Most construction lumber is made out of softwood. Fir, pine, wood from trees that don't lose their leaves. It's plentiful, fast growing, cheap, and easy to work with. But it's relatively soft and weak. Hardwood is from deciduous trees: walnut, oak, maple, etc. These
No one wants their reading experience interrupted by a pop up asking us to subscribe for email updates. And yet every blog, news, and ecommerce site invariable follows the same template. Page loads. Wait 5 seconds. Pop up appears with tiny, hard to click close button, and the same damn
I often joke that "marketing automation" is a bit of a misnomer. There's a ton of emphasis on the automated (or appearance of automated) elements, while sidelining most of the manual work that makes it happen. It is a bit like the mechanical turk (no not
I watched the Star Wars movies all the time as a kid. It feels like I watched them tens of thousands of times. Certainly enough to "wear out the tapes" I imagine. But of course it was probably less than 100 times. More likely less than 50. Yet
We switched to making pour-over coffee in a Chemex every morning, from our old method of using an automatic drip coffee machine. It's easily one of the more hipster things we've done, but it was done for practical reasons too. The automatic machine was just a
It's funny to me that marketers, as the keepers of perhaps the largest volume of customer data—from PII, purchase history, activity data, and more—are some of the most inconsistent practitioners of data security. Sure - we make big, public efforts by shoring up our privacy policies
Many of us live in our email client and chat tools all day, and think nothing of it. After all - we've got to stay informed and appear connected. But spending all day waiting for input is a bit like obsessively tracking your stock portfolio's rise
The always insightful Derek Sivers wrote a great post on saying "No" recently. I think deep down, we know that adding to the plate is usually worse. But saying "Yes" is easier than saying "no". And doing what's easier is often more
This tends to get used as a substitute for strategy. Find the low hanging fruit, capitalize on it, and move on to the next tactic. The problem is, as Rand Fishkin highlights in his excellent deck "Why Your SaaS Marketing Sucks", traffic for sites addicted to growth hacks
Seattle has got a lot of potholes, especially this time of year. There was one I remember every day on my way home from work. It turns out, most potholes don't get fixed unless someone calls it in (there's a pothole hotline). Yet every day for
Any time I prepare something to be published - an email, a presentation, or one of these blogs, I'll look it over carefully for typos and other issues before hitting the big red button. And invariably after publishing, I find some obvious issue I somehow missed. The issue
If you've ever used a Kindle, you may have noticed the "other people highlighted this passage" message as you read. It's similar to how Medium handles its highlighting feature. It serves to call out what other people found popular, presumably to help you identify