Hi Friends - Happy Sunday.
In this edition of Steal My Marketing, I want to talk about:
A Tweet thread on Chris Bakke’s interview on investing and startups
How a tiny peanut butter company grew to 500k per month in sales
How Sid Jha built Sunday Snapshots newsletter to 3000+ subscribers in 18 months and how you can too
The best thing I listened to this week, summarised in a tweet thread. There are many lessons for first-time founders - almost all startups pivot like Shopify and Slack, why hiring a fax machine salesman is better than hiring someone from Google and building a SaaS company from an agency model like Workday.
Abhishek Kumar@AbhishekLpd
Just listened to this great conversation between @ChrisJBakke and @Greenbackd Made notes on - middle market opportunities - VCs investing small sums for information gathering - Agency -> SaaS model - Pivots and Patience - Hiring fax machine salespeople THREAD 👇👇
1:06 PM · Nov 24, 2020
1 Repost · 5 Likes
Nerdy Nuts leveraged TikTok, Supreme-style drops, and scarcity to scale their tiny operation into a peanut butter powerhouse. They borrowed Airbnb’s playbook and leveraged the US elections to build their brand. Zachary Crockett has done an excellent job, sharing the startup cost, profits, and growth numbers in detail.
Sid started a weekly newsletter in May 2019, while he was in college, sharing his observations on books and academic papers, unique business stories, and a few niche parts of the internet. He sent the first few editions to his close friends and over time has built a base of 3000+ subscribers. He's since met some very interesting people like David Perell and Packy Mccormick and learned a ton of lessons. These days, 30% of his articles are based on stuff shared by his readers, which is quite amazing. Ever since I interviewed Dickie Bush a few weeks back, I wanted to interview someone in the newsletter space again and Sid is one of the most interesting people I've met online. His tips on starting a newsletter and building distribution into the content are really valuable. We talked about building your personal monopoly and the infinite leverage of the internet, Sunday Snapshots - beginning, growth, and best articles, Sid’s inspiration, and what he’d do if he started today. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did :)
The podcast is also available on Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and all major podcasting platforms. Show notes available in description wherever you’re listening, Please 5 stars on Apple Podcast. It helps me reach more listeners :)
You can connect with Sid on Twitter, read his essays, and subscribe to Sunday Snapshots
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Be sure to follow me on Twitter or respond directly to this email to get in touch. And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read/listen to through members of this newsletter.
Have an epic week!
Abhishek