You either live a proactive life (where you decided what you want out of it), or reactive (where you react to the world around you). Unhappy people live reactively. They believe their life happens to them and they have no power to change that. Successful entrepreneurs are highly proactive. They ...

Getting your first 1000 customers is no different than getting your first 5,000 or 1,000,000 customers. It all comes down to a few key strategies…

So I’m sitting in the waiting room for 45 minutes and I can’t believe I’m still here. I’m the kind of guy who hasn’t touched a piece of physical mail in 7 years because I find it super inefficient. (Shoutout to Lisa who helps me with my mail… she’s A-W-E-S-O-M-E!) But then I realize – I’m not here ...

On Nov 7th, 2013 I walked into the speakers lounge at the Growth Hacker Conference and met Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic) for the first time. Andy worked on growth teams at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and now was at WealthFront. He’s one of the “Original Gangsters” (OG’s) in the growth space – just read ...

Building an audience BEFORE you launch is something that I’ve done for every one of my companies and is a question that I get asked about all of the time. There’s this misconception that people think that if you can launch a product – then you’re automatically going to have success. “If you build ...

“How do you build a product company within a service company?” …is a question that a lot of people struggle with. There are amazing examples of companies who have started off as a consulting or service company who have gone on to launch great products. Companies like:

When I first moved to San Francisco I spent the first year immersed in startup marketing. I believed that regardless of the company I eventually started, that as long as I understood marketing I would be widely successful. Man was I wrong.

There’s a great quote from the brilliant management consultant, Peter Drucker, which really summarizes what I’d like to teach you today: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~ Peter Drucker If you have 100 customers, ...

If you’ve started a company (or are growing a business) and every time you share your business idea with other people, they start asking “oh, so you’re like [X] company?”, then you have competition. You don’t decide who your competition is, your customers do by their actions and choices.

Building a two-sided market is probably the hardest thing you can build as an entrepreneur. It’s so hard that a few weeks ago, I organized a Marketplace Founders Dinner because I felt like there needed to be an “AA type meeting” for providing support to those founders :). I don’t know if you know ...

I’m often asked how – in a 2 year period – we were able to: have 2 kids build two houses and move launch and grow our companies The truth is… very little sleep and hacking away at our approach to getting work done. I believe most people don’t mean to be lazy. They typically aren’t producing because ...