Stupid Matters

Before this era, the discipline of marketing relied on the only communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people – newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people – advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, the traditional communication channels are fragmented and passe. The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.

– Andrew Chen, in Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing

Even worse than not trying to improve their HTML and CSS rendering, some email clients have actually gone backwards. Three years ago, Microsoft decided Outlook 2007 would stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails. Before you get all excited, they were replacing it with Microsoft Word. Yes, that Microsoft Word, the word processor. In one version, Outlook went from being decent and understandable to downright terrible at displaying HTML emails from anyone except other Outlook users.

– Coding Your Emails

Great PWNz.

There is a difference between a belief and things you just didn’t know…. No, the fact that you believed it doesn’t make it any more valid or worthwhile, and nobody owes your viewpoint any respect simply because it is yours.

– Jef Rouner, in No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong

Idiots know better.

Leadership. At the end of the day, people are loyal to a leader they believe in. Leading is not managing. Although it is impossible to lead if there is no management. But leading is that special thing. It is charisma, it is strength, it is communication, it is vision, it is listening, it is being there, it is calm, it is connecting, it is trust, faith, and belief. The best founders are great leaders. They may be shitty managers which means they need to find managers to help them. But they are great leaders. One of the things we look for in founders is leadership. If we want to follow them, we believe that others will too.

– Fred Wilson, in Loyalists vs Mercenaries

Searching for answers

I like to think that Comcast’s offices are like crazy adult fun-houses: mirrors, smoke, clowns, human foosball. Oh, and booze. Lots and lots of booze.

Your product team is constantly improving the product – that is the core of retention – but the marketing team has something to offer too: communication.

– Jimmy Daly, in 15 Retention Emails to Reduce Churn and Keep Your Customers Happy

My daughter asked me if boys could play soccer.

– Marcus’s daughter reflects on Kelley O’Hara’s badass goal in the U.S. women’s 2015 World Cup semi final win over Germany.

There are teams out there that can get a million downloads in 4 weeks, and that’s not interesting to me… There are a lot of ways to game the system. I’m interested in cohort data, which is something you can really only collect over time.

I would much rather see a company that had 200,000 subscribers and data on how they used the product for a month than a company that signed up a million subscribers in three weeks but no data on how they used the product.

– Annie Kadavy, amazing person at Charles River Ventures, from 6 Moves to Nail Before You Pitch