One night in August 2012, I felt completely defeated. I had been working all summer towards the launch of my first startup, MarketOSU. It was a simple idea – basically Craigslist for Ohio State students that required a student email to create an account. For months, I had been marketing an August 20th launch date for the website, and checking …
line of sight
When I think about marketing (whether it’s Unreal, upside, or myself) I think a lot about awareness. The idea I wrote about a couple weeks ago — do you even exist to the person you want to the attention of? When we become aware of something, we start to slowly make the (erroneous) assumption that other people are aware of …
do you even exist?
Over the last couple of months, my messaging and inbox traffic has exploded. It’s still manageable; I’m an inbox zero person and have curated my “Primary” tab in Gmail to be very effective in filtering out the stuff I actually need to see/action. And some of it is still garbage, but it’s probably 5-10x busier than it was a few …
simplicity is not simple
As I study more about marketing, persuasion, and communication, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that simplicity wins out. The more simple you can make something, the easier it is to understand, talk about, remember, refer, and generally attract others. Great — so make everything simple! That should be simple, right? Not quite. Simplicity requires focus and clarity. Simplicity …