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Editors note: Shoutout to Sam Grover for sending signups my way via his LinkedIn Post, I misattributed to JUST my Twitter ads.
Most days I feel like an old dude yelling at the internet. I can even think back to when I was the kid & there was an older gentleman in my village who would yell at us to get off his lawn and stop bugging his chickens.
One of the things I don't get is the obsession with 2X speed on podcasts/audiobooks. Granted English isn’t my first language so sometimes I have a hard time what someone is saying when they are talking at 1X speed (I joke! (mostly)). I enjoy a good book - read it (maybe a few times) and appreciate the language, ideas, and texture of the words.
What's the fun of skimming through it at 2X speed. Granted not all books are good - some are better off as essays on a blog & others are better off as a tweet. Some try to stretch a single idea into 50 pages with useless anecdotes and such, that's when you know you got to drop it.
The more I look around the more I realize marketers love MarTech more then 'regular' people do. The other day I was looking up some random vendors and I landed on a Martech vendor site - the min I landed on their site it triggered a drift bot - there was another pop up when I was exiting out and when I did a BuiltWith Lookup they were running more Martech tools then a regular business. Ofcourse they had remarketing ads via Adroll and Google display and other DSPs and such.
I remember when I was working in-house and we “bought” a tool and I asked why - I was part of the demand/ops group and we didn’t need this tool. I was promptly told that they had bought a sub for our tools so we were obligated to buy a subscription to theirs.
Think about it. Most of these Martech vendors have similar playbooks - they partner with each other on content/webinar and events (aka virtual events now) - they share registrations lists and leads - they cross-promote each other in their emails and such. On social they “engage” with each other’s posts - i.e a CMO at company X will post about marketing and other marketers will flock to agree/disagree.
With 8000 vendors our there in the space I wonder if you can build a 10M business just selling tools to other Martech vendors. Similar to how I am confident you can build a 100M business selling to other startups and YC graduates without even touching the mainstream market.
Some of you are awesome to share your notes to my emails so I am going to make a point of including more (with permission)
Notes On the last letter:
"On the importance of copywriting: it is much easier for marketers to focus their efforts on things they can easily control (copywriting, website visuals) then on harder things that are also more valuable to prospects (customized messaging, financially appealing offers). In direct marketing the common wisdom is that something like 50% of campaign performance depends on your choice of target audience; 40% on the offer; 10% on copywriting."
Fahim Akter (PM at Daraaz // Rocket Internet) - "
To talk a bit about product focus on marketing metrics, I think it will have to come from marketing e.g in our roadmaps marketing or CRM talks about CaC and everything and depending on the impact we do have PMs dedicated to it.
However the different comes when you have to align CaC with objectives in product generally they do differ but perhaps adding it on the company level e.g reducing the cost or increasing profitability might help.
But I am afraid of product being too market driven, I'm not saying marketing is evil but we do have a knack to not placing ourselves in their shoes and not wanting what's best for them (at times). That is where product has to fight with marketing and if we dedicate product on marketing metrics instead of product fighting for the customer , they will join the battle."
For one thing, I am happy people are starting to speak up against the crazy tech at all costs strategy. Robinhood making money by some complex financial jiujutsu with terrible consequences sometimes.
This thread was both interesting & very armchair. But speaking of armchair analysis, it’s essentially what I do on the internet so the pot shouldn't call the kettle black. As an ex-smoker, it occurred to me that even though pot & nicotine may be similar, pot is still considered extremely taboo in most culture so that might just be the biggest barrier to pot companies rather than brand / associating it with lifestyle or anything else.
Interesting note even though it rather left me scratching my head.
Excellent reads:
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Introduction and Level 1 by Sarah Travel (Benchmark)
How to Build a Media Company with Alex Wilhelm of TechCrunch (IndieHackers)
Peloton: The "SaaS Plus a Box" Business case
Till next time,
Kamil
P.S this was a fantastic survey by Sarah McNamara (MOPS @ Slack) about MOPs compensation / consulting / agency rates etc.
P.P.S Converkit is heating this space up and Avinash would love it if I moved over.
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