sari

Once you know where you are, and where you want to go, the last thing you need to do is make sure you don't have any conflicting goals. When someone is grinding this is usually what's happening—but the conflicts between goals can be subtle and hard to see.

Land and Expand SMB / Mid-Market SaaS: ~90% is GOOD, ~110% is GREAT

If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up .

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal isn'... See more

And for the first time in your career, you feel anti-fragile. You’re no longer vulnerable to a publisher’s budget cuts, pivot to video, staff redundancy after a merger, or ‘new editorial direction’. No one can say that what you believe isn’t fit to print. You can experiment with new formats or revenue streams like exclusive chat rooms, paid podcast... See more

A decentralized social networking protocol could change this dynamic by ensuring open access to the network. Companies can still make money by offering services, as Gmail does with email and Github does with Git. But decentralizing access ensures that they can’t be monopolistic and ignore users. It creates a market-based approach where the best ide... See more

But influencer marketing is also broken. As I wrote in May’s Influencer Marketing 2.0, most influencer campaigns rely on hefty upfront lump-sum payments and use hacks like discount codes to track attribution. ROI is often poor, and measurement is even worse. The channel is difficult to scale efficiently.