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 ...

Is ADD/ADHD a Super Power? I believe that it is. I was diagnosed at 11 years old with ADD. For many years I was taking 40mg SR Ritalin, or Adderall. I still don’t understand how you can diagnose a child at that age. It honestly messed me up for many years because I believed there was something ...