Paul Sullivan

KLAVIYO NEW UPDATE! 😍 Remember the days when embedding videos in your Klaviyo emails meant creating image thumbnails with backend URLs? Well, those days are officially over! Klaviyo has just rolled out a NEW FEATURE that lets you add videos directly into your emails. This means you can engage your audience more effectively with rich, dynamic content without hassle. #klaviyoemailmarketing #klaviyoflows #emaildesigning #emailmarketing #marketingchamber #alixemail #d2c #klaviyonewupdate

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Draftboard v1: A leaky bucket & a broken flywheel I wrote a few days ago about how the length of our feedback loop was a real business killer. But given enough time, would it have actually worked? No. Because we had an even bigger problem: Draftboard referrals weren't getting hired. Even though we were sending super high quality candidates (20% got interviews), those candidates weren't converting into new hires. This was really baffling at first: shouldn't initial quality (read: first interviews) be a leading indicator? Given enough time, shouldn't more and more of those high quality candidates covert into newly hired employees? This is where we learned the hard lesson that every recruiter out there already knew, and that we were naive enough to believe we could change: the chances that even a high quality candidate gets hired are incredibly small. Why? For three interdependent reasons: 1. A new hire is a big risk - time, money, opportunity cost - so the vetting process is necessarily intense 2. This process therefore has many stages, and each stage is creates a more loss-y conversion funnel (resume screen, interviews, take home projects, presentations, background & reference checks, etc) 3. The purpose of an interview process is usually to minimize risk rather than maximize return, so companies always have their fingers on the 'reject' trigger - there is much more of a bias to reject someone than to hire him All of these contribute to a world where even great candidates have a low chance of being hired. This is a problem for us two-fold: First, our pricing model was that we earn 20% of every referral bonus. So if there are no referrals bonuses, then there's no revenue. Second - and much, much more important - was that our scouts weren't making money. If we had built a platform where our scouts were crushing it but we weren't generating enough money, then we would have been able to find some way to solve that (I'm highly confident of that at least). But our scouts weren't making placements, and through no fault of their own. When they started with us they would gush about how fantastic the product was and how much they liked it, but after making 20, 30, 50 referrals without earning a bonus, even those ardent advocates ask themselves a simple question: Why am I still doing this? What else could I be doing with my time? Is it worth my effort to share Draftboard links? And the obvious answer is no, it wasn't worth their time. The whole premise of Draftboard was that incentives drive behavior. So if the incentives are not materializing, then neither will the behavior we desire (more referrals). This is what ultimately doomed us, because scouts would start super excited and make dozens of referrals, only to churn a month later because they saw no success. Sometimes you encounter a problem you can't solve - this was ours. But without recognizing it when we did, there would be no Draftboard v2...

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There’s a lot of posts recently about the email agency space being commoditized. We're seeing email agency founders saying they are taking a step back to focus on only a few clients at a time. This is a polite way of saying that the market is saturated and we're in a bubble. I've had more than a few reach out and ask me what else they should look into if they have to pivot. In 2018-2019 I was talking to a lot of email marketers. The space was unsophisticated, raw, inexperienced. Then the pandemic happened, there wasn't enough email marketers to go around, all of a sudden everyone needed to be selling online and there was a gap in roles to be filled. That demand drove prices to unsustainable rates. The majority being spent on welcome and abandon cart flows. $6,000, $8,000, $12,000 etc. for email flows. Then upwards of $500+ per individual email creation. None of this was ever going to be sustainable. Small brands wouldn't be able to afford those prices when things returned to normal. Large brands would start really questioning the actual value of their agencies. The truth is if brands actually knew the real macro level statistics behind email they would automate it, save the fees, and actually cull their bloated lists to maintain deliverability. The attribution in email has been for a long time 100% fake. When 75% of sales from popup sign ups happen in less than a day, it wasn’t the welcome series driving that revenue. Abandon carts have the majority of people purchase before the 3 hour gap of you sending the automated email, there’s nothing magical about that email that causes the sale of someone who was high intent and got sidetracked or just held off at the moment. When 85% of your revenue from campaigns comes from people that have already purchased. I could go on about how well done product pages with assets essentially can replace the need for email asset creation. I wrote that if you build a segment that hasn’t purchased ever and signed up more than 45 days ago you’d get very little sales out of them beyond a massive discount. Can you get the above segment to hand you over money without a discount? That’s the test of whether or not your email is working. The truth is, most email marketers are babysitting a list and just keeping it alive making sure it doesn’t stick any forks in outlets. It really boils down to consistency. Now I’ve also been talking to email agencies for the last 4+ years about the importance of data collection. We're starting to hear more about zero party data as agencies look for a way to differentiate themselves, but we're also getting to the point of potentially too little too late. Data collection + ai automation + defined strategy will outperform most agencies in the long run at 1/10th the cost. This is what I see happening and fast. #ecommerce #emailmarketing #data

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The Saas bubble may be coming to an end. People are realising you can prompt AI to replicate almost anything. Saas is an easy target. I’ve seen examples of software being copied and sold at knock down prices. Software itself is alive and well. Charging monthly subscriptions for Saas however…is going through big change. The mere mention of AI 2 years ago and people paid close attention. Not so much in 2024. Interesting times. #prospecting #marketing #sales

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Lots of posts today with performance comparisons of o1 but when you use it the output differences to 4o aren’t very noticeable (at least with my prompts). I’m likely not hitting it’s sweet spot but the only difference I’m seeing is the new delay and output on chatGPT while it “thinks” 😂. Hopefully we start to see some usable comparisons comming out over the next few weeks. Any suggested examples would be appreciated? #ai #openai #o1

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If Shopify licensed their ENTIRE software stack/infra for 5 years - giving you the ability to launch your own Shopify-type platform - how much would you be prepared to pay? The only caveat would be any enhancements you made in that period would become the property of Shopify once your licence was up for renewal. Payment for such a licence would be upfront. List prices in comments (additional bonus points: what market would you seek to disrupt first?) 👇👇👇

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HUGE regret I've had over the last 6 months of entrepreneurship: Not applying new knowledge and advice immediately. A specific example: I received two free pieces of consulting on Stay Woven as part of live group presentations. One was a review on SEO keywords I could target in that market, another was a review of my current landing page and ways to improve it. The design review was in early April, and the SEO advice was back in February. I haven't applied either yet. Even though I have notes and could likely make the changes today, I lost two critical benefits: excitement and time. Take advantage of the excitement you have in the moment after receiving advice for how to improve your product. Improving your product is the fucking goal after all! More importantly, make those improvements right away so that their benefits can compound over time. If I were to improve my landing page a month ago, who knows how many more email signups and general interest I could've gained since then. Who knows how much organic traffic I could've generated from better SEO. I've lost a lot of value by not taking advantage of new information and strategy on day one. Don't make the same mistake! #entrepreneurship #motivation #keepspritzing

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To be a great services provider, it's not just good enough to do great services. You have to communicate what those services are and stay on top of your client's business goals. That comes down to accountability and the truth is... most consultancies are horrible at it. They don't provide consistent updates or tell their clients how much money they're spending. That's the opposite of how we do things at Codingscape. Here are some ways we hold ourselves accountable: 1) Sprint Demos This allows our customers to lean into a schedule and know that every two weeks they're going to see a demo of progress. It's always clear there will be a checkpoint where they can understand that everything is working out. 2) Structuring Teams Around Outcomes Our customers often have technical goals but those are mostly informed by business goals - the outcome that a company is trying to achieve. You are typically a couple of steps removed once you get to those technical, so it's really important that our account managers are checking in with the business side of our customers to ensure there's good alignment around those outcomes so we can keep the team outcome focused.

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3 ways to get your emails manually pushed to spam:  1. Telling someone they did something wrong. Example = Identifying a “data leak” or “broken links” on their website. 2. Unpolished personalisations. Example = Describing someone as a “Chief Executive Officer”, rather than “CEO”. Or non-cleansed company names like “StackOptimise Ltd”. 3. Excessively long sequences. Example = gone are the days of 8-step sequences. Stop after 3 to protect your domain, protect your accounts and ensure email volume isn’t wasted on inactive buyers.

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Plot twist .. The popularity of the Bluesky Social alternative to Twitter/X is now growing at an accelerated pace. Current growth rate is around 1 MILLION USERS PER DAY. Very few things grow that fast these days. Bluesky is a decentralized platform that is designed to not be controlled by a single company, a version of social media built by many people. It was initiated in 2019 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, but as of May 2024, Dorsey is no longer on Bluesky's board. Bluesky is now an independent public benefit corporation (PBC) led by CEO Jay Graber. You can watch now Bluesky's explosive growth in real time: https://bcounter.nat.vg/ You can find me at : drlollie.bsky.social

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We've been putting this page together for a while. This is a look under the hood at what makes Nibble such a powerful negotiator... 💰 Pricing algorithms 🤝 Negotiation techniques 🤖 Custom-built NLU We deploy a huge variety of negotiation techniques to agree deals, including but not limited to - anchoring, framing, active listening, tactical timing, reasons, demonstrating empathy... There's a LOT going on in every one of Nibble's responses. Do we have a deal? 😁 https://hubs.li/Q02wvt7m0

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I am a big supporter of bootstrapping! Mainly because your customer funds your business and you can try little experiments along the way once you have a trusted group of loyal customers. You can tweak the proposition, you can increase margins, and a loyal customer base means that you receive honest feedback regularly. For operators like myself who want to build a business on the side that is born purely out of passion and goodwill, bootstrapping is the way to go!! It’s also low risk and allows you to pivot quickly without pressure from external investors. And it’s fun! 🙌🏼 Women in Product®UK CPO Track®

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I know very few happy agency owners 😢 I know lots of happy software founders 😁 Here's why... ✅ No big team ✅ Better cashflow ✅ No client hamster wheel ✅ Building a sellable asset And yet, most content is about “How to start an agency” More people should look into software.

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"What does 'community' do?" ... 📌 Activate vocal customers, turn customers into vocal champions 📌 Prompt discussions, clip content from those discussions for socials 📌 Create UGC campaigns across platforms (low/no cost) 📌 Collect organic UGC across platforms, repurpose content 📌 Coordinate beta user licenses for product launches 📌 Gather video/other testimonials for product marketing 📌 Offer product trainings, AMAs with leadership for your customers 📌 Regular opportunities for feedback from customers/users 📌 Give non-customers a space to learn with existing customers 📌 Run customer advisory boards, host recurring calls for feedback 📌 Direct-mail campaigns for UGC/activation on socials 📌 IRL events for community members, engage on small-scale 📌 Product launch coordination for customer/community activation 📌 Seeding your company's value in various relevant places All this ^, for... ⭐ Positive impacts on deal velocity ⭐ Positive impacts on retention ⭐ Positive impacts on brand/awareness ⭐ Inbound lead generation ⭐ Valuable product feedback for iteration/new features ... You're going to keep seeing more and more community roles pop up as B2B brands recognize the importance of building a B2C voice, and capitalizing on/enhancing their dark social brand.

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I've done the £0-£1m journey in SaaS five times, three as founder. Here are 10 (of the many) key learnings I wish I knew first time around.... - Understand your leap of faith revenue assumptions that make your plan happen. Create 'x' meetings (how), 'y' % become opportunities, 'z' % converts, ACV is 'a' and payment split (annual/monthly?) is b/c. When its broken you can see where and remedy or replan. - Don't scale quota carrying reps without the confidence in pipeline. Modelling from opps to work out team size and revenue rather than multiplying reps by a quota is much more accurate. Also, no one ever models reps that don't work out or leave. But they do (both). - You don't need to wait to renewal to renew. Renew at the times of change and opportunity. Rip up old contract with 6 months left and create an 18 month new one. You can credit any cash already paid. - You can subsidise product development, if a prospect needs you to re-prioritise the roadmap. Just be transparent and understand the cost of de-prioritising other features. Never build something not planned in next 12 months roadmap though. - Annual paid up front makes SO much difference to cashflow, ability to fund growth and dilution. Model it and see. Buy Now Pay Later tools for SaaS teams now make this a no-brainer. - Make friends early with your potential future acquirers. Including competitors. If they know you are there, maybe your name gets mentioned around the boardroom table at the right time. - Never ever compromise on values when you hire. Hire good people with drive, potential and commitment over resume experiences. - Customer Success doesn't need to be a cost centre. Over invest in CS but plan to make it a revenue driver rather than cost. Investing in time with customers to understand their problems you can help with is a win win. - Pricing is the biggest lever you have on growth. Period. That doesn't 'just' mean putting up prices. Increasing ACV through product offering, swimming up stream etc. Test pricing. Understand value and how you can align value and pricing. Identify where money is left on the table and where pricing model is the cause. - Get mentors. And coaches ;-) So much more I could add - what would you add? Still learning EVERY DAY.

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FIFTY ONE Automations used by the best lead agencies in the world - for free, for you 107 pages of step by step breakdowns of crucial processes that helped over a 100 agencies scale to multi-7 figures! If you want to start posting screenshots of 20% replies like them, then it's just 1 download away...for free - you just got to start You can run these automations with Smartlead or use them as inspiration for any tool you already use. And yes, before you say anything, if you want to truly win in 2024, you NEED to be doing this as a lead gen agency—it's the new world, and speed will win! This isn't a "funnel", or a 20-slide deck; it's 100s of hours of research and writing for you - on the house! If you love this, all I ask is for you to drop a "🤖 emoji" and any one of the automation you're excited to try (first 4 pages have the list) in the comments below 🙏! Super keen to see your favs!

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Who are the top Newsletter Writers in SaaS? Can you help me out Linkedin? .... I plan to build a master list and feature them on our next webinar AND potentially invite them into the Founderpath Studio to teach with me - Live Pic below is from our webinar earlier this month. Packed house - all Founders. #SaaS #Founders

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ATTENTION ALL ECOMMERCE STORE OWNERS & AGENCY OWNERS... Here's How I'm getting $1,500 - $9,500 with 0 Ad Spent DAILY... P.S. Comment below '$1500' and I'll send you the complete doc sharing my strategy for FREE!

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