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This is a standalone resource where I make a laundry list of everything that inspires me. If you haven't read the rest of my blog already, I'd recommend starting there . The rest of my blog posts are related to my work. This one is a like a messy personal diary where I jot down things as they come to me. People I Want to Hire or Work With I maintain a dream list of people I'd like to work with. They are them. Video Editors Jim Friend - funny b2b videos. See ad for Clickup.  Jack Vaughan Gaurav Bhatt The video editors and animators in the screenshot Teh Aik : animated text videos Hayley Carloni : made Lily Ray's SEO presentation video with aligators . Excellent storytelling and concept idea. If you want bold design, she might be a great fit. Designer Lu Yu : Independent designer, based in Berlin Julián Leiss : Wrote a great article on auth0’s website redesign . Great for dev-first dev projedcts if he's open! Radhika Sen : headed design at The Whole Truth in India. I do like their creative direction in partnership with Thought Over Design. She's departing from Mumbai and may go independent. Primary Studio: Brand design studio Website Design Unseen : created the superlist site. They've been winning some serious awards. Brucira : design agency from India that designed apps like Zepto, Disney+ etc. They made Ruttl as a product. No Boring Design : interesting pitch Product Analyst  Balaji Kasiraju : This guy is impressive. Saw a reply on LinkedIn that made me add him on the list. Social Media Stonks Studio (India) Ad Agency BBH : see this ' Bassi vs Garnier ad ' posted by Cannes Mother : for their Claude Thinking campaign. The Harmon Brothers : They created Squatty Potty's viral ad campaign. Dapper : Netherlands based content marketing and performance marketing agency. B2B ads have long been boring and mundane. They're bringing D2C type content to the world of B2B, which seemed unique to me. Check out this ad . Audio Band 9Teen : For custom ad songs. They may create. Production Houses Early Man Film : if friends ask for a referral. This creative was good! Retail Marketing BrandVak : did retail for Cornitos ( case ) 3D Designer Arek Kajda : worked with MDS and did work for Pitch ( twitter ) Lifecycle Marketing Agency Scalero : I saw Notion use them. I hired them as well and really liked the experience. SEO Agency Marketing OG : mentioned in Nick Lafferty's newsletter. Worked with Hotjar, Ramp and some good clients. Market Researchers Beehive Research : Marketers researchers used by Harvard Performance Marketing Keene Do : ppc ads Paintgun : performance marketing stint for Lovable Copy Krishna P Unny : very good communicator. Good vibes. Can partner for research, art, and design writing. I'm sure there are more people that I have missed out on. Especially designers! My work at Streamline gave me access to the best designers, since only the most skilled designers would purchase Streamline. There are lots of free/cheaper resources available, but they cared enough about their craft to buy the most premium library out there. Books Panchantantra This is an ancient collection of children stories that had a huge impact on my life. Each story is interconnected to the next one and teaches kids about moral values like friendship and trust. My father narrated one story to me and my brother every night growing up. I can't find the original texts online but when I do, I'll link to it. Horse Sense by Jack Trout If you've read my piggybacking article , you know I'm a fan of this method to grow companies. You don't need to read the entire book to get the point. Inside Intuit They actually wrote a book about the early days. There are some direct marketing ads in there, and you can see how different Intuit was to everyone else that was building then. Companies Uniqlo Uniqlo 's cost of goods sold makes up 53% of their total revenue. This is significantly higher than other fashion companies like Ralph Lauren or Zara, so they're a much better value for money. Marketing spend is only at 3%. Uniqlo made it's founder the wealthiest person in Japan. I like companies that operate like this. Reformation Their tagline is "Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We're #2." Masterful copywriting. Uses the fewest possible words to get the message out. ASUS They make computers. Taiwanese company. ASUS blows out all other laptops I've ever used in my life. Customer service is excellent. To give you context: Asus will send someone home to fix things if all I do is send an email. On the other hand, Apple will force me to call someone and spend 2 hours trying to screenshare. And they might not even solve the problem. There are a thousand more features than my 16" Macbook Pro and surprisingly faster too than the 48GB Apple Silicon I have. I'm impressed by their engineering power and depth of service. But they're not easy to shop from. Posthog Posthog is a software that helps other software companies build better products with tools like product analytics, surveys, feature flagging, and experimentation amongst other things. They are chronically obsessed with transparency, focus on breadth over depth, and do branding in a strangely tasteful way. Start here . Canva X GiveDirectly Very cool mission. Very cool execution. Cool People Diana Stegall I enjoyed her podcast ' Land of Desire ' about French history, culture, and food. The storytelling and production was the best I've ever seen. She currently works as a senior editor in tech. Biswa This is an Indian comedian. I wanted to try my hand at standup comedy, improv (or atleast bringing humor in marketing) and found a youtube playlist of him teaching comedy. It's not pretty to look at, but this is the only available version today. Quotes Tur i oturen This is a Swedish quote that literary translates to "luck in bad luck". It's like the lady that had a heart attack on a flight (bad luck) but there were 15 cardiac surgeons on the same flight since they were all heading to the same conference in LA so she was okay (good luck). I heard it on a podcast lately and thought it was cool enough to bookmark. घमण्डी का कोई ईश्वर नहीं , ईर्ष्यालु का कोई पड़ोसी नहीं, क्रोधी का कोई मित्र नहीं This is a Hindi (Indian) quote roughly translated to "The arrogant has no God, the envious has no neighbor, and the angry has no friend". It comes from the faith I follow and I like to remind myself to walk this path. I think I got it from the Bhagwat Geeta but it's been years so I'm not sure. We are the ones we've been waiting for Nice. Everything Else Bananas in the US Bananas in the US are twice/thrice larger than you'd find in India. They are huge . Almost the size of your forearm. And that reflects across everything they do: giant Coke bottles, large fruits and vegetables, big homes, and so on. Having worked with Americans for the past five years, I’ve noticed a difference in the way they operate. They take risks and move fast. They always want more. You can’t become an economic superpower in such a short period without that mindset. France, on the other hand, has more delicate fruits, and it shows in how they operate. Their products are naturally more artistic, and they care about little details. India grows hardy crops that offer high nutrition at a lower cost (e.g., makhana, ragi). That’s why Indians can innovate at a surprisingly low cost. There’s even a word for it: jugaad. If you have time to spare, I’d recommend watching YouTube videos on “Supermarket tour in X country.” It’s a great way to see how people buy and sell. More so, since software is already internationalized.

Perplexity has a browser - Comet . I think it's a fabulous tool to run activation tests and to friction log. The premise is that if AI runs into issues using your app, chances are that a human would do too. Let's try to find friction for three companies: MakeMyTrip (similar to Booking.com ) Canva Calendly The first step is to identify a core action. In the case of MakeMyTrip, we want to search for flight tickets. Watch the recording below and try to identify some obvious issues. One issue that you might notice is that it books a return ticket automatically. The default return ticket falls outside MakeMyTrip's own edge cases and throws an error. The website also takes a long time to load. Moving on to another test.. Canva. Canva runs a lot of user tests using usertesting.com . But Comet still ran into a few issues, that I believe humans could run into as well. Canva uses a little crown icon to distinguish free vs pro templates. Comet didn't quite understand and ran into paywalls thrice in a row. It accidentally exported a PNG when it should've exported a GIF or an MP4 format. It missed the little alert Canva showed. It had difficulty closing the templates sidebar to pick elements. and so on... Some of them might be in this video below: Calendly had the best UX of all the activation tests I ran. AI could smoothly complete the journey. The only two places I saw it get stuck was the timezone selector and the extra popups. The timezone selector wasn't obvious for the AI to select, and the default one from Calendly was incorrect. It also had to close an extra popup which I thought could be removed. IRCTC (railway site) was the hardest of them all. AI just couldn't get through to any possible action. It didn't understand why the "Book Now" button was greyed out after a search was made. The point of this blog is not to identify issues at Canva/Calendly. The point is to show that AI has the ability to find issues that might not be obvious to us. You could run it to do mini feature tests or full blown ICP tests. You can chat with in real time, pretending to be a real user. It also takes screenshots in real time, so you don't have to. Download it here: perplexity.ai/comet

A long list of little things I discovered in the activation flow (part 1). Over a 130 screenshots If you only have time to read a few, I recommend 4, 9, 14, 16, 20, 26, 30 Potential opportunities? Not sure if this is an A/B test or a bug, but I did not see this screen in the onboarding process. After the segmentation questions, it took me straight to the modal window (?pathway=share). To reproduce, you'll need to sign up via the direct google identity login system via a work email. I also see "personal" recommended when I sign up via a work email address. It only happens when I use the email/password combo to sign up. 2. Cookie banner could be a little more subtle. I saw the cookie banner and the Google identity login on the same screen. Almost ate up half of the screen. 3. Users need to scroll to see the next question. (I'm on my smaller laptop so shouldn't affect most users). It could lead to higher incomplete rates. Suggestion would be to auto-scroll and align to the next one. Progress bar also doesn't progress as I answer all four questions since they're on the same vertical flow, essentially making it feel like the progress is static. Another suggestion would be to have a tooltip over Continue . Or some action when I hit Continue . When you hit back, your progress is lost. It would be nice to partially save progress similar to how Typeform/Tally do. 4. Perhaps this entire area that says Drop files here to upload could be clickable and not just the Upload button. A good example is YouTube Studio, though not perfect. 5. I lack business context here but would it be better to let users upload both files and folders at once? Why should someone need to make an extra click and bifurcate their search? 6. Image previews only appear after a few hours. After I upload the file, it would be nice to see the preview appear. 7. The start sharing button took me to a place where I could take no action, at least at first glance. The Share file button was disabled. A suggestion would be to group the "Create and copy link" button with the "Share file" button. It seemed a bit odd, even though I could eventually figure it out. 8. 8a. You probably know this, but the purchase flow opens in a new tab and not as a modal window. Not really an issue but thought I'd share incase you see an opportunity. 8b. It also doesn't say "Start Free Trial" unlike what the pricing page states. 9. Even after connecting my Google account, it doesn't pre-fill contact data. I'm thinking that was the purpose? Typing in, doesn't bring up any contacts. 10. There are a few links that open automatically btw. The Android page is one of them. Here's a bug report [link redacted]. 11. Great visual in the desktop app but it doesn't scale correctly.  2GB is 0.1% of 2000GB. The visual makes it seems like it's a third of it? 12. Essentials is more expensive than Plus. Plus is cheaper than Essentials. Was a bit confusing from a naming POV btw. 13. Probably need a different name for the app and the folder. Harder to re-open it because it accidentally crashed. 14. Entered card. Payment fails. I see no reason or error message. I just keep clicking on the button and nothing happens. 15. It asks for my PAN number. PAN number is a very sensitive number related to personal income taxes. I have never seen another company ask for it. My 2c is that if PayTm is asking for all those details from Bill, they are doing you dirty. When I pay via UPI, I should only be asked for my UPI ID (similar to a Paypal ID). It's one simple field. PayTm is likely creating an account in their software if they ask for my pan card details. PayTm's also not doing very well and could resort to doing such things to inflate their sign up numbers :( 14. There isn't anything like address number. It's a duplicate of zip code/pin code in the Dropbox flow. You could remove it. VAT is also deprecated, and replaced by GST. 15. Payment via UPI goes through and I see it in my bank account. But Dropbox never sees the light of it in the UI. In fact, I could see I had two subscriptions active and yet, it won't remove the banner in the dashboard. I'll update this if a charge goes through in 30 days. 16. Emails trigger far too often. Same emails are received twice. Both variants of an A/B test are sent a couple of minutes apart. Security new sign in email is received even I set a password/verify my email for the first time. 17. Kind of odd to not have a tier for 2 users. 18. Upsell (essential to business) required me to re-enter my card. Address was pre-filled though. 19. Doesn't auto-pull contacts from my work email address. 20. Desktop app for Dropbox is wonky. Kept crashing for an entire day. I couldn't reopen it. Reason was weird. Couldn't even open this message properly. 21. Still says "essentials" at the top when I have upgraded to "business" 22. Even when I see the "Billing Method Updated Successfully", it refuses to remove the banner. 23. Share works on one folder at time. Maybe have it work on multiple folders? 24. Surprised I never saw that you have this feature in the UI. So cool! 25. Replay onboarding asks users to upload a video and she waits for a few seconds for us to upload. I don't see any button in the same screen. 26. Upgrade bug in replay. I click on Learn more Takes me here. 27. Tiny, but that "Feedback" link isn't easy to see. 28. Could reduce the spacing at the top. 29. Have you considered allowing people to embed Replays in their website? It doesn't seem like it works today. 30. All CTAs in app don't mention that free trial is available btw. It would improve the CTR in the button copy if it was clearer that there's a trial available?

Collecting Cancellation Data Stripe has this functionality in their billing settings that you can use to capture cancellation reasons. Once you have this set up, you get two types of data: MCQ options that people choose from Freeform text input field when people choose 'Other' option. Exporting Cancellation Data from Stripe Stripe will let you hover over each cancellation to see what they said. But you won't be able to export this data as a CSV. You'll have to use Stripe Sigma which comes with a 30 day free trial. I don't know SQL nor did I have the time to learn how to use it. So, I used ChatGPT. Fed ChatGPT some example codes from the template section of Sigma, and asked it to create one for this use case. Took me 20 minutes of trial and error but the outcome was pretty nice! You can paste both of these in the editor as is and then hit RUN. SQL Snippet #1 - Freeform field SELECT cancellation_reason_text, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason_text SQL Snippet #2 - MCQ field data SELECT cancellation_reason, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason Analyzing Churn Data Download the MCQ version and create a lovely bar graph to see the primary reasons why people cancel. For the freeform field, it'll require a bit more work before it's usable. You'll have to Import that data in Ch atGPT and ask it to run cluster analysis and 'group by themes'. Then, you can ask it to convert it to a table format, add numbers based on how many times the theme recurs, and expand on each! Making Decisions with Churn Data You'll know why people are cancelling before paying hundreds of dollars for a churn prevention tool. But once you know why people are cancelling, you can take better steps to across the product, starting with segmenting them at the onboarding. ⭐

Imagine this... You need to grow 10X but your budget is 1/10th. How would you win? If I told you that was possible and then some more, you’d probably call me crazy. In the past three years that I’ve worked at Streamline  (an icons and illustrations library), we’ve grown to millions of users. The majority of Fortune 100 companies use/pay us, including customers like Vanguard, Twilio, Bloomberg, and Booking.com. You’d probably find it hard to browse the internet without running into Streamline. Streamline is bootstrapped, calm , and without a sales team. The company has a zero meetings culture and sometimes our founder will even promote competitors. It is wild and beautiful at the same time. So, hi. I’m Khushi. I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . In this article, I’ll go beyond the common knowledge that we’ve already seen with PLG and marketing. I’ll share counterintuitive learnings with some starting ideas to implement them in your own company. Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn: Never market alone. You’re a small team. You need outsized impact. Find a horse to ride. Your free product should probably scare you. Don’t limit PLG to only the product. Expand it to your team’s time and everything else. Be shameless when asking for help and advice. and some more! #1 Tip: Find a horse to ride Finding a horse to ride is a concept from a book called Horse Sense . It means that you need to find something bigger than yourself to climb the next mountain. Maybe it is a rich dad. Or your successful partner. SurveyMonkey’s CEO was Facebooks’ COO husband, and that’s how they got the idea of a growth team ( source ).  It is a concept similar to piggybacking in international business. Piggybacking is a market entry strategy where you partner up with someone local and ride on their back. So, how did Streamline piggyback? 1. Piggybacked with channel partnerships Streamline created a plugin for Figma . Eventually, we won Figma’s best graphic design award in 2022 and became a top 1% plugin of all times. We also partnered up with Lucid. This gave us access to 60M users that could reach Streamline in 2 clicks. Channel partnerships  bring in users that retain. Unlike a paid ads campaign, you’re embedded in their workflow. 2. Piggybacked on end users with attribution Every person that uses Streamline for free is required to attribute to us with backlinks. Not everyone will honor these license rules but those that do helped us cross a domain authority of 74 with around 100k backlinks. When you think of attribution or watermarks, you don’t need to have a singular use-case. There are more ways to incorporate them , even with paid users. 3. Piggybacked on schools like Harvard Streamline’s taught by educators at Harvard, ShiftNudge, and some of the top design courses in the industry. Instead of simply offering an education program, we wanted to make sure it compounds. Every student that uses Streamline attributes to us from their design portfolio. Portfolios are the most shared asset by any student. We’re also a small team so we ask students to introduce us to their educators, instead of directly offering the license to a student. Educators then distribute Streamline to their current students and all future batches. It also reduces abuse of the program. Acquisition is done by a single student but the distribution is done by the educator by the hundreds. Plus, it’s taught by educators so product recall is much higher. Streamline is also embedded in the curriculum. 4. Piggybacked on trends like memes Memes are very shareable and instantly recognizable. We created a vector meme set that went viral. It hit the front page on HackerNews and got us roughly a thousand backlinks. Then, we doubled down on it. We drew people’s favorite memes if they’d share. So, how can you piggyback? Piggyback on thought leaders, like Reforge piggybacked on Andrew Chen. Piggyback on celebrities by creating a variation of what they’ve said. Music covers  is an example. Twitter did this with their “ If you can dream it, you can tweet it ” campaign. Piggyback on macro-economic trends. Piggyback on your employees similar to what Google did  when they first launched Gmail. Piggyback on your end customers. There are just so many different ways ! #2 Tip: Structure your free product such that it scares you Too often, the free version is a lead magnet in disguise. It offers the bare minimum to incentivize a sign up. Think of Notion, Figma, Canva. All of their free versions are awesome. Yes, it’s going to compete with your premium product but someone else is going to disrupt you if you leave that gap open. That’s why companies like Procter and Gamble have similar products in different price ranges or targeting different segments. How Streamline structures its free product? I remember saying, “Hey, we’re probably giving too much for free”. And our founder responded with, “That’s the threshold. If it scares you, let’s run with it. Anything less than that is not useful”. Our free library offers real vector icons. People don’t get non-editable PNGs that aren’t as useful. When Streamline was first launched as a side project, the founder created the largest ever icon set that the world had ever seen. He shared it for free and was an instant hit. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s cheap. The free products are labor intensive to create. Pixel icon set  took a very long time to create and is ungated. Lots of our sets are open-source. Think of open source as a distribution strategy , not a business model. The product is also ungated . No need to provide your email address to download thousands of assets. All features are ungated and free to use. Trial requires only an email, no card. Although, instead of throwing people directly in the app, we realized it was better to show a welcome modal window  educating them about Streamline. Instead of clicking on a CTA, they can also close the welcome modal which is more of a Systems 1 thinking. But it should still compound. It’s a business, not a charity. #3 Tip: Compound everything. In simplest of terms = PLG means the product grows itself. It’s a compounding loop. More users bring more users. What if you applied this compounding loop to other parts of the business as well? Compounding your team’s time Let’s take an example. Say you could pick one of the GTM opportunities. A one-off newsletter sponsorship with a big influencer or run ads on a small website. Assume that the setup time for both projects is nearly the same. I’d pick option 2. The ad banner.  Newsletter is a one-and-done project. It requires time and discussions. When you set up an ad on a partner website, you don’t need to have a second conversion. Once it is set up, it can last for years if things go well. This way, you compound your time. With every new partner, I add up. This means, partners are only brought on after research because I want it to last for years. Our sales process is also PLG of sorts People fill out a form with what they need. And we send a quotation over to them. That’s it. There are no meetings. We’ve closed large contracts by just a few emails. Even governments have bought from us simply after exchanging a few emails. The product is very visual, so that definitely helps. Compound even a referral campaign  We don’t ask users to share with other users. Instead, we ask users to share with influencers. We try to max out distribution with every campaign. #4 Tip: Solving churn Churn will always be something to consider with self-serve companies. Streamline can’t lock data in. Plus, you aren’t forced to call someone to cancel a subscription. How we’re addressing churn? Better ICP targeting to freelancers, knowledge workers, and agencies. There are companies that get a subscription when they have a major redesign coming up but after that, they don’t anymore. Create a one-time purchase product for individual brands that only needed one set. This helps us get larger AOVs with more satisfied customers. Plus, it increases word of mouth. Once someone downloads an icon set, it will live forever in their design system and helps optimize for internal team shareability. How you can handle churn? Shift your ICP targeting to users that spread more word of mouth or retain longer. Learn how to calculate your word of mouth coefficient  and monitor it . If your ICP has an on-and-off use case, consider offering trial extensions, pauses, discounts before they cancel. #5 Tip: Have influence over the product Many growth teams are asked to market, activate, retain and do all sorts of things while having no real influence over the actual product. When the product tanks, this team is usually the scapegoat. You can’t expect to be given influence without putting in the hours. I’ve spent my own money to learn the subject before I tried to market it. I remember taking 6-month long courses on product design and UX that cost thousands of dollars. Eventually, I was given a proper growth pod with devs, designers, and support resources. The founder actively asks for my feedback on every new feature/product we build. And I do give (a lot!) of feedback/suggestions. The team is excited to work on growth problems. I remember asking the company for an additional 15% of engineering capacity and they gave me far more than I asked for. You can’t grow a product you don’t believe in. Growth teams deserve a skin in the game. One of my favorite matrixes is the shareability matrix. How shareable is your product? Internally within a team and externally. You can apply this to all features and products. Although, I do step out of conversations very often. Streamline is more of an art than it is a science. The design team has a very high bar. For example, Streamline’s entire library is drawn multiple times over. They spend an obsessive amount of time harmonizing and re-harmonizing a set, even years after its drawn. Look at that ampersand (&) icon from our chunky Plump icon set that was inspired by cartoons. This level of attention to detail resonates with our target audience. And I don’t think a single competitor can match that. The lesson here is to step in and give feedback, but also step out when working with creatives. #6 Tip: Be shameless when asking for help The more you know, the more you’ll realize what you don’t know. I remember cold-dming execs at billion dollar companies who were ready to extend an hour of their time to help me out. Hillary Miller  who was the Head of Whimsical and now at Calendly mentored me every month for over a full year, for nothing in exchange. People like Aazar Shad , Mike Taylor  (ran a 50+ growth agency), Foti and Jessica (founders at GrowthMentor ), Katelyn Bourgoin , bet on me in the early days. I remember reaching out to Michael Pici  (ex VP of Product, Revenue at HubSpot), Adam Fishman  (ex-Head of Growth at Lyft), and Nick Lafferty  (ex-Head of Growth Marketing at Loom). I asked them to critique and poke holes in my strategy. I asked them why I’d fail.  I even chain-smoked 60+ courses  from Reforge, CXL to learn as much as I could. There are lots of people who have helped me get here. The journey is not easy but it’s fun when you have great friends/family/advisors to help you along the way. It also helps to have a good founder like Vincent! Thank you for reading and I hope this article helped! Disclaimer: These are my insights and hypothesis. These opinions are mine alone, and not of the company’s. However, I made sure to get approval from the company to share this article.

No one dreams that they will become a marketer when they grow up. You could be a scientist pushing humanity forward. A surgeon saving lives. Or even a founder solving problems. Marketers? We're most commonly know to spam. Growth practitioners? We're most commonly know to suck the life out of a good product. Clearly, everyone hates marketers. It's not a secret. So, why on earth would I knowingly choose this profession? Re: "I love you" I once sent a newsletter. The response I got was "I love you" from one of our users. In a world where marketers spam, this is my KPI. Where people actually want to hear from you. Look, I know. Marketers don't build a product. All we do is amplify. We help good products reach more people. Like journalists, we amplify stories. Too often, good products die out because no one thought how to bring it to market. And build a real business around it. It's not this black and white with "good" and "bad". Amongst all of this, my aim is simple. Great products deserve to win, and then some more. And I do that in four ways: acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention. I almost never touch the core product but strongly influence the product depending on what the market wants and what we can win against. If your goal is entrepreneurship... Then solving marketing & growth is a great skillset to have. Consumer behavior is notoriously hard. People don't act the way they think. They don't think the way they act. It's as much of an art as its a science. Your company depends on you... Who do you think gets fired if the company fails to make money? Company doesn't perform well? They say "oh, our marketing isn't great". CMOs have the shortest tenure. Driving income is a huge responsibility that marketing and growth team shoulder together. The life of the company depends on how many people resonate with you and draw money out of their pockets. Marketing teams can no longer be siloed into these awareness-only buckets as they have been historically. You have to influence the product. You have to be on top of bugs, monetization model iterations, algorithm changes etc. You can't be accountable for revenue or poor performance if you don't have influence over every part of the company. * By influence, I don't mean ownership. Much to my mother's disapproval, I have rejected bonuses too. This is how I justify it: I will still want us to reinvest it back into the business. This is definitely not financially smart. Sometimes, companies know I'll reject it so they'll just send it and tell me later. More importantly, I also get to work with awesome people, who put me first. I understand not every company can and will do this. Unfortunately, I live for validation. The fact that people like what I do makes me happy. Almost every company that I have ever joined as a consultant offered me a full-time role :) Failure and feedback loops Marketing and growth teams are close to the customers in two ways. Failure is real. It cannot be sugarcoated by user count or qualitative feedback. Instead, if you're not making money, you're responsible. We have the shortest feedback loops. Product takes months to build. Design iterations take longer. Engineering has to get through several sprints to ship. We can ship an experiment and train our intuition almost immediately. It's as real as it gets. Customer support is close to customers but doesn't have revenue accountability (except for mature companies). We talk to customers to map out their buyer journey and trigger points. We know how we compare to our competition and what changes are they making in their product in real-time. Having short feedback loops and being close to customers gives us so much more insight into what works and doesn't. Given all that context, here are some founding principles of how I think about marketing and growth. My growth and marketing manifesto 1. No traffic for the sake of traffic Target people that will get value out of your product. It's easy to believe every channel can work for you. If you're a B2B brand selling solar home installations that cost tens of thousands of dollars, posting generic drowsy content on IG is never going to work. Be honest to yourself and look for early signals to lean into it or pivot away. Essentially, there are two types of users we want: 1) People who can get real value out of our product 2) People who offer us feedback to improve 2. Ship with intensity and urgency Focus on things that matter. And then execute best you can. I've made mistakes of hiring people that simply cannot get things done. Or they need a hundred feedback rounds to ship even the little things. It's hard to find people who love what they do so much so that intensity and urgency is a by-product. They don't count the hours they spend. And they *want* to spend their weekends advancing in their field. If you don't love what you do, you'll just get burnt out. To win, you need four things. Mediocrity is competitive. But there's always room at the top. And that's where you should want to go to. Here's a tweet by the founder of Runaway to better explain what I mean: 3. Never market alone Find a horse to ride and piggyback on anything . You're a small boat in an ocean. You cannot make big waves by doing it yourself. Let the wave carry you. 5. Find out what is working So you can double down on what is working and what isn't. Very hard to execute in real life though because buyer journeys aren't simple. I used a lot of stuff at Streamline to get clarity (qualitative interviews, post-purchase surveys, product marketing analytics data, marketing mix models). Start with the easy stuff. Then layer on. 6. Chase insights, not revenue Revenue is an outcome and focusing too much over it just leads to stress. I hardly check Stripe to see how much money we make every week. Instead, I mine insights. And use those to form winning strategies. And eventually, you'll see you've come pretty far. See how one insight helped us reach 60 million users . Figma's first ever marketer shares a similar sentiment, "Metrics don’t help because what good is +x% [growth] when you need to 10x, 100x, 100000x? All you have is intuition." 7. No fluff If something's not working, we have to be honest about it. Cut down fluff from everywhere. I don't like to spend time working on stuff that truly doesn't matter. And hate it when copy is unnecessarily wordy or stuffed with adjectives. 8. Play with sportsmanship No belittling competitors. At Streamline, our competitors often promote us. Vincent promotes our competitor launches. It's kind of weirdly healthy. It won't apply to every industry but we don't throw shade. 9. Be honest with your audience, no clickbait-y content or dark patterns I don't like to receive click-baity zero value content. And I don't want users to receive content like this either. It's simple. Treat your users like they're already customers. 10. Be curious and invite feedback Feedback is a gift. I often publish my work in Slack inviting feedback from whoever is willing to give it. Earlier in my career, I would feel bad when I received harsh feedback. But now, I actively seek out feedback. And it really helped me improve. 11. Optimize for happiness I took a class at Essec called the Science of Happiness and it taught me more about psychology than anything ever could. Many people aren't truly happy. We are in a loneliness pandemic. 😶‍🌫️ It honestly doesn't cost much to put a smile on people's faces. It's free to do. At least, most of the times. An example of this is when I had to send a discount code to a guy named Marq. The coupon code I sent to him was called "MarqMyWords," and he was surprised I took that time out to be unnecessarily creative. When I provide harsh feedback to someone on my team, I now try to do it in a way that brings them joy. It's challenging, and I admit that I fail at times. 12. Aim for inbounds, over outbounds Over the years, I've tried outbound multiple times and realized that the ROI never works out. Maybe they churn faster or the conversion rate is lower or you're terribly impacting your brand equity. Inbounds are the way to go. Here's an example. I received an inbound message from Shaan Puri back in 2021 that said something along the lines of if I was consulting for growth marketing or had an agency. Shaan Puri is pretty well known! There was no way I could reach him via outbounds. Or, from Kyle, who is pretty much defined the PLG space as we know it today. And another inbound from the person behind one of the most viral UNO campaigns ever. She created the “You can’t draw 2 on draw 2” post. She also worked with government intelligence agencies to fight terrorists, using data and marketing! Absolute badass. You might argue, "Hey Khushi, it's probably because you're bad at outbound". Well, maybe I am. But I do know that I don't like to be on the receiving end of outbound sales messages. Asking for feedback via outbounds is great though but direct sales wasn't something I could ever see work. And the only time outbound sales sort of worked for me was when Stefan Bader from cello.so reached out. It was mostly because I was already interested in his work and I sent him a connection request first. 13. A no is better than a maybe or a yes If I come to you for feedback or suggestions, I prefer you say no to a certain project idea vs a maybe or a half-yes. Aggressive prioritization is the name of the game. Thank you for reading my rather long manifesto. I'll make it shorter in the future. It is essentially a guideline about how I think about marketing and growth. And why I am still excited by a field that nearly everyone hates. I'm always looking for good talent, so if you'd like to work with me, send me a message. Best, Khushi

I recently wrapped up a complex technical SEO and programmatic SEO project. The site has hundreds of thousands of pages. After about 9 months of iteration, we've started to see incredible wins. Every time you hit a new traffic milestone, Google sends an email. These emails are like a drug. You can see the quick succession in which we hit them. Sometimes, they aren’t even a full week apart. What works and doesn't work with programmatic SEO? Technical SEO is different from programmatic SEO It's more task-based and requires deep, specialized skills. Programmatic SEO can be handled internally, but a technical SEO review will require external help if you're creating hundreds of thousands of pages. A spiky point of view For PSEO to work, you need a point of view, a specialized competitive advantage. If you don't have a competitive advantage, there's no defensibility. I like building things that companies can get benefit from even if I'm no longer working there. Their growth shouldn't stop if I'm not around. So, be extremely defensive on the projects you work on with programmatic SEO. A no is typically better than a maybe . That means, no to — Content that ChatGPT can generate (now or in the future) Content that is generic enough for competitors to generate too Content that relies on piggybacking  off a partner. If the partner already dominates the search query, you'd end up competing with them. The only time this works is if you use a multi-pronged approach that targets LLMs, forums, and layers on paid ads. Content that is costly to serve for free. Anything more than a couple cents per user is costly for most products. It should also never generate customer support tickets unless that fits into your growth loops. Content that brings traffic but is unlikely to bring customers. The cost to serve should be low so that you're not forced to monetize free users just to cover expenses. Serving these pages is expensive. We've had our AWS or Vercel bill explode because it's not just Google crawling them. A bunch of LLM crawlers do too (even TikTok has one), and they all weigh your site down. You can block some of them but you'll still want to allow the majority of them since LLMs search is the future. If you're looking for an SEO consultant, send me a message  and I'd love to make an intro :) Lessons from programmatic SEO and when to bring in an experts Technical SEO is better left to experts You can drown in tasks and you need someone to filter out the good-to-have vs the must-have tasks. Reading Google's wordy documentation and having the expertise to skip through the irrelevant stuff isn't easy. SEO is iterative When I brought on the consultant, I shared with him and the team that I see SEO as an iterative process. It’s okay to try something, see how it performs, and even recall it if we learn something new later. I’ve said the same to developers and designers. In many cases, B+ work is actually better than aiming for A+. It gets us moving faster, and avoids spending too much time perfecting something that might need to change anyway. Setting that expectation early helps. At the same time, if quick wins are the priority, this might not be the right kind of project. That usually signals a modest expected return, and to make the ROI look reasonable, you’ll probably try to keep the investment low. But big wins usually require big swings. If the upside isn’t meaningful to begin with, it might be better not to invest at all. You should own the strategy and insights For the strategy bit, which involves a business and competitor understanding, it's best to bring those insights from the internal team. You typically don't want to delegate this to external technical SEO partners. The intuition muscle isn't there yet and it's not a good use of their specialized skillset. I only gave access to Google Search Console and that was sufficient to drive the wins. No customer research calls, no Mixpanel, nothing. Own the project management I understood technical SEO deeply enough to steer the ship if we ever started working on the wrong things. I am not an expert but curiosity helps. We set up a Slack channel. Typically, I had one meeting a month with the consultant and zero meetings with developers/designers. I would first share the context of the project I wanted to pick up, on the call. The SEO expert would then estimate and come up with a list of things we need to do to achieve the goal. I would then be asked to double check if the list made sense and if there's anything we could remove or add. Once it was approved, I'd then hand off to our devs and designers to build. I'd take up any questions my team had. If it got too technical, I'd move it back to the expert. I'd get some sort of rough estimates from devs on how long each task would take. Eg, this task will take 3 hours with high confidence or, this task will take 2 days with low confidence This helped the team move way faster. We want the expert to share his expertise, not drown in project management or QA work. I wanted to ensure there was no scope creep and minimize surprises in the business. In fact, developers/designers were not recommended to directly communicate with the consultant even though they were all in the channel. We had a private internal channel and a shared channel. After devs shipped all the tasks in the sprint, they'd mark it in review. I'd typically review first and then hand off to the expert to review. I did not review each task individually otherwise it would distract me from all the other projects I was deployed at. Our developers were senior enough that they typically did not require a lot of feedback rounds or QA once tasks were shipped. We usually got them right on the first try. P.S Bugs do creep up. They deindexed the entire site and I only caught it a week later! But the quality of work was always high. So, having a small senior team helps. Thanks for reading! Always happy to hear questions, stories, or ideas. You can subscribe to my newsletter if you'd like. Emails are sent out once a quarter, or semi-annually.

Is CXL worth it? CXL is pretty darn awesome. Some content is slightly outdated, some of it is a drag. But other than that, I think the growth marketing minidegree and all-access pass is superb. Hi, I’m Khushi Lunkad. I'm a growth marketer working for SaaS and Ecommerce companies. I discovered my passion for growth marketing in 2018. Since then, I have completed over 60 online courses on Coursera, Edx, DataCamp, Hubspot, Facebook Blueprint, Google Academy, Copyhackers, Chase Dimond, Foxwell, CTC etc. If after reading this review, you realize CXL isn't right for you, I put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses tagged with budget, seniority and goals. Check that out as well! It’s been 20 months since I completed CXL’s minidegree and so far, I’ve managed to work with the best minds in the world. People know what CXL is and what is stands for. Edit as of June 2025: AI is evolving rapidly. I'm checking with CXL's team whether they'd update content, because otherwise you're at risk of learning outdated stuff for months. I heard back from the team. Review of ConversionXL’s growth marketing courses : CXL’s beginner’s courses were more actionable than the advanced courses from Google Academy. Their All-Access Pass is a little pricey and may be an opportunity cost for some. Most of the teachers at CXL institute are good at both — their work and teaching. Some (1–2) teachers are good at what they do but their teaching styles didn’t suit me. Know the Certificate requirements before you sign up. CXL does not take the quality of their education lightly. And I compare this with 60+ courses , some worth $4000 and some completely free that I have taken. You need to get 90% of the questions right to pass and the questions are tricky. But, it’s actually one of the best entry-level courses out there, no joke. The videos are incredibly well-edited and concise = 0% rambling. I’ve benefited greatly from the training at my job and consistently impress my colleagues by just applying the learnings. Every video has a transcript that you can search. Most lessons come with downloadable slides, lots of templates and reading material. The instructors share everything that they’ve got without any hesitations. But, this is what an instructor at CXL shared with me 😐 "CXL is very tactical. Some courses are also very beginner level. Some are good, of course. But I think overall Reforge is far more advanced." - An instructor at CXL So, what should you do? I don't really want to confuse you, but it is what the industry believes. CXL is tactical. It will get you started in the field and you won't find a better starting library elsewhere. Top experts in the industry, including the head of growth marketing at Loom and an EIR at Reforge, reviewed my resume. They noticed CXL and praised its credibility. Completing a 100-hour course shows hard work. So your efforts won't be in vain. CXL is better than free courses and some paid courses Here's what I regret: I was on Peep’s mailing list for quite a while and I wish I had decided to take this course earlier on rather than taking free courses on Google with their analytics and adwords. I didn’t store information properly in the initial days. But you can do better . CXL is even better than paid courses like Growthschool . Boy was I pissed after spending $300. Who is CXL not for? CXL is probably not for you if you have no experience with marketing. A basic foundation in marketing is necessary to make the most out of the course. If you’re a founder trying to learn marketing instead of hiring someone else, please don’t do that. CXL is too intense. Hire a marketer, a consultant, or even a mentor. This course isn’t for you if you just want a certificate, even though you get one. This course is for you if you want to get ridiculously good at data-driven marketing. If you’re not at all technologically savvy. If you're too senior in your marketing career, and already know your way around most of the stuff. If you want to specialize say in Google ads, then CXL might not be the right choice. You're better off going for a specialized course like God Tier Ads . View a list of all the courses I've taken. If you checked any 2 of those 6 statements, please reconsider before investing your time and resources. Other important details (I’m doing a brain-dump) I think they also give you access to a Facebook group. CXL shifted between a circle.so community and a FB community; not sure if any of them are still active today. The FB community helped me back in 2020 but now I have over 10+ Slack channels to get help. The growth marketing minidegree was amazing and we didn’t have a lifetime access deal like you have today. The current Black Friday deal is probably their best deal ever. The all-access may be in terms of optionality. But you can also have a decision paralysis with so many options, so know what works best for you. Everything is pre-recorded. CXL also has personalized/live courses called Sprints if you prefer. After every lesson in a course, the instructors give you an empty templates to refill based on your data. Super practical. I found some courses to be really interesting and useful like this and this . If you can start with any one course, I'd recommend this one. It made me cry tears of joy. I honestly did not like a bunch of courses like this and this one. Some courses can be outdated even if you wouldn't expect it like this one so use your judgement! Although, I see a lot of fresh courses that weren't available when I took so that's nice. CXL Alternatives Demand Curve’s Growth Marketing Training — Demand Curve is all text, no audio/video. CXL is audio/video/text/AMAs. Julian Shapiro’s content is really good but if you don’t have a startup, then you may not be able to extract the most out of Demand Curve’s training. [Edit: I took Demand Curve in early 2022, it's better for founders, not marketers. ] Reforge — quite expensive at $2000/year but considered the best in the industry. They give you access to 22 programs but you need to apply and get accepted. [Edit: Fun fact, I got a scholarship on April 28, 2022 ] Read the full post Growth Hackers : Their courses are backed up by a popular personality in the growth marketing world — Sean Ellis. But the courses aren’t taught by him. They are taught by partners. CXL does have 1 course by Sean Ellis :) Udemy : I haven’t personally ventured into this space because I found out that Udemy has a bare minimum instructor vetting system. If I have to try tens of instructors to find the right one, then it’s a waste of time. CXL Scholarship — They have a scholarship program as well but you need to apply, get accepted and then write a 1000 word blog post each week. Edit Jan, 2023: Scholarship is no longer available but they launched another alternative which costs $100. CXL course review by other nice people Take a look at some real reviews posted. cxl reviews for growth marketing cxl reviews for messaging course cxl reviews for analytics cxl reviews for content and seo cxl reviews for influencer marketing Bottom Line Look, if you’ve made it this far, it only points to one thing — that you’re serious about your future. CXL is one option to get started, and probably the easiest because of their 7-day trial . Next, take some time to understand how the industry works. I have an article here . If you want some course recommendations that aren't already on my course list, just ask me . I'm pretty resourceful as you'll see below. 😄 My recommendation is to start with CXL. They have a 7-day trial. You don't have to start the search process all over again. Maybe you’ll find the missing piece and use CXL as a stepping stone to a better future. Remember, CXL is not a magic bullet. The more you get into growth marketing, the more you'll realise what you don't know. CXL is the best way to get a step in the door. It's not the final step you'll take. Put simply, where you source your knowledge is far more important than how much you consume. Can I download CXL courses for free? 🙈 CXL is tactical, which means their courses constantly need updating. The problem with this is that you could download content that is already outdated. That'd be twice the amount of time you'd have to spend learning and re-learning. If you're lacking budget, I'd recommend CXL's New Scholarship Program. It costs a one-time fee of $100 and then they help you get hired too (which may or may not work. I've tried recruiting once from their pool but I didn't hire anyone.) If you want to take one or two courses, go for the $1 plan and skim through it. CXL also puts a LOT of content on their blog which in my opinion covers most of their content, but it's a bit too much to read through. Blog's free. You could force-download the content from their site using shady methods but it'll take longer to individually download the content than for you to consume it. Plus, you'll never watch it if it's downloaded on a hard drive that you have to keep plugging in to your laptop to watch. You won't have transcripts to read along the videos. The templates and files won't be easily accessible. You'll lose a lot of motivation along the way. It just won't be worth the effort if your time has literally any value but you could get access and download the content. I'm not sure if CXL's free courses are good or not. Better to go for the best quality of education out there if time and money constraints can be easily sorted out. About other minidegrees from CXL CXL Analytics Minidegree Content is outdated. They are still using UA instead of GA4 (as of July 4, 2023). Here's the feedback I received: My experience with GA and GTM is that the industry is shifting to Mixpanel Marketing Analytics and Segment. GTM is so unintuitive that even my developers struggle to use it, so no wonder we'll do too. CXL CRO Minidegree If learning is the goal, this minidegree is great. Content won't ever be outdated. However, it doesn't teach you how to do in-product experiments and CRO is sort of owned by Product . You need to stitch marketing site data to product metrics like activation, retention, and engagement metrics, which I don't remember CXL teaching. It's still useful and is a good alternative to the $1500 growth.design course. Liked this cxl course review? First of all, thank you for reading my experience at CXL Institute! I put in hours of effort into making the most comprehensive and honest review of CXL’s minidegrees. I’ll continue to improve it as time passes. Please leave a comment below if you feel like it. Or just say hi . It's good be friends :) And if you're feeling extra generous and thought this article helped you to make a purchase decision, please sign up using my affiliate link . 🤗 Why I wrote this article and why I want to improve it further? I wasn’t able to find any honest review of whether CXL Institute is good or not. Everything out there was unoriginal, useless or incomplete. Ever since completing the growth marketing mini-degree , I wanted to write a sincere review.

Lately, I've been thinking that you don't have to market too hard to win wars. You just need some fuel to start the racecar. Your seed distribution strategy. And then a solid referral strategy / PLG growth loop on the top of it should work. I want to share a few unique referral marketing examples I loved to study. I see so many SaaS products all the time that I wanted to explore other fields. Referral marketing examples 1. This bag of chips has a call to action to share to share with a friend 2. When Dunzo drivers are on the road to deliver everyday groceries for a customer, more potential customers see Dunzo and are reminded of the service. It was also a successful way of entry into a new market for Dunzo. 3. Defending your referral strategy: The execs at Apple refused to extend iMessage to Android users because parents would stop buying Apple phones if they could text their kids on Android via iMessage. Here's a leaked email . 4. Google literally relies on referral marketing on all their products. Even the largest company in the world knows that referral marketing is the best way to grow. Google photos has shared albums and daily spotlights highlighting a friend/family member that you are encouraged to share. Their entire UI design is to get you to share. 5. Vanta hands out badges to companies with vetted security processes. These companies add the Vanta certified badge to their website footer. These help the enterprise buyers check out Vanta for all their other procurement needs too. Plus, backlinks. No wonder, Vanta's founder and CEO is one of the richest self-made women in the world. 6. MyGate is a apartment security management app. MyGate throws up this massive poster that clearly says "Welcome to MyGate" for all societies using MyGate / or on their basic plan tier. Anyone visiting the society is bound to notice. Mygate is one of the fastest growing companies in India with 60 million users. This is 'powered by typeform" but IRL. 7. "Make the logo bigger" isn't just something marketing managers ask without a reason. Most fashion houses slap their logo on their cheapest product ranges. Take a look at the Sketchers shoe. There are 5 places on the shoe where the sketchers logo or wordmark is present. Each customer becomes a walking billboard. Regardless of which angle anyone else looks at, they'll see the brand name. I think Sketchers went a bit overboard with this though because it'll attract the wrong kinds of customers. 8. You'll hardly ever notice an ASUS logo on the laptop. But Apple's is unmissable. Their logo glows. It's larger. It's centre-aligned. Has better legibility. Everyone around you gets exposed to the brand (more touchpoints). Plus, it's on the inside and the outside. Compare that to ASUS. Even if ASUS got product placement in movies, it'd be much harder to recognize. The wordmark "ASUS Zenbook" is left aligned which is hard to see. And on the outside, you've got the brand logo which can only reflect light but not emit. 10. Like we saw with Peppy, Mr. Beast's chocolate brand "Feastables" is also relying on referral marketing to grow. SHARE is printed on the bar and is the first thing users see as they tear open the wrapper. 10. Passes , founded by one of the youngest self-made billionaires and co-founder of Scale AI, is an app similar to Patreon. Lucy Guo's company has a referral program, which essentially involves referring others and earning a commission. It is a single-sided incentive. This might work if you have a memberships based marketplace business model and need support on the supply side. 10. Rhode has these viral phone cases that will appear each time you take a selfie. With orders, they offer free tattoos. Tattoos are share-worthy. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

I accidentally found myself down the partnerships rabbit hole recently at Streamline. Marketing channels can fade out over time and I'd rather develop skills in those that can never be obsolete. The Work 1) Partnered with Super Super makes website creation easy with Notion. They won the Golden Kitty award at Product Hunt and are quite renowned in the design world. I teamed up with them to craft a microsite using our free vector sets. This allows people to seamlessly copy and paste illustrations directly into Notion. Our partnership received a lot of love from the community . 2) Partnered with Lucidchart and Lucidspark Lucid has secured a place in the Forbes Cloud 100 List as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, boasting a valuation of $3 billion and a user base of 60 million. Thanks to our partnership, accessing Streamline is just a matter of two clicks in their app. I wrote about our experience in Lucid's blog here and on their lucid.co/developers page. Developer page includes my testimonial alongside friends from Slack and Headroom. Partner page has more context: Streamline was prominently featured as a partner in Lucid's press release , alongside other early partners such as Slack, Salesforce, and Notion. They hosted us at their developer webinar featuring our tech lead 3) Partnered with our indirect competitors This might be traditionally unheard of. The way I got this idea was by asking users in our post-purchase survey "What alternatives did you use before switching to Streamline" and saw a lot of users graduate to Streamline after using alternative products. So, I reached out to them and struck a partnership! Edit: Actually, partnering with even your direct competitors isn't all that uncommon. Adidas partnered with Bata while Puma did with Metro. It's wild and you should read about it! The Takeaway Partnerships take quite a while to get started, and there's a bit of talking back and forth that can happen. Sometimes, partnerships fizzle out. You need to figure out how much time and effort a partner is willing to invest to make the partnership work. And do they have good enough reasons to do it? Getting Mentored When I was working out the partnership with Lucid and acting as the PM to build the extension, I asked for advice from Michael Pici (VP of Product, Revenue at Hubspot) to draw upon his experience. I also had many video messages with Nick Lafferty , who used to lead Growth Marketing at Loom, to check if my decisions were on the right track. I always asked them questions like, "What am I missing?" or "Where could this decision go wrong?". For the partnerships with our competitors and other partners (redacted), I continue to have regular calls every month with Hillary Miller (Head of Growth at Whimsical). There are a lot of people who say nice things about me and are eager to watch my career grow but Hillary is the one making it a reality! It takes genuine effort to get into the weeds with someone and offer nuanced advice. And it is much harder to do that consistently every single month with no expectations in return! So, I cannot emphasize how important having a mentor is and I feel like I lucked out with her as mine! What I've learned so far is that the goal of a partnership is to make sure everyone wins: you, the partner, your users and their users. And if that combination matches, then no one is off limits. Sometimes, partners will promote you without you ever asking for it. Ask once, and if they like you, they'll keep featuring you. Figma mentioned that Streamline had one of the best community profiles on their marketplace. They featured Apple next, who are a big inspiration for us. No amount of money can buy a placement like this from Figma. Their team featured Streamline on their own 😄 With partnerships, there are templates, processes and better attribution mechanisms that can make the process better! Which you'll figure out over time. But the original creativity and the execution is where the heart of partnerships lies. I also want to touch on influencer partnerships a bit. The one thing that has worked for me is to be kind, especially when people least expect it. For example, I typically can tell if something's going to be delayed or not. You have two options. Either rush them to meet a deadline. Or, flip it out and go over and beyond. If creators ask for an extension, give them way more. I can go on and on... with screenshots. But you get the point. I've even offered our spot to another company if it makes the creator more revenue and I'd take another spot (if it costs me nothing to switch). Thanks for reading! - Khushi Lunkad

The company I work at went viral today. Not by a coincidence. We make icons. The Wins 1. Earned 900+ backlinks overnight and it's on the road. 2. Hit the front page on Hacker News. 3. Which in turn, got us a featured in many design and dev resource websites such as this one. Influencers started adding us to their directories. I wondered if I could create a surprise and delight campaign with these influencers who organically promoted us. To test, I offered to create a custom drawn meme as a thank you. And it resonated! People had some really niche asks for memes. Which our design team turned around in less than 24 hours. Scale the Piggybacking Memes inherently are a viral product and very share-worthy. I wondered if I could 10x the success of the test above. In our monthly email newsletter, I usually send out new product launches. But this time around, I wanted to piggyback on our users. I launched a giveaway: Spread the word and win a free custom meme I wanted to keep things simple: ❌ No dev overhead. No complex referral marketing programs to integrate. ❌ No money or tacky incentives. Designers are really fun people, and have a true love for life. So didn't want to incentivize with money or credits which doesn't feel right, and can even be a headache to manage. And it blew up. People started tweeting about. Adding it to their directories. Sharing with friends. It made its way to our company Slack for recklessly being shared across the internet. ❤️‍🔥 I'm pretty proud of this piggybacking campaign. This is a classic case of piggybacking, and a win I'll remember for a long time. 🌈 I'm a small team, with a tiny budget. Our freemium business model doesn't support high CAC channels. So, I have to be creative and punch above my weight. The constraints led me here. Thanks for reading. Best, Khushi #NeverMarketAlone

[Trigger Warning: This post talks about death.] On the 13th of Jan, 2025, I lost my best friend forever. Meet Ginger. I spent the majority of my life with her. I loved her most of everything I ever loved. She was home. Death teaches you more about life than life ever does. Her death wasn't sudden. I was expecting it since she had been sick. Three days before she passed away, our vet had prepared us of what's about to come. Pro tip: If you have a dog, there's a new medicine that's a preventive tick fever tablet. Check with your vet if you can give it to your pet once every month. Tick fever can relapse and it's often hard to keep recovering. Ginger was 13 years, 2 months old when she passed away peacefully. She wanted to be petted until the very last minute and we did round the clock shifts to make sure someone kept petting her every single minute. Even though she put up a tough fight, her body gave up at the end. This is the probably the closest I've been to experiencing death. As I get older, I'll start to lose more loved ones. And every date will be reminder of a good day or a worse one. The reason I write this post is to share a few things: How marketing shifts when you have this context Some examples To honor Ginger After the disastrous event, I didn't really care about anything. I cancelled all my calls. Told a few people about what happened but honestly, nothing really mattered. So, how would I handle this with empathy if I was on the other side? I remember working for a company a few years ago. The founder had a distressing relationship with her parents. Canva sent an email prior to Father's Day to let her opt out of what's about to come. She really appreciated receiving this email and shared with the entire team. It looks like Etsy also does the same: The default CTA is to opt-out. And it's not a tiny hyperlink. It's a proper button. I find Etsy's email better than Canva's because it's more targeted to Mother's Day vs isolating the customer from every special occasion. At another company, the founder fell sick. He wasn't able to work even a single hour a week. He didn't care that his payments to subscriptions failed. Recovery was most important. When the Customer Support rep emailed the founder, all he got was crickets. And kept wondering whether his email copy was good? Or whether the offer was good? There are a lot of times that things aren't in our control. People are suffering through losses. And they just don't care. Just having this context is probably going to make me a better communicator: People can lose their family (parents, partner, children, pets, siblings) The age range is important. Elder people must've had more suffering than younger ones, on average. Problems vary. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's someone passing away. Maybe it's their own health. Maybe they lost their home (check Palisades fire). You can't even control the trigger moments. I wake up if I hear the sound of a dog barking. I'll wake up if it's even a whimper. There are just so many trigger moments that it's impossible to control. We don't need to walk on thin ice nor do we want to feel sorry for people. This is what life is. But, what we can do is be different. Having a bit of empathy will immediately force you to make some tweaks. Will you send a price increase email with 2 weeks notice? For example, Wix sent me a price increase a week or two before my card would be charged. And they increased prices by 100%. This seemed very off-brand for Wix to do, because my experience with them has been great. But their monetization team decided to sacrifice user's trust (and recommendations/word of mouth) at the cost of a short-term revenue gain. 1) If your business has a lock-in and you need to increase prices, grandfather existing users to the features they originally subscribed to. If they want your newer features, let them opt-in. Bait and switch when you have a data lock in is risky. What you can do instead is remind people of the amazing discounts they got at the point of churn. You can code this yourself or use Churnkey. 2) Don't advertise a cheaper price if you can't honor it. Sometimes, people get too excited with a free plan and are overly generous. Then, they bait and switch because they have bills to pay or launch newer features that need adoption. 3) Disclose renewal rates up front if you want to discount. For transactional businesses that have no lock in, do as you'd like! It's actually better if your prices fluctuate a lot. Regret minimization is a real thing. I used to hold back on certain decisions but I might not going forward. Life is short as is and I don't have as much time as I think I do. So, I'm not going to spend my life wondering about decisions that don't matter much. The older people get, the faster they make decisions. Ginger was the greatest dog I could've ever asked for. She was and will always be my best friend. No one can ever replace her. But I'll never get another dog. I know my heart will never be able to go through this pain again. So if marketers feature dogs in their ad campaigns, it might drive my attention but I'm not sure if it'll make me feel the way they intend to. That's all, thanks for reading! If you've got more examples, please share them in the comment section below.