For reason that are unimportant, I was reading some old blog posts of mine from 2005. The number of websites that I linked to back then that are no longer around is crazy. Over 75% I’d say. Back then, I thought these sites would never die and they would be the new institutions. I was wrong. Things change and links rarely get redirected. Side note, I hated Apple with a real passion back then....
WordPress and SquareSpace and other camel cased companies have eaten the bottom the web market. For the most part, it’s for the better. However, if you’re looking to play around with web tech and want to see how websites can be blazing fast when not weighed down with plugins and overwrought templates give a static site generator a try. The most famous has to be GitHub Pages powered by Jekyll. I spun up a couple of those sites over last couple years....
Copying from a competitor is plagiarism. Copying from a different genre is creativity. I always slap my head when reading, say, an executive summary that’s being submitted to a competition and reads like every other executive summary. Why not stand out? Find inspiration NOT from other executive summaries, but from a short-story or a great recipe or a movie. You can still copy, err be inspired, by others work. Just not your competitors....
Write 1,000 words a day. Giving growth and marketing advice to the earliest stage startups is tough. So many things need to be done that it’s almost impossible to focus. Lack of team, time, and money overwhelms the mind quickly. I’ve noodled on what a good, simple, and achievable heuristic could be. The best I’ve got is to write 1,000 words a day. That’s not internal emails or Slack message words....
Not in the first week, but probably the first year. If I had a time machine that allowed me to go back in time I would stop by id Software during the making of Quake and ILM from the beginning until the opening of Star Wars. The creativity and ingenuity of those two culture changing companies is inspiring. Since a time machine that goes backwards is almost certainly impossible the best I can do is listen to a five hour podcast with John Carmack and watch a six hour documentary about ILM....
Is he old enough to eat popcorn? Let me look it up. How can we speed up his potty training? Let me look it up. We all trust top search results more than we should. But I talk to founders every week who have no SEO strategy. If I trust the top search result to raise my kid, then I’m pretty sure I’m buying from a top search result too....
“Well, the main point is to make money.” It was a response I got some genius thing I said yesterday. I nodded and we went along with our conversation. Upon further reflection I think this what I wish I would have said. “Then get a job at ‘big company x in your industry’ or, heaven forbid, Wall Street. If there isn’t a passion beyond money I don’t know why you’d work for an early stage startup....
In our content marketing group meetup yesterday we were talking the good ol’ LinkedIn algorithm. I brought up a strange data point and wonder if it’s just me. I get more views to video posts that are YouTube links than I do to videos that are natively uploaded to LinkedIn. Am I the only one? Comment on LinkedIn
“Take a right instead of a left.” The useless directions I provided to Melissa this weekend. There were seven turns before this turn. I counted. In my mind, I already moved through those obvious turns and was already at the only turn in question. I find myself giving similar directions when talking about strategy. After thinking about something deeply, I find myself providing answers only to the problems in question. This doesn’t help people who aren’t in the room....
I saw my friend David Carpenter last week. Years ago, he gave me a simple piece of sales advice that I share once a week with someone. I figured I share it here. I had a Jeep with a fried electrical system. It needed real work. Someone was interested in buying it and I asked Dave if $750 was a good price. His answer, “well, you can’t negotiate up.” Comment on LinkedIn