Solopreneurs: How much time are you spending on personal brand + zoom catch-ups + networking events etc.?
31.01.2025 17:22
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Solopreneurs: How much time are you spending on personal brand + zoom catch-ups + networking events etc.?
The solution: We created self-serve onboarding content that we could push to Closed-Wons to the moment they signed, including a Quick Start guide, and the Slack community.
Even worse, because of capacity planning issues, some customers sometimes weren’t getting a CSM assigned for 2-3 weeks.
So at a moment in the customer journey that should be exciting: “yay you signed” - we were ignoring customers for at least 3-4 days, and sometimes 2-3 weeks.
After auditing what was going on, we realized a lot of the post-contract onboarding process was manual. Closed-Won Deals were assigned to CSMs manually, and onboarding materials were emailed manually.
As soon as we started measuring, the teams started to self-correct on their own.
Micro-solution: Doing more to push fresh Closed-Wons into self-serve Onboarding
To operationalize this, we started adding “Starts” to the Marketing/Sales dashboards as the last metric in the funnel, and started adding “Closed-Wons” to the Product/Success dashboard as the first metric in the dashboard.
In this case, Marketing/Sales’s portion of the value chain should extend from Lead all the way to Starts. And Product/Success’s part of the value chain should begin earlier than Start, all the way at Closed-Won.
This way both teams are accountable for the hand-off.
Macro solution: Overlapping Team Metrics
I might get a lot of heat for this one, but I strongly believe adjacent teams need to have overlapping metrics.
Here’s how we fixed it: ⤵️
Turns out Revenue org was managing-to Closed-Won Deals; Product/Success org was managing from Customer Starts to Renewals. We realized that Closed-Won Deals weren’t lining-up w/ new Customer Starts & uncovered that many customers were falling through a crack & churning out
The teams had focused on optimizing their part of the funnel, but lost all their gains at the handoff between teams. One of the weakest hand-offs is from marketing/sales to product/success.
The Learning: As Steven Sinofsky famously said “Don’t ship the org chart.”
I was working in a ~$40M ARR business when, deep into board prep one night, we realized there was a ~$4M leak in the funnel somewhere between Closed-Won Deals and New Customer Starts.
So the next time you’re thinking about your a branding project, ask your leaders: where’s the spice? And are we brave enough to crank it up?
But for spiciness to be tasted, you need a second ingredient: Bravery 💪
Every brand says they are playful, but very few are brave enough to put a playful monkey high-five into a serious SaaS product for a mission-critical function.
So, what is Spiciness?
Professor Byron Sharp uses the term ✨brand distinctiveness✨. The way I think about it is you choose a brand attribute and crank the spiciness level up to Ghost Pepper so that it breaks-through and can be tasted by the end user.
That's my # 1 learning from branding projects at SoFi, Codecademy, and Codecademy working with excellent design leaders like Conor McGlauflin and Emelyn Baker.
Most branding experts talk about consistency, but there are two key ingredients to great branding that don’t get talked about enough:
The first ingredient is Spiciness.🌶️
Either way, this quirky animation is a powerful brand moment that made the pressure of hitting ‘send’ a little lighter for hundreds of thousands of users.
If you were a marketer in 2010, this high-five brings-back all the feels. First, exhilaration of having just hit-send on a big email campaign. Next, there’s a touch of fear, knowing you might face embarrassment if there’s a typo you didn’t catch.
By applying these principles, Nick didn’t just grow his Twitter following—he transformed it into a $150M real estate empire.
Now that is one heck of a triumph.
Read more on my Substack:
Once Nick had reach, just by opening-up about the types of opportunities he was pursuing, he was able to connect privately with under-the-radar but more-established operators. Together, they benefited from his reach, sourcing deals.
👑 Ask for opportunities in public, then connect with more-established lesser-known players
Data shows less than 25% of users on social platforms post regularly. The other 75% just consume.
It’s not until he’s been at it with that intensity for 8+ months before he something goes massively viral, helping him add 47,000 new followers in a single month.
In March 2020 he was averaging 250 posts/mo, in July 500 posts/mo, and in Jan ‘21 1000 posts/mo - despite having a relatively low follower-count.
🗣 Do not underestimate the level of consistency that’s required
Everyone’s heard “success doesn’t happen overnight.” But the level of effort Nick was expending is mind-blowing.
When everyone is talking about tech, it takes courage to take the other side. Nick's distinctive angle allowed him to stand out in a crowded space and harness the ambitions of an under-served audience.
His content struck a chord: not all of us studied computer science at an Ivy League school. For the rest of us, sweaty startups are much more accessible.
🔥 Be brave: stake-out a contrarian POV
While mainstream media was glorifying tech startups like Facebook and Tesla, Nick eschewed this and instead focused on “sweaty” businesses like Storage Squad.
Through this deep dive, we identified three core lessons from Nick Huber's Twitter journey that can be transformative for anyone looking to build a powerful social media presence:
Founder-led growth using LinkedIn/X has gotten extremely competitive. But one person who’s cracked it is Nick Huber, growing from 0 to 388,000 followers. My team spent over 20 hours reverse-engineering his playbook. We dissected his 10 highest-performing posts, his 5 biggest follower growth-spurts.
