Hiten's Pick
From Losing Money to a 51% Profit Margin in 5 Months
When you raise money you are able to invest in your business ahead of your revenue because of the funding. In a self-funded business you are spending money to grow the business as the money comes in from customers.
That's why profitability is so important to self-funded companies, because every dollar you add to your profit margin adds to your dry powder that you can invest back into the business.
Nathan Barry's bootstrapped startup, ConvertKit, was growing its expenses in lockstep with and in excess of new revenue, so it was perpetually not-quite-profitable. After deciding to make profitability his primary focus, Nathan got the company to a 51% profit margin and $538,000 in cash within 5 months.
nathanbarry.com
Business
13 Daily Activities That Will Double the Size of Your Personal Brand in 6 Months or Less
The #1 rule of building a personal brand is to be yourself. Don't be one of those people who is totally different in person than you are online. My co-founder Neil Patel shares 13 things to do every day that will help you build a personal brand that's an extension of yourself.
quicksprout.com
Challenge Coins and Company Credits
I love it when startups treat their companies like their own little labs. Companies need to experiment with company culture just as they experiment in building their product. At ReadMe, they give away "challenge coins" to every person the company couldn't have existed without and that's helped them build a culture of gratitude.
readme.io
Product
You Don't Know Your Customer And It's Crippling Your Growth - Lessons on Conducting User Research
Sean Ellis's product-market fit survey is the most valuable survey you can send customers to understand their relationship with your product. Benji Hyam of Grow and Convert explains how to use it in the real world to improve your SaaS marketing.
growandconvert.com
The Real Product Market Fit
Product-market fit is one of the most important concepts in the startup world, and no one agrees on how it should be measured. I chatted about this on a panel with Drift co-founder David Cancel at SaaStr Annual 2016, and he said that in SaaS, product-market fit is about finding repeatable revenue. Michael Siebel, partner at Y Combinator and previously co-founder of Twitch, writes about how he measures product-market fit and the method he uses to help founders to find it.
themacro.com
Marketing
How To Boost Facebook Ad Performance With Dark Posts
Using "dark posts" on Facebook, Soso Sazesh at Growth Pilots was able to dramatically improve Facebook ad performance. Soso breaks down exactly how he achieved 43% higher clickthrough rate, 22% higher conversion rate, 15% lower cost per click, and 30% lower cost per acquisition.
growthpilots.com
We Grew Our Blog Traffic 138X: Here's What It Taught Us About Content Marketing
When your content marketing is working, there's one surefire way to write more successful content. Write content that helps others learn how to win with content. Dave Gerhardt, marketing lead at Drift, shares how he was able to grow Drift's traffic from 198 visitors in October 2015 to 27,369 by the end of June 2016.
drift.com
Sales
Top SaaS Sales Executive: Stop Trying to Sell to Everyone
Data is transforming the way that sales teams are run, thanks to products like Mattermark. Companies that use data are able get much extremely targeted with their outreach and do more with much less. Ali Powell, senior account executive at HubSpot, talks about how they run a data-informed sales process along with her three rules of prospect engagement.
mattermark.com
Growth
How to Build a Brand from Nothing
Most founders think that early marketing is about building a conversion or sign-up machine, but it's not. It's about building a brand. I wrote about how to build a brand from nothing from my experience and based on what I've seen first-hand with people like Leo Widrich from Buffer.
hitenism.com
Tip of the Week
How to find out fast if your idea is legit
The concept of MVP sprang up during the early startup movement and has become a bit muddled in definition over time. In a product development sense, it refers to the first thing you can release for a product in a minimal way that helps you start learning about your product and its viability.
In this episode of The Startup Chat, we share some examples of how startups can begin the process of testing an MVP and pitching a concept to get response from potential customers. Testing often includes pitching something before release and before any real functionality.
Listen to the episode and learn how to quickly find out if your startup idea is legit:
How to determine a Minimum Viable Product by working backward
How emotional detachment is a necessary tool for success
Why perception changes when customers look at actual products vs mockups
How launching something that lacks features can be a signal of eventual success
thestartupchat.com
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