If you’re looking for ways to build leverage, you should think about persistent problems. What are the obstacles that you’ll encounter on the journey between the first step and the finish line? Not all problems are worth investing in, but if we consider that persistent problems need to be solved repeatedly, we’re already off to a good start. That means that our solution accrues a little value each time we repeat the process....

There’s a major paradigm shift that takes place in the marketers I’ve seen grow from good to great: they begin to think about marketing in terms of campaigns, not as a big, continuous thing that they do. It may appear to be a subtle distinction, but my experience suggests that it’s anything but. In reality, a mature marketing program is a collection of specific programs that have been built, tested, iterated upon, and can be counted on to produce consistent results....

Certain products aren’t the obvious choice for most people, but for the ones that get it, they’re the only choice. These are lumpy products. Lumpy products have something different about them. They stand out. If they exist in a commoditized market, they aren’t the product that most people buy. They’re more expensive, more specialized, or harder to find. They’re never Amazon’s Choice, but for the people that get it, there isn’t any substitute....

Sometimes people believe that new businesses should act as-if – as-if you’ve already been there. As-if you’ve got thousands of happy customers around the world. By acting as-if, what you’re really trying to say is, “you can trust me because I’ve done this before.” The thing is that people trust your reputation more than your direct word. If you’ve really been there and done that – show me, don’t tell me....

Hey is a new email service from the team behind Basecamp. As a company, one could argue that Basecamp is better known for the way they think about work than the work itself. They’re opinionated people that build opinionated software. It’s without surprise then that Hey is a polarizing product. This team sat down and did what they’re known for, and that led to a significant rethinking of how people could (should?...

Typical subscription businesses exist to give you more of what you’ve already received. They can’t easily alter the deal. This is because they’ve only got transactional opt-in. The buyers and sellers came to an agreement with pre-defined terms – for this amount of money you’ll send me this thing at these intervals. That’s pretty much the definition of doing things the way they’ve always been done. I’m seeing the outlines of a new model emerge, and I couldn’t be more excited....

One of the most repeated pieces of advice for startups is to do things that don’t scale. The halls of the startup hall of fame are adorned with examples:  Airbnb founders personally took photos of the initial listings.  CD Baby had no music recommendation engine, it was just founder Derek Sivers listening to everything that came in. Here’s a site with dozens of additional examples. What this means is that you should do things that surprise and delight your initial customers, regardless of the cost of doing so....

The primary goal I have with Conversion Gold is to give you the mental models and concepts that I’ve collected over the years, in hopes that you can apply them to enrich your interests. I don’t often write about the one easy trick, or provide copy and paste swipe files of killer headlines. I want to talk about the concepts. I want to understand why these things work. I’m more interested in discussing principles and strategies than I am in discussing tactics....

Money is often at the forefront of our thoughts. Most of us have dreamt of a number — how much money do we want before we retire? For some, this is the arbitrary trophy number that they’ve picked that allows them to stop trying and hang up their gloves (and often to be able to do something they really care about). For others, it could be more logical, like some function of retirement age, financial lifestyle requirements, and potential investment returns over a period of time....

If you’re SEO savvy, you probably also noticed the switch Google made several months ago, to a mobile-first indexing scheme. This means that as Googlebot crawls the internet, they’re scoring your pages based on how they render and appear to a mobile user agent. Do me a favor. Go into your analytics tool of choice and take a look at your desktop conversion rate. Now take a look at your mobile conversion rate....