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10 years of startup marketing
“It’s over, dude. Let’s just let it go.”
It was 2015, and my best friend and I had spent the past three months building a clothing line.
We did everything to make the best T-shirt for working out at the gym — the perfect stretch, no shrinking, and no weird smells after a sweaty workout.
I sold everything I could find to pay for the first batch of shirts — my Xbox, old cameras, video games, even my laptop (I downgraded to a cheaper one).
We even did a professional photo shoot.
Then, we launched.
Crickets.
“Let’s give it a few days. Post about it on your Facebook and Instagram,” said my friend Evan.
Another week went by.
Not a single sale. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
It was embarrassing. And it led me to feel resentment toward brands that did succeed. “I guess it’s just luck,” I thought. “And I’m not lucky.”
Wahh wahh.
What I didn’t realize was that this moment would be the start of my marketing career — one that just crossed the 10-year mark.
A few months after the failed clothing line, I realized that nobody cares about your product by default. Maybe your mom will, but that’s about it. You can spend weeks, months, even years building the best product. But if no one knows you exist, nothing happens.
I realized I had to build an audience. I had to get people to know I existed first. That realization led me down a rabbit hole of studying Instagram marketing.
Six months later, I had a new brand account with over 17K followers. I launched another clothing line and announced it on that page. Four sales on day one.
And that led me to my first real lesson:
1. Learn how to drive traffic.
Pick a channel and obsess over it. Social media, SEO, YouTube, ads — whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Just pick one and stick to it.
That lesson changed the way I think about marketing.
It also set me on a path that would eventually lead me to San Francisco — where I landed a role at my dream company.
And that unlocked the door to a whole new wave of lessons in the years to come.
2. Retention is the silent killer of startups.
In 2019, while living in San Francisco, I got accepted into Brian Balfour’s Growth Series program. I had the honor to learn in-person from early marketing employees at companies like Facebook, Uber, and Pinterest. That’s when I was taught: most startups don’t die because they can’t get customers — they die because they can’t keep them.
Startups die not from lack of acquisition, but from failing to retain the people they fought so hard to win.
But how do these big tech companies even acquire customers? Why is it that some businesses make 7-8 figures a year and some of them make 9-10 figures a year? Well…
3. Think in loops, not marketing funnels.
Everyone teaches funnels: awareness, interest, desire, action. But the biggest companies grow through loops. When every output becomes your next input — like referring team members, user-generated content, or inviting friends — you create compounding growth. Funnels are linear. Loops feed themselves.
The biggest tech companies don’t grow through funnels — they grow through loops, where every output becomes the next input and the snowball just keeps rolling.
Lessons 2 and 3 caused a paradigm shift that made me think about growth and marketing in a scientific way. And the more it internalized, the more I started to see it everywhere within successful companies.
But then, I learned that breaking down growth into a science (too much) can make you lose sight of the spark that started it all. You run the risk of making marketing feel less human. And the next part is a lesson I learned the hard way…
4. Market things you deeply know and understand.
One of my first marketing jobs was running ads at an agency. I was juggling seven clients — one of which was a VoIP startup.
I didn’t even know what VoIP meant.
One morning, the client yelled at me on a call — rightfully so — for underperforming ad creatives. I remember sitting in my chair afterward thinking, “Why did I get this account?” I had no idea how to speak to someone who needed VoIP software.
And then it clicked: you're only as good as your understanding of the customer.
The best marketers are the customers.
I learned early on that if you don’t get the product, you can’t get the customer — and no amount of data will fix that. You do a disservice to yourself and your customers when you market something you don’t understand or care about.
Because if you don’t care, how do you expect others to? If you don’t understand how a product satisfies a need, you’ll never know how to relate to the people that need it most.
Which eventually led me to realize…
5. People don’t buy products — they buy change.
Inspired by the book Breakthrough Advertising, I started seeing products differently. People don’t care about features — they care about how your product will make them feel, or who it will help them become.
Us marketers create opportunities for people to become better versions of themselves, to realize the lives they want.
People don’t care about the product you’re promoting — they care about the transformation it creates. Because people don’t buy products, they buy change — and your job as a marketer is to turn vague desires into a clear vision of that change.
It’s a very abstract thought to wrap your head around, I know. When I first heard this in the book, it went 10ft over my head.
But over time, I started to see it everywhere — from personal care products all the way to financial reporting software.
Okay, that’s five lessons from the last 10 years.
If these first five resonated, the next five go even deeper. They’ve shaped how I think about content, creativity, and the future of marketing.
Stay tuned for next week’s edition — I’ll be sharing Part 2 with the next five lessons.
(P.S. I just made a free 4-hour course on affiliate marketing and SEO. It’s in the ‘SEO & content marketing’ section of this email.)
With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):
Marketing news from the past week
Europe’s fastest growing startup
Onboarding email examples
How Brex grew an SEO moat
9 marketing psychology concepts
Ad in the wild
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🚀 All things growth & product
Europe’s fastest growing startup, using AI to grow products, increasing conversions with boring sign up screens, and common pricing page mistakes.
💭 Guess the riddle
The more these are taken, the more they are left behind. What are they?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
💌 Email marketing & copywriting
Onboarding email examples, how to re-engage email subscribers, and is it always benefits over features in copywriting?
✍️ SEO & content marketing
How Brex grew an SEO moat in 8 months, does Google SEO affect LLM optimization, and a free affiliate marketing course.
How AI will affect brand social, the main purpose of rebranding a company, 9 marketing psychology concepts, and ethically using scarcity in marketing.
🧠 Food for thought
📣 Ad in the wild
New beehiiv ad campaign on the NYC subway. Apparently they’ve had the best month so far.
Spotted an ad in the wild that caught your eye? Reply to this email with the ad and your @ for credit to get it featured!
💻 Website of the week
🏝 Cool marketing jobs
Okay, that's it for now 🧡. See you in the next edition!
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“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Riddle answer: Footsteps.
🤳 Social media, branding, & psychology