First and foremost, welcome to the newest subscribers of Talking Growth. Over the past week, I've wanted to do a content series where I highlighted building Growth Roadmap and my personal brand in the open. Much like anything in marketing nowadays, I threw a few feelers out there and people signed up expressing interest. So once again, thanks for signing up, and as promised, I'll share updates on my progress so far.

On today's agenda, I cover all things GR and my following, highlight how to measure word of mouth, and touch on Casey Newton leaving The Verge to start his own publication plus some other gems.

🌱Talking Growth

Growth Roadmap x Talking Growth Live (Announcement) - I'm in the early stages  (pending Linkedin approval) but hopefully, by next week I'll be kicking off the first of Talking Growth Live (TGL). On TGL I'll have other founders, CEO's, CMO's and creators discussing how they grew their business and following with a heavy emphasis on content and social media. My thinking is that this will be helpful for early-stage founders and creators who are looking for growth strategies and tactics that don't require a $10M marketing budget. Let me know if you're interested by responding to this email.

Growth Roadmap Biz (Updates) - One of our direct competitors just landed a small seed round. While other founders and CEO's might be upset, I literally jumped for joy because they validated the market for us. We differ from them; however, the fact that they were able to raise a seed round gives me further validation we're on the right track. So for now, our goal is to continue working bootstrapped and improving our product experience.

Personal Following Growth (Updates & Insights)- the platforms I'm focused on growing are Twitter, LinkedIn*(more so leveraging this platform), IG and TikTok. The reason being is that as long as TikTok doesn't go anywhere, it'll be the next big channel, and Twitter and LinkedIn are where founders and thought leaders live religiously.

TikTok has a high organic reach so I'll quickly be able to learn what content is performing well and repurpose it to IG Reels & LinkedIn stories. I don't have a large Twitter following yet but I repost my best content (based on the little engagement I receive) to IG & LinkedIn.

This tactic is proving success so far because my content pillars are AIRTIGHT and focused around growth marketing and content strategy which allows me to "DJ" my content.

Insight/Recommendation of the week
Fine-tune your content strategy and then find channels that have a short feedback loop (e.g. TikTok or LinkedIn due to their high organic reach). Once you find those channels, test different content, and cross-pollinate your content that performs the best.

Twitter - focusing on engaging with larger influencers (as stated in Project Popeye) is proving beneficial in generating more engagement for content and followers.

Twitter Followers Before & After:15-22  

LinkedIn - performs extremely well when posting early in the morning or lunchtime based on EST U.S. time. Motivation content does exceptionally well.

TikTok - if you're not going to dance then make how to/learning content. TikTok is more of a brand-building channel, so prioritize as you wish but optimize for watch time. I still need to learn more about TikTok but of the videos that do well, they tend to have an average watch time of 13.5 seconds. You have to post alot on TikTok and because I've been dormant, it's going to take a few days of consistent posting to get my account authority back.

TikTok Followers Before & After: 374-375

Instagram - Instagram organic reach is tough, so my goal here is to push my TikTok following over to IG as posting 1x-2x a day is usually sufficient. Hopefully reposting my TikTok videos to Reels will help increase my reach.

Instagram Followers Before & After 372-392

Growth Marketing Database - New content wasn't added to the paid library this week but there will be updates next week.

In terms of free resources, if you ever wanted to learn how to measure word of mouth marketing, Reforge did an amazing job explaining how to do it. See here: Measuring Word of Mouth.

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📰From the news

Linear Commerce - Web/2PML is ahead of the curve when it comes to discussing the intersection of commerce and media. In this piece, he dives into how Bar Stool Sports is building one of the best media companies out there and how commerce weaves directly into their model.

The New Media Future - Media companies are changing in the fact that every company in the future will be a media company. Media is attention and another opportunity to acquire, retain, and monetize your audience. In this NYTimes article, they take a dive into how high profile journalist like Casey Newton are leaving larger companies such as The Verge for Substack.

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🎤From the people

The Mike Speiser Playbook  - Kevin Kwok is a phenomenal writer and previous at GreyLock Partners. In his essay, he covers Mike Speiser's approach to building companies and how he frequently wins with the most recent being Snow Flakes IPO.

My .02 - While a bit unorthodox, his approach Mike's approach makes sense as he has skin in the game for the early-stage companies he incubates.

💡 Inspo

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