I’ve been learning a lot about marketing lately. It’s my Achilles’ heel, but I want to change that. To learn the big concepts in marketing, I’ve been reading books, listening to and watching podcasts on YouTube, reading newsletters, etc. I’m even debating attending a conference on written marketing, something I never would have done before.

Knowledge and wisdom are different. Here are my thoughts on this from an old post:

Knowledge is acquired by learning new information or being made aware of something. Learning about marketing is an example of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge acquisition doesn’t always equate to adding value. There’s another step.

Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the outcome you desire. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it. Wisdom is acquired from experience (yours or someone else’s). Growing your company through marketing execution is the result of wisdom.

I’m now trying to move from acquiring knowledge about marketing to gaining wisdom. I’m getting experience by applying my knowledge and running tests on this blog. Here are a few things I’ve been doing:

• Titles – David Ogilvy’s books (and my most-read blog post in 2024) helped me understand the importance of titles. The content can be great, but if no one is curious enough to read it, it doesn’t matter. The title is critical to generating curiosity. My blog post title was an afterthought before. I’d throw something together just before I published to say I checked the box. I’m now more intentional about titling and have the beginnings of criteria for my blog post titles. My titles are much better than before I learned about marketing, but I still have more work to do.
• Descriptions – Similar to the titles, descriptions were a check-the-box exercise before. Each blog post has a description that’s visible in Google search results. I’m now making it a priority to write descriptions that generate curiosity.
• Tagline – People need to know what this blog is about, so I’ve added that info to the tagline. I also added a personal flex and credibility booster by including my number of consecutive posts (1,775+!). Now people know this blog is about entrepreneurship and biographies. The messaging in this tagline might still change, but it’s better than before.
• Calls to action – Marketing is all about getting people to act, usually by buying something. I’m not selling anything, but I still want to test getting people to act through my marketing efforts. Persuading them to subscribe is my focus. I’ve never made it a priority to get subscribers, but I’m changing that. A pop-up has been added to the bottom of blog pages to prompt readers to subscribe. I’ve added some text to the pop-up to test my messaging skills. I’m trying to clarify the value add, but I don’t love what’s there now. I’ll keep iterating on this message.
• Awareness – Awareness is broader; it focuses on optimizing for search engine optimization (SEO). Titles, descriptions, and a bunch of other stuff are being refined to help make posts show up in Google and AI app search results.

Those are most of my marketing efforts underway now. I’m learning a lot from doing them. As I read and learn more about marketing, you’ll likely see more changes to this blog. Everything won’t work, and I’m OK with that. The goal is to acquire wisdom through my own experiences.

I’m a few months into conquering my Achilles’ heel: marketing (see more here). I never understood the big concepts in marketing. More importantly, I never tried to understand them. And I paid the price for it. Not understanding marketing and not hiring someone to fill that gap prevented me from growing my company past our $10 million peak. I’m confident that the company could have gone to over $100 million in annual revenue if I’d filled that gap.

I’ve been reading a lot about marketing over the last few months. Right now, I’m focusing on messaging and telling your company’s story. This means how you position what you’re selling to your customers. From lots of reading, it’s clear that the foundation of messaging (and all marketing, really) is the problem. You must be clear about what problem you’re solving.

This seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. I went years in my last company without having a clear idea of the root problem we were solving for our customers. Lacking that, I also didn’t have a target customer profile (i.e., what people were experiencing this problem). Therefore, I didn’t know how big our market was (how many people exist that have the problem). Because I didn’t know the market size, I didn’t realize how big the opportunity was. Because I didn’t know how big the opportunity was, I hired based on where we were, not where we could go. There were more downstream implications (that weren’t good), but you get the idea.

Not having a clear idea of what problem I was solving was a major mistake. I was so focused on revenue that I missed the bigger picture. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees and missed out on building my company to over $100 million in revenue.

After learning more about the big marketing concepts, I now realize that not having a clear idea of the problem made it harder for me to understand marketing. It’s difficult to create an effective message when you don’t know how you’re creating value for customers and who those customers are.

Businesses exist to sell solutions to problems. If you’re not clear on the problem, selling (and marketing) your solution is many times more difficult.

One of the things I want to do is expand the reach of the content I share on my blog. I’ve been studying marketing for the last few months (see here), and I’ve learned that a big part of marketing is making people aware that something exists. I figure my blog content is a good way to do some more learning by doing.

One thing I noticed and have read about is that people are now posting blog-type content directly on platforms instead of directing them back to their website. Instead of sharing a link to their blog, they’re posting the blog content directly on X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn, for example. Apparently, if your post includes a link to content off the platform, the platform’s algorithms show that post to fewer people.

Learning this reminded me of how I started. When I began blogging in March 2020, I wanted to start in as frictionless a way as possible. I didn’t have a blog site, but I did have a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn allowed you to post “articles,” so I started sharing my daily posts as LinkedIn articles. Those did well because of my built-in LinkedIn connections. After my writing habit was fully formed months later, I bought a domain, designed a website, transferred my old posts to the website, and started posting daily on both platforms. Then, I stopped sharing content via LinkedIn articles and started creating posts that linked back to my blog site. Eventually, I stopped LinkedIn altogether after about two years and posted exclusively on my blog.

Well, I want to test some of the marketing tactics I’m learning by helping my blog content reach more people, so I’ve been debating posting my content on other platforms. Basically, I’ll start doing what I used to do. I’m familiar with LinkedIn, so it makes sense to start posting there again. I want to learn X, so it also makes sense to post there.

The concern is that I’ll have to manage posting on three platforms—my blog, LinkedIn, and X—every single day. One is fine, but three I’m not sure about. I’ll continue to ponder it a bit, but maybe instead of going from one to three, I should go to two and then move to three after I’m comfortable with the second platform.

A few weeks ago, I shared that I was going to start putting energy into better understanding marketing, or at least its concepts. Making a great solution isn’t enough—you must get it into the hands of people who can use it. That’s the important role marketing plays, and that’s why I want to understand it better.

Since that post, to understand the big concepts, I’ve been reading biographies of entrepreneurs who founded marketing agencies. I’ve also been consuming interviews on YouTube in which founders share recent growth strategies.

I still have a long way to go. Indeed, marketing will likely be something I study continually going forward. But I do have a much better understanding of marketing now. Reading biographies about entrepreneurs who deeply understood the craft of marketing and built businesses to help others market really helped make things click.

I’m excited about marketing now. Before, I didn’t understand it and was annoyed by it. But understanding it better has made me want to continue to learn about it, and I’m excited to try marketing my next idea!

I’ve been learning more about marketing recently. Last week I finished reading the second book about David Ogilvy. He was a famous advertising entrepreneur who founded the agency Ogilvy & Mather. One of the points stressed in both books is how important a headline is.

Most people will read an ad’s headline, and then some percentage will read the rest if the headline catches their attention. David focused on the headlines because he understood that people will never read the body of an amazing ad if the headline isn’t effective. Great ad content alone doesn’t sell products—there must be a great headline too. Most people focus on the former, but the latter is equally, if not more, important.

I want to improve at thinking about and writing the equivalent of headlines. I’m going to practice with titles for my blog posts. I write these daily, so it’s a good way to get reps of something that David said matters more than people realize. If I get good at this skill, I’m sure it’ll pay off in ways I can’t imagine.

One of the things that prevented my company from reaching nine figures in revenue was our marketing. We didn’t have a marketing strategy, and execution wasn’t great either. We still managed to reach over $10 million in revenue—but despite our efforts, not because of them.

My company’s marketing efforts were a reflection of me, the founder. I suck at marketing. I don’t understand it, and I didn’t try to hire to fill my gap. Even today, I haven’t tried to understand marketing. Of course, I could—many people deeply understand marketing and have shared their wisdom in books and other content. I just haven’t put the energy into trying to learn it.

I doubt I’ll ever be a great marketer, but I think there is value in learning some of the timeless concepts and frameworks of marketing. This week I’ve decided that I’m going to try to learn them. I’m not exactly sure how it will happen. I imagine it will be a mix of reading and talking to marketing-minded entrepreneurs, but we’ll see.

Marketing has been my Achilles’ heel as an entrepreneur, but I’m excited to put effort into understanding it better. I think it will be fun.

I started working on a project today. I have zero experience in the space and had no idea where to start, so I did some research online. I found a service provider whose site answered all my questions and then some. It had videos and document templates and offered a quarterly masterclass to answer questions. After digesting some of this content, I understood what it would take to complete the project and decided it’s best to hire someone instead of doing it all myself. I decided to hire the company whose content was so helpful. In fact, I didn’t even consider anyone else.

I really like how this company is giving knowledge away, free of charge, to attract customers. No salesperson or email campaign tried to convert me to a customer. Just a self-serve educational process that reinforced to me that this company is credible and trustworthy but also positioned me to complete the project on my own if I chose to do so. I’ll sign up and likely have to talk to a salesperson to become a paying customer, but the salesperson will basically be processing my order instead of having to sell me. Actually, I’ll be pushing them to get me onboarded quickly so I can complete my project quickly.

If you’re an early founder who understands a problem and space deeply, consider sharing that knowledge broadly. It could be a great way to attract qualified customers and shorten your sales cycle.

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I went to the store to buy an appliance today. I’m not knowledgeable about appliances, and I wanted to make the purchase and get on with my day. There were a ton of options. I narrowed it down to two or three based on price and features. In the end, I picked one based on the brand name. It was a reputable brand that’s known for making quality products. I got it home and tried it out, and it worked great. I’m a happy customer and will likely buy another appliance from that brand when the need arises.

Brand is important to a company. It’s what it’s known for and how people perceive it. Establishing a brand takes time, so early start-ups usually don’t have much of one. However, founders should be thinking about their brand from day one. How do they want to be perceived by their customers? What do they want to be known for? They should try to align their actions and strategies around the brand they want to build.

I’m not a marketing-minded person. I didn’t spend much time thinking about brand in the early days of CCAW. When I did, though, I knew we wanted to be known for quality products and exceptional service. At the time, we were selling some entry-level products of inconsistent quality that were difficult to warranty through manufacturers. These products weren’t aligned with our desired brand, so we stopped selling them. Our customer service satisfaction went up and our warranty claims went down, both of which did align with our brand.

If you’re an early founder, start thinking about the brand you want early on and reinforce it through your decision-making. You’ll be much more likely to build a company and brand that others respect and admire.

I recently went shopping and encountered a surprising sales style. The salesperson was knowledgeable, but he didn’t seem to care if I bought the product I was interested in. He wasn’t pushy or even trying to close the deal. He merely suggested I test out the product. I did, and I was impressed. A few days later, I bought it. Afterward, I asked the salesperson why he was indifferent to my purchasing decision. He said the product is so great that it sells itself and that if I didn’t buy it, someone else would—he sees a constant flow of people who are ready to buy.

This company has done a great job of understanding the pains of their customer and creating a product that solves them magnificently. Potential customers test the product, immediately see the value it creates, and are ready to pay for that value. The salesperson is there to answer questions, but the product itself is doing all the selling.

Lots of early founders want to focus on sales and marketing after they launch their product. They believe that’s the key to growth. Both functions are important to any business. But in the early days, founders should be laser focused on their product as the key to growth. An amazingly good sales and marketing strategy is to make a product so wonderful that people easily understand the value it creates for them. Happy customers spread the word to others. When those folks try it, they’ll love it and buy it, and they’ll spread the word.

If you’re an early founder concerned about sales and market, ask yourself: Is your product good enough to market and sell itself?

Customer acquisition was always top of mind at my startup. I’m not marketing-minded and I wasn’t smart enough to hire someone strong in this area, so we struggled. Eventually I figured out a decent strategy. When we acquired customers, we did so in a profitable manner. Over time, I realized that retention (which in our business model meant having customers who bought repeatedly) was key to our growth.

We spent tons of time, energy, and money trying to find new customers. Once we had them, it was easier to convince them to stay (purchase again) than it was to find new customers. If I had to continually replace old customers with new ones, fast growth would be extremely difficult. When I figured this out, we started to focus on the things that mattered most to our customers AND the type of customers most likely to be loyal. This, with other adjustments, allowed us to grow quickly to over $10 million in annual revenue.

Getting customers is important, but founders should also think about how to keep them. If your customers stick around, you’re on to something!