1/ India’s early stage ecosystem is set to explode. Thanks to 'fuck you' money

“A people too must live before it can philosophize,” philosopher and author Will Durant concludes in his book The Story of Philosophy.

2/ Lebanese-American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes that concept a bit further when he says that to be free to do what you want the way you want to, you need something called “fuck you” money. At family dinners, it's referred to as financial independence.

3/ Like philosophy, and other risky endeavors that need chutzpah, fuck you money is an important ingredient for an entrepreneurial ecosystem to thrive. Several Indian tech companies, including the likes of Zomato, Nykaa, and Paytm, are likely to go public in the coming weeks.

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JPK

@therealjpk

30 Jun

@arun_pattabhi

1/ ⚡️How do you go think of creating a marketing strategy for your SaaS startup? Here's @arun_pattabhi, the chief growth officer of @freshworks on how: I like to think of two broad dimensions before crafting a marketing strategy.

2/ The first one is around the complexity of the product and the second one is the complexity of the buying environment. Your marketing approach and strategy will change depending on these two factors.

3/ When we started out at Freshworks, we mainly sold to the small and medium enterprises and they discovered us through search. So we had an inbound marketing engine, fueled by paid search and content marketing optimized for search discovery.

Read 9 tweets

JPK

@therealjpk

28 Jun

@stephsmithio

1/ Content can be a powerful way to grow your startup — whether it is to build a brand or acquire customers. Here's @stephsmithio on how.

People often ask me if they should start with a podcast, a blog, a newsletter, and so on. These are all just forms of content.

2/ Content is a way to articulate ideas to an audience. So there’s no correct answer to this.

However, I do encourage people to start out with written content. This is because the written content ecosystem, although more competitive, is a lot more developed.

3/ And that means that you have many more ways to grow your content. It also has the best approaches to distribution and differentiation compared to something like podcasts that are often done by creators with already large audiences.

First, start by defining your goals.

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JPK

@therealjpk

28 Jun

@ginag

1/ ⭐️ Lot of startups underestimate the power of brand in the early days especially now because you can acquire customers through paid channels. But it's absolutely critical if you're a product led company. Here's @ginag on how they thought about brand at Duolingo.

2/ The brand personality, how users relate to the company and the app, and what it means to them is crucial. The copy being super friendly was always intentional.

3/ What drove us was being intentional about our brand persona and thinking through if Duo, the character, was a person. What would he or she be like? What is Duolingo as a brand? What are the words that describe us as a brand?

Read 8 tweets

JPK

@therealjpk

24 May

1/ The world’s 3 largest smartphone companies currently are Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Apple is 45 years old. Samsung is 83 years old. And Xiaomi? Just about 10 years old.

2/ It is not only the world’s 3rd largest smartphone seller, but was one of the youngest companies to make it to the Fortune 500 list with revenues of $37.7 billion (2020) and profits of over $2 billion.

When Xiaomi started out, China was a battlefield of over 400 brands.

3/ How did Xiaomi break out? I read dozens of books, spoke to industry experts, and pieced together a book on Xiaomi’s rise. A thread on the market conditions then and a short tech history lesson.

The story begins with a small family enterprise in Chicago, not Beijing.

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