

• Advice on starting a business

• Noah’s transformations in his life, career, and business

Because AppSumo sells new products that may or may not succeed. This targeting is also very practical. As AppSumo is great for people you would describe as “early adopters” - people who are on trends before they take off.

And AppSumo gives them the chance to get lifetime access for a massive discount.

Perfect for someone starting a business who wants to save on costs and can take a risk on a new product, without layers of bureaucracy.

Noah is a great example of personal and company brand alignment, which combined give him a clear pitch:

To help founders turn ideas into actual businesses with the right products.

🖇️ 2. Multi-channel repurposing

One thing Noah does better than most founders and creators is creating a content ecosystem.

Everything is connected and feels a part of one larger story. Noah’s world. With each platform having a slightly unique angle.

What you listen to on his podcast, continues on his YouTube videos, and often in his newsletter as well. And then those get chopped up for our LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok feeds.

A whole story told in different parts. For different preferences. And with unique takeaways.

I’m not sure on the structure of his whole team, but I know that Jay has had a big part to play in this and deserves a mention - His work was a massive driver behind the successful launch of Noah’s NYT bestseller Million Dollar Weekend.

Noah has created an almost Marvel-like Universe with his content. You see a snippet, you want to see the full video, which then leads you to the podcast. And the cycle continues.

But how do you do this practically?

Look at content like a pyramid:

• Long-form content: Create a video, podcast or newsletter to start.

• Short-form content: Chop up that long-form piece into TikToks, Carousels, or threads.

• Snippets: Break it up a step further into short posts on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tweets.

The great thing about the pyramid is that it can actually work both ways.

Snippets can easily be downstream of long-form. But they can also be a great place to test ideas for longer-form content.

Just remember: The more touch points = the higher chance someone will become a fan and an AppSumo user.

I want to end this section by saying that Noah is over a decade into his social media journey. He has developed processes, has a team supporting him, and knows the game.

I say this because this part of his strategy is hard if you’re new to posting on social media - so if you don’t have the expertise or budget to hire a team or agency, I would recommend going all in on only one long-form and one short-form platform. Then only expanding once you’ve seen some success and have built out systems.

If you are looking to build a personal brand that grows your business, but don’t know where to start, my team and I have some resources to get you started! Click here to reach out.

🌮 3. Honest and authentic

You can have a super-targeted and high-value ICP, and be on every platform, but if you’re not authentic people will be able to tell.

Noah does this and more. Creating a genuine connection with his audience by being:

1. Valuable: Noah has a wealth of experience. From being employee number 30 at Facebook to growing AppSumo to almost $100M in revenue. He doesn’t shy away from sharing this knowledge and has become a top resource for anyone looking to grow their business.

2. Vulnerable: Noah often tells personal stories in his content. He’s open about his mistakes, his income, his losses, and his learnings. He doesn’t hold back from being real.

3. Inviting: Noah is awesome at making his audience feel a part of his journey. With subscriber events, subscriber giveaways, and subscribers starting businesses on his channel. Noah’s content feels more like a community than a class.

Because of these Noah has become more legitimate and likeable. And ultimately people are more likely (and wanting) to check out and use AppSumo because of it.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

Zapier: Automated SEO machine worth millions in organic clicks

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

Approach your SEO strategy from multiple angles.

As generative AI is becoming a more daily part of our lives. Programmatic SEO is becoming more popular - and understandably so.

Programmatic SEO can be a great boost for early-stage startups to get the ball rolling while their blog is building traction and authority. And takes a fraction of the time.

But SEO has a lot more potential. The easier something becomes, the more it becomes commoditized. You need to blend in value-packed blog content to build off a programmatic base.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Last month Zapier brought in over 6 million organic search visits.

That’s impressive for any business.

But when you consider that the monthly search volume for “automation tool” (the core of Zapier) is under 10k. It’s like finding a different flavored Dorito in your packet. It’s awesome. But you’re also puzzled how it got here.

So how has Zapier done it?

By turning the focus away from them and onto their partners - the apps that Zapier integrates. Over 90% of those 6 million visits came from non-Zapier brand searches.

They have gone after their partners' use cases. Creating content on an almost infinite list of potential use cases for their Zapier.

“Best productivity app” - guess who pops up #1 organic on Google?

Zapier. Not Notion. Not ClickUp. Not Monday.

“Calendar apps”?

Zapier. Not Google Calendar. Not Fantastical. Not Hey Calendar.

“How to send Calendly bookings to Notion database”?

Zapier.

And the best part?

They’ve pretty much automated it all.

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🚪 1. The helpful backdoor

Zapier had to find a solution to the problem of low search intent for its core feature.

So instead of focusing on Zapier’s solutions, they focused on creating high-quality, unbiased, informational pieces that answered questions people were already searching for - ‘best’ lists, how-to guides, etc.

Then once they got people on the page, they delivered on the search’s promise, but also offered an alternative, better solution: Zapier. Opening a back door for user acquisition.

Today their blog contributes over 67% of Zapier’s organic traffic. A huge driver for signups.

To make this practical, let’s look at a recent post: The best AI chatbots in 2024.

Zapier is not an AI chatbot. But it does provide integrations for a lot of them. And through the article, opens the back door to you becoming a Zapier user. Take this example with Claude:

A few clicks later and you’re creating an automation to write email responses.

These are often high-volume keywords that if you can rank high on Google, bring thousands of visitors per article.

The best example, Zapier’s hack with the ‘best’ format:

Ranking in the top 3 for 2,397 keywords with this ‘best’ pattern in the USA alone. And becoming a go-to source for unbiased product reviews and comparisons.

🛬 2. Intent-based landing pages

I know you’ve been here before:

You find a new tool. Fall in love with it. Can’t stop using it. But it doesn’t quite fit into your current tech stack. Why? It doesn’t have the native integrations for the tools you use.

So what do you do?

Well, you Google it - or maybe you use GPT or Claude.

Either way, you get the same answer.

Zapier.

Rather than trying to convince users on integrations and automation. Zapier targeted the specific use cases already being searched for.

They redirected their SEO focus away from Zapier and onto their partners - who were often already household names with a ton of brand value, or niche tools with not many competitors for search. Either way, a win.

To do this, Zapier automatically creates 3 tiers of integrations every time a new app joins their platform.

1. App landing pages (like this folk page). This is the start. It’s where all the integrations for a specific app can be found. Each page is generated to fit a template structure and layout.

2. App to App integrations pages (like this Typeform to folk page). This is where we start to see the mass scale. Stemming off the main app page can be hundreds of integration pages.

3. Workflow-specific pages (like this page on how to send new entries from Typeform to create new persons in your folk CRM). This branches off from each integration pair into the specific use cases. We’re again talking about hundreds for certain integrations.

Because of this programmatic (automated) approach, they can reach massive scale, with almost no human effort. And on top of this have created a content growth flywheel to automate sales:

More traffic and users → More apps want to join → More integrations → More landing pages → More traffic and users. And so it continues. Practically all on automation.

🔗 3. Links everywhere

One of the biggest things that stuck out to me about the Zapier website is just how connected everything is. They are masters of internal linking.

Let’s go back to the Claude example from above.

You see, it’s not just the backdoor that’s been opened. But also the door to the kitchen and lounge. Then you follow those links. And get to more suggested automations with Zapier. And you guessed it, more internal links.

Why does this work so well?

1. It keeps users on your site for longer. Which increases Google’s ranking of your site and increases the chance of conversion.

2. Provides more chances for someone to find a Zap that appeals to them.

3. Passes link equity between pages (Zapier uses pages that have a lot of backlinks to boost other pages)

But key to it all, is that Zapier’s content is information-rich and useful. People won’t buy from you if your content isn’t valuable.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

Zillow didn’t start off by creating new data points. They used data that was already available, but hard to get to, and invisible to most people.

But this leads to a key lesson that often data availability isn’t the issue. It’s the accessibility of it that is.

In these marketplaces, the way to win is to package that data for users in an easily digestible, enjoyable, and shareable way.

So instead of looking to generate new data points, think about how you can improve an already available set of data by focusing on the user experience.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Back in the early 2000s purchasing a home seemed like a solved problem.

Using an agent was the first, second, and third option.

And it worked.

But there was an underlying issue.

Information was not equally available. It was heavily skewed towards the agents.

And thus, relied on high levels of trust between the end-user (you) and the middleman (agents). But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and in the case of purchasing real estate, agents are really valuable.

So rather than replace agents, Zillow ventured to democratize the data available to agents, empowering home buyers and sellers.

They centered their product positioning around access to information.

To do this, the team took months to build a database of millions of properties to develop what was new ground for the real estate industry:

An algorithm to estimate the value of a home.

Their core differentiator, the Zestimate.

Essentially what Zillow had done was create a way for a home buyer or seller to get an objective view on the value of a home.

Today, the average margin of error for Zestimate is just over 2%.

Practically wiping away the need for subjective price valuations (in most cases).

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

👷 1. Doing the dirty work

All the information Zillow used for their Zestimate algorithm was publicly available.

So anyone could have used it.

But the problem was that the information was hard to access, fragmented, and often localized. Meaning you as an end-user would’ve needed to put a ton of effort in to estimate the value of a home.

Well to democratize this data, Zillow set out to do this for you: accessing multiple sources, cleaning it, understanding what matters, updating it constantly (home prices are not static), and creating a single source of truth estimate.

Zillow had made their user lives easier and better (all of agents, buyers, and sellers).

While at the same time, not being at odds with the industry incumbents - agents.

Which can often be a problem when entering into traditional industries. And something you should look to avoid, unless you have substantial financial backing or a completely revolutionary product.

While Zestimates might ruin the day of agents trying to drive a higher price. Ultimately, they help everyone get to a fair price quicker and easier - and have probably helped to weed out lemon agents.

📣 2. Viral moments

The founders of Zillow, Rich Barton, Lloyd Frink, and Spencer Rascoff, knew the viral potential of Zestimate.

It’s provocative.

It could tell you that your house is worth much less than you think

Or much more if you’re lucky.

Even better, you could compare the value of your house to your neighbors, your friends, or even your favorite celebrities.

They were betting on Zestimate taking Zillow viral. So they doubled down on its provocativeness.

One way they did this practically was to make the Zestimate one number and not a range. With Barton saying, “points are more provocative”.

Another thing they did was keep Zestimate under wraps when building, but letting the media see it (under NDAs) and getting them ready to write about it once it was released.

Boy were they right on their bet on Zestimate.

By the second day, more than 1 million people had visited Zillow.

And by the fifth day, over 2 million.

Zestimate instantly started debates with homeowners and the nosy rest of us.

Home values were now publicly visible. And everyone wanted to see them.

📲 3. Time to binge

But Zillow didn’t just stop at a moment of virality.

They used it to create a behavior of bingeing.

You see, before Zillow there was no culture of pointing out the flaws in the kitchen lighting of a $20M LA mansion with less than $1k in our bank accounts.

Now this isn’t to say that Zillow was the first home listing aggregator.

But, because of their emphasis on opening up the data - they were the first to create this binge-worthy experience:

You were no longer limited by listed homes. You could get a price estimate for any home.

You could now get a true price estimate (critical to if that $20M lighting is a dealbreaker).

You could now go and find out the true price of every home you’d driven past.

All your favorite celebs.

The Zestimate for one of Beyonce’s houses.

All your friends.

Zillow had created a user experience that emphasized staying on the platform. While also creating share-worthy moments.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

When using a new product users are often overwhelmed (especially if your product has multiple use cases and a blank slate of possibilities).

You need to remove this feeling, increasing activation and retention rates, by guiding new users on how to get started and be successful with your product.

One of the best ways to do this is with clear and easy-to-use templates so your users can hit the ground running and have the confidence that your product will deliver as promised.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Miro creates a world of infinite visualized possibilities for its users (if you haven’t used it, it’s truly limitless).

For most new users, the specific use case of a blank Miro canvas is confusing. It can do anything, and seemingly everything. So where to start? And where to go?

By lifting the guardrails of possibility Miro created this battle between unlimited potential and the first step.

Users struggle to comprehend just how many use cases are possible with Miro (a common problem for everything tools such as Airtable or Notion), they can think of so many, but there are multiples more.

But at the same time, because of this literal blank canvas of possibility, users can become overwhelmed, leading to inaction, and ultimately churn.

Although on opposite ends, Miro solves them the same way: Free Templates.

Templates? Seriously?

I hear you. I know on the surface templates don’t seem worthy of a deep dive. But Miro’s unique strategic thinking behind theirs does.

Let’s make a deal, if you get to the end and you think I’m right, you’ll leave your feedback by clicking “Great”. If you get to the end and think I’m wrong, send me your startup and I’ll feature it in a community section next week. Deal?

So without further ado…

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🧍‍♂️: 1. Each to its own

Miro gives each of its templates its own landing page.

You might think this is excessive. But it serves a critical purpose.

To demonstrate it, we’re going to run an exercise: Think about how you search on Google (or Bing - surprisingly there are ~100 million of you out there using Bing daily).

I’m willing to guess you aren’t regularly searching terms like “whiteboard tool for growth marketers”.

You’re probably more vague in your searches. Something like “GTM templates”.

Miro understands this.

So they use individual landing pages for each template to drive massive top-of-funnel value. These template pages make up less than 3% of their organic pages, but drive ~30% of traffic value.

This is a massive competitive advantage for them.

As with each new template, there is an SEO-optimized landing page attached to it.

Plus, every user who creates an account with Miro after landing on a template page skips the problem of not knowing where to start.

They start with the template they landed on.

Meaning the activation rate is a lot higher and the user is more likely to become a paying customer for the long-term.

💡: 2. Open source innovation

This was actually where this newsletter was originally going to focus on (before I decided to move one level higher).

This is because Miro’s use of community is, in its own right, deserving of being studied (let me know if you’d like to see it in a future deep dive. And if you’re interested now look at this awesome breakdown from my fellow South African Jaryd).

Miro doesn’t only leave template creation to its internal team. They empower their users to create a more successful community with the Miroverse.

An innovation hub for user-generated templates - of which they have thousands (substantially more than their internally built templates).

The Miroverse has been the center of Miro’s community building. With profiles (from Zoom to your neighbor’s cat), likes, views, awards, challenges, and more, Miro has facilitated a community dedicated to helping each other and creating awesome Miro boards.

The Miroverse has become a platform to open source use case expansion - Reversing the tables on the traditional dictating to users how to use the product.

Creating a self-sufficient machine, bigger than would be possible internally, that consistently increases Miro’s TAM (Total Addressable Market) as these new use cases are added by users.

To make this even better, the SEO boost from point 1 applies here too. But with another added benefit.

Community boards are ripe for back-links.

Think about all the template creators, YouTubers, and Bloggers linking their (and other) Miro templates for their audience.

To make this last point tangible. Imagine a YouTuber starts using Miro Boards to brainstorm YouTube ideas - they can easily share this as a template with their audience - giving Miro more backlinks and boosting their SEO.

So what are you waiting for, invite users into your innovation process.

🎯: 3. Double down on what works

The last pillar of Miro’s template strategy is to use templates to generate data.

One of the problems with a product like Miro is that it can do anything. It is a whiteboard at the end of the day, just virtual.

This can lead to disjointed marketing that is vague and trying to appeal to everyone.

To avoid this, Miro uses the data they generate from their (and user-generated) templates: how popular each template is, if it leads to sticky users (a user with a high retention rate), if a use-case is prone to sharing, etc.

By doing this, Miro can target use cases it identifies as popular and high-value. Helping with their positioning, their messaging, and their product roadmap.

And also giving Miro potential lead magnets to draw new users in - using popular templates to increase the chance of giving users that aha moment and turning them into evangelists.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

Chess.com: Partnerships for beginners to the GOAT.

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

Brand partnerships can be a powerful way to create habits around your product and push users down your sales funnel.

Practically, you can use partnerships to meet users who are in different stages of the sales funnel where they already consume content and hang out.

Practically, have a tiered partnerships approach, with stage-specific brands and influencers to reach your whole sales funnel.

Doing this can naturally push users from never having heard of you to evangelists of your product.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Chess is nothing new. It’s been around for over 1,400 years.

But it has never been as popular as it is today. With over 600M global players and over 140M of them registered on Chess.com - a 350% increase since January 2020.

Chess.com has consistently been an early adopter of new medias.

But importantly, they were early to the rise of the Creator.

Chess.com was one of the first companies to truly leverage influencer partnerships. This, as we will get into, expanded over the years: from chess streamers to the greatest chess player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, and even The Queen’s Gambit series.

The genius of this tactic though lies in the tiered approach Chess.com took to win first-time chess players, chess fanatics, and everyone in between.

Stacking partnerships at three different stages of how aware user were of chess. This created a partnership funnel that has skyrocketed growth, increased stickiness, and reduced churn.

The arrows represent which type of users enter at which stage.

Chess apps rely on network effects: You want to always have someone to play against. You want to play against people at your level and the best players in the world. And wherever that place is, that’s where you’ll play.

So Chess.com made sure they were that place. By first winning over chess regulars. Then targeting those already looking to get into chess. And finally, attracting new players to the game.

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🎬 1. Become the product for those who know

When Chess.com entered streaming and video content, they found a completely undervalued asset: Chess streamers.

I was watching an episode of My First Million, where Shaan Puri, ex-Director of Product at Twitch, said that while he was at Twitch, new brands were making millions using Twitch influencers as their only marketing channel. And sometimes they weren’t even paid - just given free products.

And this was ~7 years after Chess.com first started partnering with Twitch and YouTube creators.

You see, the type of person who watches a Chess streamer is most likely a regular chess player. They knew this. So they started making partnerships with different streamers and YouTubers. Quickly winning the market and establishing themselves as the go-to platform for regular chess players all the way to the greatest chess player of all time, Magnus Carlsen.

These partnerships came in different shapes as well, sometime it was just for the streamer to play live on Chess.com, and other times they put the streamer in the game as a bot (a computer player) that users could play against.

Chess.com became the go-to place for regular chess players to play. They had the best players in the world, and you could play against them (or at least their bots). Strengthening their network effect.

🫂 2. Welcome beginners with open arms

As the Queen’s Gambit chess boom arrived, more people naturally started watching chess streams and videos - a place Chess.com had already conquered.

They could have easily sat back and waited for these new players to be exposed to Chess.com through these streamers. But they went a step further:

They went to welcome them before the door and show them the way in.

Partnering with the show to introduce Beth Harmon (the main character) bots into the game at different ages.

Be honest with me now, 10-year-old Beth beat you hey? Because same.

This partnership blew the game up. With Chess.com reporting almost 200k new signups at the peak of it.

But Chess.com was not done growing, and in 2022 broke the Queen’s Gambit daily signup record by more than 100k users, because they had continued to be at the forefront of new chess players.

One of the best examples of this is the Mogul Chessboxing Championship. Yes, chess + boxing. And importantly a bunch of influencers competing.

The event was hosted by Ludwig, one of the biggest streamers in the world and featured 16 influencers. It was a massive success! Reaching over 500k live viewers at its peak.

And this wasn’t even the first influencer event they hosted, having done 4 influencer championships, Pog Champs, between 2020 and 2023. With superstar influencers throughout the tournament, including Mr Beast.

Chess.com capitalized on the influence of non-chess-related influencers as well as the hype of Queen’s Gambit, making Chess.com as easy as possible to find for players already looking to start playing the game.

This is where the partnerships funnel really kicks in. Because now, the partnership direction flipped. New players were starting on Chess.com and were being introduced to chess influencers through the platform (remember those bots from earlier). Plus, now there were more players searching for chess lessons on YouTube. And guess who came up?

The Chess.com partners.

This reinforced Chess.com as the platform to be for these new users. Keeping users on the platform for longer.

🌍️ 3. Capture a whole new world

As Chess.com has grown, they have realized that they are not bound by the size of the game. They can grow it.

Going beyond the chess world into mainstream media and other popular games and apps to introduce more people to chess itself.

Some of their longest-standing partnerships have been with athletes.

Chess.com has 7 athletes who you can play against their bot, including Larry Fitzgerald, Christian Pulisic, Luka Doncic’s Ai (Luk.Ai), and NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown.

Introducing the sports world to chess, with the allure of playing against your favorite player.

All of these give Chess.com a sense of mainstream superstardom, and bring in users who have never played chess before, nor did they want to before their favorite celebrity posted about their bot. Chess.com has begun to grow the game itself and not just its share of it.

Recently, Chess.com has also started to partner with super apps, Duolingo (~100M MAUs) and Clash of Clans (~75M MAUs). Each massive in its own right.

Doing this, Chess.com is trying to redirect the user behavior of daily app usage to Chess.com. Much easier to do than to create new habits.

This step completes the partnerships funnel as these new users start to funnel down into the middle bucket of partnerships, Queen’s Gambit and non-chess streamers, before finally becoming a super fan, watching the chess streamers from the Chess.com app.

Chess.com is growing its business and the game of chess through partnerships.

By layering, step-by-step, partnerships appealing to different users.

Starting from the easiest-to-reach, regular chess players, to those wanting to start playing chess, and finally, introducing new players to the game.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

Sheldon

Today’s deep dive is one of persistence and bouncing back in the face of failure. And it’s packed with actionable takeaways for you to apply to your business. So strap in, because this is a good one!

There’s this awesome concept of Inventing on Principle, which is this idea that if there is something in the world you feel is wrong and you have a vision for what a better world could look like, that should be your guiding principle on what to work on.

And this is exactly what inspired Vlad Magdalin to start building Webflow, for the 4th time - but this time was different. He had found his guiding principle.

He believed that the world could be a better place if more people could use the power of technology, specifically to build sophisticated websites. And so, he convinced his brother, a designer, of his vision, and along with their third cofounder, Bryant Chou, they set out to democratize web development by making it intuitive and visual.

11 years (and a bit more if you add in attempts 1 to 3) and a $4B valuation later, Webflow powers over 3.5m users to bring magic, in the form of websites, to life.

This is the story of how Webflow went from Zero to One. 🚀

Today’s deep dive at a glance:

• Webflow’s Growth Timeline

• How Webflow got the ball rolling: Think like a developer

  • Finding their wedge

  • Used their ICPs as hubs

• How they became the Webflow we know today: Responsive scaling

  • Bring their users along with them

  • Added ICPs to scale

Webflow’s Growth Timeline

The story goes that Webflow was founded in 2013 by Vlad and Sergie Magdalin and Bryant Chou.

But it actually begins much earlier than this. With 3 false starts before finaling going all-in and coming out on the other side.

It was 2005. Vlad was studying computer science. And for his senior project tried to build a tool that automated some of his development work.

He was obsessed with the name “Webflow” and even maxed out his credit card debt to buy the domain for $4k - a typical college project…

And so Webflow was born.

Problem was, Vlad was finishing college and needed to find a job. Which he eventually did, at Intuit. Sadly, Webflow came to an end - for now.

Because then a bit over a year later, Vlad got the itch to start building it a again - working nights and weekends while at Intuit. The problem this time?

He was too all over the place. Depending on the client, the requirements changeg a ton and he was never clear on what he was building.

But 2 years later, he gets together with some of his buddies from Intuit and they give it another go. Only for it not to go quite as planned:

• They didn’t find traction.

• They had a trademark denied (and received a cease and desist threat)

• One cofounder lost motivation

• The tech wasn’t quite sophisticated enough yet

• Their jobs got more interesting

• They got rejected from YC (again, for now)

And so once more. Webflow came to a close.

But then almost 5 years later and guess what appears in his mailbox…

A letter from his mom.

Underneath the trademark for Webflow. Completely unsolicited.

This re-energized Vlad and so he went at it again - this time focusing more on frontend development than backend.

Around this same time in 2012 everything changed for Vlad. He came across a video, “Inventing on Principle” which really challenged him to think why he did what he did - but also exposed him to the idea of interface manipulation - which is a fancy way to say how can he create a product that is intuitive, where you directly do the thing - traditional coding requires interface between the code and the outcome. His idea was to make it visual and easy to understand.

He phoned his boss the next day to let him know that he planned on quitting.

And in September he asked his brother - an awesome designer and the ideal person to build this with - to move in with him.

They pooled all the money they had, sold stocks, withdrew savings, and decided to put $15k into making a Kickstarter video. Only to be kicked off the platform because they didn’t know SaaS products weren’t allowed.

Around the same time they were rejected from YC. Again. And almost had no money left.

They went into survival mode, brought in Bryant Chou as their third cofounder and CTO, and created a demo to show the world. And to their surprise, it exploded on HackerNews. Getting 20-30k users to sign up on a waitlist.

They used this traction to re-apply to YC for S2013.

They got in.

This gave them a bit of a breather in terms of money, but they still didn’t have a customer.

And the launch to their waitlist didn’t bring in many paying users (~50).

By the time demo day at YC came they were ramen profitable (enough for the three of them to afford ramen and nothing else).

But fundraising was hard. They initially only raised $300k (I say only because the YC culture is to raise in the millions for your seed).

They then decided to stop fundraising and focus on building - this ironically drew in over $1M in additional investment. Leading to a total seed raise of $2.9M (split between 2013 and early 2014).

But growth was slow. Too slow to raise a Series A. And so the Webflow team went into a default alive mode - i.e., profitability hunting. They stopped hiring, cut costs, and focused on becoming financially sustainable. They didn’t raise again for over 5 years.

The interesting thing about Webflow is that from here, there wasn’t some crazy inflection point where growth couldn’t be contained - but rather consistent growth, year after year, for half a decade. Until the no-code revolution and their $72M Series A in 2019 that is.

Growing from 4k customers and $1.5M ARR in 2015 to 45k and ~$25M ARR at the end of 2019 (profitably as well).

To exploding in 2020. Reaching $66M in ARR.

In March 2022, Webflow crossed the $100M ARR mark and today that number is closer to $140M ARR, with more than 3.5M users and a $4B valuation.

Short on time? 4 Tactical Insights from Webflow

If you only have a few minutes today, here are 5 of my favorite actionable insights from this deep dive:

• Find both a technical and position wedge into a market that only you have. This eliminates any competition and you create a competition of one. Once you win with this market, you can begin to expand.

• Look for growth opportunities that are one-to-many. For example, hubs that are connected to as many people as possible, like influencers. This way you only have to make the sale once, and then your customers will grow your product for you.

• Make your customer more successful in finding, onboarding, adopting, and succeeding with your product. Create processes, content, features, and resources that create this viral organic loop that spurs growth. Webflow does a great job of this by bringing their users along this journey with content, their marketplace, and its product wishlist.

• Incentivize User-Generated Content (UGC). UGC is one of the most scalable growth channels as your customers are doing most of the work for you. So find ways you can incentivize this - for example, commission on template sales, exposure to your other customers, or even gifts in the mail. UGC is often viral, so once you get a few people to do it, more will follow.

Keep reading for more on these, plus plenty more tactics you can replicate from Webflow.

How Webflow got the ball rolling: Think like a developer.

🧀 1. Finding their wedge

The first question asked to Webflow is always how are they different to Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly, i.e. your common website builders.

And it’s a great question. Because website builders seem like a solved problem (even at the time).

But there’s a fundamental difference between that group and Webflow.

Webflow is an abstraction on top of code. What this means simply is that you are still thinking like a developer when you use Webflow. It is just in a visual way.

The Wix group is more Photoshop-like, in that it is template designs that drive the website.

But even this might sound confusing to us non-technical nerds (we are still nerds, just not the engineering type). So to compare it:

Webflow = FinalCut Pro and After Effects.

The others = iMovie.

Both have important use cases. But approach different use cases in a different way. With Webflow you can build a customized and sophisticated product and not simply a website.

So their positioning became clear. They empowered designers to create powerful and unique websites without any code.

You’re probably thinking why no one else had done this yet? Well, Webflow took advantage of new technology - responsive design (the lack of which had even stopped them in the past). In simpler terms, making code more efficient for all screen sizes and views.

So it became the core foundation of their product.

But it was a tight window of opportunity:

• All the new startups in 2013 were focused on mobile.

• Responsive design was so new that all the industry giants (like Adobe) couldn’t react fast enough.

They used responsive design as their wedge, and in doing so, became a competition of one.

They truly gave designers the ability to create beautiful and powerful websites without the need for an engineer.

They could design, build, and launch - with no code, but with the full power of code (i.e. responsive design and HTML-level customization.

🎡 2. Used their ICPs as hubs

As I mentioned above, Webflow had a very clear positioning when launching. And what this led to was a very specific Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) - freelance and agency designers.

They had essentially given designers the ability to become visual developers - democratizing the development process with a visual and intuitive interface.

If you think about this persona, they need everything: hosting, design flexibility, interactions, customization, and powerful websites.

And Webflow was the only one that could give them this without an engineer.

But Vlad, Sergei, and Bryant realized one critical thing about this ICP. They are basically a customer-led sales team.

For every new project they did, they brought more customers to Webflow.

This is the ultimate leverage in marketing: One to Many.

Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief used the term “hub and spoke model” when building Morning Brew.

Essentially you want to find hubs that are connected to as many people (spokes) as possible. And this is exactly what Webflow did by using freelancers and agencies as a growth channel. They only needed to make one sale. And from there, the responsibility was on the customer.

Webflow didn’t leave its customers on their own though. As part of their content strategy, they support these freelancers and agencies. For example, blog posts on how to convince clients to use Webflow over WordPress.

When you find a hub, don’t just leave them hanging. Support them. Give them content to share, referral bonuses, merch to give away, and guides on how best to sell you. Bring them into your business. This will also make them feel a part of something bigger than themselves and they will feel more committed.

How they became the Webflow we know today: Responsive scaling

❤️‍🔥 1. Bring their users along with them

From day one, Webflow was committed to building sustainably with the long-term in mind. It shaped many of their business decision, including fundraising and their product roadmap.

Key to this vision was to ensure that they brought their users along with them in their growth - as they grew and became a better product, so did its users grow and build better products.

This led to an alignment of incentives between Webflow and its users. I’ve talked about this concept before, so I won’t go too much into it. But what Webflow highlights here is just how critical aligning incentives between you and your users is to a sustainable business.

It makes you think long-term.

You have to think about how you can consistently build your product so that it continues to add more value to your users, so they can be more successful, and therefore use and share your product even more.

It forces you to put your customer’s success first.

And that’s exactly what Webflow did. By bringing their users along for their growth ride. Building a more resilient business in the process, while also making their users more money.

There are a few key ways Webflow brings its users along with them:

Blogs, Ebooks, and other resources: Helping potential users find the product (and be successful on it)

Webflow is big on content marketing.

It’s a core part of their growth with over 400k organic monthly users coming to the site. One of the biggest drivers for this is the Webflow blog.

With dozens of long-form, information-rich blogs each month about design, development, engineering, bts at Webflow, entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy. And importantly, spread throughout the customer journey:

• Top of the funnel: Things like “11 best fonts for web design”

• Middle of the funnel: Content like “6 featured Webflow projects”

• Bottom of the funnel: Specific pieces like “From Figma to Webflow: turning your static designs into interactive websites”

And although Webflow’s blog brings in around 20% of its organic revenue - this is only part of their content strategy. Another important part is what they call their “Resources”.

Webinars, Ebooks, White Papers, and reports.

Now this is not really a strategy to help more users discover Webflow, but it is one to help convert users by providing endless content that will help their ICPs build websites and businesses.

Webflow understands that to convert users, you first need to get them to your site, so they use a funneled SEO approach which generates them millions of dollars of free organic traffic each month.

Webflow University: Making users more successful onboarding onto the product.

The next way Webflow brings its users along their journey is by making them more successful in using the product. I.e. getting them better at web design with courses, documentation, interactive learning, community, and certifications (and the resources I mentioned above).

Let’s think about the three main ICPs for Webflow:

1. Freelancers and agencies:

The better websites they can build, the more clients they can make. Which leads to more money for both them and Webflow.

Plus, with Webflow’s certifications, they can add another layer of legitimacy when selling to new clients.

2. Marketing teams:

Marketing teams are typically non-technical. But they need to be able to iterate a website quickly to test different copy, positioning, and add new landing pages.

Webflow University gives them a place to learn how to do this as efficiently as possible. Making them more successful in their jobs and less dependent on engineers.

3. Founders:

At the early stages of a business founders typically have two main goals. Growth and revenue. Having access to Webflow University helps them onboard quicker, removes the need for an expensive designer and developer, and they can launch an MVP quicker.

The University is a great way to reduce the learning curve, onboard users faster, and increase adoption and activation.

Webflow Marketplace: Making users more successful with User Generated Content (UGC).

One of the most successful features Webflow introduced was the Webflow Marketplace - giving you everything you need to create an amazing website, by the community. This includes:

• Templates - to give you a headstart when building.

• App Integrations - to superpower your website.

• Libraries - to build faster.

• Expert job board - to find Webflow-approved partners.

• Community inspiration - to be inspired by what’s possible.

Focusing on UGC has been one of their biggest growth drivers. From driving SEO traffic to the templates page (which ranks on Google for “free templates” and is one of their most visited pages), to the scalability and inherent virality of UGC.

What the marketplace allows is for users to feel more confident in starting projects. It gets users to quickly register an account and start building.

And a lot of this is driven by other users. And this is by design. Webflow leaned into UGC from early on, incentivizing it by paying commissions on UGC sales. For example, if you create a template and sell it - you earn money.

This means that you are directly incentivized to promote Webflow. Driving traffic, increasing conversions, boosting domain authority, and growing their brand.

What’s become even cooler about this is that we see a bunch of creators having a freemium model with their templates - with the more basic ones as free lead magnets. This is all giving Webflow free content to give to new potential customers.

This has become so scalable that it produces over $50k equivalent in organic traffic.

The same applies for all their other UGC content - just not as popular - the more Webflow grows, so does its customers.

Product Wishlist: Making the product better through its users.

Webflow has one of the coolest ways of bringing their users into the product roadmap that I’ve seen: The Webflow Wishlist.

Where users can vote on new product ideas, in a Reddit-style upvote. However, to make it even more effective, the Webflow team limit the amount of upvotes you get, so that you have to be extremely thoughtful about which features you truly want.

Some of the core features of Webflow today came from this wishlist, such as user login and membership functionality.

By doing this, Webflow outsources ideas and can speak to its customers at scale. Then Webflow can use this and align it to their strategy and vision to shape its product roadmap - it’s important that you don’t just blindly build what your customers say they want. If you do this, you’ll end up looking like everyone else.

You need to translate what your users say they want into something that solves the underlying issue of what they truly want and make sure it aligns to your overall vision.

Over the last 11 years, Webflow has become a champion for its users’ success. They have brought them along their journey and as they have grown, so have their users. Leading to more true fans and greater customer loyalty.

The results of this are hard to fully quantify, but the keyword “Webflow” is by far their most organically searched keyword, accounting for ~15% of traffic.

And for a company getting over 400k monthly visitors, this is a good indication that the Webflow word-of-mouth is strong, and that is driven by customers loving the product.

🪴 2. Added ICPs to scale

Remember Webflow targeting freelancers and agencies as hubs?

Well, if you think about they work, they usually hand over the website to their client. Meaning they hand Webflow a different user - with different needs. Typically this is the marketing team within a company.

Soon these users became a large portion of Webflow’s customer base. And Webflow was awesome for them, because it helped them stay closer to the website process. They could launch landing pages, tweak messaging, and add content all without engaging devs - freeing up engineering resources for core product development.

And so Webflow leaned into this. (Plus there were only so many freelancers and agencies Webflow could sell to and they were limiting themselves by not expanding their ICP after winning over the first one)

First highlighting their visual way to build for the web and adding messaging on handing clean code off to your devs.

This then changed into a full emphasis on no-code and the product’s ability to create powerful websites, for marketers that are constantly changing things without needing developers’ time.

This addition also opened up their expansion into enterprise. They could have their marketing team design the landing pages, hone in the messaging, A/B test different flows, and all without coding - they could even hand this over to the dev team in a way that worked for everyone.

But importantly, this was an addition rather than a replacement. Adopting a product-led sales motion by adding a sales team to leverage their existing PLG momentum.

This change in positioning was aligned enough with their previous ICP that Webflow didn’t need them to split into two separate audiences. They could convey their value to both audiences with the same product and proposition.

And importantly for their freelance and agency users, it opened the potential for their businesses by making Webflow more enterprise-acceptable - another example of them growing together with their users.

Alongside this, Webflow also leaned more into early-stage founders who:

1. Wanted to launch and test an idea quickly.

2. Had a proven idea and wanted quick feedback cycles to optimize their website.

Webflow works great for these personas for a few reasons:

• Reduces the time to build a product = A quicker MVP.

• Fully customizable = Unique UI/UX.

• Visual and intuitive UI = Non-technical founders can be closer to the product.

• There is instant feedback to changes. Faster tweaks to copy and design.

• It is powerful enough for most non-core product use-cases = Technical founders can focus on developing the core product and reduces need to hire additional engineers.

Today, their user base is about 50% freelancers and agencies and 50% teams (and founders) within organizations. But key for Webflow’s mission, this happened very organically. Meaning they didn’t lose that uniqueness that made Webflow, Webflow - they are still very much a platform for everyone (and not tailored only for enterprise).

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

I want to start this week’s deep dive with a visualization (bear with me).

Imagine selling your company for $12B. Insane right?

Now imagine that you bootstrapped it. Never raising a cent of investor money. So you and your cofounder have ~50% equity each.

Well, this is exactly what happened to Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, when they became the biggest bootstrapped exit in history, selling Mailchimp to Intuit for $12B.

So strap in - because this is a fun one!

Mailchimp is the oldest company I’ve deep dived yet (24 years old). But it wasn’t always the Mailchimp we know today.

It actually started as Rocket Science Group, a web dev agency for big tech companies. Only problem - it was 2001. So when the .com bubble burst. So did theirs.

But as you will see, Ben, Dan, and Mark (a cofounder they bought out in 2008) were super gritty - you couldn’t get them to stop, no matter how hard you tried.

They moved on to a new type of client. Airlines. But it was 2001 and 9/11 meant that they had to find a new industry again. Which they did - into real estate (luckily by 2008, they were all-in on the email side of their business).

While building for their clients, they started getting requests to also help with email. Which they did. But they hated the tools they had to use - they were clunky and overly-complex.

So they created their own, based on previous code they had built for an e-greeting card business idea they had.

They then took this a step further, allowing people to use the software themselves, on a pay-per-send basis. This was all while running their webshop.

But then one day it all changed. They looked at the revenue streams of both their webshop and Mailchimp. And although Mailchimp was still much smaller. It was growing dramatically. So they went all in. And within a month, their Mailchimp revenue tripled.

This is the story of how Mailchimp went from Zero to One. 🚀

Today’s deep dive at a glance:

• Mailchimp’s Growth Timeline.

• How Mailchimp got the ball rolling: Serial belief in their product.

  • Marketing led by their product.

  • Stayed tinkering with many small bets.

• How they became the Mailchimp we know today: Sticking to what they know.

  • Get users to start using the product as soon as possible.

  • Staying true to the Mailchimp way.

Mailchimp’s Growth Timeline

As I mentioned above, Mailchimp was founded in 2001 as a web dev agency.

Where before going all-in on Mailchimp in 2007, was doing ~$300k in annual revenue. But nothing could have prepared them for the journey to come.

By the end of 2007, they had 10k users and had increased their revenue to around $500k.

The next year Ben and Dan bought Mark out of his shares, before flipping the business upside down in 2009, when they introduced their free forever plan (after 9 years of not having one). In one year, their profits increased 650% and their total users went from 85k to 450k - with paying users increasing 150%, taking their ARR to $2M and hitting profitability along the way.

By February 2012, they tripled their user base to 1.2M (at some points growing over 5k users per day). And so when the end of the year came around, they were at over 2M users, making over $30M in ARR.

From here Maichimp got on their rocketship and took lift off. And in 2016 hit 14M users and $400M ARR. Insane.

In 2021, history was made, when Mailchimp sold to Intuit for $12B - making ~$800M ARR at the time of the sale. This made Mailchimp the largest bootstrapped exit in history.

Short on time? 5 Tactical Insights from Mailchimp

If you only have a few minutes today, here are 5 of my favorite actionable insights from this deep dive:

• You don’t need to plan for a home run. Look for the singles and when you see the right ball - smash it out of the park. Mailchimp didn’t know that Serial was going to be the biggest podcast in the world or that Twitter was the next big social media. But they were able to be at the forefront of their explosive growth by constantly making small bets and testing things out.

• Innovation is the best form of viral marketing. Give your users the best experience possible and they will share it. So think of your product as a key component of growth and marketing and find ways to make an ask right after you’ve shown the value of your product (e.g. in the footer of an email written on Mailchimp).

• Be ready for luck to hit you. There’s this great quote I heard from Scott Galloway (and am about to get slightly wrong): In business and in life you have to ser your sails. You never know when the wind is going to come, but when it does - you want to make sure you’re taking advantage of it. So set a strong foundation and create a backlog of consistency and excellence to put yourself in the best position when Lady Luck comes knocking.

• Get users to onboard as soon as possible. One of the best ways to predict a user who won’t churn is how quickly the onboard and use your product. So make onboarding enjoyable, simple, and super clear. You want to walk your users through the most important steps to understanding your product.

• Position your brand as something relatable for your target persona. You want your target persona to feel heard and understood when they come across your brand. So speak like them, dress (your color and designs) like them, hangout where they do, and importantly stay as true as possible to this when growing to keep the same viral customer-led growth.

Keep reading for more on these, plus plenty more tactics you can replicate from Mailchimp.

How Mailchimp got the ball rolling: Serial belief in their product.

⚙️ 1. Marketing led by their product.

Most people reading this are probably aware of Product-Led Growth (PLG). A strategy where the product itself is the driver to acquire, convert, engage, and retain customers.

Essentially creating the best product possible and using it as the main marketing channel. Creating a viral growth loop that leverages product evangelists - someone who will shout about your product to others.

But when Mailchimp was founded in 2001, PLG was unheard of.

Even more so, they were a service, not a product. There was no product to even lead growth.

But actually, when you think about it, the culture of service businesses is often very similar to PLG companies - they try to deliver the best service possible, so that their customers refer them to others.

So in essence, Mailchimp already had a culture of delivering excellence as a marketing tool.

But they needed to transition this into their product - which originally was used as an internal tool to just serve their existing agency clients.

This turning point for Mailchimp came 9 years after launching, when they introduced their Free Forever Plan. Going freemium (again before it was cool).

Although done out of necessity, it turned out to be the biggest driver of their growth - unlocking their PLG. Making their viral growth flywheel crystal clear:

• User signs up for Mailchimp free plan.

• User sends an email using Mailchimp’s free plan.

• Recipient clicks the Mailchimp logo at the bottom of the email (included in every email sent on the free plan), linking to the Mailchimp website.

And so the cycle continues. No need for advertising. Mailchimp was promoting itself.

And to incentivize this behavior even more. Mailchimp added referral bonuses which could be used as credit towards paid plans - giving free users a reason to brag about the platform.

Ben said that they viewed innovation as marketing. Building became their growth.

And because PLG wasn’t really a thing back then. They didn’t think about it like this. They just wanted to give their users the best experience and they knew they would then share it.

In their first year of being Freemium, profits went up 650% and their user base rocketed from 10k to 85k. They had poured the fuel on the fire of a great product.

What I love about this is that it aligns the incentives of Mailchimp and their customers. Mailchimp only makes money when its users have over 500 emails on their list (the boundary of their free plan). Meaning it’s in Mailchimp’s best interest to help you grow.

If you grow, so does Mailchimp.

What this led to, was Mailchimp providing tonnes of content to help you grow. They introduced guides, educational video content, how-to’s, emails dedicated to it, and much much more.

Mailchimp became a leader in email marketing education. They knew it was the best way to increase their revenue, but also to help retain their customers for longer - reducing churn.

But all of this relied on one thing. Having a great product.

If you want to use a PLG strategy, make sure your product is worth sharing.

🧪 2. Stayed tinkering with many small bets.

We, as mere mortals, have this obsession with overnight success and hope that luck smacks us right in the face.

But the reality is that these things are like unicorns. And not the overvalued startup type, those are everywhere.

I mean actual unicorns. They don't exist (or at least I’ve never seen one).

Now I do want to clarify before I get into this, that luck of course still plays its part. But what separates those who benefit from luck from those who don’t is the backlog of work and preparation that gets forgotten when you become an “overnight success”.

To bring this to Mailchimp.

Mailchimp went from relative obscurity to a household name in a matter of seconds. Literally. The catalyst to the giant we know today largely came from a three-second clip of a 14-year-old mispronouncing Mailchimp in a sponsorship.

But how did we get here?

One of Mailchimp’s core beliefs was to constantly make small tests (or bets). A new social media popped up? Well, they were on it and posting. So when the next Facebook (or in their case the first Facebook) hit the big times, they were riding the wave.

They constantly did this. And were early adopters of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And here’s the first thing that many would put on luck - they were on the right social platforms at the right time. Not because of luck. But a result of constantly placing small bets on all new potential growth channels - many of which failed.

But the biggest homerun in their journey came at the dawn of podcasting. With the player that made the whole industry: Serial.

Now I could make some joke about those of you living under a rock who hadn’t listened to it. But that was me until a 16-hour road trip a few weeks ago…

Now for those of you lost like me, Serial is probably the most popular podcast of all time. With over 300M downloads of Season 1. Which if you haven’t listened to, go for a walk and put it on. It is GRIPPING.

And guess who was the opening sponsor for every episode? Mailchimp.

Again, you may say it was luck or that they had a big budget already. But you’d be mistaken. They definitely didn’t have a big budget back then and this wasn’t their first rodeo, Mailchimp was already testing sponsoring podcasts. In particular, with This American Life, the developer of Serial.

And they had left such a positive and unique impression on This American Life that when they were looking for sponsors for their new show, Serial, Mailchimp was the first name they reached out to.

Another example of luck meeting preparation.

The ad went on to become one of the most iconic of all time - when in a street interview asking people about the company, a 14-year-old girl mispronounced it as “Mailkimp” (now the typo above makes sense I hope).

Mailchimp thought it would be funny to use the ad and ran with it. Buying the domain and redirecting to their landing page. And what a decision it was.

National media shows picked up the ad. It went viral on different social media. And it made it memorable for listeners to search.

Soon Mailchimp went from something only nerds (like you and me) knew, to a mainstream name.

This culture of tinkering didn’t stop at marketing. It was in their product as well.

Once Mailchimp started to look to expand from solely helping people send better emails to running better businesses and selling more, they thought about what products they could add to the mix and tested them in small doses.

One of their first ideas was landing pages. Something they didn’t really think would move the needle - but it fit with their repositioning.

Boy were they wrong about it moving the needle. With Ben later saying that it was one of their biggest inflection points in growth.

Again, it wasn’t luck. They had built a great foundational product and tinkered with multiple different features to add. So when they saw a potential home run, they could lift their arms up and hit it into the crowd.

To tie this all together. Don’t try to be an overnight success. They don’t exist. Don’t confuse a horse with some glitter and a horn glued onto it with a unicorn. They might look the same - but no matter how you dress it up, a horse is a horse. And that’s what makes it great. Because it’s strong, fast, and agile.

Prepare for the moment luck comes flying at you - because if you’re not ready to catch it, it’ll fly right past you.

How they became the Mailchimp we know today: Sticking to what they know.

🚨 1. Get users to start using the product as soon as possible.

The best way for Mailchimp to predict a customer’s success with the product is how quickly they use it.

I mean think about it. How many Freemium SaaS products have you signed up for that you never end up using? You keep promising yourself you’ll get to it on the weekend. Then the next weekend. Then the next weekend. And before you know it, you never think about that product again.

It’s even true for some paid products - you quickly jump into a monthly subscription (because it’s only $11.99 right), but you don’t onboard straight away and next thing you know, you’re billed again for it. And you never used it once. So you go and cancel it.

Mailchimp wants to avoid this abyss. So they try to get you to use the product as soon as possible - guiding you with everything you need to design and send an email, grow an email list, and what to write about.

They don’t overwhelm you with making money and scaling to thousands of email subscribers (yet). This would do the opposite of getting users to start as quickly as possible. Because while it can be encouraging to see how you can make money, it often feels too far away.

Let’s take their signup flow to illustrate this. They already try to learn as much as possible about you.

What are your goals with Mailchimp?

 What are the most important features to you?

How many subscribers do you have? And even making a brand integration from your URL - so that you can keep your brand consistent as easily as possible.

Then once you go through this signup process. Boom. 3 recommended steps based on what you chose.

Basically creating a super clear to do list for you to get started on Mailchimp. Layer this on their user-friendly product and you have a recipe for quick adoption.

And quick adoption means a sticker user. And a user who’s more likely to grow - and thus upgrade to a paid plan.

Another example is with one of their previous email marketing campaigns:

1. Guide on how to get started with Mailchimp.

2. Blog on how to grow your email list.

3. Blog on setting up your first campaign.

The three necessities for success on Mailchimp. Delivered straight to you. Right after signup.

Notice what these three things had in common?

All are super useful pieces of content marketing.

And this is another tactic Mailchimp uses to get quick adoption of their products: They have an almost endless supply of useful content to make you feel more comfortable and confident in using Mailchimp. From YouTube, to blogs, to how-to-guides, to email campaigns, Mailchimp do it in whatever way you prefer to learn.

They even have a bunch of non-English videos on YouTube, catering to their global audience.

Content is a great way to build trust with your audience. But it also helps to increase conversion and retention. Making more successful users (and faster).

🐒 2. Staying true to the Mailchimp way.

I’m sure this was one of the more difficult things Mailchimp had to do while scaling the way they did. But it was also one of the most intentional.

From its early days, Mailchimp had a very unique brand. Fun, quirky, vibrant, colorful, and not-too-serious. So basically everything email usually is…

They were open about not being for everyone. They didn’t want to make complex, custom enterprise products. They wanted to help the small guys and girls win. Your mom-and-pop shops. Brick and mortar and online.

And this is why people loved Mailchimp.

Mailchimp was like them. A few friends with a dream to create something special. With no funding, bootstrapping their way to glory. They were fun and quirky - as are most entrepreneurs. And could talk like SMBs (Small-Medium businesses), nailing their consistent voice and tone, using fun images and GIFs in their emails.

Their Founders were bought into it all the way. Take a look at Ben’s old Twitter bio - he was even making fun and playing along with the whole “Mailkimp” Serial ad from above. And it didn’t feel forced, because the brand grew out of the fun experience of building Mailchimp and the experience they were delivering already - fun, creative, and independent work.

Mailchimp wanted to stay for the people.

The symbol for this?

Their beloved Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV.

Even to the point of creating an online visual diary for users taking pics with Freddie (sorry, Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV) merch.

The fact that they got people to wear merch with their mascot and logo, when it’s a chimp, just shows the deep connection they have with their customers.

The foundation to all of this though is two-fold:

1. Having a specific target persona. Mailchimp knew they were not for everybody. They were for small business owners who were a bit quirky and willing to take a bet on a fun brand that was easy to use and affordable. Particularly, founders who wanted to get their marketing going without any engineering resources (important to remember how technical email used to be).

2. They kept their word with this persona. Mailchimp had plenty of chances to go upstream into enterprise, but they chose not to - in fact, they even lost Uber as a client because of this. They were committed to building a product that made sense for their core user, and focusing their support on them as well.

They were relatable to their persona. The Mailchimp founders were their persona before the company shattered what they thought was possible. They were a small business for years. So they could talk and act like their customers. Their customers felt this and could relate to them.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

Let’s get into it!

Calendly: 0 to $3B taking the headaches out of scheduling meetings

Have you ever had 1,000s of users begging to pay you, but couldn’t afford to accept their money?

I’m guessing no (although email me about it if you have!)

Well this is the situation Calendly before they became the $3B giant we know today.

After running out of money for development, Calendly had over 1,000 users but couldn’t pay for payment integrations to be built. And so became Freemium by default.

But hey, rather this than no users - although I can’t imagine Calendly not having any users, it serves such an important purpose in society.

Making scheduling meetings less of a headache.

In just over 10 years, Tope Awotona grew Calendly into a Product-Led Growth Giant. Scaling to over $270M in revenue and a $3B valuation - staying profitable most of the way as well!

This is the story of how Calendly went from Zero to One. 🚀

Calendly’s Growth

Before founding Calendly, Tope was a bit of a serial entrepreneur, with a few failed businesses on his resume - alongside being a really good sales guy.

His role right before founding Calendly was as a national account manager serving Fortune 500 clients and businesses with over $1B in revenue. So we’re talking big-time sales here.

One thing that kept popping up as a challenge was scheduling meetings.

These big companies bring their platoons of security, IT, compliance, accounting, execs. You name it. They bring it. Which made finding the perfect time for a meeting a nightmare.

So one day Tope was trying to set up a meeting for >20 people from 3 different companies (not including himself), and it was just a pain.

John had a Board meeting Wednesday so couldn’t do anything before, Katie had a deadline Friday so was also out then, Ted had his kids baseball game on Tuesday, Robyn had a karaoke day on Wednesday three weeks from now…

And like that, it clicked.

There must be a solution to make this easier.

So Tope went online to find one.

But the problem was there wasn’t a solution.

There were good products, but none that really ticked all the boxes for customer-facing roles - most were designed for the owners of the meetings, not the recipients of the invites.

And so for the next 6 months, Tope signed up for every product on the market solving a similar issue. We’re talking ~30 products.

And he used them religiously.

What he learned was that their customers actually liked their products. But wanted more.

And so Tope decided to go all in. I mean literally all-in.

He withdrew his 401k - paid the penalties as well. He took high-interest loans. Maxed out his credit cards. And found a dev team out in Ukraine to build the MVP for $200k.

Railsware’s case study on Calendly

2013 came along, the product was ready, and Tope launched it. Calendly was now alive. But completely breathless, without revenue.

The initial plan was for Calendly to be a paid product with a 14-day free trial.

But Tope ran out of money before he could pay for the payment integrations to be built - and it was too late. Calendly had already begun to spread as a free product.

In spring 2014, Tope raised $350k (about 9 months of runway), which allowed him to afford payment integrations. And so in August 2014, Calendly introduced their paid plans.

By September 2014, 15k people had signed up. And by the end of the year, they were making roughly $100k ARR.

And by the end of 2015, they hit profitability and were at ~$1M ARR. Tope and the team then 10xed this over the next two years - reaching $10M in ARR with the introduction of a new pricing tier.

To say Calendly exploded over the next three years would be an understatement.

At the end of 2020, they were at $60M ARR with over 5M active users.

Then after a draught of no outside investment. Calendly raised $350M at a $3B valuation.

As of today, Calendly makes over $270M in ARR with over 10M active users. Making them one of the biggest businesses in the world. So let’s take a deeper look into what drove this success early on.

Key Success Factors (KSFs)

If you’re short on time, here are some actionable takeaways from Calendly, with all the juicy deets below. Enjoy!

🧩 1. Found Founder-Market Fit: Tope knew he wanted to run his own business. So he tried to make it happen - a few times actually. But they all failed. He tried to solve for money by founding a business. Until Calendly that is. When he built a business to solve a problem that he understood.

💌 2. Built an experience everyone loves: Calendly understands that their product isn’t just used by the meeting holder. But by recipients as well. So they focused on building an awesome experience for everyone who would use the product, to create Product-Led Growth.

🧑‍💼 3. Understand who their ideal customer is: Calendly was very specific about who their ideal customer was (someone in a customer-facing role) and built for them. This meant they could prioritize the right features and craft the perfect unique experiences.

🧩 1. Found Founder-Market Fit

As I mentioned earlier, Tope was a bit of a serial entrepreneur before Calendly.

Starting at 17, he registered a provisional patent for a new type of cash register (a typical teenage side hustle).

He got the idea from working at a CVS, so he understood the problem, but didn’t take the business any further because he didn’t feel that he was the right person to solve this problem (awesome self-awareness for a 17-year old).

Then after working for a few years, he got into ecom - selling projectors.

But $20k and 6 months later he shut it down. Why? Margins were too thin and people who want to buy projectors also want to be educated on them.

Tope knew nothing about projectors. Nor did he want to learn about them.

With his next business he tackled the margins of the projectors, now selling gardening equipment.

But the same problem stuck. People wanted to be educated on the best products to buy. And Tope couldn’t care less about which lawnmower cut finer grass. And so the business only lasted a few months before also shutting down.

You see Founder-Market Fit can also be asked as: “Are you the right person to solve this problem?”

There are 3 main questions to ask to figure this out. Let’s go through them, using Tope and his journey with Calendly to highlight the difference.

1. Are you obsessed with solving this problem? 🤓

This is arguably the most important question to ask yourself.

If we look at Tope’s previous businesses, there’s a consistent theme to why they failed. Tope didn’t care about the problem he was solving.

Building a business is hard. It’s even harder when you don’t like working on the problem you’re solving and with the people you’re solving it for.

If your business takes off, this could be a 5-year, 10-year, or even longer journey. So if you can’t stand the thought of working with lawyers, don’t build a legal-tech business.

Let’s take Calendly for example. Tope was passionate about solving the problem of taking the work out of scheduling meetings. He knew the pain and wanted to solve it.

2. Do you have the expertise to solve this problem? 📚

Straight away you can see that Tope had the expertise to solve his problem. He had been in sales for years and had been trying to schedule meetings for years.

Importantly, he also understood both the perspective of the salesperson and the recipient of a sales call - something which the other tools at the time lacked.

There are a few ways you can build the expertise to solve a problem:

• You’ve worked on a similar problem before.

• You’ve worked in the industry or a similar industry before.

• You have the technical or soft skills needed.

• You’re the ideal customer for this problem.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to have the expertise to solve a problem. But the more you can tick the better (take Tope, he ticks all the bottom three points above).

3. Do you have a story that resonates with your customers? 📖

The simplest way to answer this is: Are you relatable to your customers?

Especially early on in a business, your story is important to winning customers. They need to believe the two points above - that you care about them and their problem and have the expertise to solve it.

Imagine you’re a salesperson who came across Calendly back in 2014.

You’re undecided. You’ve tried 10 different tools already and none quite met your needs. Why should you try another?

Then you read Tope’s story. He’s just like you. A salesperson. He was facing the same pains as you. He needed a solution just like you do. And so he built Calendly.

Now do you have more belief that the product will meet your needs better than all the others you’ve tried?

That’s the power of a story. (Assuming you said yes 😂)

💌 2. Built an experience everyone loves

One of Calendly’s most important unique value propositions when it launched was its user experience. But importantly not just for the owner of the meeting - but also for the people booking meetings.

Of all the tools that existed at the time when Calendly launched, none created an enjoyable experience for everyone. So they changed that.

When you’re doing sales and a prospect clicks a link to book a meeting with you, you don’t want them to drop off because they get confused or put off by the bookings page.

You’ve done the hard work to get them here - Calendly’s positioning for salespeople was that they get prospects over this last hurdle and onto a call with you without any hiccups.

Now this is just a sales example. The same applies to any customer-facing role (Calendly’s ICP).

Once people have shown intent to book a meeting, you don’t want to lose them because of an unfriendly scheduling product.

But this tactic didn’t only improve booking rates. It was also Calendly’s biggest driver for user growth.

Calendly was one of the pioneers of Product-Led Growth. But how did this work practically for them?

Well, let’s go back to the beginning of Calendly to see:

Calendly had yet to launch publicly when their development team in Ukraine shared the product with another one of their clients - a B2B SaaS in San Francisco, specifically serving school teachers.

Once the school teachers saw the product and booked meetings on it, they loved it. And started using it to book parent-teacher conferences. It worked like a charm.

They loved it. The parents loved it. And it decreased admin time and increased show-up rates.

Word spread quickly and soon hundreds of teachers and schools were using Calendly - without Calendly lifting a finger. In fact the product wasn’t quite ready to launch, but it was too late. Word had spread and it wasn’t going to stop.

Soon Calendly spread beyond teachers. Parents who were salespeople or customer success managers saw how easy it was for them to book a meeting and wanted to use it for themselves.

Because Calendly had focused on giving everyone who came into contact with the product a great user experience, it spread organically - people loved receiving Calendly’s, so they wanted to send them too.

🧑‍💼 3. Understand who their ideal customer is

When Tope started building Calendly it was for people like him. Customer-facing roles - think sales, customer success, recruiting.

But soon there was tension.

Calendly could go so much wider than this.

I mean I’m struggling to think about a role that couldn’t get value from Calendly. Everyone hates scheduling meetings.

But only some consistently value it enough to pay for it. And those are people working in customer-facing roles.

Speaking to people is the meat and potatoes of their jobs. So making the meeting process smoother and more effective has a huge impact on their work.

Salespeople can sell more. Customer success managers can retain customers longer. Recruiters can vet and hire more people. Freelancers and consultants can close more projects.

Tope and Calendly understand this.

And so Calendly's messaging and product development was tailored towards this.

Even look at Calendly today. They are telling us who their ICPs are.

And they are showing the benefits to each ICP clearly.

Being clear on their ICP also helped them with their product roadmap. For example, one of their first integrations was with Salesforce. And when we look today, they even have LinkedIn integrations to help salespeople book meetings on the platform.

One example of a feature that didn’t get built but was requested by users who didn’t fit their ICP was a Venmo integration - to accept payments for retail vendors. But this doesn’t fit with who they are building for. So they didn’t build it.

Calendly’s decision on who to focus on was also awesome in that they chose not only the people who needed their product the most - but also the people who could make it the most viral.

Salespeople (often) try to prospect as many decision-makers as possible. Recruiters try to reach out to as many candidates as possible. Their ICPs are users who reach out to many people - creating a win-win for Calendly. If their customers can get in front of more people - so do they (very similar to a strategy used by Flodesk).

Calendly is a great lesson to be clear on who your ideal customer is and to prioritize them.

Tactics to replicate Calendly’s growth

Create persona-specific landing pages and content 📄

We talked above about how Calendly was super clear on their target personas. But what were some tactical ways they got these personas into their product adoption cycle?

Calendly knew that at a high level, someone in a customer-facing role was their ICP. But that could be broken down more specifically (as we talked about above).

So they wanted to make sure they were speaking clearly and in the most effective way to each of these personas. And so they created persona-specific landing pages and blogs.

Each of these landing pages uses language specific to that persona and shows Calendly’s impact for users like them:

Showing relevant features of the product and potential workflows for each ICP, as well as giving them valuable content to help them become better in their jobs.

This hyper-targeted messaging, social proof, and valuable content builds trust and increases adoption of Calendly as well as advocacy.

If you have more than one ICP, you need to differentiate for them.

Create content and landing pages for each.

Then direct traffic, through paid ads, internal linking, and social media directly to the relevant landing page. This will boost your conversion rate significantly.

Understand your competition 🥊

Calendly wasn’t an overnight success.

In fact, Calendly took 6 months to even go from idea to Tope actually building a product.

Tope wanted to be sure he was solving a problem with a product and not building a product to hopefully solve a problem.

He started with the problem first and wanted to fall in love with it.

In all my deep dives this has been a golden thread - Find a problem to fall in love with and solve it in the best way possible.

But I’m getting distracted and you’re probably wondering what this has to do with competition. Sorry, I get excited and easily distracted speaking about product building.

Well you see, Tope’s research was super thorough. Deeper than any company I’ve covered in this newsletter yet.

He bought ~30 similar products to see how they were solving the problem:

• Were they solving the whole problem? (i.e., did he even need to build something else)

• What parts did they not solve?

• What did they do really well?

• What did their customers love?

• What did their customers hate?

• How did they approach customer support?

• How was their onboarding experience?

Tope asked these and a bunch more questions to himself for each product. He became obsessed with the problem.

He spent hours engaging with users in community forums, submitting support tickets, acting as a buyer of the software, and battle-testing each of the products.

These were some of his key learnings:

1. Customers loved the products, but wanted more.

2. Most products only focused on traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.

3. The products only thought about the meeting owners.

4. At a minimum, this was a decent business without changing anything. But there was exponential potential growth to be had if he could lower the barrier to entry and make it appealing to the people booking meetings as well.

After these 6 months, Tope was clear on what the gap was in the market, how to position Calendly to stand out, how to improve the user experience, and how to speak to customers.

Now I’m not saying you need to spend  6 months without building. But the lesson here is to really fall in love with solving a problem. The solution should come from that.

So build early and build fast.

But remember you’re solving a problem and your product needs to be the best solution for that. So speak to customers. Try competitor products. Find who has a deep pain that needs solving and what that solution could look like.

Don’t build blind.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

Flodesk: Five years bootstrapping to $25M

Email marketing is hard. It’s even harder for small business owners who don't have an army of marketers to design, write, and craft killer emails.

And the tools at the time didn’t cater for the increase in innovative entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. They were often complicated to use and difficult to get started with.

So Martha Bitar, Rebecca Shostak, and Trong Dong set out to change that. They wanted to build an email marketing tool that makes it ridiculously easy to design emails people love to get.

And Flodesk was born.

5 years after launch and Flodesk has bootstrapped its way to $25M in ARR.

But this isn’t about where they are today. It’s about how they got here.

This is the story of how Flodesk went from Zero to One. 🚀

Business model: How Flodesk makes money

Flodesk’s business model is beautifully simple.

They have three plans:

• Link in bio: Free

• Flodesk Email: $35/m annually (or $38/m monthly)

• Everything (Flodesk Email + Flodesk Checkout): $59/m annually (or $64/m monthly)

Unlike other email service providers or e-commerce platforms - each of their tiers is only the one monthly fee. No incremental cost per subscribers or additional transaction costs.

Additionally, every user gets a 30-day free trial On their Everything Plan.

Even more awesome, their pricing of their email solution has only increased once in the company’s history - when they launched publicly.

They also never run any sales - but every single one of their users has a referral link that will give you 50% off your first year (and give them some money).

Flodesk’s Growth

Flodesk launched in August 2019. After a few months of testing with ~30 users.

The plan was to bootstrap the business - so no investor money. They were going to fund this thing.

To do this, the idea was for Rebecca and Trong to work on Flodesk full time and Martha to continue in her job for a few months. They set December 2019 as the date to decide if they should go all-in, with the goal of having 500 paying customers.

When December came they had 5,000.

Safe to say they met their goal.

So Martha left her job at HoneyBook, and the two of them went all-in on Flodesk.

What’s crazy about this, is that if you do some quick math. You’ll see that they were doing ~$190k/m within five months of launching (5,000 x $38) - now it was probably a bit less considering referral codes and annual plans. But it was still substantial.

Before they even closed in on the one-year mark, Flodesk was doing $5M ARR. Which is super impressive! Even reaching profitability along the way in March 2020.

By July 2023, Flodesk was doing $20M in ARR. And had achieved a YoY growth of 391%. This is just insane.

As of today, Flodesk is doing over $25M in ARR. Profitable and bootstrapped. An awesome combo. Keeping a large chunk of equity and having cash flow.

Key Success Factors (KSFs)

There have been plenty of reasons for Flodesks quick rise to success. They have managed to fill a huge need for an underserved audience. And because of this have created a customer base of true fans.

Here are three drivers of Flodesk’s journey that particularly stood out to me:

🗻 1. Go above and beyond for their customers: Flodesk has built a culture of serving their customers above all else. Always overdelivering on value. This is shown in all areas of their business, from their affordable pricing, to their customer support and everything in between.

🥅 2. Aligned their goals with customers’ goals: Flodesk have done an awesome job in aligning their goals with their customers’ goals. Meaning when their customers win, so do Flodesk. This has been the driving force behind Flodesk’s biggest growth channel, customer-led growth.

📚 3. Picked a customer they understood: Flodesk were extremely intentional about their customer. Choosing small business owners as their ideal customer profile (ICP) early on. They did this because they understood small business owners from their past experiences and because of this could effectively communicate with them and solve their pain points intuitively.

🗻 1. Go above and beyond for their customers

Flodesk is a truly customer-first business. Building a culture of service from day one.

Even going back to their MVP, this belief of over-delivering value to their customers was clear. They wanted more than anything for their customers to succeed.

When they released their MVP, it was really barebones.

It was a system to send out emails. That was it.

There were no editable design templates or suggested email sequences.

It was simply a system that allowed you to send out emails.

So to still provide additional value to their first 30 beta testers on the MVP. Rebecca herself created custom emails for all 30 of them. Just think about that, she would individually design emails for every customer in photoshop and then walk them through how to send it through their MVP. This must’ve taken up so much time - but yet she did it for her customers to succeed.

Another example of them making sure their customers were successful happened right at the start of the pandemic.

They noticed that the usage of their platform was down for a few days.

So they immediately reached out to customers to see what exactly was wrong and how they could help. They didn’t wait weeks or months, just a few days and they were speaking directly with their customers.

Through this process they identified that people felt stuck on how to respond to the pandemic and how to tell their customers of their response.

So Flodesk immediately partnered with some of their customers who were already creating templates and email flows and created a COVID templates collection, which became their most used templates since launching and turned what was heading to one of their lowest usage months, to their biggest spike thus far.

Example of one of their COVID response templates.

Martha and Rebecca’s dedication to their customers is also seen through their constant communication with them. They consistently speak to their customers to try and improve the product, valuing customer voice over feature brainstorming.

They are also super engaged on their Facebook support group, helping answer any questions they can (if the other customers don’t beat them to it).

Even look at their pricing, Flodesk have a super simple and business friendly pricing strategy. One flat and affordable monthly fee, no matter the size of your business.

They could’ve easily gone down the route of their competitors, adjusting pricing based on subscribers and emails sent. But they didn’t.

The biggest way they have gone above and beyond for their customers though was probably through Flodesk University.

Flodesk partnered with customers who were already creating content around Flodesk to build a community and central resource to share knowledge and insights, so their customers can take their email campaigns, and ultimately businesses, to the next level.

The courses range anywhere from getting started with using Flodesk to design or even making money.

Now creating a central resource like this isn’t something unique to Flodesk.

But they used it to showcase other SMB owners’ expertise. And in typical Flodesk fashion, sent all their partners the best recording equipment (for them to keep).

Yes, Flodesk benefits from going above and beyond for their customers. But this is another thing Flodesk is great at - Aligning incentives…

🥅 2. Aligned their goals with customers’ goals

Flodesk are big believers in Customer-Leg Growth (CLG).

Meaning their customers can be the biggest accelerant to their growth. Driving awareness, conversion, adoption, and retention.

Consumers today often don’t want to talk to salespeople. They want to take the word of others online and try a product for themselves.

So Flodesk looked where these conversations were happening so they could optimize growth from them.

But how do you control conversations between two other people?

You give one of them an experience so good that they can’t help but share their experience with your product.

To do this, they aligned their goals with their ideal customers’ goals. The more successful their customers, the more successful they would be.

So Flodesk made sure they blew their customers away with easy-to-design, on-brand templates that resulted in success for their users.

Now it helped that they were an email service provider - emails are inherently personal and social.

But to make the sharing process even easier, Flodesk added a footer to say: “Made with love and Flodesk” - which ~83% of users leave on.

This means that Flodesk became incentivized to:

• Help you build your email list. Exposing them to more people.

• Create the best emails possible. Increases the chance of conversions which leads to:

• Make you money. The more money you make, the more likely you stay with Flodesk.

This creates this viral growth loop where every email you send brings more eyeballs to Flodesk, which leads to more emails being sent, which leads to more eyeballs, and it goes on and on.

But underpinning all this is customer success. So Flodesk is super incentivized for you to succeed.

This forced their whole team to be extremely dedicated to customer success.

In fact it even shaped the growth of their team, with no sales or marketing function - but rather a Customer Experience and Success team, which is a big percentage of their company.

To show the success of this strategy, over 75% of their referrals come from individuals, not influencers, meaning they have created salespeople in all their users.

📚 3. Picked a customer they understood

When coming up with the idea for Flodesk, the Founders were already super clear on who they wanted to serve - Small business owners (SMBs) and micro-entrepreneurs (often creatives).

But why this customer profile?

Well for starters, the founders believed that this customer profile was underserved - whenever they spoke to someone in this target market they would see the excitement beaming off their faces.

But also because they understood this type of customer.

In Rebecca’s past life, she was a designer for literal superstars (like Rihanna and Lincoln Park), turned small business owner - one of which was a business selling email design templates that she would create in Photoshop.

And Martha had worked at HoneyBook, where a group of her customers were SMBs who relied on email marketing, and often asked for her advice.

This allowed them to deeply and intuitively understand this type of customer. And from day one you could see how this moved the needle in their growth.

Their first landing page converted at well above industry average. Because they could answer the questions they knew their customers would have, before they had them.

They knew what to say and how to say it.

This stayed with them throughout their growth.

Beyond knowing how to communicate with their customers and capture their attention. They also knew how to find these customers and what to build for them.

Plus, Martha, Rebecca, and Trong never stopped trying to understand more about their customers - constantly remaining relatable and knowledgeable, but more on this a little below in how you can replicate Flodesk’s growth.

Actions you can take to replicate Flodesk’s success

Charge Early 💸

One of the most important things Flodesk did was to start charging their customers early on.

And not because it gave them cash flow soon. Which it also did.

But because they validated that their idea was one people were willing to pay for.

When Flodesk started they got 30 users in a free beta test. They wanted feedback more than anything else. And this was working great.

They were improving their product!

But they came across some advice that you should charge early. It’s much different convincing someone to use a free product than selling them on using a paid one.

This is a nerve-racking process. You’re scared that you lose testers and you could be confronted with the reality that people aren’t happy enough to pay for your product.

But it’s a critical step to proving you have a cash-flowing business.

So they told their 30 beta-users that they were changing to a monthly subscription to build the business…

Not one of them wanted to stop. Everyone was up for paying.

By doing this, they had essentially proven some kind of PMF (Product-Market fit).

They had something people were willing to pay for.

This also made them realize that they were just about ready to launch out of their test and to the public - giving them the confidence they needed that they had an awesome product.

I’ve had a similar thought process with this newsletter. Although not selling anything, I’ve taken on advertisements as soon as possible - and not to make money (it’s not significant yet anyway). But to prove that this can be a viable business and people don’t stop reading when I do introduce ads or other revenue channels.

Another benefit of charging early is that paying becomes the norm.

If you are free for too long, users might never want to pay - the same for this newsletter, if I don’t advertise for two years and then suddenly I introduce brand placements, I could understand that my readers wouldn’t be too happy.

So although it might be intimidating. Charge early. It’ll help you realize if you have an idea people are willing to pay for. And if they’re not, you can figure out how to pivot sooner.  

Put customers in touch with each other 🔮

Flodesk had the awesome initiative to create a community Facebook group (very similar to Lemlist’s), Flodesk Insiders. Which now has ~18k members and is super active with around 10 posts per day.

In its own words, it’s “a space for Flodesk members to connect, share ideas and support one another in the pursuit of success.”

And this is exactly how it’s used.

Through this group, Flodesk has managed to create a supportive community around their product. One that has significantly benefited their business.

You see, Flodesk deeply understood their target customer - micropreneurs and small business owners - and they leveraged one of the most defining characteristics of these groups. That they want other small businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed.

You can see this everywhere: Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, in-person events. Small business owners want to win together with other small business owners. There has been this culture of helping each other that is inherent within this group.

And Flodesk used this perfectly.

Creating what is practically a customer success team of their users.

Their customers ask for help and get instant replies from other Flodesk users. And this isn’t just technical product help. It’s also strategy and business advice.

This is awesome for Flodesk, because the more successful their customers’ businesses are, the more likely they are to continue using Flodesk.

This strategy has been so successful that 2.5 years after their launch, Flodesk had managed to achieve a 97% retention rate. Which is incredible! Especially if you consider that they had no upsells at the time - meaning they couldn't increase their net retention through upselling existing customers.

Flodesk has built a truly sticky product. And facilitating productive conversations between their customers has been a huge part of this.

Figure out where your audience likes to hang out.

Meet them there to facilitate and encourage them to help each other.

Not only will this reduce your churn. But potential new customers who see this supportive group will be more likely to buy your product.

Become your customer 👟

One of, if not the most critical parts to building a successful startup is deeply understanding your customer, their pain points, and their needs.

And one of the best ways to achieve this is to find Founder-Market Fit (FMF). What I mean by this is the alignment between a founder's skills, experience, expertise, and passion, and the needs and traits of the target market.

Flodesk is a great example of achieving FMF. Rebecca had experience as both a designer and a small business owner - specifically selling email templates to other small businesses. So she intuitively understood other small business owners and their pain points.

Martha had been in business development, and was responsible for a group of educators who used email marketing as their key sales channel and would constantly ask for advice on how to use it effectively - to which Martha would try and help them (or send them to Rebecca).

So by having the experience to truly understand their customers - Rebecca and Martha intuitively knew what to build, what to say in their copywriting, and how to say it. As well as where to find their ideal customers.

They had picked a customer they understood. But they didn’t stop here.

They treated understanding their customer as a muscle they could work out.

Building habits to understand them even deeper,. To name a few:

• Talking to at least one customer every day.

• Asking new customers why they joined.

• Asking every customer who left, why they left.

• Engaging in the online communities customers were in.

They used all of this to constantly refine their messaging and product development.

Translating what their customers were saying into what they actually needed to solve their pains.

There are a few ways to really become your customer.

The best way is to be your target customer - take Stan founder John Hu for example, who was a content creator who built a business helping creators make a living. This gives you the best understanding of what it truly means to be your target customer.

But by no means is it necessary, there are two other ways to become your customer:

1. Work for a startup that serves your target customer (or any sized-company, but with a startup you will have the most hands-on experience). 👩‍💻

2. Do more research, and speak to more people in your target customer group than anyone else. 👩‍🔬

By building a business where you become your own customer, you will be able to resonate and relate more with your customers - increasing retention, reducing acquisition costs, and growing profitably.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

Deel: $12B enabling the future of global work

In just five years, Deel has enabled over 25k companies, including Nike and Shopify, to scale their global operations and hiring.

The HR and Payroll giant is democratizing access to global-top jobs, processing over $10B in payments in over 150 countries, while also improving business efficiency and scale.

Deel has been one of the fastest-growing startups in history, reaching $500M ARR and a $12B valuation in the blink of an eye. And its founders, Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, did it in Deel fashion, fully remote and not based in Silicon Valley.

Born from the vision of two truly global citizens, Deel was a pioneer in remote working. And are now building out their suite of HR products to enable the future of work.

This is the story of how Deel went from Zero to One. 🚀

Business model: How Deel makes money

Deel provides a whole suite of HR and payroll solutions.

From global hiring and payroll to compliance, employee relocation, and even mergers and acquisition onboarding. They do a lot. But their business can be split into three core units, or models:

1. International contractor management 📑

2. Employer of Record (EOR) hiring 👩‍💼

3. Global payroll 🌍

1. International contractor management 📑

Deel’s first product to find PMF. Their independent contractor payments solution.

Deel allows you to hire, onboard, manage, and pay international contractors from over 150 countries compliantly. Helping you reduce compliance risks, keep up to date with global regulatory changes, ensure timely and flexible payments, and save dozens of HR admin hours.

Pricing for this starts at $49/m.

2. Employer of Record (EOR) hiring 👩‍💼

After becoming the leading international contractor management tool, Deel expanded. Adding its EOR product.

Essentially what this means is Deel opens legal entities in different countries and hires employees on your behalf.

So, similar to their first product, the difference being in the status of the hire. Their first solution was for contractors, this EOR product gives the hire full-time employee status - which comes with different legal requirements and benefits.

Deel provides secure EOR services in 120+ countries. With an all-in-one management platform for payroll, tax, and compliance solutions on top of it.

Their EOR solution helps you stay compliant on contracts, minimum wage, terminations, and any other relevant local laws - mitigating your risks of hiring globally. While also automating your manual HR work with their employee management platform.

Pricing for this starts at $599/m.

3. Global payroll 🌍

Their newest solution comes in the form of simplifying and consolidating international payroll.

These are for multinational companies (or companies that want Deel’s help in expanding internationally) that want Deel to help with compliance, tax, and automation for the complexities of a global payroll.

Pricing for this is only available at a custom quote rate. And it makes sense, this is typically for large enterprises.

Deel also has two other products that fit into all three of these categories, Deel HR which is free and enables product expansion for new users, and Deel Immigration, which helps visa sponsorships in 30+ countries.

Although Deel has a free tier, you can’t even open an account on your own. You need to book a demo call. They are a sales-led growth company.

So they do this for a few reasons:

• Helps them qualify leads better.

• Gives potential customers a friendly face to associate with Deel.

• Easier to upsell customers on a call.

• Helps users understand Deel and its potential use cases better.

Deel’s Growth

Deel’s growth has been meteoric.

I usually start with a little write-up into a company’s growth. But I just want you to look at this growth chart. Over just FIVE years.

Deel has been one of the fastest-growing startups in history. In just five years, they went from launch to $500M in ARR. That is just insane.

And it’s not just vanity metrics.

Deel has been profitable since September 2022. With ~85% gross margins.

As of today, Deel supports over 25k businesses globally in 150+ countries, including Nike, Shopify, Revolut, and BCG - with 500k+ workers onboarded, and over $10B processed in global payroll.

Along with this, Deel has grown to over 3,000 remote team members in 107 countries.

To enable this hyper-growth, Deel raised a total of $679M from March 2019 to May 2022. Their first investment was going through YC, raising an additional $3.9M upon completing the cohort. And a year later raised $14M.

Then in the space of 13 months, they raised their Series B, C, and D for a total of $611M - valuing the company at $5.5B. Seven months later, they raised an additional $50M, taking their valuation to $12B.

Deel’s growth has been crazy. And importantly - they’ve become profitable.

Key Success Factors (KSFs)

There have been plenty of key success factors in Deel scaling to $500M ARR. There has to be for a company of Deel’s success. Here are three that really stood out to me.

👟 1. Speed of execution: When I was researching Deel, one of his early investors said that Alex has this incredible sense of urgency about him. If something can be done today, it will be. I got that same feeling listening to Alex and also Shuo. Both of them are all-in on what they have defined as a core value for their company “Deel Speed”.

🤼 2. Value on team: To scale at the speed Deel has, you have to lean heavily on your team. Alex and Shuo did just that. Empowering their team to take full ownership of their work through an intimate hiring process, an emphasis on fit, complete trust, and leading by example.

🗺️ 3. Readied themselves for a growing need: Alex and Shuo found a problem that people deeply needed solving, and they believed this need was only going to get bigger. Boy were they right! And although they could’ve never anticipated a global pandemic, they did notice a trend and put their sails up, to ready themselves for any winds that came. And when the pandemic hit, they set off to sail.

👟 1. Speed of execution

Alex and Shuo do everything YC teaches. And they do it better than everyone else. They have this sense of inevitability to them. And their speed of execution, or “Deel Speed” is the epitome of this.

They don’t just believe in Deel Speed for product. But in everything - Customer support. Operations. Marketing. Everything at the business is about speed.

But not just speed. They believe in doing things really well, and really fast.

To put it in their own words, “We move fast and build to last.”

Both Alex and Shuo pinpoint it as the most important part of their culture and a massive driver of their success.

And I agree.

Want the best product? Build something as quick as possible and test it. Iterate it if there’s promise or if it bombs, move on.

That’s fine. Part of being quick to build also requires you to be quick to move on - it builds trust with investors, your board, your team, and most importantly, your customers.

Talking about customers, Deel Speed is crucial in customer support and success. The faster you can help your customers solve problems with your product, the happier they will be, and the less likely they will be to churn.

Speed = Customer loyalty.

Speed is the DNA of Deel.

All of this is why employees love Deel, or in some cases, hate it. The Deel culture is not for everyone and they know that. They want people who want to move fast. And they know that isn’t for everyone. But if you are up for it, they make sure Deel will be the ride of a lifetime - so how do they do this…

🤼 2. Value on team

In just five years, Deel had grown to over 3,000 employees. And amongst wave after wave of tech layoffs, has yet to be a part of it. So it’s not just over-hiring too quickly. The business has needed to hire everyone.

Alex really values the hiring process. He understands how crucial it is. Not just for who you hire, but for who they hire, and who that hire hires.

He also understands that hiring is so much more than a person's CV and big-name companies they have worked for. He wants to make sure that everyone who joins is bought in on the Deel mission and culture - they are prepared to work fast and hard, and they genuinely care about solving their customers' problems.

Alex was so obsessed with the hiring process that he interviewed just over the first 400 people hired in the company.

He also believed that this deep understanding and appreciation of the hiring process would make him a better CEO for a company providing HR and hiring solutions.

The only reason he stopped was because his team let him know that he was becoming the bottleneck to hiring.

This is another example of how Alex and Shuo value their team.

Although Alex wanted to be part of every hiring decision, he trusted his team when they came to him and believed that the process was being negatively affected (speed and scale-wise) by him still being in it. Even against his own beliefs.

This culture of trust is intentional. They believe in complete trust until proven otherwise. Not the other way around. But then to support this, they have very tight KPIs for employees. Essentially it is all yours to lose. This is why their remote culture thrives. They don’t rely on appearances of hard work, but rather outcomes.

To keep this culture of trust embedded in the business, Alex and Shuo share, with their team and their users, their plans and goals for the company, how they want to help, and even their numbers, such as their revenue.

Deel has built a massive team of superstars through a clear mission alignment, care for customers, and mutual trust between their leadership, their team, and their customers.

🗺️ 3. Readied themselves for a growing need

Some might say (and have said) that Deel was lucky that Covid happened.

And on face value, it might seem like that. In fact, a lot of people who know of Deel probably think of it as a business born out of Covid. But that’s not the case.

Deel was founded in 2019. Before the pandemic.

Alex and Shuo not only identified that there was this need in the market, both from an employee and employer perspective, but also that it was growing. Big tech companies were already starting to adopt hybrid working models.

Seeing her friends at LinkedIn and Google only go into the office 2 or 3 days a week had Shuo believing that fully remote work was possible and that big companies were heading towards it. On top of this, when they were at the office, her friends said they barely knew anyone, and if they did speak to them, it was through Slack.

So why were people not hiring the best talent possible from around the world and allowing them to work remotely?

One major reason was that it was hard.

Before Deel, hiring an international contractor compliantly and making sure it was documented correctly was challenging. On top of that, payments were even more complicated because of foreign exchanges and delays.

Alex had seen the same problem, but from a different perspective.

Having lived in multiple countries, he saw firsthand how his friends from different countries had different opportunities and outcomes. Solely because of where they were born.

A lot of his friends couldn’t get high-paying jobs because of visa issues and local labor laws. So Alex wanted to eliminate border barriers to work opportunities.

So before COVID shut down the world, Alex and Shuo had both identified this as a massive problem to be solved.

But still, some would say it’s luck. And to some degree they are right. The pandemic obviously accelerated Deel’s business - from the perspective of companies adopting remote hiring sooner.

But is that pure luck?

I’ve discussed before the concept of generated vs blind luck. It’s actually very hard to think of something that is pure blind luck - find money on the floor? Well no, you could probably increase your odds of that happening by walking in different neighborhoods.

It’s a simple example, but it gets the point across. There are almost infinite ways to increase the chance of luck happening to you. In Deel’s case, that was identifying a need that was growing and building a solution for it.

I recently heard Scott Galloway on My First Million talk about this concept of having your sails ready and open. I think it’s a beautiful way to put it.

We can’t control what happens to us in life. But we can control how we respond, and having their sails ready to take advantage of an opportunity is exactly what Deel did.

So when thinking about your business, are you prepared for a massive gust of wind?

Because it can either set you sailing faster than ever or sink your ship.

Actions you can take to replicate Deel’s success

Eat your own dogfood 🐶

Before you start munching on one of Scooby’s tasty treats. I don’t mean that kind of dog food. I’m talking about using your own product.

It’s super helpful for a few reasons:

1. Understand your customers better: Using your own product helps you relate to your customers. Understanding their needs and the best way your product can solve them.

2. Find new product ideas: Realize your product doesn’t quite solve all your needs? Well, this is a perfect way to spot a new feature or integration. Your customers probably feel the same way as you.

3. Spot bugs and frustrations quickly: You want to start working on bugs as soon as possible. Using your product frequently, allows you to spot bugs and potential areas that are frustrating your users sooner.

4. Build trust with your customers: If you believe in your product enough to use it, your customers will feel like they can too.

Deel is a great example of a company that eats its own dog food.

They are a fully remote company so naturally their product is a perfect fit for them. And so they’ve used it since the beginning and through its expansion into different business models.

By doing this, Deel has been able to build a better product that truly and effectively solves their users’ needs.

Be involved in everything for as long as possible 🦸

One of the most impressive things to me about the founders of Deel is how involved they have been for so long.

As I mentioned before, Alex was involved in the hiring process for the first 400+ employees.

But this wasn’t it.

Both Alex and Shuo, along with much of their team, are heavily involved in customer support. In fact Alex has even asked people to DM him with feedback and questions about Deel.

I’ve also heard stories of him being super active in different group chats, including the YC alum group (which includes over 100 of his customers) - answering any comments, questions, or support in needs in 5 minutes or less.

Not only quick, he’s also detailed when he gives help.

Both him and Shuo have been involved in customer support tickets, helping wherever they can and deepening their understanding of their users.

They both understand that no amount of advertising or other growth hacks can help you as much as regularly talking with your customers.

Doing this builds superfans! No matter your size.

So see how you can stay involved in the core aspects of your business as long as possible - customer, product, people.

By doing this, you’ll stay closer to the problem you’re solving, your users, and your team.

Allowing you to not only build trust with your team and customers, but also to make better decisions.

Integrate with popular tools 🖇️

One of the hardest parts about creating a new product is getting people to adopt it into their daily routines.

Especially when you are moving upmarket into big enterprises.

People have their ways of doing things and they want to stick to them. Their employers also don’t want time to be lost adjusting to and learning a new software - unless it's necessary.

One way to make this adoption process easier is to integrate your product with commonly used tools that make sense for your product.

For Deel that meant accounting software, people management platforms, communication tools, and project management trackers to name a few examples.

Their core strategy is to be able to enter either through an individual solution that integrates into other products and then from here, slowly expand their solutions within a company.

Having integrated solutions is helpful not only to sell one product now, but also to open the door to more in the future.

Educate people on the problem you are solving 🧑‍🏫

Although they are a heavily sales-led growth company, Deel are excellent at creating organic content that educates potential users and passively makes them aware of the solutions Deel offers.

They have a massive selection of articles and resources, from broad topics like “How to hire international employees”, to more niche ones like their “Quickstart guide to hiring in South Africa”.

By doing this, Deel demonstrates their expertise in the industry, while addressing the needs, pain points, and frustrations of their target audience.

So think about how you can serve your potential customers before they even sign up for your product or service. Deel does this by educating their audience through blog posts on real problems their target audience faces.

Creating practical and valuable content will help you build up your SEO, drive organic traffic, and importantly, it will help you build massive trust and credibility.

Potential customers will see you as an expert in solving their problems.

Bonus quick tip: Create a WhatsApp group with your customers 🦜

Want a quick way to get feedback from your customers and build brand evangelists?

Create a WhatsApp group with 50 of your most engaged users and speak to them daily.

• Ask what features they want.

• Ask them about key product decisions.

• Ask them to send you messages when they find bugs.

• Bring them along on your journey. They should be a part of it.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

Grammarly: Reaching $13B as one of the first AI powerhouses

Written communication is ineffective. It leads to $1.2 trillion in economic loss in the USA alone.

In 2008, Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko fresh off of selling their previous business realized how much of a problem ineffective communication was. And so along with Dmytro Lider, they set out to build a solution that helps solve it.

And Grammarly was born.

What started as a spelling and grammar checker, is now a fully-fledged communication enhancement product - helping with tone, structure, research, clarity, and ultimately, effectiveness. Serving over 30M users every day.

This is the story of how Grammarly went from Zero to One. 🚀

Business model: How Grammarly makes money

Grammarly’s business model has evolved over the years.

Initially, Grammarly was a premium-only tool. Students and universities had to pay ~$90/y upfront to get any of the features.

They were also focused more on selling to the universities themselves rather than individual customers, as they still had relationships from their previous business - MyDropBox, a plagiarism checker they scaled to 800+ universities and ~2M students.

Grammarly was profitable pretty much from Day 1 of launching. Partly due to their extensive network, but mainly due to them engaging with this network before launch on how to build a solution fit for them (but more on this later).

Around 2012, so four years after its launch, Grammarly expanded its focus beyond students, academia, and professional writers.

And in 2015 Grammarly introduced their Freemium model, something that although common now, was not super popular back then.

Today, Grammarly has three non-enterprise plans today:

1. Free: Basic Grammarly features to create mistake-free writing.

2. Premium ($12/m): More advanced features to help make your writing clearer. 

3. Business ($15/m): Introduces team features to help communication at work.

Then Grammarly also has an enterprise offering for bigger teams and companies (150+ seats) wanting to use the tool with additional security and support features.

Grammarly is quite unique in that it started with enterprise sales at Universities. Used that entry to build a better product and improve their messaging so that they could enter the B2C (Consumer) market. And now that they’ve scaled this, they are re-focusing on enterprises. But now with hundreds to thousands of employees at each company already using Grammarly.

Grammarly’s Growth

Grammarly’s growth numbers have been kept quite private. Intentionally so.

Grammarly wanted to avoid being noticed as a serious competitor by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, so that they could remain the industry leader for more effective communication.

But we do know some things.

The idea for Grammarly stems from the co-founders’ previous plagiarism detection business, MyDropBox, when most of their customers asked them why people plagiarize. They didn’t have the answer. But enough people asked that they got curious and looked.

One of the biggest reasons they found was that it is incredibly difficult, and often intimidating, for people to effectively put their thoughts into writing.

They ended up selling MyDropBox, but this learning stayed with them.

And so a few years later, Grammarly was formed.

But critically different to MyDropBox. They were now addressing an issue from a fundamental direction - they were making it easier for people to write something of their own.

Oh, and they decided to bootstrap it. Which they did for 9 years!

They spent a few months, and ~$1M in development, constantly speaking to potential customers (both the universities and students) to understand what they wanted and needed.

Because of this, they launched to a waiting customer base and were profitable pretty much straight away. And have been since.

In 2010, they reached 150k students as users, and by 2011, this number had reached 300k students - with 250+ universities as customers.

Using these numbers with the ~$90/y subscription fee, Grammarly were probably making somewhere around $20M - $30M per year. Just two years after launch.

From 2008 to 2013, we know that Grammarly doubled in key metrics every year - i.e., doubled their users, revenue, and team members. And so by the end of 2013, was probably making between $60M - $120M per year.

Side note: I just want to say, this was one of the trickiest deep dives to do because there was very little legitimate information on Grammarly’s growth. So these revenues are estimates based on information I’ve put together from multiple sources and can’t say I’m 100% sure I’m accurate. But I’m very confident.

Around this time, Grammarly went all-in on their consumer business and then in 2015 switched to a freemium business model. Which took the company to a new level over the next decade.

By the start of 2018, they had 7M+ Daily Active Users (DAUs), and over 10M total downloads.

And by the end of the year, Grammarly had increased this to over 10M DAUs and 30M total users, with ~200 employees.

Again, info was hard to come by so some of these years are estimates.

As of today, this number has boomed!

Grammarly has over 30M Daily Active Users. This is incredible. 30M people use Grammarly daily - their total number of users is probably around 60M if I had to guess (but this could be wildly off).

What’s even more impressive is that they did this bootstrapped for the first 9 years. First raising in 2017 - $110M at over a $1B valuation.

Since then, they have raised two more rounds, a $90M round in 2019 and then a $200M round at the end of 2021. Which gave them a $13B valuation.

Putting it as the 10th most valuable US startup according to a CB Insights report.

Key Success Factors (KSFs)

There have been plenty of reasons for Grammarly’s rocketship growth. Too many to count. But here are three that stood out to me, particularly in their beginning stages and their switch to a consumer focus.

⛔ 1. Focused on a smaller entry point: Everybody writes. ~1.5B people write in English every day. Grammarly has a huge potential market, with a bunch of different segments - each with different needs. Grammarly started by focusing on one subset of customers: students and academia, in order to test, improve, and set the foundation for the future of Grammarly.

🪜 2. Phased-in their vision: Grammarly started with a vision to be much more than a grammar checker. But they knew in 2008 that this was not technically feasible, nor would it be easy to understand for people. So to tackle this problem they split their development into parts that could each stand on their own. The first being spelling and grammar.

🤝 3. Met users where they were at: After Grammarly had validated their product with students, they looked to grow their consumer base. The problem was that a more diverse target audience meant more places people were writing and more reasons for writing. Grammarly realized that to continue their wide growth, they needed to meet people where they were writing to remove any friction. So they introduced their browser plugins to transform any online textbox into somewhere Grammarly would work.

⛔ 1. Focused on a smaller entry point

When they launched, the founders of Grammarly had an idea in mind for what the company could eventually be, enabling more effective communication for everyone.

In particular for the shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy.

But their TAM (total addressable market) was just too wide and varied. Studies have shown that the negative effects of communication (miscommunications, misunderstood tone, etc.) lead to over $1.2T (yes Trillion) of economic loss per year. In the US alone. And the problem is just getting worse.

This figure shows how ineffective communication is a truly widespread issue. It affects everyone.

But Grammarly couldn’t tackle this enormous challenge from day one. They needed to find a wedge that they could use to leverage and grow from.

So they picked the market they believed was the easiest to get to - the one with the strongest and most obvious pain they could solve intuitively.

Students and academic researchers.

They have high-stakes and easy-to-understand consequences for correct and consistent spelling and grammar.

Students' marks depend on their spelling and grammar. And they understand this clearly.

Researchers need their grammar, spelling, and consistency to be almost flawless to be able to publish papers.

Papers they spend years writing.

The consequences are substantial for academics and their criteria for success with spelling and grammar were super well defined. Grammarly understood this given their experience with universities from the MyDropBox days.

It also helped that they had plenty of universities they could reach back out to and sell to - which they did.

Within 2 years Grammarly had 300k+ students and researchers registered as users at over 250 universities (who were ultimately their customers).

Alongside this growth, Grammarly started experimenting with the consumer market, and quickly attracted another key segment: Professional writers (journalists and authors).

But their diversity in users didn’t stop here. Consultants, salespeople, government officials, and more started using the product.

Grammarly knew they had successfully managed to expand from their first core users and went all in on the consumer market, who now use Grammarly for all sorts of professional and personal uses, even including dating profiles.

One reason this strategy was so successful was them understanding who Grammarly could serve effectively at the time, given its constraints in product.

An online text editor that you pasted your writing into and took 30 minutes.

Students and researchers, who took days, weeks, or even years to write something were fine to wait an extra 30 minutes. But a banker who needs to reply to an email instantly just wouldn’t have been able to wait that long.

Now this old copy-paste version of Grammarly is probably completely unfamiliar to you - what happened to the Chrome extension? Well, let’s talk about that.

🪜 2. Phased-in their vision

Grammarly’s use cases might sound so obvious now. But back in 2009, their idea was a bit out there.

The technology wasn’t really where it needed to be. And people didn’t understand how a computer could achieve the things Grammarly can do now - they couldn’t see beyond a spell checker.

So because of these two things, Grammarly broke the problem of improving communication down into pieces which they phased in:

1. Spelling and Grammar 

2. Clarity

3. Style and Tone

4. Effectiveness

They knew that the easiest thing for people to understand was spelling and grammar.

They also knew that the capabilities of technology were capped at the time. They were years off where they needed to be technology-wise for anything more than spelling and grammar.

But they wanted to be the first one to take on the technology, so instead of waiting until they could build the “perfect” product, they started with what they could, given the resources they had.

Spelling and Grammar were things that computers could predictably and accurately correct.

Grammarly was actually one of the very first startups to successfully use AI as a core enabler of their product. Very cool.

But importantly, in breaking their vision down into pieces, Grammarly made sure that each piece was solving its own tangible problem - i.e., it could stand as a business on its own.

Think about the early example of academia.

A spelling and grammar checker solved its own tangible problem. Students and researchers didn’t need it to do more to be useful.

Grammarly today is so much more than this simple spell checker. It’s moved far along its mission of improving effective communication, with even more to come with the boom of generative AI.

🤝 3. Met users where they were at

A key inflection point for Grammarly was the introduction of their Chrome extension.

After they switched their focus to the consumer market, Grammarly still had quite a high level of friction.

You had to copy your writing. Go to their website. Paste your writing. Make the adjustments. Copy it again. And then paste it back.

All pretty simple, but a lot of steps. Especially for quick communication, such as email.

To address this, Grammarly introduced a Microsoft Plugin. This made a big difference as millions of businesses use Microsoft - it’s the most common suite of work software in the world.

So now sending emails on Outlook and writing your next memo could become a lot more effective with Grammarly. They had started to meet their users where they were at.

But this was just scratching the surface.

Their introduction of web browser plugins, beginning with Chrome, turned Grammarly into an easy-to-use every day staple for millions of users.

Their browser plugins gave users a consistent experience. Every text box, the same.

Grammarly could be in places Words and Docs couldn’t - like your next job application (I won’t let your boss know don’t worry).

And it still worked in Word and Docs.

Users have loved this consistent experience.

But most of all, users have loved not having to change their habits or places of work.

In just a few clicks you can install Grammarly and you won’t even notice it’s there.

Until you need it. Perfectly and subtly integrated into all your writing.

It makes its users' lives better, without them having to change anything.

Actions you can take to replicate Grammarly’s success

Speak to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) before launch 📢

I’ve done over 10 of these deep dives now, and this has popped up in most of them: Speaking to your ICPs before launching.

There’s a few reasons this works so well:

1. Takes the pressure of sales off

Sales can often be stressful. There’s a lot of pressure to sell a new product.

I’m not here to argue whether this is right or wrong, or to give a solution on how to deal with it, for the sake of this, I just want to acknowledge that it happens.

You have no/few customers and you need money.

By speaking to your ICP before launching, you remove this pressure.

You have nothing to sell them (at least not yet).

You just want to ask them some questions, validate your idea, and see how you can make it a better fit to solve their problems.

It becomes a conversation rather than a sales call. This is a lot easier for most people.

Especially those new to sales.

2. Builds a pipeline of hot leads

By speaking to people from your ICP, you’re making them aware of you and your product.

You’re showing you care enough to try and solve their problem.

This builds trust.

As well as creating a group of people you know have the problem you’re solving for. And who know you’re building to solve it.

So when you do decide to launch, you have a qualified pool of people who need your product, that you can reach back out to, and say you’ve finished building a solution for their exact problem.

3. Refine your product and its messaging for launch

Another benefit of speaking to your target audience before launching is that it can be super useful in shaping the development of your product and refining your messaging.

You can learn what features your customers truly need, what are nice to-haves, and what aren’t so relevant.

But more than this, it helps you learn how to market to people similar to them. How do they speak about their problems, what language do they use, and where do they say the roadblocks are?

Bringing your ICP along the launch to MVP can be super useful in not starting from zero.

There’s an awesome video that touches on this that I went into last week if you’re interested.

Be okay with bringing in a CEO if you need to 👨‍🏫

Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider are truly bought into their mission. They want to improve lives by improving communication.

That is their driving force.

One thing they did early on, in 2011, to move forward along their mission was to bring in a CEO.

Someone who had experience growing a business of this scale. Someone who had a history of excelling at this.

Max is great at growth. That was his zone of genius. Alex is great at product, that is his zone of genius. And Dmytro is great at development, and you guessed it, that is his zone of genius.

And so rather than thinking because they were the founders, that they needed to be the CEO, they stepped into their zones of genius - and hired a CEO to do the same.

Realizing you’re not the right person to be CEO of your startup is a hard process. It needs you to have no ego and a willingness to let go control of your baby.

It’s not easy.

It’s also not always the right decision. And sometimes it’s hard to know if it is.

Are you just scared to take the next step in growth or is it actually something your business needs at the stage it and you are at?

You need to be honest with yourself and your co-founders.

Remember, you want the best for your company, your team, you, and your customers.

And sometimes there’s someone better positioned to lead that growth.

That’s okay.

So if you think your and your co-founders’ zones of genius lie elsewhere. Be okay with looking to bring in a CEO.

A lot of successful companies have done this.

Don’t be afraid of paid advertising when starting 💳

There seems to be a movement nowadays of organic marketing or bust when you’re starting.

But I don’t agree with this.

Yes, I think organic marketing is great. Creating content is the best way to give value to as many people as possible. It’s also cheaper and easier to do when you’re starting.

But performance marketing still has its place. In more than one way as well.

Even, and particularly, if you’re bootstrapping.

One of the great things about performance marketing is that the feedback cycle is almost instant.

You know in a few hours if there’s a return on your money.

When you’re bootstrapping this can be super helpful. Because you need cash flow. And something this instant can literally save your business.

Yes, it is a double-edged sword in that it costs money to begin with. And it could fail. You could lose your money.

So I’m not saying do it blindly or ignore content marketing.

But using paid ads is the best way to instantly understand your marketing’s effectiveness.

Use language that doesn’t resonate with your potential customers?

You can identify this straight away and test something else.

This is the other benefit of paid ads.

Not only are they great for a quick revenue cycle. But they can be awesome for testing features, copy, and messaging quickly and super accurately.

For example, highlighting different features of your product in different ads will help you see which to prioritize in development and branding.

I’m a big believer in organic marketing.

But don’t ignore paid ads. They can set you up massively for success.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon

Million Dollar Weekend (MDW): The launch strategy that led it to #1 on Amazon

I’m doing something a little different this week. Rather than deep-diving a startup, I’m looking into the launch of Noah Kagan’s new book, Million Dollar Weekend - what worked, what didn’t, and what you can learn from it for your GTM strategy.

Noah and his team have given me a behind-the-scenes look into their launch strategy - which has been super interesting! Shoutout to Noah and Jay who answered any questions I had and helped set this all up!

Here is what I’ve learned from it and how you can implement the ideas Noah used into your business (or book if you’re writing one).

I hope you enjoy!

This is the story of how Million Dollar Weekend went from Zero to #1 Bestseller. 🚀

Launch Strategy Summary

Noah’s launch strategy for Million Dollar Weekend started long before he even started writing the book.

The reality is that this book was 15+ years in the making.

People rarely buy business books to learn from people who haven’t done it before. They don’t buy books with no credibility.

So the story of MDW’s launch success is in many ways a reflection of Noah’s success - from his times at Facebook and Mint, and more importantly, him building AppSumo to a soon-to-be $100M revenue business (which he tested in a weekend - living by what he says) and growing a massive online following.

Noah had put the time in. Learned valuable skills. Consistently proved them.

And now he’s sharing what he’s learned.

But let’s bring this back to the present - when Noah decided to write a book. (Okay this isn’t quite the present, but you know what I mean).

Noah thought for him to write the best book, he needed to speak to those who had written bestsellers before him - Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, and James Clear, to name a few.

One key thing he learned from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, was to plan your marketing far in advance.

So that’s exactly what Noah did.

He started working on the launch 18 months before the release date.

He created a single source of truth spreadsheet to coordinate the launch:

• Podcasts 🎙️

• Content 📹

• Bulk buys 💰

• And much much more

Noah and his team planned content for every single day - to coordinate a huge marketing effort centered around content and leveraging Noah’s following.

Noah and his team tested a LOT of different launch tactics, too many to give each the time they deserve, so I’ve grouped them into what I saw as the most important key principles they used in multiple tactics - before pulling out specific tactics that worked that you can use in your GTM strategy.

Key Principles

🌏 1. Being everywhere: A key component to the success of the MDW launch was the number of touchpoints people had with Noah and the book. Noah was everywhere when it launched. Posting multiple times per day on every platform. And appearing on what felt like every single podcast I listen to. You couldn’t avoid Noah if you were interested in entrepreneurship.

💑 2. Creating a personal connection: One of the most important factors in being memorable and creating a connection with your audience is to be vulnerable and tell personal stories. Noah made sure to let his personality shine through in his content and the launch strategy, ultimately driving more true fans and sales.

📲 3. Testing and doubling down: Noah and his team spent months learning from leading authors to plan their launch strategy. Creating a long list of ideas to try and test what worked best and double down on it.

🌏 1. Being everywhere

I don’t know about you. But Noah has been everywhere I’ve looked for the past few months.

The first place I noticed this was with my go-to podcasts.

It felt like in the span of a few weeks Noah had made an appearance on every single one of them.

My First Million (my favorite listen always). Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Tim Ferriss. Leveling Up with Eric Siu. Mark Manson. Chris Williamson. Honestly, I could go on forever with just his podcast appearances - there were over 80.

Interestingly, Noah and his team found that in terms of direct traffic, smaller podcasts didn’t really move the needle - even when combined.

But this doesn’t mean if you aren’t on Tim Ferriss it’s not valuable.

Smaller podcasts can be great for practice and to get you into the rhythm of telling your story.

While also increasing the potential touchpoints for people to interact with you.

And also potentially opening up doors to other podcasts - ask every podcast host you go on, to put you in touch with one other podcast. This will build momentum and credibility (especially if you are less known).

Going on all these podcasts helped Noah keep MDW top of mind for his target audience and increase the number of interactions with them.

The more touch points = the higher chance someone will buy MDW.

But Noah didn’t stop at podcasts.

He posted multiple times per day on all his social medias - Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube (including the Community section).

As well as hosting AMAs (Ask me anything) on different subreddits like r/GrowMyBusiness, r/GrowthHacking, r/Startups, and getting over 100k views for his AMA on r/entrepreneur.

These AMAs were awesome. Not only exposing him to a new audience. But also building personal connections with people - talking about building connections with followers…

💑 2. Creating a personal connection

One thing that worked really well for not only engagement but also sales was Noah building a genuine connection with his audience.

But how did he actually build this connection?

The first way was to be more vulnerable with his followers, telling personal stories and anecdotes in his emails. These worked really well for driving sales, as well as shares.

He then carried this over to Twitter and LinkedIn, telling personal stories, often accompanied with pictures - like before and after growth stories (again very personal).

As mentioned above, another way Noah built this connection was through Reddit AMAs. This was a great way to give valuable insights to not only his fans but also a new audience. And Noah was super responsive - replying to every question, including one of mine!

These were super helpful in building trust - people felt super engaged with Noah and whenever he answered a question, he immediately became more legit and likable to them.

Another way Noah and his team built this connection with his audience was by bringing them along the journey with him.

People want to feel a part of something unique.

And so Noah gave them that.

Inviting his email subscribers to an exclusive virtual launch party. The email for this had one of the highest open rates for the whole launch.

One of the other ways Noah built this connection was to create in-person experiences with his fans, such as giving them a chance to fly out and meet Noah. This got people excited about buying MDW and helped spread the book on social media with a sweepstakes to win the prize.

But building this personal connection didn’t start at the launch.

When writing the book, his co-author Tahl Raz pushed him to be more vulnerable in his writing - telling personal stories he hadn’t shared before. This strengthened the relationship between Noah and his audience.

Once people read a personal story of Noah’s in an email and then purchased the book - this connection they felt would deepen from Noah’s vulnerability. And the reader would be more likely to share the book with someone else - or on social media.

Noah has spent years building an audience of followers interested in entrepreneurship. For this launch, he focused on developing a more personal connection with these followers, being open and vulnerable by sharing personal stories.

📲 3. Testing and doubling down

Getting a behind-the-scenes look into the launch strategy of MDW one thing immediately stood out to me.

Noah and his team tested a ton of different ideas.

From social media posts and giveaways, to email marketing, Instagram DMs, in-person experiences, MDW Cohorts, podcasts, live YouTube Q&As, AppSumo promotions, and much more.

And it wasn’t just the channels they tested. But the formats and little details as well.

Things like adding a link to the first Tweet vs subsequent tweets (rather add them later in the thread). Or testing whether videos of Noah talking did better than videos of other people talking more (in podcasts for example).

Everything seemed intentional and everything was tracked.

With the team noting things that worked, things that didn’t work, and new things to try.

And it didn’t stop here.

Once they found something that worked - they doubled down on it.

Finding any edge they could to promote MDW.

Testing wasn’t limited to their content strategy only.

Noah was super intentional about testing both the book itself and its packaging.

One piece of advice I often give to startups is to build WITH your customers.

And Noah did exactly this with MDW. He had ~1000 people read the first draft to give him feedback on what he was missing and where he needed to double down.

Through this, he tested the content of his book with his target audience before even releasing it.

One of the coolest things I learned about the MDW process was just how detailed they were with the packaging of the book.

Noah wrote an awesome article about it here - I highly recommend giving it a read.

But to summarize what they did:

They set up Facebook Ads campaigns in affordable countries to test which covers performed the best out of a few options - The snapping finger graphic being one of them.

They then tested the covers with the top results against each other in five more iterations and the snapping fingers won.

After this, the team wanted to test the subtitle.

So they put out polls on Twitter, YouTube community, and his newsletter - there was a clear winner:

Then came the color of the book - they repeated the Facebook ads strategy from above.

And 1M+ impressions later yellow came out on top! Wait, yellow?

So why was the final version green?

Well, there wasn’t a significant difference between the two. But for 2 reasons it made sense:

1. Green was the color Noah had used on his blog for years.

2. Green really stood out when they tested mockups of the book in a store bookshelf and on Amazon. It was so different to every other book - especially business books.

The last step to finetune this was to decide on the size of the font used.

So what did Noah do?

Tried to look at the book from afar.

Could people walking by the store see the book title?

The answer was no - so they made it bigger.

And just like that, MDW as we know it was born.

Interestingly, after launching the book and it becoming a New York Times bestseller - the team experimented with how putting “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover would effect their Facebook Ads performance. The best version increased their click-through rate by 19%!

Noah and his team are ruthless with testing. Making sure they are always optimizing reach and sales.

Tactics to replicate MDW’s success

Put effort into graphics 🎨

One thing that worked really well for the launch was including easy-to-understand graphics in their social content.

One style of graphic that worked particularly well was when it called people out. I don’t mean like for a fight.

But when Noah and his team posted content that called out “Wantapreneurs”.

Another type of visual that worked well for the launch was a young photo of Noah attached to a story of growth - people love seeing progress as it makes hard things seem achievable.

Well-crafted graphics can be awesome for your reach. They work so well for a few reasons:

1. People are highly visual: A lot of how we understand the world comes from what we see. Your followers are no exception. Graphics are more likely to grab people’s attention and keep it.

2. It’s quicker to understand: A well-put-together visualization of a complex topic is much easier and quicker to understand than text.

3. Visuals are memorable: Graphics and visualizations can be used to create a strong visual identity and help your followers remember what you are saying.

See what I did there? 😉

Another thing that the team did which worked really well for traffic and ultimately sales, was putting the URL to MDW in the visual.

Make creators feel special 👸

I’ve talked a lot about creators before.

I think they can be really awesome for your business if you are strategic about working with them.

Creators are by all measures Connectors - the people who share what they love with anyone that will listen to them.

And creators have a lot of people who will listen to them.

Almost the perfect blend for a Tipping Point in your GTM strategy.

Noah, being a creator himself, understood this.

And he took advantage of it.

Noah and his team sent VIP boxes of MDW to creators who had relevant social media followings.

This achieved 2 key things:

• Made the influencers feel special.

• Gave them something interesting to post about.

This is an awesome combo.

Making influencers feel special instantly makes them want to share your product.

And giving them Insta-worthy packaging to post with gives them the material they can use to share how special they feel - which makes them feel even more special.

Repurpose content that works 🔄

Creating content for every social media platform can often feel overwhelming - trust me, I know.

Noah and his team simplified the process by repurposing content that worked on other platforms.

I’ve talked about this before in my deep dive into Stan - but there’s a really cool way to think about content creation that makes it feel more approachable.

Think about content as a pyramid you can systematize:

• Core content: This is generally a longer piece of content, i.e., a YouTube video, podcast, or newsletter.

• Short-form content: Core content can then be cut up and repurposed into Shorts/Reels/TikToks.

• Snippets: Core and short-form content can then be repurposed as LinkedIn and Twitter/X posts or even an Instagram story.

Using this content pyramid method, you can create multiple pieces of content in one sitting. Reducing the time required and increasing total reach.

Noah and team did this excellently.

Repurposing plenty of content, with a typical pyramid being: emails into blogs into Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Noah also repurposed content horizontally, testing the same content on similar platforms - for example Twitter/X to YouTube Community.

A trend that I’ve seen recently starting to gain a lot of traction with creators like Jay Clouse.

And it worked super well for Noah as well, with some repurposed Tweets getting over 4k likes on YouTube Community.

Don’t overcomplicate content creation. You can create one awesome long-form piece of content and chop it up into multiple pieces - making them relevant for specific platforms.

Use your followers for content ideation 📢

When you’re a content creator, followers are the users of your business.

And what’s the best way to improve and direct your product?

Speaking to your customers.

Building a business is ultimately building a solution for your customers. So you need to make sure they love and use it.

The same goes for content.

Speak to your followers - What do they want to see you post more of? Do they want to see you expand into different areas?

You’ll never know if you never ask.

But don’t stop here.

Actually listen to your followers. Use what they say.

Not only will this make your content more relevant and likely to resonate with people.

But it’ll also make your followers feel heard and a part of your journey.

You’ll build a loyal following.

Noah did this in a few ways.

One was to ask his email list which podcasts he should be on - the podcasts they listened to would likely have other potential fans.

Another way was to look through Noah’s Instagram DMs to find stories about people’s experiences reading MDW.

This not only gave Noah more content to post, but gave him a ton of social validation to take advantage of.

Have a great week, speak soon!

Sheldon