Public.com

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Leadership5 steps

Customer-Insight Career Leverage

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

Strategy3 steps

Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does

Market leaders survive by challenging and cannibalizing their own products before an upstart does it for them.

Leadership5 steps

Dynamic North Star Metrics

Hold a North Star for at least six months, then be willing to abandon it

Strategy5 steps

Experiment Only When You Need To

Treat A/B tests as risk mitigation, not as the default proof of impact

Innovation4 steps

Fail-Fast Iterative Validation

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

Leadership3 steps

Get Promoted by Not Optimizing for the Promotion

Focus 100% on business impact and make your ambitions known — but never engineer your work around the title.

Marketing3 steps

Good Friction vs Bad Friction

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

Guided Onboarding Wizard

Replace tooltips with an immersive wizard that builds the user's first workflow with them

Strategy5 steps

Hard-Bar Activation Metric Selection

Pick the activation metric only 5-15% of users hit, then decompose it into levers

Strategy4 steps

Lower-Confidence, Higher-Volume Experimentation

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

Strategy4 steps

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Segment by Learning and Building Style

Personalize onboarding by how someone builds and learns, not by their job title

Sales4 steps

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

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

Leadership3 steps

The Failure Interview Question

Ask senior candidates about one time they failed and what they learned — and watch how they answer.

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

Strategy5 steps

The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)

Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org

The Pill-in-the-Hot-Dog Onboarding

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

Communication6 steps

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Reverse Trial

Run a premium trial on top of freemium: showcase everything, then fall back to free forever

Communication3 steps

The Rule of Seven

When an email thread hits seven replies without resolution, stop typing and get on a call.

The Two Onboarding Traps

Stop naming features and stop mapping onboarding to your pricing tiers

Innovation3 steps

Write the Press Release First

Before building anything, write the launch press release as if the product shipped today.

Strategy4 steps

Year-Horizon Growth Portfolio

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