⚖️ Reframe what you need to succeed, what is costly signaling, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 35th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Limited Supply, Nudge, and All In.
What you need to know
🪄 Nik Sharma’s landing page tricks
💍 What is costly signaling?
⚖️ Reframe what you need to succeed
From the community
🦆 Sam's ugly ducklings
🪄 Nik Sharma’s landing page tricks
🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 50 mins listening)
Your landing page is your shop window. It’s the first thing people see. It either lures customers in or sends them packing. Nik Sharma, Co-Founder of HOOX and Co-Host of Limited Supply, unveils his secrets to a killer landing page.
What they say
The recipe for an A+ lander
The 1st ingredient is the one that 99% of landing pages miss if they’re created in-house. You need to have a good angle to buy the product. For example, with Cadence you’re not just selling capsules or containers, you’re selling an easy way to travel and go through TSA.
The 2nd ingredient is copywriting. You should focus on the customer benefits after using the product. I think 95% of the page should be written in that point of view.
The 3rd is social proof. There are three types of social proof that I like to hit. One is customer reviews on the page itself. The second is ‘established’ sources. I put established in quotes because depending on who you’re selling to, they’ll see different sources as credible. A very young person might see a YouTuber’s quote as a lot more established than the New York Times. The third is user generated content, especially if you want to show what your product is like.
The 4th is the five main questions that every ad creative and landing page needs to answer. Those questions are: What is this product? Why does it exist? How does it benefit my life? Why is this product the best option? How soon can I get it if I order right now?
The 5th is the shop section. You want it to be full of information and objection handling but at the same time it has to be clean and easy to follow.
The 6th is how does it work and what’s inside. If you’re selling a product over $100, you want to include everything that’s coming in the box. You want to answer every silly question someone could have that would prevent them from buying right there.
The 7th is the brand story. Founder stories are great because they make it feel more human, like there’s somebody actually behind the screen.
The last ingredient is pixels and scripts. This is everything from having a floating CTA as you scroll to having Microsoft Clairty so you can look at heat maps, scroll depth maps and user recordings. Make sure you have all of your other pixels - your attribution software, your ad pixels, and all that stuff. That’s pretty much a lander.
Nik Sharma
What I say
Why it matters: A lot of this advice may seem obvious. The reason it’s worth repeating is because we forget to follow the recipe over time. Instead, we start to wing it. This can be dangerous. By omitting ingredients we can throw off the entire landing page. The best solution is to save this page and reference it later.
Between the lines: Harry Dry compiled an amazing assortment of landers. I’d thoroughly recommend subscribing to his newsletter for other A+ marketing tips like this:
Note, this isn’t a sponsored post! His content is just that good.
💍 What is costly signaling?
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 27 mins listening)
“At 30 years old, Sam is a generational prodigy.” Yes, that guy. Back in May, I put Sam Bankman-Fried on a pedestal. How wrong was I?! Now, he’s shown himself to be a fraud, among other things…
So, how did he fool me? How did he achieve a $32 billion valuation only to destroy it all in a week? The answer: costly signaling. Phill Agnew explained all you need to know on his latest episode of Nudge.
What they say
Caesar risked death to gain influence
Caesar was captured by pirates. He was 22 when this happened. It was extremely early in his career.
The pirates demanded a ransom of 20 talents of silver. Upon hearing this, Caesar insisted ‘Don’t you know who I am? 20 isn’t nearly enough. I’m worth much more than that. Don’t ask for less than 50 talents of silver.’
This is irrational behavior. The higher the ransom, the less likely it would be paid, the more likely Caesar would be killed. No normal person would do this. You’d bargain to get the ransom lower.
Caesar was not normal. He knew the power of costly signaling. He knew that by placing a higher ransom on his head, he’d only increase his perceived worth and grow his influence.
Ultimately, his ransom was paid in full. Once Caesar was freed, he raised a fleet to capture and crucify his pirate kidnappers.
Phill Agnew
What I say
Why it matters: With this in mind, how did Sam use costly signaling to trick me out of my pride and Sequoia Capital out of $210 million?
Sam painted himself as the crypto savior with his rapid rise to wealth and power:
He started bailing out or supporting faltering crypto projects in 2020.
His net worth skyrocketed to ≈ $15 billion by the age of 30.
He announced in May that he would donate up to $1 billion in the next presidential election.
All of this signaled a genius level of intelligence that investors and writers couldn’t help but revere. The result? Sam and FTX escaped with far less diligence, creating an environment for him to steal billions of dollars of customer funds.
Between the lines: We can learn from both the greats (like Caesar) and villains (like Sam). Costly signaling as a technique isn’t itself wrong. You can apply this at your own business to achieve your goals.
Let’s put it into practice. Here are a few examples for applying this to direct mail:
Handwritten letter > printed letter
Thick, weighted letter > cheap paper
1st Class stamp > 2nd Class stamp
These changes are cheap to implement but can be super impactful. They signal to the customer that they’re important, that you’re an authority, and that this is a vital message. Ask yourself ‘How do I use this technique to get what I want?’
⚖️ Reframe what you need to succeed
🥇 First place (3 min read vs 1 hour 28 mins listening)
We often hear advice but don’t act on it. It’s not that we’re dumb or we’re not listening. No. It’s because we’re defensive of our current plans and past actions. We think of counter arguments. We create a narrative as to why we’re right. I’ve found reframing the question to be a great way to overcome this defensiveness. David Sacks does exactly this for founders facing financial hardship.
What they say
It’s time to reflect and readjust
One thought experiment for founders is to think ‘What was my plan at the end of 2019?’
Why do I say that? Because 2020 and 2021 were two of the most distorted years in the history of financial markets because we had Covid and then we had the reaction to Covid.
You saw Zoom’s market cap hit $100 billion. All the e-commerce companies were doing extremely well. You had all of this money printing. You had 0% interest rates and so on.
We lived through this incredibly distorted time so go and look at what your plan was supposed to be for 2020 when you created it at the end of 2019. That was the last time you were thinking without any distortions.
You probably doubled your headcount during the last 2 years during these heady times. If you were to go back and look at your 2020 plan, you’d probably see that you could get by with half the headcount you have now.
Founders start thinking ‘I can’t go back to operating at half the level of headcount.’ But you were at some earlier point.
David Sacks
What I say
Why it matters: Don’t pussyfoot around. Goldman Sachs infamously fired the bottom 5-10% of performers every year.
Given that some companies layoff 10% of their staff annually, it’s very, very unlikely that a 10% reduction in headcount will be enough to safeguard your business over the next 18-24 months.
It’s way better to cut too much and rehire if needed than do multiple rounds of layoffs and devastate your morale and culture.
Between the lines: Medicspot has made 80% of staff redundant this year. It has been a rollercoaster of a ride. However, these difficult decisions have given us the best chance of success in the future.
I’m no expert when it comes to layoffs, but I’ve got recent first hand experience leading this with my team. If you’re considering layoffs at your company, I’m happy share what went well and what I’d change with hindsight. Reply if you want to chat.
🙏 From the community
Thanks Aayush for the inspiring roundup about profitable niche businesses:
🦆 Sam's ugly ducklings
Sam shared the story about MarketBeat, the online market data and analysis aggregator. Beyond the extraordinary, there is a world of entrepreneurs who run astonishingly profitable million-dollar businesses by focusing on micro-niches…
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Shoutouts
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Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.