It was six months after my trek through the cloud forests of Peru when I learned I'm not supposed to hike in jeans. At least it's what I was told, on a different mountain range and continent, by a Seattleite guide who volunteered to lead a
After helping Pinecone go from an unknown pre-seed company to a household name in the AI space, I'm returning to independent consulting (and writing). Mission-driven In 2013, the same year I started consulting, I got the idea to run the New York City marathon. That idea turned into
You know the nagging feeling that your product, project, or company has become more complicated than it needs to be? You can solve many problems and get better results by doing something unthinkable to many: removing parts that once seemed essential. My crusade against complexity continues with this short story
“Wabl” is a principle I instill in my own and my team's work. (Pronounced like “wobble”.) I want to share it with you because it could help you do better work with less time and agony. When you review some work — like code, a strategy, an architecture, a
Being swamped — overwhelmed by stuff to do — is the default state of being within a startup. There's always more to do than time to do it, and the list keeps growing. Everyone else working at every other startup feels this too. Even if it doesn't look
Signups are a lousy measure of growth. They're unreliable and too far removed from actual business goals. If you have a goal for reaching some number of signups, I suggest defining and tracking activations instead. Here's why, and how… 1. Signups are unreliable I'm
Everyone who joins my team is required to push something to production within three days. Some people freeze up upon hearing this on their first day, either from imagining the amount of work they’ll need to squeeze into the next 72 hours or from thinking I’ve lost my
Whether it was our first call or our hundredth, founders inevitably asked me whether they should market and sell their enterprise software to buyers/executives (top-down) or to users (bottom-up). My view, which only strengthened every time I uttered it, was this: Marketing and selling to users is just another,
After consulting enterprise software startups on marketing for nearly eight years, I am joining Pinecone as VP of Marketing. Consulting felt like a thrill the year I started, with a short runway, high stakes, and more determination than relevant work experience. In the years since then it felt like a
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Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast. Is it worth it? Long ago I got fed
Product-led growth (PLG) accelerates the pace of growth just like DevOps accelerates the pace of product development and deployment. Very soon, running an enterprise software company without PLG will be as unthinkable as running one today without DevOps. Definitions of Product-Led Growth As with any emerging methodology, there is no
In college, I took a self-defense class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next semester, I took a kickboxing class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next and final semester, I took an Isshin-Ryū Karate class, taught by Sensei Flagg. It was the exact same class each time. The administrators just couldn’
An unordered, ongoing list of tips and answers to questions about consulting, based on my experience as a startup marketing consultant since 2013. Updated regularly. What does a consultant actually do? I’m a developer, and If I ever wanted to be a consultant I have no idea what I’
In the 1960s the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture on The Law of Gravitation. One commenter, who claimed to be present for this lecture, said: “[The lecture] was spellbinding, and I would say that fully half of the people there were not physics majors. They just wanted to hear
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply with
One of the many stupid things I did in my first year as a consultant was booking the cheapest everything and paying out-of-pocket when traveling for business. My first business trip to San Francisco, in 2014, was to meet with Scalyr, and it included a cheap room in someone’s
As the all-natural eating movement went mainstream in the 90’s, food and beverage companies rushed to slap the “All Natural” label on their products to meet market demand. For many of those companies, the change involved nothing more than updating the packaging. It worked. Neither the public nor the
What do these words have in common? * Fast, quick * Easy, effortless * Modern * Best, top * Simple * Powerful * Beautiful * Flexible You’ve probably seen them used to describe software products. Maybe you use them to describe your own product. They seem like great descriptors, because you know they’re truthful, and what’
Your year was better than you think. Our negative memories have a stronger affect on us than positive memories. As a result, we overlook all the great things we achieved, miss opportunities to improve, and start the new year with either hopeless pessimism or unrealistic optimism. This is an easy
If you want enterprise customers, then users are just half your audience. The other half are buyers — executives with budget authority. Many startups focus on the users and forget about the buyers, then struggle to sell. Free trials, free and low-cost tiers, and open-sourcing are for making users want your
