Brett Farmiloe

Go check out Sasha Orloff's Notion pages he created. More and more I think people are going to be utilizing Notion for some really interesting things. Some Examples of what I have used it to cook up recently: 💡 Book Club Invitee List (created a form for people to fill out that flooded into a database) 💡 Built a custom database of tasks for operations to complete. 💡 Create a project plan for internal comms rollout. 💡 Create a database of Tech Stack analysis. 💡 Template for Church Services for me to review my notes and record what I learned. It can be used for so many cool things. Thanks Sasha Orloff for showing the world what it can do in the Founder Space. What have you cooked up lately in Notion? #notion #accounting #operationsmanagement #projectmanagement #coo #ajtheaccountant

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Early stage fundraising is convincing enough people with credibly + resources to believe that you're onto something big. Remember it is a bi-directional discovery process. And more often than not, a lot of people with not enough credibility or not enough resources will give you their opinion. If everyone was a believer, you wouldn't have a shot at 100x-ing your company. It's a feature not a bug. Remember that. If you're not careful that can drain energy. Incredibly important trap to avoid.

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220 Reviews. All 5 Stars. Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it. A heartfelt thank you to our incredible clients and the amazing team that makes it all possible. When I launched Bosah Group, I set out with two clear goals: 1. Bring people together. 2. Contribute to the growth of Texas. Every day, I’m fortunate to pursue my passions—Consulting, Technology, and Real Estate—and help others achieve their goals. Need help finding your next apartment or dream home? Message me. Looking to build a standout website or app? Let’s connect. Want guidance on scaling your business? Reach out. Here’s to more connections, growth, and success—together.

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New work: a new brand identity and website design for fal fal announced their $23m raise yesterday, and are tacking AI with a generative media platform for developers. It's quite rare to create a brand for a 3 letter-word company. Some projects take some time to chip away at its core, but the founders at fal really embraced a yearning for expression and the opportunity to create on an infinite canvas. The core concept of this identity relies on the typographic system. It is three-pronged: the camera, the typewriter, and the processor. The image, the words, and the machine. All crucial primitives of what makes AI... AI. https://fal.ai/ https://www.adamho.com/

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Super interesting thread with lots of insightful responses! Thanks Timothy! Here’s my 2 cents. Theme store themes are packaged and distributed for a merchant audience, not agency/developer audience. It’s compiled code. We don’t develop our themes that way, why should you? I build themes with well scoped theme components, Figma files, docs, CI, and workflows. All of these help us ship faster and at a higher quality. Why should you need to do these things yourself when they’ve already been solved or can be iterated from something that already exists? Themes are GIANT projects. Building a world class buying experience that checks all the boxes of quality and functionality from scratch just doesn’t make sense. If there was a design and development environment that gave you everything you needed, without limiting the final product you’re trying to deliver, why would you chose to not use it? If any of this resonates with you, you’re going to want to follow what we’re doing at Archetype Themes 👇 https://lnkd.in/ekQesRAD

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I've made a concerted effort to collect testimonials from the brands that hire agencies I introduce them to. This is the 2nd time I've helped Mike Kaplan, CMO at AVOXI find an agency. There's a few consistencies among the testimonials I receive. - Speed - Quality If you talk to a few of the RIGHT agencies, the time spent finding the right vendor is drastically reduced. Marketing moves fast. CMO's have a million things on their plates. A long drawn out agency search is draining. Speed kills.

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To celebrate Cal.com, Inc.'s newest launch on @ProductHunt today, I sat with Peer Richelsen to discuss how building Platform and Atoms is a full-circle moment + more 🚀 In this ep, we covered:  ✊🏻 Open vs. Closed and why OSS will win 💡 The importance of IP in a post-AI world 🔥 How premium products can be built using OSS 🤑 How to approach enterprise sales as a 1x founder 🙏🏼 The impact of Y Combinator on Peer as a founder PS: I'm a tiny investor in Cal.com and a big believer in Peer and the team! If you are into OSS, support the launch here: https://lnkd.in/e_CaE_KQ Links to the ep 👇🏼 🔗 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eBUv5E9q 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epngcvFU ❤️ Sponsor Corner ❤️ Big shoutout to acquire.com for making this episode happen! Acquire is the best online marketplace (I can vouch for this) to buy/sell startups, and I know many founders who have sold their businesses there. If you're looking to wind down your business and cash in some of your founder chips, check them out - https://lnkd.in/gM5VZBFC Andrew Gazdecki and the team are always on the hunt to find ways to help more founders through Acquire 🫡 Lastly, if you are a listener and have been enjoying the episodes, please take a minute to drop your rating on the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eaaw-tJk I appreciate you for giving your attention and time 🙏🏼

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Hey Nashville Founder and Funder friends: StartupNash is hosting events! We are having a happy hour during the week of #3686, and I want you to come. This event is for high-growth founders in Nashville launching something new (or an interest in newly launched startups)! Founders should expect to meet peer connections. Let me share a bit more. - Startup founders have a lonely road. It's important to make/invest in professional friendships. - 3686 is a great time to share new things you're working on/launching. - We practice peer mentorship (founder knowledge sharing) every day in StartupNash. - We are bringing our community experience to life with this ongoing event. There is a mix of founders and funders already signed up. Those attending 3686 can attend the conference happy hour, then StartupNash in East Nashville, then LaunchTN's after-party. It'll be a busy day but we can do it! I'll be attending every event. How you can help: - Share this event with a founder new to town - Be open to knowledge-sharing with founders - StartupNash is seeking sponsorships for our founder events in the future Details here: https://lu.ma/03h7wpei

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Controversial opinion: The best way to qualify CMOs is to ask this question (especially if you're a startup) “Tell me about a business or a side hustle you had before.” Here’s why: It’s an easy way to filter out all the B and C players. A bad answer is “I’ve never done that” An ok answer is “Here’s a personal blog I set up to sell my services as a freelancer/consultant” A good answer is “here’s a side project I set up to teach myself SEO” A GREAT answer is “Here’s an affiliate site I made/a community I grew/a micro SaaS I built. And here’s how I drove traffic to it. And here’s how I monetised it. And here are the 3 people I hired to run it” If you’re hiring a fractional CMO, chances are you’re an early-ish stage startup. You probably have systems that are chaotic at best, non-existent at worst. You don’t have a huge budget to work with (otherwise you’d be hiring someone full time). And you don’t have much of a team to support them. You’re probably hoping they can help build and mentor your marketing team as you grow. So what you need is someone who can thrive in that sort of environment. Someone who can take the initiative. Someone who can focus on stuff that will move the needle quickly and be able to hire, lead and mentor a team that can build on the marketing processes the fractional CMO sets up. Someone who can work effectively with minimal supervision and can get you traffic and paying customers from scratch, with limited resources and budget. I’ve been on both sides of this - as a fractional CMO, and also coaching founders and helping them hire marketers. So if you need some help with this, shoot me a message. #cmos #saas #startup

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Hiring alert! One of our newest MKT1 portfolio companies is hiring a founding marketer. nodaFi is vertical SaaS that understands a wedge-in strategy. The team is scrappy and values marketing--and really understands their ICP - facilities managers. If you're based in the Bay Area and interested in helping bring a tech-first approach to an industry that operates with pen & paper, take a look. The founders are awesome (cc Jacob Pandl & Michael Loyda) JD link in the comments.

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In a recent episode of The Expertise Economy podcast, I sat down with Johnny Page, CEO, and Matt Verlaque, COO, of SaaS Academy. Johnny shared a crucial insight for SaaS founders that challenges conventional wisdom 👇 "Many founders aim to delegate sales once they reach $15-20K MRR. This is often a critical mistake. We advocate for founders to remain deeply involved in sales for as long as possible." Why? According to Johnny, "No one can articulate the problem and solution more compellingly than the founder." Key takeaways from our discussion: > Founder-led sales drive stronger growth > Focus on consistent wins rather than quick handoffs > Clarify your customer acquisition strategy > Define your ideal customer profile precisely > Optimize your sales channel and offer > Maintain this focused approach for at least 12 months This strategy is the catalyst for transforming steady growth into exponential scale. For a deep dive into scaling strategies for your SaaS business, watch the full interview now: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u SaaS founders, what has been your experience with sales leadership? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. #sales #SaaS #SaaSAcademy #Scale #Startups #Podcast #Leadership

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A few weeks ago I wrote about how I creatively worked my way into a partnership with THE Jordan Peterson. This week, I want to breakdown how I launched his course that did $18,000 in the first 15 minutes. While most creators are looking for the secret shortcut to launching a wildly successful course - the answer is really just doing the “obvious boring” things in the right order. Let’s first address the elephant in the room - Jordan Peterson has a massive audience. I won’t pretend that this wasn’t a major factor in the success of the course but a big audience doesn’t always = a big win. My previous company, Increase Media, had been working with Jordan’s team on content marketing for a while so, when they wanted to launch a course, it was a natural fit that we would support on the marketing side. Let’s talk about the boring obvious things that make millions: 1️⃣ Research Most creators think that premium video and polished materials are what make or break a course - but more often than not, it’s the small things. Pricing, while seemingly innocuous, is actually a major piece of the success puzzle. We decided to give the course away for free to the 200 people live in the audience when the course was being filmed to acquire deep insights on perceived value. Not only did this help us nail the pricing but also provided us with early testimonials that helped sell it before it was even launched. 2️⃣ Sales It’s critically important to talk to your customers pre-launch. From these conversations and reading testimonials we were able to craft a compelling customer voice that appealed specifically to our target market. While there are many great course platform tools, we chose Kajabi and built the course sales page with the exact language our early customers used. This really sped up the sales process and helped a lot when it came to customer success and FAQ process. 3️⃣ Marketing The MOST important part of launching a successful course is marketing. It doesn’t matter how good your material is, how great the video quality is, or how beautiful the branding is - if no one knows about your course, no one will buy it. Our marketing plan revolved around video clips from the course because Jordan Peterson is a very distinct and well known individual. While “talking head” video isn’t required, we found that videos perform better than static pictures and text posts. Many creators are afraid of paid ads but this tactic is what helped the course reach $8M+ in revenue. It’s worth taking the time to figure out how to run paid ads or hiring an expert to lead this effort. All in all, launching a massively successful course is simple - but not easy. If you want to explode on the scene and win big, it’s important to do the work. Even when the steps are boring and obvious, following the proven path is the key to major reward.

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My first job out of high school was in sales. It was at this shopping mall in San Diego where I grew up. Bob was the owner of the shop and is still one of the best salespeople I've ever seen in action. His approach was simple: He spoke to everyone like they were his friend and that they had all the money in the world to spend (not shopping from your own pocket). I've learned many lessons from many others about sales and other topics since then and was happy to share some of them recently while recording an episode of the SDR Hire podcast with Stefan Conic. Every time I have a conversation with Stefan it's always a stimulating exercise. We end up with many threads to pull on - from our business adventures (because it's been definitely just that), our ongoing learnings, to life in Serbia. But the conversations I remember most between us are our discussions about what's happening in our personal lives. It is always life affirming and much more meaningful than anything business related we discuss. Stefan is constantly curious and just a wholesome person. We'd been trying for months to hit the record button so I was uber excited to finally make it happen. Like many of our conversations this could have kept going for hours. Some of the topics we cover: • how to land an investment in 2024 • AI opportunities for founders • how to hire salespeople • what's the state of Startups in the Balkans • how geopolitics affect the investment scene Congratulations on all of your earned success and the new edition to your family my friend. Cheers! Click on the link to see the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eNFQxTbW

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What does it really take to scale a company from an idea to 1,000+ people—and still keep your culture intact? I just unpacked this and so much more with Evan on The Hard Part Podcast! 🎙️ We dove deep into the challenges and opportunities that shaped my journey—and why I believe the future of AI is Agentic. Here’s a glimpse of what we covered: 🚀 How co-founding AppDirect taught me to scale a business while preserving culture—scaling to 1,000+ people 🌩️ Why the cloud revolution was a catalyst for innovation—and how it shaped my perspective on entrepreneurship. 🤖 Why I’m so excited about Agentic AI and its potential to transform how we work— 💡 Building GTM-1 Omni, a model that helps companies generate leads that convert (because let’s face it, half of campaigns don’t). 🔧 Why the best founding teams are problem-solvers first and executives second. 🔑 Building Digital Trust to improve outbound marketing and unlock real results. This episode is packed with insights on scaling, building the right team, and why the future of software will prioritize human experience. If you’re an entrepreneur, AI enthusiast, or just love hearing about the hard parts of building something from scratch, this one’s for you. 🎧 Tune in here: https://lnkd.in/gGB-bMP2 I’d love to hear your thoughts—what resonates most with you? Drop me a comment below! 👇 #Entrepreneurship #AI #AgenticAI #StartupJourney

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Is Your C-Suite “Way Too Crowded”? In his 2018 Fast Company piece, Russell Fleischer, GP at Battery Ventures and three-time tech CEO, warned that “the modern alphabet soup of C-level titles threatens to slow down innovation.” “If everyone’s a chief, no one is.” Not to mention the downstream cultural implications where “more people come to the CEO with their hands out looking for their own shiny titles”. This said, it’s a balancing act. A large public tech company with no CFO, for instance, is likely to be painfully chaotic in a different way. So, just how many C-level executives are expected at your company according to market benchmarks? Let’s take a look. _________________ Here are the benchmarks from an analysis of 7,272 Pave customers on the median C-suite size by company stage: ✅ 1-25 FTEs median => 1-2 C-level execs ✅ 25-50 FTEs median => 2 C-level execs ✅ 51-100 FTEs median => 3 C-level execs ✅ 101-200 FTEs median => 3 C-level execs ✅ 201-500 FTEs median => 4 C-level execs ✅ 501-1,000 FTEs median => 5 C-level execs ✅ 1,001-3,000 FTEs median => 6 C-level execs ✅ 3,001+ FTEs median => 8 C-level execs How does your company compare to the benchmarks? Caveat: Founders actively employed by their companies are included in these benchmarks, while chiefs of staff are not. _________________ I will conclude with some final parting words of wisdom from Russell Fleischer: “I’m not saying that org charts and job titles should never change. Far from it. But my general advice is to tread carefully if you’re considering creating a new C-level title in your company. Doing so might give you a whopper of an organizational headache–one that will take more than a couple of aspirin to cure.” Good luck out there. #pave #csuite #benchmarks

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If you're looking to end the week on a high note (or just need fun distraction!), check out Sean Twersky's advice on startup leadership in the latest episode of Best Manager Ever. Sean's past direct reports from Instacart, Sprig and now EvenUp rave about him as a uniquely caring and supportive manager who ALSO knows how to get the most out of the team. Sean gives us concrete advice for how we can all replicate his success: 1️⃣ Sit down with direct reports to learn about them as humans -- What's their personal story? What are they interested in? What are their goals? 2️⃣ Think about how you can match the skills and interests on the team with the ever-changing business needs 3️⃣ Find opportunities to help them grow in the directions they genuinely care about 4️⃣ Be open to helping them achieve their goals, even if that means moving on from your team ^^ And underpinning all that is a genuine curiosity about and care for other people, which I could hear in Sean's voice throughout the interview. So if you're not sure where to start, try the simple act of shifting towards curiosity and care. I'll link the episode in the comments, and I'd love to hear your takeaways! We'd so appreciate you sharing this with a friend, or rating and reviewing wherever you get podcasts . #Leadership #Management #BestManagerEver

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One of the biggest things working for our PE-backed projects is tried and true SEO. While many agencies will come in and instantly recommend 20 net new blog posts, refresh page content, and try to invest in other things that may accelerate growth, there's a huge opportunity to just optimize the existing assets. This prolongs success and often leads to frustrated clients being assured 'well you know, SEO takes a long time to take affect...' Get some quick wins right away to get buy in and trust. Examples: Started project mid January and for just optimizing existing blog posts, product pages, home page, and meta: ✅Organic Traffic grew 15% ✅High intent form submissions grew 74% ✅Product pages replaced the high priority keyword rankings from the blog pages for a far superior landing experience (and in turn converted the same volume of high intent form submissions from the products page in April as received the entirety of Q1) This will apply for nearly any established site with decent history & authority. Small tweaks will make a world of difference. And while you're diving into the low hanging fruit wins, you can start formulating your longer term plan for growth in the background.

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