Christmas happened already?!?

2024 is basically gone. Usually comes as a bit of a shock, even though we could see it coming literally all year.

For me, personally, it was a great year. Professionally it was meh… some stuff worked, some didn’t. Maybe instead of an unsolicited advice post I’ll get into a bit of that. But first, some unsolicited advice.

Getting stuff done

The year is pretty much over, so unless you work in retail or are selling into a market that needs to spend its end of year leftover budget, it’s a good time to reflect and plan for next year. Three things to consider for next year.

First, give your strategy enough time—but not too much. A founder I know had an ambitious goal for new customers by the end of December–starting at Thanksgiving. Any strategy that has completely unrealistic goals will be unsuccessful, and worse–might lead you to believe that other things are broken. Keep the urgency but also give your strategy enough time to work, based on the realities of your business and the actual behaviors of your customers.

Second, give your strategy enough resources. Give yourself enough resources for whatever you’re attempting that you can feel confident you gave it enough. Better to err on the side of investing too much than to wonder. But quick way to run out of resources is to try too many things at once. If you make 10 bets, its impossible to resource all of them well. Emails, ads, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, conferences… that’s just 5 and I’m tired of typing already. Even if you’ve raised $25 million for your Series A, you can’t get everything you want done at the same time. You can always stagger them.

Finally, be disciplined. If you gave yourself enough time and resources, but it didn’t work–end it. If you’ve tried something, using a proven playbook or with a trusted advisor or operator in the drivers’ seat, and it didn’t work–just stop completely, so you can give your full focus to something else. Don’t fall into the “its working ok” trap, and keep it on life support. Cut it off and go find something that works great. Great companies aren’t built on 10 mediocre, underperforming tactics. They’re built on 1-2 hyper effective tactics.

My 2024 lessons

You didn’t ask but I’ll tell you anyway. Personally, 2024 was a huge win. Did my first backcountry ski trip, with my 13 year old son (his first too) and that was amazing–more amazing than I expected. Also, we survived. We sorted out a difficult situation with my daughter’s school, and now she’s in an amazing place.

There were other trips, all of which were great and lifetime memories for kids (or parents, or both). I even sent something at Mammoth that was probably not a great choice… but I survived.

Professionally, however, it felt like a losing season overall. The market seems to have changed. As a result, the work shifted to more execution focused work–setting up outbound campaigns, running LinkedIn ad campaigns, building websites or landing pages, things that have immediate impact leveraging the great team I’ve assembled. We delivered great results for clients, but it wasn’t what I expected to be doing this time a year ago.

2024 Experiments

Outside of consulting, we tried a three new things this year–a podcast, a newsletter, and a course. We’re batting 0.333 on the new activities–which, actually, isn’t terrible, but at times felt not great. What surprised me was how easy it was mentally and emotionally to pull the plug on things that didn’t work. With a small team, entirely funded from revenue, there’s zero mercy for activities that don’t deliver. Let’s look at all three.

Podcast

The podcast–Seed to Sequoia–was a lot of fun to create. I talked to friends old and new, from Leo Polovets (Susa) and Sean Byrnes (ex-Flurry, now Near Horizon) who I talk with somewhat regularly, to Tony Stubblebine and Lars Leckie, who I hadn’t spoken with in a while to new friends like David Hersch, founding CEO of Jive Software (among many other achievements).

I learned a lot from the actual episodes. Some of the advice is timeless, some of it is very timely. But it completely failed to hit any metric I truly cared about. Yes, occasionally a founder I speak with mentions being an avid subscriber, learning a lot from it. But the time it requires from me, on top of significant production costs, make continuing it an obviously poor choice.

We did learn a lot about podcasts and podcasting, and if at some point we come back to podcasting, we’ll be well equipped to succeed. But for now, it’s time to focus elsewhere. I’ll let other people read reddit posts as podcasts with wild success, and not be jealous.

Course

When it became clear the podcast was not working, I decided to explore doing a course. I would put this in the “hasty decision” bucket–there’s good and bad to founder hasty decisions. In retrospect, this may have been more of the bad than good.

I already do courses (for Alchemist Accelerator) and they’re always very highly rated (9 or 10 out of 10) so I had lots of confidence in the product and a lot of material to begin with, so it seemed a relatively small lift to leverage a platform and build out a course. It could replace the podcast as a thought leadership and top of funnel device. Less well funded founders–at earlier stages–who didn’t fit with advising or agency work could do it, and some might later become clients. And perhaps most crucially, given the reach I had on LinkedIn and the platform’s own reach, marketing it wouldn’t be hard.

We put together a compelling offering, and put it up on the platform. With a week’s notice, I did a preview on how to get your first 10 sales, and got around 25 people to show up. Realizing that that wasn’t enough, we did a new preview–on M&A for founders. I put a lot more into marketing–I did all the things, which took a lot of time bug saw results. We had over 200 people sign up. It felt like we were really onto something.

But, for reasons, they didn’t convert to doing the full course. Perhaps the M&A subject was interesting but regular growth, not so much. The difference between painkiller and vitamin perhaps? The simple math showed that there simply weren’t enough people at the top of funnel to fill a course. Even with 200 showing up.

So I’m done with courses for now. I’d be happy to run one for a captive audience (say, a venture firm wants to do it for their portfolio companies). But without a significant change, it’s time to focus on things that worked.

Newsletter

This newsletter has resoundingly worked in 2024. It’s grown to almost 5,000 subscribers, and serves a few purposes. It forces me to collect my thoughts on important, relevant subjects. People read and enjoy it. I get replies to nearly every article from a founder or VC saying that it resonated. One article was picked up by a big, global group of post-exit founders. I had one friend and founder say that he relies on it every week to guide his thinking, and several reactions to recent posts.

Do you get value out of it? What would you like to see more of? Less of? This is an area I’m ready to invest more in because it works–and it doesn’t feel like work.

Bonus

I said we did 3 things, but we actually did a fourth–a live, in person event at SF TechWeek. This blew me away–we had over 150 people sign up. Probably 130 of them were total strangers. With minimal effort by us.

Without much effort at all, we were able to engage with and drive awareness across our target demographic. It was a good reminder that pushing on these other strings really hard is not the way… the way is channels that work well without a lot of effort.

Personal accountability

I look back on the experiments, and how I spent my time in 2024, and notice a few things. First, I put clients first. The lack of marketing in the first half was because I was focused on clients. It’s a tradeoff–and one I’d make again. Second, I was quick to stop things that weren’t working, but not clear in the moment about how much time those things were taking. The lack of effective marketing in the second half was because I was putting a disproportionate amount of time and resources into the podcast and course, which weren’t working.

While I was quick to end them, the third observation is that I leapt in without testing the market first. Getting lucky on the first try is a strategy, it just usually doesn’t work. I was 2 for 4 on this strategy in 2024. In 2025 I plan on making an adjustment.

To 2025

This is still an experiment. I’m excited to continue to work with clients into 2025, and am looking for a way to reach more people in ways that are viable on an ongoing basis. I think a lot of the in-the-trenches work in 2024 has made me even more knowledgable about growth and GTM levers on a tactical level, which will serve me, clients and this newsletter well in 2025.

I’m working on a new product, turning what we do for our clients into an AI-enabled, SaaS product. If you want to send more, better emails I’d love to talk to you about what you’re doing now and what you’d like to do–just reply, or grab a time here. This time, I’m starting with live conversations to understand the market better before I leap in.

Have a great holiday, and a great start to 2025!