Moving Boulders One Pebble At A Time

We can take the same reason to-do lists don’t work well and apply it to our work to make progress faster.

To-do lists are traps because we tick off the small, easy jobs first. And leave the bigger, more challenging jobs till later… which often means never—leaving a lot of value sitting on our lists.

By making a couple of tweaks to the way we work. For the same reason, we get stuck box-ticking – chasing dopamine hits. We can turn small steps into large results.

All we need to do is break those big jobs down into smaller jobs until they seem just as manageable to work through as the other simple stuff on our lists.

Nothing groundbreaking, right, yet many this mistake.

Instead of building a website, design a website.
Instead of designing a website, design a home page.
Instead of designing a home page, write the home-page title.

Just make sure your small steps are towards larger outcomes rather than being the outcome.

Sending an email to hire a contractor to design your website is much better than sending an email to ‘check-in’.

The New Viral Marketing Strategy

Side-project marketing is the new tool all the nerds (I’m a nerd, so I can say this) are talking about.

They’ve helped DuckDuckGo become one of the world’s most popular search engines and Hubspot become the world’s number #2 CRM.

Saas companies have been using side-projects to find more leads and customers for a good while now. Like this website grader by Hubspot, which brings them thousands of leads per month.

These tools get the attention of people who otherwise wouldn’t have found or used the company’s main product. Companies turn that attention into leads and sales.

With tools like:

• Tools/Apps
• Quizzes
• Calculators
• Simple Games

The point here is to create something, not for your current customers but people that you’d like to become your customers.

Almost every bank website has a home loan calculator. Banks want to issue more loans; people want to calculate loan repayments. People go to the bank’s website to use the loan calculator and end up customers.

Someone once said, “the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing”. Well, this is it.

Because these side-projects don’t generate revenue by themselves, you’ll have little competition. It makes it easy for you to rank on google and become the number one tool in your category.

Start by;

• Finding a Side Project Marketing idea
• Building the product or service with no-code tools
• Launching the project to get viral traffic
• Optimising your project for organic traffic

“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

~ W.Edwards Deming

Where We’re Learning

• Side Project Marketing -> Mentioned above. Nico from Failory has created a great in-depth guide on side project marketing.
• Swift System -> For those interested. Russia has been removed from the Swift system this week and Sahil Bloom does a good job of explaining what the Swift system actually is in this Twitter thread.
• Ukraine Conflict Explained -> If you want a deeper understanding of Russia’s motives this video is it. Endorsed by many in the know it’s a 30 minute deep-dive into the lead-up to Russia’s invasion.

Don’t Make This Mistake

Processes matter. But only when they serve your business goals.

A few years back, I made the mistake of investing hundreds of hours of mine and my team time into creating and following processes that didn’t serve our primary mission.

I was getting lost in the weeds creating processes for paying bills, hiring contractors, responding to emails, and so on—low value and low-frequency work that was already getting done without much issue.

We weren’t profitable, and our bank balance was tiny. Investing time into processes that didn’t generate revenue and everyone already roughly knew how to do was silly.

I think processes are really valuable, and I encourage anyone asking for help with their business to build them. But there’s a catch.

They’ve got to produce an ROI.

They have to do at least one of these three things & ideally all three.

• Save you and your team time
• Make you more money by improving the way you operate.
• Reduce your stress by fixing recurring problems in your business

When my business was failing, instead of worrying about standardising the way we did admin or hired contractors (which we couldn’t afford to do at the time anyway), we should have been creating processes that helped us generate more revenue.

As soon as I switched focus and started building a sales funnel, we fixed our cash flow problems.

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