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Stories you should know

Workers are taking on more responsibilities, bigger territories, and heavier workloads — without any raise, promotion, or change in title to go with it.

Gig workers are strapping iPhones to their foreheads and recording themselves doing household chores so robotics companies can train robots to replace them.

My brother launched an NFL analytics platform as a side project. Two years building in silence, then he dropped it. It blew up - a million users in a couple weeks. The product was figured out. The business wasn't.

So I joined him to help grow it.

There's no marketing team. No GTM strategy. No sales team…. It's him and I.

Growth revolves around Twitter, partnerships, DMs, content and having a damn good product.

As a start-up, you are the brand. Whether you like it or not.

Salesforce didn't become Salesforce until Marc Benioff made himself impossible to ignore. He staged a fake protest outside a competitor's conference. He gave away the CRM and let it spread while he manufactured the controversy.

HubSpot's early growth wasn't the platform - it was two founders who wrote a book, coined the phrase "inbound marketing," and made people repeat it before they ever logged into the software.

You see this in sales too. The best reps I've ever worked with don't just carry a quota. They carry a reputation. They build networks, become the person a prospect trusts, and when they leave a company, their pipeline follows them.

So what does this actually look like when you're not Marc Benioff?

It looks like picking one place your audience already lives and showing up there every day, with a point of view. Benioff had "no software." HubSpot had "inbound." You need your version - the one phrase or angle that makes someone say "oh yeah, that's the person who talks about ___."

Some resources that have been helpful for me when getting started are Justin Welsh’s Content OS and Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. I have no affiliation with either and they have been immensely helping for growing my Twitter account, sales pipeline, and this newsletter.

So whether you're a founder, a rep, or someone with a side project and a full-time job - it starts the same way. One DM. One post. One conversation

Tim Ferriss on how to build a network when nobody knows who you are.

Felt relevant given everything above.

Happy Masters week,

TG

P.S. I reply to all emails