Okay ok okaaaay, it's been a while. Hope all is well with you. Over here things are... well... chaotic to say the least. But let's not dive into my own personal failings again. We gonna do something different. Yeah... the ask-me-anything thing. Since (re)starting this newsletter my inbox turned into the good kind of chaos. Replies, hot takes, life updates from people I haven't seen since ICQ and MSN Messenger. Many questions. Few haters. Real shit. Like....well, let's call him Thijs, who was curious about the following: "If you might slip some tips into the newsletter on how to do proper marketing for software or growing as a company that creates (software, products or whatever can be created). I am very interested on your take on that."Cool. Let's go from what I knew back then to what I know now. One. Marketing is not a department. It's the product. We never really did marketing at WeTransfer. Okay, maybe the company started smashing money at things at a later stage, but at first the product was the marketing. No forced signups. Full-screen curated wallpapers instead of pop-up banners. Respect as a feature. And every transfer was a tiny ad, delivered by the most trusted channel on earth: a friend sending you something. You can't buy that. You can only design for it. Two. Audience before product. My blog came before WeTransfer. Years of posting things I loved, for free, for nobody, until nobody became somebody. Trust compounds slower than money and it's worth more. Most folks do it backwards, they build the thing and then go looking for the people. Start collecting the people now. And not followers. Subscribers. Followers are rented, subscribers are yours. The fancier term is "community", but really, it's just a bunch of people excited about what you're doing. Three. Make sharing the feature. Boomerang grows because sharing a file IS telling someone about it. Nendo causes mayhem in group chats because a figurine of your kid's drawing begs to be reposted and sent around. Foto Foto albums get shared before they're even ordered. So ask yourself: what does using my product make people show other people? If the answer is nothing, that's not a marketing problem. It's the roadmap. Features don't make a product. Four. Taste compounds. Everyone can make software now. Literally everyone, ask the eleven year olds. So taste is the distribution. Every pixel, every email, every silly 404 page. Do it with taste, consistently, for years, and it adds up to this rare thing called a brand. Product plus personality is brand, and it's the last moat standing. Five. Talk like a human. Delete empower. Delete seamless. Delete solutions. If you can't explain your product to my 9 year old, you don't have a marketing problem either. You have a product problem. And yes, he charges for consults now. Paid in Minecraft credits. So, before you screenshot those five as a playbook, remember there is no playbook. Playbooks are relics from the past. The trick is that there is no trick, just high agency, experiments, and time. Sometimes years. Which is honestly great news, because nobody with a growth hacking budget has that kind of patience. So I've stopped going to market. The market comes to me. It arrives in group chats, sideways, three weeks late, in a voice memo that just says "bro what IS this." That is the whole strategy. There is no other strategy. Make more, make it stranger, put it out before it's ready, and let reality assemble itself around the stuff that sticks. Most of it won't stick. That's not failure. That's the cost of finding the one drawing that makes a stranger cry. Let's call this veel forward hahaha. Not fail forward, that's like a fridge magnet. Veel. Much. Lots. Volume as a belief system. You cannot think your way to the thing. You can only ship your way there, again and again, slightly embarrassed each time, until one of the experiments quietly rewrites what you thought you were even building. And here's the part I actually believe, the big dumb hopeful part. We are the smallest studio you've ever seen and we out-ship companies a thousand times our size (and budget). Not because we're smarter. Because we're not scared of looking stupid in public. That fear is the thing keeping most makers quiet, and it protects nobody. Drop it, and the distance between an idea in the shower and a stranger using it at dinner is basically zero now. No one can compete with you being you. That's the future I want to live in. Not "AI does everything" but real people making more things, faster, with less permission, for their own communities. A world a little more handmade, not less. So make the thing this week. The bad version. The one you'd be slightly ashamed to send. Send it anyway. LFG!
That's all folks. Ask more, assume less. Ask me anything. Business, products, mistakes, midlife shenanigans, mountain biking, why I'm still online this much... just hit reply, and I might use your Qs for the next newsletter. N. |
Veel Forward
Okay ok okaaaay, it's been a while. Hope all is well with you. Over here things are... well... chaotic to say the least. But let's not dive into my own personal failings again. We gonna do something different. Yeah... the ask-me-anything thing. Since (re)starting this newsletter my inbox turned into the good kind of chaos. Replies, hot takes, life updates from people I haven't seen since ICQ and MSN Messenger. Many questions. Few haters. Real shit. Like....well, let's call him Thijs, who was curious about the following: "If you might slip some tips into the newsletter on how to do proper marketing for software or growing as a company that creates (software, products or whatever can be created). I am very interested on your take on that."Cool. Let's go from what I knew back then to what I know now. One. Marketing is not a department. It's the product. We never really did marketing at WeTransfer. Okay, maybe the company started smashing money at things at a later stage, but at first the product was the marketing. No forced signups. Full-screen curated wallpapers instead of pop-up banners. Respect as a feature. And every transfer was a tiny ad, delivered by the most trusted channel on earth: a friend sending you something. You can't buy that. You can only design for it. Two. Audience before product. My blog came before WeTransfer. Years of posting things I loved, for free, for nobody, until nobody became somebody. Trust compounds slower than money and it's worth more. Most folks do it backwards, they build the thing and then go looking for the people. Start collecting the people now. And not followers. Subscribers. Followers are rented, subscribers are yours. The fancier term is "community", but really, it's just a bunch of people excited about what you're doing. Three. Make sharing the feature. Boomerang grows because sharing a file IS telling someone about it. Nendo causes mayhem in group chats because a figurine of your kid's drawing begs to be reposted and sent around. Foto Foto albums get shared before they're even ordered. So ask yourself: what does using my product make people show other people? If the answer is nothing, that's not a marketing problem. It's the roadmap. Features don't make a product. Four. Taste compounds. Everyone can make software now. Literally everyone, ask the eleven year olds. So taste is the distribution. Every pixel, every email, every silly 404 page. Do it with taste, consistently, for years, and it adds up to this rare thing called a brand. Product plus personality is brand, and it's the last moat standing. Five. Talk like a human. Delete empower. Delete seamless. Delete solutions. If you can't explain your product to my 9 year old, you don't have a marketing problem either. You have a product problem. And yes, he charges for consults now. Paid in Minecraft credits. So, before you screenshot those five as a playbook, remember there is no playbook. Playbooks are relics from the past. The trick is that there is no trick, just high agency, experiments, and time. Sometimes years. Which is honestly great news, because nobody with a growth hacking budget has that kind of patience. So I've stopped going to market. The market comes to me. It arrives in group chats, sideways, three weeks late, in a voice memo that just says "bro what IS this." That is the whole strategy. There is no other strategy. Make more, make it stranger, put it out before it's ready, and let reality assemble itself around the stuff that sticks. Most of it won't stick. That's not failure. That's the cost of finding the one drawing that makes a stranger cry. Let's call this veel forward hahaha. Not fail forward, that's like a fridge magnet. Veel. Much. Lots. Volume as a belief system. You cannot think your way to the thing. You can only ship your way there, again and again, slightly embarrassed each time, until one of the experiments quietly rewrites what you thought you were even building. And here's the part I actually believe, the big dumb hopeful part. We are the smallest studio you've ever seen and we out-ship companies a thousand times our size (and budget). Not because we're smarter. Because we're not scared of looking stupid in public. That fear is the thing keeping most makers quiet, and it protects nobody. Drop it, and the distance between an idea in the shower and a stranger using it at dinner is basically zero now. No one can compete with you being you. That's the future I want to live in. Not "AI does everything" but real people making more things, faster, with less permission, for their own communities. A world a little more handmade, not less. So make the thing this week. The bad version. The one you'd be slightly ashamed to send. Send it anyway. LFG!
That's all folks. Ask more, assume less. Ask me anything. Business, products, mistakes, midlife shenanigans, mountain biking, why I'm still online this much... just hit reply, and I might use your Qs for the next newsletter. N. |