446. Mailbag 📮
Mailbag for November 2024
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’m co-founding a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content, and we’d love to hear from you, anytime. Come say hello.
Thank you to the many readers who write in to say hello or to chat about marketing, tech, life, you name it. I love hearing from you! As I chat with folks, I realize that many of the questions I get asked might be questions that others have as well. So I’d like to start answering them here in the newsletter.
If you have a question, feel free to drop me a note. I’ll be sure to answer you via email and then might use the answer in an upcoming mailbag, too — with your name removed to keep things private, of course.
Here goes the first mailbag! 📮
First steps with advising
Q: How do you even get started with an advisory role?
I saw a TikTok the other day that said you should be as generous with your LinkedIn title as humanly possible. If you’ve given your local barista some business advice, then you’re an advisor!
Now I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but I do think that advising looks a lot of different ways besides the $4,000/hr retained expert.
You may already be an advisor and not even know it yet.
Advising can be as casual as one-off conversations with founders or marketers where you’re sharing your perspective on what you know best. It could be a single strategic project or a freelancing gig. It could be a WhatsApp thread. Advising, especially early on, usually looks like free advice. The more free advice you give, the more that people will start coming to you for free advice, and sooner or later someone will pay you for it.
To take your first steps with advising, try this:
Join some marketing Slack communities. There’s almost always a channel in there where people are asking for help. (I like ProductLed and Forget the Funnel as two examples.)
Sign up for fractional marketplaces like MarketerHire and Continuum
Keep an eye on your LinkedIn or Twitter (er, “X”) feeds, and comment whenever someone’s asking for advice
Once you’ve done it a couple times, you can start calling yourself an advisor in your LinkedIn headline and resumé, which may lead to more and more opportunities.
Personal positioning
Q: How do I position myself when I’m good at so many things?
You’re right! Everyone is good at so many things.
There are two frameworks I like to keep in mind when thinking through this. First is the Venn diagram about your ideal work. Here’s what it looked like for me when I was at Buffer:
The three parts are:
What am I good at?
What do I enjoy doing? (Because the think you are good at isn’t always the thing you enjoy!)
And what does my company / the market need?
The intersection of these three things makes for a pretty compelling personal positioning narrative. And when in doubt, the more specific the better!
Which brings me to the second framework.
One of the best ways to stand out in the job market is to combine two different skills in a totally unique way. Here is how Marc Andreessen phrases it on his blog:
Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix…
Your two “pretty goods” become one “really great!” and this can be the thing that you position yourself around.
Also, while we’re on the topic of career advice, I also love this quote from the pmarca blog, especially for early-career folks:
Don’t worry about being a small fish in a big pond — you want to always be in the best pond possible, because that’s how you will get exposed to the best people and the best opportunities in your field.
Lifecycle emails
Q: What does good customer lifecycle communication look like in a Product-Led Growth (PLG) company?
Lifecycle comms — the emails, in-app messages, and other touchpoints that users see as they experience your product — is one of the best levers that we marketers have for moving the needle on important PLG numbers like activation.
(There are many other levers that live in the product, too, so don’t make lifecycle comms do all the heavy lifting.)
Good lifecycle comms would have an open rate around 30 percent, and a clickthrough rate around 5 percent.
Good lifecycle comms would have at least some segmentation of your emails so that you’re sending contextual, relevant info to as many people as possible.
If you’re in need of some inspiration on where to start, check out these worksheets from Userlist. They’re up to date on all the best practices and are helpful food for thought as you build your lifecycle program.
Benchmarks for paid marketing
Q: What are good benchmarks for paid acquisition?
Your LTV:CAC ratio should be at least 3:1
Your CAC payback should be at least 18 months
And if you’re doing B2B demand gen, your yield should be 5:1 (yield is the amount of pipeline dollars you create for every dollar you spend)
My Spotify
Q: What are you listening to lately?
Thanks for asking!
Here is my playlist of favorite songs from 2023 (so far). Only two months left in the year, so please send along any favorite tunes that I can add to my list.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
