The Wall Street Journal

Choosing a Startup PR Agency

Vet PR agencies on month-one behavior, writing samples, and lead time — not on big-brand logos.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

Leadership4 steps

Design the Job to Fit the Person

Stop hunting unicorns against made-up job descriptions; reshape roles around the good people you find

Self-Mastery5 steps

Energy Drivers and Energy Drains Audit

Mine your past for moments that energized or drained you, then turn them into job design requirements

Find-the-Nugget Angle Selection

Ignore the company's own messaging; find the single thread reporters care about and double down.

Focusing Power on an Addressable Target

Strategy works only when you concentrate a genuine source of power on a target that can actually be moved.

Incumbent Anchoring

Position your product as taking on a household-name incumbent, never as a new category.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Job Prototyping via Informational Interviews

Treat yourself as a product: prototype many roles wide, interview people who hold them, then narrow

Manufacture the Story You Belong In

When you're too boring to cover directly, create the news, trend, or data others must cover — and live inside it.

Pitch the Freelancer, Not the Editor

The hungriest, most reachable writer at an outlet is usually the freelancer — target them, not the busy staff editor.

Press as a Trophy, Not a Megaphone

The value of coverage is often the 'as seen in' validation you deploy yourself — not the readership.

Problem-Solving Story Over Success Story

Editors reject polished wins — lead with the challenge you faced and how you got through it.

Publication-to-Story Fit Map

Match each story type to the one publication most likely to cover it, before pitching anyone.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Pushes and Pulls Compass

You only truly change jobs when a set of pushes builds enough energy and pulls point the direction

Reverse-Engineer the Publication's Mission

Editors serve their audience, not you — decode who each outlet serves, then fit your story to that mission.

Strategy4 steps

Spotting Bad Strategy

Four tells that a 'strategy' is actually empty: no diagnosis, goals-as-strategy, fluff, and incoherent actions.

Strategy4 steps

The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)

Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

Marketing4 steps

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

Strategy4 steps

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

The Contrarian Coverage-Gap Angle

Give reporters the bold opposing view on a trending topic they're already covering positively.

Innovation3 steps

The Crux: Insight Through Immersion

Find the single hardest solvable part of the problem, immerse in it, and let insight emerge.

The Direct Funding Pitch

Pitch funding news by pattern-matching a beat reporter and stating the deal in three sentences.

Leadership4 steps

The Foundry: Facilitating a Group to One Action Agenda

Put the leader plus 7-8 people in a room, surface 25 problems, then focus on the one or two addressable ones.

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Four Career Quests

Diagnose which of four job-change 'quests' you're on so you optimize the move correctly

The Human Customized Pitch Email

A short, human, story-first email that proves it was written for this one person — not a mass blast.

The Jargon-Strip Clarity Test

Say what your product does out loud in plain answers; if the writing can't match, strip the jargon.

The Kernel of Good Strategy

Every real strategy has three parts: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

The Lightweight-First Outreach Opener

Open cold with a one-line 'are you open to ideas?' instead of a full pitch, to earn a reply.

The Pixar Career Story Template

Distill your career into a seven-line Pixar-style story that intrigues interviewers and clarifies your direction

The Press-as-Fundraising Filter

Only pursue press when you can name a specific business job it will do — same discipline as raising money.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Value Deny: Finding Opportunity in What You Can't Buy

List what you should be able to buy but can't, or how a familiar product ought to work but doesn't.