11 Pieces Of Advice
Over the last 21 years of my professional life I have been the leader of EMEA’s largest crowdfunding business, held leadership positions across Product, Marketing and Growth
I often speak on the same 30 to 50 pieces of advice. Particualrly when I keynote at conferences or when appearing on podcasts.
I am often asked my advice and regularly share the same or iterations of advice, so here are eleven of my go to pieces of advice.
Search For The Product Or Brand Wow Moment
Growth Advice:
Growth for most b2c brands comes from paid media. & then the magic moment (product or brand) happens & become less reliant on the drug habit. Or
You become addicted and never get away from paid.
If you are big enough this can work well however you will always have a huge reliance and your ROI, ROAS, CAC etc will always be hire and you will likely have to paid for reactivation (think a re-acqusition of the customer) vs free interactions
Signal vs Noise
The quicker you understand your performance signals, the better you will cut through the noise and guiding teams to success.
Too many focus on noise. And then go looking for signals, and think everything is a signal.
Products Have To Be In This Order:
The best products are
1/ Easy to learn
2/ Easy to use
3/ Easy to share
4/ Easy to personalise
Anything else and you will struggle from day one. Speed of learning (time to learn) is key to most successes
Know The Game Or Be Played
‘No one likes playing the game’ is utter BS!
Work in an org of 10, 3 do.
100 = 30 It multiples up
Sad but true & it’s important to know you will be in it OR On the receiving end.
Have An Agreed Principle
The best internal principle win. ‘smarter shopping’ was a brilliant motto & principle when winning the coupon space, we made every visitor leave smarter.
We won because this guided everything we built + promoted.
Be crystal clear!
No Jerks…Ever
Never ever tolerate ‘brilliant jerks’,
Or jerks who have ‘brilliance’.
Jerks rarely change, flashes of brilliance aren’t ever enough
Experience Can Come With A Bias Cost
Experience can be bias. Understand that this happens in every industry.
Be mindful many potential hires with come with baked in bias and a fear of change or it never worked before.
This will not help you win
Internal Communication Is Essential:
Poor communications breeds gossip and internal misinformation.
Design deliberate comms flow that enables open and transparent Q&A.
This sounds easy, it is not but beats competitors easily.
Learning More From Misses Than “Wins”
The best teams in the world learn *more* when they lose a battle than when they win one… those who only know they win by hitting numbers break quickly & as soon as performance drops.
They then lose the war.
Simple Connections
Teams working more closely with aligned goals win.
Newsroom concept is not complicated but delivering this and setting up as newsroom that relies on each other is huge leap of faith and demands operational excellence!
Customer > Competitor
Has helped me with two decades of work. If good enough for Bezos than should be good enough for us all. Check in 4.30pm
I am going to be sharing a week’s worth of different pieces of advice over on Twitter under #ddwins.
