Here are a few handpicked highlights from the podcast:
On Twitter, you’ve said instructors should not think about marketing way late in the game. What led to this observation and how can people actually practice this?
I think Silicon Valley has a very product first mentality. There's this idea that if you have a great product, then it will sell itself. You don't need to market it.
I always thought that this was pretty backwards, especially being a marketer where sometimes the product team would hand over a product and it's like, okay, we really should have thought more about this before. Spending a year and a half building this thing that now no one wants, and now it's too late to go back and change a couple of things that hey, if we had just talked about this as a Crossfunctional team from the beginning, that we would know that our customers are actually not so eager to do this.
One of my favorite examples of this is Pomp. Pomp was our first creator on Maven, and he spent a couple of weeks putting together his curriculum. We all felt really good about it, and then one day were like, okay, maybe we should test to see if people want this. Just a gut check.
He put out a survey to his audience on Twitter. Going in, Pomp thought that his prospective students were crypto beginners, so this course was geared around people who were new to crypto. When the survey results came back, though, were surprised that 60% to 70% of respondents who are interested in the course actually self diagnosed as intermediate to advanced in their knowledge of crypto. Were whoa, okay, like, pause. This is great. Now let's adjust the curriculum.
Let’s talk about the Spiky Point of View. How would you define it? Why is it important?
In startups, a spiky point of view is a belief that is rooted in your experience, your expertise on a topic that you're an expert in - that other people could disagree with, other experts could disagree with.
So it's not a hot take. It's not something controversial just to get a reaction. It's something where based on your track record and your actual lived experiences, that you feel very strongly about.
One example of this is that one of my finding points of view that people spend too much effort on product launches and not enough effort on everything that comes after the confetti settles and the launch is technically over. This is from my own experience working the last 15 years as a marketer. It's like, okay, great, so launch week is over and now it's the next week. What's the plan for continuing the momentum? And we kicked off with a bang. But how do we continue that? And it's like, oh, don't know. No one thought about that. So that's my spiky point of view.
Another marketing expert could disagree and they could say, actually, Wes, I think that launches are the most important part of a product's life cycle. That, starting off the bank is super important because it anchors the consumer's mind in what this is and then everything thereafter there's more leeway, right? That's the opposite spiky point of view and that is totally legitimate too.
The thing with Spiky points of view is that different experts, you can get ten different experts in a room and they could have ten different spiky points of view. The great thing about a spiky point of view is that it helps you stand out.
You tweeted that course materials should always be super raw and include real examples of DMs and Cold emails. Why do you believe in this?
Yes. I came up with this cheeky concept called the content hierarchy of BS, where at the bottom it's Twitter. As you work your way upwards, the amount of BS that you can drop is less and less. Books are kind of in the middle.
If you're up on stage keeping a keynote, you're up there - the spotlight on you, all the audience staring at you. There's so much halo effect from you being the expert and no one being able to question you, and you just spewing your inspiration.
Whereas in a cohort based course, you're all logging in live on Zoom, right? I might be teaching. There's 200 people here. The chat is alive and well. If there is something that people are skeptical of, people are talking about it in Zoom. They will call you out.
The antidote to the content hierarchy of BS is the superspecific how. SSH - that's what I call it for short. The superspecific how is the idea that you want to have concrete, tactical, practical, actionable ideas in your course.
That could look like screenshots, it could look like sharing actual scripts. It can be email copy, it could be sharing the actual Google doc where things are laid out. It could be sharing your notion set up and walking people through what this actually looks like. It's really the difference between saying communication is important and showing it.