Looking for the right audience? Start with a better story.
Marketing
11 articles
How to photograph your product for Instagram
You do not need a studio, and the studio look is wrong for Instagram anyway. What you need is a window, a piece of white card and a repeatable way of framing the shot.
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LinkedIn, for founders who are never going to post every day
Most LinkedIn advice assumes you will post five times a week forever. You will not. Here is what actually works at one post a week, and what to do with the other four days.
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Instagram for things you can hold
Beauty, coffee, wearables. What to actually post when the product is physical, why the flat lay stopped working, and how to tell a hundred thousand views that sold nothing from a thousand that sold out.
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How to get your product into shops, and what to do once it is there
Independent retail is the most underrated channel a small physical brand has. How to approach a buyer, what margin they expect, and why getting on the shelf is the easy half.
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Shooting your own product photography, with a phone and a window
You do not need a photographer to sell a physical product online. What actually matters in a product photo, the setup that costs under £30, and the shots every listing needs.
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What to do in the week after an event
The evening is the easy part. Almost everyone wastes the seven days that follow, which is where most of the value actually was.
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One piece of content, eight places
Writing more is not the answer when nobody saw the first one. Here is how to get eight uses out of a thing you already made.
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Nobody reads your launch post, and that is fine
Launches feel like the moment everything changes. They are almost never the moment anything changes, and planning around that makes them work better.
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How to write a cold email that gets answered
Most cold email is bad in the same four ways. Fixing those gets you from a two percent reply rate to something worth doing.
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The landing page test that takes ten minutes
You cannot see your own page any more. Here is a way to find out what a stranger takes from it, without a research budget.
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How often to post, and what happens when you stop
The honest answer is less often than the advice says, and far more consistently than you are managing now.
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Events
11 articles
How to Run a Product Stall That Actually Pays for Itself
In-person markets are expensive, and the till rarely covers the day on its own. What a stall actually costs, the two questions to ask every visitor, and why the list matters more than the takings.
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The investor dinner, and how to run one people accept
Fourteen seats, one question, and no pitching. The practical version: who to invite, what it costs, how to seat it, and what to do in the week afterwards.
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Before you book anything, write the one line
The sentence a guest repeats to a colleague decides whether your event fills. Write it first, and let it kill the ideas that don't survive it.
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The guest list is the product
People come for the room, not the room's contents. How to curate a list, what ratios actually work, and why over-inviting is the most common way to ruin a dinner.
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What happens on the night
The timings, the seating, and the two or three moments that decide whether the room warms up.
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Can one evening really fill a month of content?
What to capture on the night, what to do with it afterwards, and how to do it without turning your guests into extras in your marketing.
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The six weeks before, hour by hour
Most events are promoted in one burst and then silence. Here is the cadence that actually fills a room, and the two moments that do most of the work.
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Should you charge for a ticket at all?
Free events are cheaper to fill and more expensive to run, because a third of the room doesn't turn up. When a price helps, and what to do instead of one.
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Borrowing someone else's audience
A co-host with the right list beats any amount of promotion from your own. How to pick one, what to ask for, and the split that keeps them coming back.
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Where to promote it, in order of what works
Ranked by return for a small event, not by reach. The first two do most of the work and neither of them is a post.
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How do you know if it actually worked?
Headcount is the number everyone reports and the one that means least. Four things worth measuring, and the one question that predicts the next event.
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Networking
8 articles
How to Source Actual Deal Flow from Events
Large conferences and pitch competitions rarely produce proprietary investments, because every competing fund sees the same companies at the same time. Which rooms to enter instead, and how to behave once you arrive.
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What you can tell about a company in a room that you cannot tell from a deck
The specific, observable things worth watching when you meet a founder in person, and the ones that feel like signal and are not.
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How to be useful to someone you just met
Most networking advice is about being memorable. Being useful is easier, works better, and does not require a personality transplant.
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The follow up that actually lands
Nice to meet you, let me know if I can ever help. Nine words, zero chance of a reply. Here is what to send instead.
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Warm introductions, and how to ask for one
The double opt in intro is the single most useful social convention in business, and most people ask for it in a way that makes it hard to say yes.
Read itWhat to do when you know nobody in the room
The bit everyone finds unpleasant, handled mechanically, so you do not have to rely on feeling confident.
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Keeping in touch without being annoying
The gap between the first meeting and the moment either of you is useful to the other is usually a year. Here is how to survive it.
Read itHow to run a dinner people talk about afterwards
Twelve people, one table, and a couple of decisions made in advance that separate the evenings people remember from the ones they endure.
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Storytelling
8 articles
How to market a message most people disagree with
PR for founders, campaigners and anyone whose position is the thing being argued with. Why reach makes it worse, what to do with the loudest critic, and how to build the small group of believers who actually move it.
Read itGive your brand story a shape
A story has a shape, and so should the way you talk about your brand. Borrowing the narrative arc, and bending it to fit an event or a campaign.
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The one line people repeat when you are not in the room
Your positioning is not what you say about yourself. It is what someone else says about you to a third person, badly, from memory.
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Start with the problem, not the product
Every founder opens with what they built. Every listener is waiting to hear whether it is for them. Those are not the same sentence.
Read itWhy your origin story is probably boring, and how to fix it
Nobody cares that you and your co-founder met at university. They care about the moment you realised the problem was real.
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Write the case study before you have the case
It sounds backwards. It is the fastest way to find out whether what you are building is worth writing about at all.
Read itHow to talk about what you do at a dinner table
The pitch you have rehearsed is the wrong length, the wrong register, and aimed at the wrong person. Here is what to say instead.
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The words your customers use are better than yours
You have been staring at this for a year and you have invented vocabulary. Your customers have not. Go and take theirs.
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