TOP 20 TIPS THAT STILL HIT

Don’t fill 100% of your 12-month roadmap: A fully packed 12-month plan leaves no room to respond to what customers want, what’s newly working, or how the market is changing. Leave intentional space for discovery, new opportunities, and killing bets that no longer make sense. AI is forcing product builds to move faster. Don’t get stuck on an outdated roadmap.

Remember, you always have more than you think: Give yourself 5 minutes focused on gratitude to fuel your momentum before you begin a product sprint.

Run the Time Test on before putting resources behind a new idea: We all get excited by new ideas. Make sure they are not a distraction. Focus on chasing the inspiration that won’t leave you alone.

Study how brands talk to customers, not just how they look: Write a list of the best 5 brands in your category. Study what they're doing: how do they talk to their customers online? Are they commenting back on IG? What's their lifecycle marketing look like?

Run a $5K event instead of a $50K ad buy: The goal is to do something so delightful it looks non-pushy, makes great social content, and proves your software brand extends to IRL. You don’t need to drop big $$ to make an impact on socials.

When you plan for a splashy product launch, pick one exact launch date, months out: Picking a specific date will make your life so much easier. This is the date your video, social posts, story, OOH, everything goes live. Make sure you pick an EXACT DATE vs. a general ballpark or week because it’s tighter (for attention) and ensures everything flights correctly.

Segment who's actually mad before you respond: Figure out what people are mad about. Segment who's mad: customers, haters, competitors, board members, employees, press. Translate the hate: they're mad we did X because it clashes with their belief of Y.

Steal winning UGC hooks from TikTok search: Go to TikTok. Search for relevant keywords. Filter by like count. Limit results to the last six months. This shows you exactly what's working: hooks, text, formats, and angles.

Design software products for progress, not just quick hits: Dopamine doesn't run out or get cheap, but when it's triggered too frequently in the same way, the brain tunes it out. That's habituation: the reward loses its impact, and the behavior becomes less reinforcing. The solution here is building to make your customers feel like they are making worthwhile progress as they move through your product.

If views online aren't converting, consider overhauling the whole social campaign: If your video views aren't converting, ask what their actual value actually is. It's not that views are useless; they just weren't translating into meaningful business outcomes. Sometimes a complete overhaul is what the business needs if you’re focused on lower-funnel conversions. We regularly turn off creative that meta allocates spend to when it doesn’t actually convert.

Anchor new products in something familiar first: Humans crave familiarity. Anchoring a product in tradition gives people a feeling of safety and legitimacy. Familiarity lowers friction, tradition builds trust, and anchoring in something known gives you a constant baseline.

Put the aha moment inside the first 60 seconds: People think this moment can happen externally, like in marketing content. That's false. This needs to happen in the product experience. The first thing someone does in your app has to produce a result they want to share or screenshot.

Make your onboarding pass the one-brain-cell test: Does it pass the one brain cell test (i.e. can someone fly through onboarding half awake, with one brain cell active)? This is the state 99% of people are in when they use your product. Fewer words mean less room for someone to think and easier for them to tap a button.

When you’re hiring a Product Marketer, test for funnel thinking, not top-of-funnel obsession: Ask them to name their top 5 product marketing experiments they’d ship in their first 30 days. Rank them by priority.

Reveal your product's value in layers: This will help you have control over guiding user discovery: a user learns one thing, then another. Each reveal builds confidence in the product and increases conviction, which leads to product stickiness. Top product builders definitely don't deliver everything up front.

When you’re shipping UGC, volume beats perfection, every time: A strong UGC engine will pump content that is fast to make, cheap to produce, and interesting enough to share. With our brands, we don’t waste time overthinking content. We take the opposite approach: high volume, fast iteration. This has led to 2.5B+ views and millions of customers.

At the top of each quarter, double-check your operating rhythm: You need owners. You need honesty. You need to make shit happen now. 

Every week, check in:

This rhythm compounds & grows into something, or you watch it all fumble in real time. Without consistency, owners and tracking, every project stays half-built.

Run a bloat check every quarter on your marketing costs: Take time to do a practical gut check to find where the bloat is hiding: retainer agencies, poor ad campaigns, overlapping tools, duplicative contractors. Tap the link to find an exact guide I used in-house to cut costs that didn’t make sense.

Go find where your future customers already live online: Getting involved with micro communities (where your target customers talk amongst themselves, like a Facebook Group or sub-Reddit), is one of my favorite seeding strategies for new startups, and I've seen companies start with this and leverage it all the way to 100M+ in ARR (Shoutout to Clay). In fact, doubling down on community is something we’re seeing more and more of in B2B as companies fight for market share amidst growing competition and tool collapse.

Don't hire a new employee for a growth lever until you have proof it works: Don't overhire before you clearly understand your growth lever. Make sure you have stat sig on a new growth lever that works before hiring there. Prove it yourself first, then scale once you have a framework for how someone can 10x it. Side note: if you can’t coach the person in the role, you won’t be able to uncover if they are bad for the company quickly enough.