Testing a new idea requires a completely different approach to performance marketing than scaling a business. If you have the wrong approach with your Facebook ads, you’re doomed. Building the right audience is the first step to creating a Facebook campaign. Let’s make sure that you’re building an audience that’ll reflect the goal you’re trying
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 are yet to fully explore the potential of social media distribution. In fact, they’ll 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
For most technical founders, 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
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 a simple way to build
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
When you’re launching something new, it can be hard to decide your positioning. You want to try several different tests as you launch so you can learn what resonates with your potential audience, but how do you write copy that shows your offer in several very different ways? It can feel tempting to read about
I reached out on Twitter the other day to ask what early-stage builders grapple with advertising on social media. If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts about launching your startup, I really like social media ads as a way to test and iterate on ideas quickly, so you learn what the market wants—and
I’ve launched 50 startups, mentored about 200 more, and have taken a dozen startups to $2MM+ in ARR. Successful ones tend to get off the ground the same way. There are 3 distinct phases to go from $0 to $2MM. If you do it right, this can be ~18 months from start to finish: 1.
6 years ago, I created a system to manage and evaluate writers at scale. It works so well a local content agency who I’d hired as a contractor ended up paying me $15k to train their team in how to implement it. I’ve built and scaled this to teams of 3 to 40 writers in the
Most of the time when CrowdTamers works with clients, they already have a product that they launched already. We talk a lot about Grow to Market and “launch before you’re ready” here, but it’s worth noting that approach isn’t the only way to grow your business. I like launching first, because it lets you validate
For the last two months I’ve booked myself on 1 podcast a week with about 90 minutes of work, total. The process is surprisingly simple: Find a podcast you want to be on. Listen to 2 – 3 episodes or read the show notes. Here’s a quick hack if you read fast like me. Take
The older I get, the more surprised I am that so many people work the nine to five, hate their boss, hate their job, make dark jokes about their significant other, and live lives of quiet desperation. There’s a lot more out there to life if you can come to grips with three key concepts:
Inspired by a recent Twitter thread of mine, let’s talk a bit about the why behind CrowdTamers I’ve been running a freelance business I’ve called CrowdTamers for about 14 years now, working as a freelancer at companies all over the world. As I’ve had kids and now as I’m fast approaching the creaky old age
Over the last decade or so I’ve spent in excess of a million dollars in ads for small startups, helping them launch and grow their businesses from $0. I talk a lot about how to use advertisements to discover brand positioning for early stage startups, which looks quite different than an established brand’s ad performance.
I’ve taken a dozen startups from $0 to $2MM+ in ARR, mentored more than 200 startups and taught thousands. Here’s how I teach building a battle-tested and ready to go acquisition funnel in as little as 9 weeks that will scale from $0 to millions. Note that it’ll take more than 9 weeks to scale
