It isn’t every day that I hop on a Skype call with a startup founder who is so blunt. “We don’t sell online forms. We make organizations more productive,” he subtly corrects me. “It’s a deceptively small difference. After all, who cares about boring surveys? I started JotForm 13 years ago, and even I’m not […]
The corpse was so well-preserved that they thought it was fresh. 6th of May, 1950, Denmark. Local workers found a man completely submerged in peat, arranged in a fetal position. They named him the Tollund Man. On his head was a cap. Around his waist, a belt. There was a leather noose around his neck. Apart […]
“Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual. But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read.” — Gregory Ciotti Ciotti adds that the root of the problem lies in our desire to impress. He’s probably right. I wasted the first two years of my blogging […]
“Once you publish a blog post, you have to email as many influencers as possible,” he tells the guy next to him, “and ask them to share it on their social media.” I know I should mind my own business and stop listening to their conversation. But overhearing strangers in coworking spaces is always more […]
Finding a startup to work for is easy. Finding a founder whose vision you believe in isn’t. I’m sitting next to a founder whose vision I have admired over the past year. It couldn’t get any louder in this downtown Starbucks in Singapore, but noise is probably the last thing on both of our minds. […]
As a startup marketer, spending my lunch break arguing with developers is not my favorite part of the job. “That’s bullshit,” our CTO replies. “MailChimp’s product isn’t any better than the rest; it’s just another tool to send your newsletters. Why spend $200/month when their competitors offer the same thing for a few bucks?” I […]
I will publish an article only when I have something important to say. That’s what I reminded myself every time the egocentric ‘me’ wanted to publish more often and be the center of attention. It wasn’t easy to resist. As I watched new personal brands gain popularity on a growing platform like Medium, it felt like […]
We have exactly $325,710 left in our bank account. The cash is burning fast, and we’ve already wasted a big portion of our seed investment trying to market a product for which we thought we had already found a product/market fit. “Four out of ten,” shouts Lauren, breaking the silence we’ve had for almost twenty […]
When I decided to start freelancing for startups, people kept advising me to always ask for the client’s budget right at the very beginning. So I asked. “Hey man, oh yeah, thanks for asking. Well, as you know we are a startup and we don’t have a budget yet but we’ll give you a lot […]
On my way to the co-working space, I grabbed my mobile to read the same Slack message yet another time: “Ali, that’s good, but we should look at what converts.” It never failed. It was either a client or a colleague on the same marketing team. There was always someone who never missed the perfect […]
