This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See

The facts aren’t at issue here; they can’t be. What’s happening is that these theorists are taking comfort in their standing as outliers and they’re searching for a feeling, not a logical truth.

The goal of the smallest viable audience is to find people who will understand you and will fall in love with where you hope to take them.

If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.

The simple marketing promise Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with: My product is for people who believe _________________. I will focus on people who want _________________. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________. And you thought that all you were here to do was sell soap.

At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals.

If you had a chance to teach us, what would we learn? If you had a chance to learn, what would you like to be taught?

a focus on the customer as the only project of a startup. Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing. That, and only that, separates successful projects from unsuccessful ones.

Sonder is defined as that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.

Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.