Brand = Accumulated Customer Happiness
How brand actually works for startups and why all marketing should be performance marketing.
Continue reading →The New Problems Every Marketplace Faces After Product Market Fit
The advice marketplaces receive when solving the cold start problem rapidly becomes dangerous as the business heats up.
Continue reading →The Unbundling Fallacy
When capital flows like water, many ideas seem like great standalone businesses. A 13-year bull run led to predictions of the unbundling of Craigslist, Facebook, Ebay, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many others that largely has not played out. This post explains why, and how to predict which ones will succeed.
Continue reading →The future of marketplaces: coordination, capital, and creativity
Airbnb and Doordash ripped to a collective market cap well over $100B. They're also two more data points in a long trend toward marketplaces with higher commissions and that do more work to earn those commissions. This post explores what this means for the future of marketplaces and why in many cases the marketplace model will go extinct altogether.
Continue reading →Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
The most common mistake founders make when it comes to customer acquisition is focus: investing in too many channels at once, and as a result not investing in any one channel enough.
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