Before you invest time and money into that idea or product feature, yo have to validate first. Find out why you should validate and steps to take when validating your idea.
💡 I’ve seen plenty of great founders build and launch micro startups as a way to try many different ideas and see what sticks. I’m not a builder, though: I’m a marketer. So I had an absolutely insane idea to start off 2023. I’m not going to build 3 startups in Q1 and launch them
TikTok ads are low CPM (that is, confusingly, the terminology marketers use to talk about “cost per thousand” impressions), can be great engagement, and are easy to get started using. If your audience is <35 or is located in South America or Asia, you should probably be checking the platform out. Yes, even if you’re
Building a personal brand is important not only during your education but also when looking for work. By publishing articles and engaging in conversations on non-academic forums, you’ll establish yourself as an expert and make it easier to find opportunities. Not only will this help you financially, but it will also give you the recognition
Go To Market is a daunting enough task when you’re trying to launch a new CRM or to-do list, more so when it’s for something as complex as Web3. When you best describe your project as “a token that serves three distinct purposes: governance over the network, staking and bonding”, most people won’t even know
I’ve written a whole lot about how to generate the content for your landing page. At CrowdTamers, we’re obsessed with finding a clear, repeatable ways to create landing pages as quickly as possible because we make several every week. I don’t talk much about the design. That’s not because it’s not important–you can see looking
Odds are pretty high that at this moment, right now, your pricing is too low. Let me be more clear: Unless you actively know that your pricing’s not too low, your pricing is probably too low. When you first launch a startup, you don’t really know how much people will value the software you’ve created.
I’ll tell you a secret: you can send messages straight to someone’s inbox with a 70-ish percent open rate. The catch is: you’re sending it to their email inbox: you’re sending it to their InMail inbox. For <$1 per opened message, though, LinkedIn Message Ads can be some of the cheapest and most effective ways
Precisely 18? Yes, precisely. One of our most common methods for writing different headlines at CrowdTamers is to fall back on the 3 classical arguments that Aristotle developed 2,500 years ago. But it’s one thing to say, “Write a logical appeal”. If I’m telling you to talk about your business or your product logically, what
A business needs 3 things to be able to succeed: A problem An audience An offer Most people, when they’re launching a startup or a business, fixate on the first of those 3: the problem. I dare say almost no one launches a business without knowing a problem that they want the business to solve.
Testing a new idea requires a completely different approach to performance marketing than scaling a business. If you have the wrong approach to your Facebook marketing, you’re doomed. Building the right audience is the first step to creating a Facebook campaign, so let’s talk about how to make sure that you’re building an audience that
Building products is hard. Launching a new business is hard. Everything about it is confounding: you deliberately create order out of nothing. As the founder, you have to conceive something that doesn’t exist and, through hard work and unwavering belief, bring it into existence. If you’re wrong about your business idea: the timing, the positioning,
Google search advertising is a nearly bottomless source of high-intent traffic that is looking to purchase. It’s also expensive click traffic which is one of the easiest ways I know for a founder on the early stages of their go-to-market journey to throw a few thousand dollars down a hole to no effect. There are
Most content marketers will tell you must wait 3 – 9 months for content to generate any kind of positive return on the investment it took to write it. They’re wrong. Your content can make you money the day you publish it if you crack how to distribute it. And that’s the problem. Most content
When you push that first code commit live on a production server, it feels like you’ve made the leap from “dreamer” to “doer”. Congrats! One problem: 24 hours go by and no one has signed up. Crap. You have to market this new idea. After spending a weekend reading blog posts and watching YouTube videos,
In spite of being a startup marketer for 20+ years, I’ve only been running CrowdTamers as an agency for the last 1. Before that, I was short term / fractional CMO, serving 1 – 4 clients at the same time, helping build, grow, and scale the marketing practices in their startup; I’ve used CrowdTamers as
Since our focus at CrowdTamers is startup go to market, we talk a lot about launching. But there’s something scary about your first launch: you’ve never shown anyone what you’re up to before and maybe you suck at it. Maybe not? How do you know? Most entrepreneurs aren’t master designers. Heck, I used to be
Eight months ago, I published a blog post about the 9 experiments to take you from $0 in revenue to building the understanding and fundamentals of a million-dollar funnel. Since then, it’s earned me $250,000. That’s kind of interesting, but what’s more interesting than that it has made that much money despite only getting 1,300
Recently we’ve talked about the importance of launching today to validate your ideas and also how to build a WordPress website to launch a landing page in a few hours. But WordPress requires you can install a SQL database and comfort with somewhat advanced web technology. What if you want something simple? I’ve recently been
Inside every employee is an idea for a business that they’re convinced could make a million dollars. For almost everyone, that idea remains pure, unblemished, and a wistful possibility that is never threatened with reality. There are good reasons that most people’s business ideas never even approach fruition: the statistics of business success are grim.
The majority of times I see people sharing information about their A/B tests, it looks something like: “I just ran a test and got 40 visits at a 12.5% conversion rate on page A whereas I got 7 visits at a 14% conversion rate on page B, so Page B is clearly better!” This is
Most founders don’t understand what makes a good test. 💡 A good test tries several bold new approaches to talking about what you do, speaks to several different audiences, or repackages your existing feature set into completely different products. Testing minor variants of language are not gonna cut it. Let’s start with the first one:
I was reminded by a recent Twitter thread about “what constitutes an MVP” that I’m confident launching just a landing page and seeing if there’s demand long before I build a product and I did just that for CrowdTamers AI, I promised a follow up to our initial CrowdTamers AI testing post from, uh, July
I have been known to angel invest in a few companies and am an advisor to a few more. As part of my goal to launch 1,000 startups to $1MM in ARR over the next 6.5 years, I see a lot of startups from the inside. I want to help every startup and founder with
I give webinars from time to time. Here’s a short one about one of the core elements of what I’m trying to accomplish at CrowdTamers; the systems and thinking needed to build, iterate, and scale a startup from $0 to $2 million a year in revenue. I’ve done it more than dozens of times, so
I’ve mentioned that CrowdTamers as an agency is run off of Notion plenty of times on Twitter. A few people have asked on Twitter, IndieHackers, and elsewhere exactly how I’m doing it, and I have been saying for months that I’ll get around to showing how I do it. Well, I’ve finally done it. 🙂
Marketing is fun, right? Flashy graphics. Fun campaigns! Exciting budgets! I’ve run more than a thousand different marketing campaigns over the years I’ve been in this business, and the #1 thing that everyone does wrong when they run campaigns is that they don’t build out their reporting to answer questions. I get a little shouty
Retargeting, as an ad mechanism, is quite well known these days. Put a pixel on a landing page, send traffic there, and then continue to advertise to the people who’ve seen that page to re-engage them and try to close the deal. But what if you could pre-target your ads—send ads only to your best
We’ve written previously about how to validate your top-of-funnel test on Facebook. There are a few cases where Facebook isn’t going to be the right channel for you, though: Bot traffic on Facebook can be really bad, especially since the new iOS 14 update. You might want to specifically target people who care about the
I comment often enough when talking to clients or new hires that I have been running growth & marketing for the better part of 20 years and I still get it wrong 70% of the time. The CrowdTamers AI launch is one of the 70%. Initial launch results are all pretty bad, but that’s not
