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
Need to build a campaign to validate your first startup idea? You’ll want to build a top of funnel marketing test to drive clicks to the new landing page. If you’ve never bought a Facebook ad campaign before, don’t worry: there are just a few steps. There are thousands of blog posts that talk about
A successful startup needs to balance their only two resources—time and money—and the wolf eats money with a gleeful howl. So startups try their hardest to get the most out of every penny they feed that wolf.
The other resource—time—is consumed quietly by a thousand small rats in the basement. There’s nothing loud and showy about how this vanishes, nibbled away in meetings and false starts, in projects half completed and deals left unfinished.
Whether you’re fixing a broken funnel or just trying to improve a marketing campaign, it’s important that you have tools to think about your core value prop and find different ways to present it. Fortunately, 2,400 years ago, Aristotle figured out common different ways to persuade people, so we don’t have to. He invented the
For the last 6 years, I’ve taught a workshop in various forms that I now call “Your Brand Sucks (if you don’t do these 5 things)” on 3 different continents. It’s usually a 4 – 6 hour workshop, but I recently recorded it as a 30 minute webinar for marketing / agency networking community Communo.
Key to a good growth content marketing experiment is building a funnel which will drive audience into leads and leads into customers. If you’re not building (and testing) funnels to make your content perform for you, then you’re not doing anything I’d call growth content marketing. Let me lead with TL;DR for the impatient: TL;DR
Let me tell you the #1 growth hack I know: Launch your thing today. For any B2B or B2C or B2B2C startup idea out there, there exists a way to find an audience who looks like your buyer persona and spend a few hundred dollars buying traffic to a landing page and seeing if it
Almost everyone I talk to has positioned their business incorrectly. This sounds crazy, right? What are you doing in business, if you don’t have a unique position to your company? In the last 6 months I’ve gone on deep dives with more than 30 companies, talking about their market positioning, what makes their brand special,
One of the hardest things to do when you’re spinning up a growth content process is figuring out what to tackle and in what order. The most important foundations for any business are its positioning, its audience, and its message, but there are dozens or hundreds of ways to test and improve all of those
Score the quality of any website’s content marketing in 15 minutes or less with this simple worksheet from CrowdTamers’ founder.
Live events are great but how can you get solid data on your lead generation tactics without data? Here is an easy process to get that exact data.
Learn how a growth marketer attending an event can prepare correctly, execute optimally at the show, and maximize ROI of followup after the show is finished.
When you’ve created content, you’ve done about a third of the work of content marketing. The other two thirds comes from distributing it widely after you’ve made it. The best content with no audience is nothing but a wasted opportunity. I’ve already talked about that a bunch, so I’m not going to drive that point
