HubSpot

$100 Voting for Prioritization

Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.

2x Activation Energy for Change

A new bet must grow at a multiple of your baseline to matter—don't dribble it in.

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

Brainstorm high-value actions, correlate them with conversion and retention, then experiment to prove causation

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

B2C2B: Horizontal Wedge to Enterprise

Win a billion-user consumer use case first, then let personal users carry the product into their workplace.

Influence5 steps

Behavioral Pricing: Compromise, Decoy and Framing

Raise revenue 30%+ by reframing tiers and framing prices — without touching the product.

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Brain-Dump, Group, Vote, Single-Author (Company Values Workshop)

Crowdsource the raw material for values, but never write the definitions by committee

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

Build AND Buy

Reframe build-vs-buy as build-and-buy: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% that differentiates.

Building the PLG Team and Org

Start with a growth PM and an analyst, then formalize into a cross-functional PLG org with three growth heads

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

When to bundle products and when a single-product land wins

Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading

Read where the market sits in the eternal bundle/unbundle cycle to decide vertical vs horizontal.

Catalyst Review Forum

Replace the standing weekly review with parallel, role-based topic blocks anyone can join.

Cathedrals Not Bricks

Make every team member see the whole cathedral, not just the brick they're laying.

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

Choose a centralized CDP stack or a warehouse-plus-reverse-ETL stack based on your engineering resources.

Productivity5 steps

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor

Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately

Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

Context and Outcome over Pain and Gain

Study the context that makes the irrational rational, not just the pain to be relieved.

Leadership7 steps

Culture as a Product

Every company builds two products: one for customers, one for the team. Culture is the second one.

Customer-Insight Career Leverage

Grow your career by pulling ground-level customer insights up to executives instead of waiting to be promoted

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Leadership6 steps

Debate, Decide, Unite: Systematic Decision-Making

Name the decider, list the factors, stack-rank them, then unite behind the call — with calories proportional to consequence.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Designing Yourself Out of Your Weaknesses

Refuse to spend years becoming passably okay at something — negotiate the constraint at founding, in writing.

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Do the Opposite

Study what everyone's doing not to copy it, but to find the 180 that stands out.

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

Dual-Track Category Building (Sell Into Today's Budget, Build Tomorrow's Category)

Rank in the funded category you already fit while running a long-tail campaign to shift the market to your new one

Editorial SEO Operating Model

Split the work: SEO manager picks topics and outlines, a domain-expert writer writes, then analyze.

Expected-Conversions Prioritization

Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.

Fail-Fast Iterative Validation

Since ~80% of hypotheses fail, use cheap validation methods first and reserve A/B testing for pre-vetted ideas

Fight for Simplicity: The Third-Order Cost of Complexity

Entropy always wins unless you fight it — price every feature at its dimensional cost, not its build cost.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

Seek peers in the ring with you who'll throw real punches—not advice from the sidelines.

Communication3 steps

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

Tag every piece of feedback FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, or Plea so teams know how hard to weigh it.

Communication3 steps

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale

Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage

Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

Instrument first and last UTMs on day one so you can move to multi-touch attribution without waiting.

Good Friction vs Bad Friction

Adding friction that addresses the user's psyche can increase conversion, because not all friction is bad

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

Change one part of the growth system and you change them all—so fix the true source.

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

Hire Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

How You Charge Beats How Much: Pricing-Model Design

Pick the monetization model, then the price metric, then the structure — the number comes last.

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

Coach by exploring a well-informed hunch with someone, not lecturing them from data

Hypothesis-Driven SEO

Generate hypotheses by analyzing sites (and asking their SEO managers), then test to validate.

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

Judge people by their actual output, not by how they talk in a conversation.

Internal Link Spread Optimization

Most sites starve their own pages of internal links; fixing spread is SEO's biggest quick win.

Intuition as Hypothesis Generator

Treat product taste as a hypothesis machine, not an oracle — then debate it down to a working hypothesis

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

Build product-led sales as an evolution, not a revolution: intuition, then regression, then platforms.

Irreducible Complexity — The Simplicity Audit

1 + 1 = 1.5, not 3 — every addition subtracts, so audit the system, not the local decisions

Leaders, Fillers and Killers

Sort every feature into leader, filler or killer to configure packages that unlock segments.

Innovation3 steps

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

Stop debating consequential decisions — run the experiment that shows the upper and lower bounds now.

Lego Brick vs Lego Box (Selling Solutions Up-Market)

Sell ready-made solution boxes to move up-market while still building composable bricks behind the scenes.

Lower-Confidence, Higher-Volume Experimentation

Drop the 95% confidence bar to run more experiments, backstopped by qualitative corroboration and a pre-set game plan

Communication4 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit (Meetings and Decisions)

Force every meeting and decision to declare its purpose, owner, and method out loud

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

Build a growing pool of aware, engaged leads — via freemium — and let them convert on their timing

Finance4 steps

Net Revenue Retention Above 100% (and Why NRR Lies)

Expansion revenue must beat churn, but NRR flatters you — watch logo churn too.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

Measure growth by counting the moments you felt underqualified and stretched.

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

Derive how you lead by forcing your values down to three, then plotting your work style

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

Players, Coaches, Captains

Split leadership into on-field captains and sideline coaches so top ICs never leave the game.

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data

PQA Signal Detection

Find the exact usage signals that mean 'engage sales now' using users, volume, velocity, and behavior.

Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

Write the launch press release before you build to keep products marketable

Price Before Product: The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation

Have the pricing conversation months before launch and use it to prioritize what you build.

Pricing Selects the Market (Sell Growth, Not Savings)

Price and positioning choose your market — reframe your product as growth to charge many times more.

Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework

You can't solve a problem directly — break it into ranked causes, then solve the biggest

Problem-People-System (PPS)

Diagnose a systems request by problem and people first, never jump straight to the tool.

Mindset4 steps

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

Stop hoping the next fix makes it easier; reframe success as earning harder problems.

Product Accountability for Pipeline

Make product — not marketing — own PQA pipeline, with leaders on revenue and PMs on the KPIs that feed it.

Productize to Segments (the 'You Can Act Differently' Test)

Segments are defined by needs and willingness to pay — and only count if you can act differently on them.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two

Every launch drops one of three; software lets you drop quality only if you plan to earn it back

Reading the Signals for Product-Led vs Sales-Led Growth

A decision tree for whether and when to hire your first salespeople

Marketing6 steps

Rebrand as a Product Development Process

Run a rebrand with sprint teams, owners, and transparency — not as a marketing reveal

Reset Through Better Abstractions

Don't fear throwing work away — a better abstraction compounds and recovers sunk cost fast.

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue

Innovation6 steps

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

Communication4 steps

Say the Thing You Think You Cannot Say

Voice the hard observation by detoxifying it into a question you own

Selling to Developers via Self-Serve Proof

Developers must prove products themselves, so invest in self-serve — sales can't convert them at the build stage

SEO Readiness Assessment

Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?

SERP Reverse-Engineering

To learn what page to build, read what Google already ranks for your target keywords.

Communication5 steps

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

Solving for Everyone Is Solving for No One

Get specific about who you're NOT for—that guardrail is stronger than defining who you are.

Systems Not Goals

Build a default-on repeatable system instead of chasing a one-off target.

Systems Over Headcount (The Small Bus)

Solve with better systems and talent density instead of adding people; a smaller bus turns faster.

Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

Fix the 25-40% of churn product teams ignore — payment failures, off-boarding, cancel flows

Tell Me What It Takes to Win, Then Tell Me the Costs

Ask for the un-watered-down plan to win first; negotiate the costs down second.

The 10% Planning Rule

Never spend more than 10% of an execution period planning it.

Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

Ten hard metrics to judge whether a company is worth betting your career on

The 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

The 5-Question Stalled Growth Diagnostic

Diagnose why growth is slowing by asking five questions in strict priority order.

The Acceptable / Expensive / Prohibitively Expensive Price Ladder

Three questions that reveal both a price range and the psychological cliffs you must hide behind.

Sales5 steps

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

Match funding to goal: bootstrap cash-flow businesses, fund only clear paths to $1B revenue

The Break-Even Indifference Test

Offer economically identical pricing models and see which one people irrationally prefer.

The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy

Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.

The Cancellation Ceiling (Maximum Customer Cap)

New customers divided by cancellation rate is the hard ceiling on how big you can ever get.

The Category Creation Go/No-Go Test

Four checks — budget, buyer language, competition, and vision scope — decide whether to invent a category or win an existing one

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

Build a company like a house: founding documents, operating system, and operating cadence

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

The Downturn Pricing Playbook (Never Drop the Price)

Three moves that protect price integrity in a recession: de-feature, non-pricing actions, change the model.

Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

The Elephant Curve (Channels Saturate and Sag)

Every acquisition channel starts as an S-curve then sags — assume your winners will decline.

Innovation3 steps

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The Five PLG Readiness Components

The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

The Four-Channel Category Rollout

Customer language, PR testing, analyst/directory validation, and content — the mechanics of making a category real

The Four Forces of Progress

Model demand as a tug-of-war: two forces push people to switch, two hold them back.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Four P's: Potential, Probability, Passion, Prowess

Score any idea on four factors — and always compute potential before probability.

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.

The Full PLG Funnel Audit

Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

The Incognito Cry Test

Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.

The Influence-Graph Fanboy Loop

Run PageRank on your community's network, then approach the central nodes for feedback — not distribution

The JTBD Switch Interview

Interrogate the story of a real purchase to recover the true causes of a switch.

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

Communication7 steps

The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote

Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.

The Most Charitable Interpretation

Hire for and enforce a norm of assuming good intent, and let the misfits leave

The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks

Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

The Non-Fatal Override

If it isn't fatal, let them run it — but log your skepticism first so the outcome teaches both of you

Innovation3 steps

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

Influence3 steps

The Panini Effect

Show your product line as an unfinished puzzle and attach rates jump from 20% to 40-50%.

The Path to the C-Suite

Five career levers plus a work ethic that compound you into an executive

The Pill-in-the-Hot-Dog Onboarding

Bury the intimidating-but-necessary onboarding step inside familiar, exciting content instead of leading with it

Productivity4 steps

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

The three infrastructure layers plus per-funnel-stage tools every PLG motion needs

Leadership6 steps

The PM Framework Wrapper

A PM's real output is a framework that wraps strategy plus a point of view — and gets everyone to the same destination

Sales3 steps

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

Convert self-serve usage into large enterprise contracts by bridging individual, team, and enterprise value.

Finance4 steps

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

Stand up a pricing committee and do one small monetization thing every quarter, forever

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

The Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

Sales5 steps

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

The Six Phases of the Buying Timeline

Meet buyers where they are on their timeline instead of forcing them onto yours.

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

The Tempo Framework

Align every team on what shipping cadence 'good' looks like, then close the gap

The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth

Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning

Sales3 steps

The Three Lead-Attribution Channels (PQA / PQL / MQL)

Route leads by whether usage and a buyer exist, because each channel has different conversion rates and playbooks.

The Three Pillars of Self-Serve Monetization

Lift free-to-paid conversion by fixing awareness first, then checkout friction, then the model itself.

The Three Sources of Energy

Every purchase draws on functional, emotional, and social energy, not just utility.

The Three Types of SEO

Programmatic, editorial and technical SEO are different games; pick the one your queries reward.

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

The Two Paths to Opinionated Software

Either encode a best practice that already exists without technology, or teach a better way and enforce it in the product

The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)

Define what to build and how to grow from the use case, not the persona.

The Value Metric Pricing Model

Charge on a metric that scales with value so acquisition, retention, and expansion self-correct

The Values-Encoded Brand System

Build the brand as a system whose elements each encode a company value, so every touchpoint stays on-brand without training

The VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

The 'What Made You Cancel?' Rooter-Cause Diagnosis

Ask what made them cancel (not why), then dig past the surface reason to the real causes.

Sales5 steps

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

The Year Is Made in the First Six Months

Because buying cycles lag, your annual number is set by what you ship in H1, not H2.

Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

Defer black-or-white judgments about decisions and people until the last responsible moment.

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

Screen martech candidates for curiosity, engineering scrappiness, and freedom from tool bias.

Topical Authority Adjacency

Rank by starting where you're already known, then expand into semantically adjacent topics.

Topics Over Keywords

Modern Google ranks one page for a cluster of 200-2,000 keywords; target the topic, not the keyword.

Productivity4 steps

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

Set review rhythm by two signals: too fast if no progress, too slow if content is stale

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

Communication3 steps

Two-Way Write-Ups

Make written docs conversational with done-reading, Dory questions, and a sentiment table.

When to Centralize a Martech Function

Use the 100-150 person threshold and b2c/b2b axis to decide when and where to own martech.

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Year-Horizon Growth Portfolio

Protect growth teams from weekly-win pressure by committing to low/medium/high bets over a year-long horizon

Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets

Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.