🦄 Culture at Its Best; VC Returns Over the Past Decade; Influencer Referral Tips...
Good morning! We’ve heard more than a few bad interview stories in our day, but these gems might be Unicorn Culture at Its Best, and start your day out with a laugh. You might expect an interviewer to take off their sandals and put their bare feet up on the desk mid-interview, but we’d bet you have never heard of an interviewee being asked to pretend they were 5 years old and to tell a story.
Without further ado...
🚫 You really should try to avoid startup porn, a prime example being Gary Vaynerchuk’s “When to Expand Your Business, According to This Successful Serial Entrepreneur. Reads like these won’t provide real insights and are a waste of your time, you’re heading straight for cliche, common sense advice that doesn't deal directly with the day to day of operating a business. Luckily, Joel Wish thinks you deserve better, and is taking his real life stories to the Marker community. We suggest you give him a follow.
🕰️ This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but raising VC doesn’t always equal success, and in many ways is shooting for the stars. But you may not know exactly to what extent. More than half of companies that raised venture dollars between 2009 and 2018 lost money, and fewer than 4% generated those illustrious 10x returns you hear about (see the numbers below via Correlation Ventures). The best returns occurred in 2000, when 20% of all dollars invested yielded 10xers! Time to invest in that time machine startup.
🍔 Logo design may not seem like the most important decision your business will ever make, but a good logo can be beneficial for a number of reasons—it can pique the interest of customers, differentiate you from competitors, and facilitate brand recognition. So what do the best logos have in common? A study featured in the Harvard Business Review found that they are descriptive, and include textual or visual elements that illustrate what your product does. They also found that only 40% of businesses used descriptive logos, while 60% didn’t. Just look at Burger King and The New York Islanders compared to McDonalds and The Minnesota Wild. If you didn’t know the latter two already, would you be able to tell what they did?
✉️ BellCurve’s Growth Report is quick read on cutting edge B2B SaaS marketing tactics from some of the top Growth VPs in B2B SaaS (check out their slack group to chat with these like minded marketers). This week the group discussed how to improve your email open rate by identifying keywords that will send your message straight to spam, as well as ways to reach your audience who didn’t open your email. Here’s the skinny: wait a couple weeks to give non-openers a second chance, then export a list of them and resend the email with a new subject line. You can also send via a 3rd party mailer (think Mixmax) that connects with Gmail, and has a better chance of beating spam filters.
🦌 An increasingly relevant topic that Barron Caster covered was how to get the most out of influencer relationships. Starting with a referral system where influencers get a percentage of sales/signups will save you upfront costs, and create a mini-pyramid type of structure. Another way to get more bang for your buck is to focus on influencers with 10k-150k audiences. These influencers are at an early stage where they may even be willing to work in exchange for free access to your product, and you can always scale up to larger influencers once your brand has more of a reputation.
🤗 No matter how many awesome new features you build, your product is always going to have some haters. Jay Baer, author of Hug Your Haters, will tell you that these haters aren’t really your problem—ignoring them is! Giving these angsty customers the time of day allows you the chance to recover and retain them, which is a whole lot easier doing that than finding new ones. Yes, there will be some poor fit customers who you may not be able to keep on board (or even want to, for that matter), but in most cases, you can gain valuable insights about your business by hearing haters out.