Chers amis, fans de bonnes lectures,
Bienvenue aux 50 personnes qui nous ont rejoints depuis mardi dernier ! Si vous lisez ceci et n’êtes pas encore inscrit, rejoignez vite les 2885 personnes qui ont déjà eu la bonne idée de le faire. C’est juste ici !
Dans les JCNews cette semaine, mes dernières lectures les plus intéressantes, dont un zoom sur un must-read à ne pas manquer !
Ecrivez-moi pour en parler, sur Linkedin ou sur Twitter. Les JCNews sont aussi disponibles sur le Blog Alan. Bonne lecture à tous !
Chaque semaine, je publie un must-read que vous choisissez.
👉 Comment accélérer significativement le rythme de votre équipe marketing (First Round)
"I believe that speed is the single most critical — and most overlooked — characteristic of a winning marketing team. (...) They build MVPs and validate hypotheses with their users. But marketers have a harder time adopting this mindset and are more campaign-driven."
"To find the one program that might be a real game-changer, you probably have to sift through 10 other ideas. Maybe some of the marketing strategies sounded brilliant on paper, but when you get into the execution, you realize that many assumptions were incorrect. You need to focus your team's energy on nurturing the seeds that have the most promise — and divest from the ones that don't."
"The programs that end up having a sizable impact on the company are typically massive and can take one or two years to build, with plenty of micro-iterations along the way. The faster you make those iterations, the faster you'll course-correct to a truly impactful program."
La vitesse n’est pas la caractéristique principale d’une équipe Marketing et pourtant on devrait penser le marketing comme le produit : des cycles courts, de l’apprentissage, de la prise de risque. Bref, un biais pour l’action, comme chez Alan.
To go faster, start by understanding what's slowing you down:
Real speed is moving fast towards impact and learning. It's moving as fast as possible towards the most important thing, based on clear directives.
You might think you're moving fast by putting a plan in motion and getting things out the door, but wasting time on initiatives that don't pan out is the biggest drag on startup marketing teams.
"We started talking to customers and what we heard was an emphatic, 'I'm just running a small cupcake shop and I don't know anything about HR — I want to find answers to my questions and to avoid big mistakes,'" says Rezaei. "It became clear that we had wasted a whole year on the wrong content strategy. From that point forward, we started to incorporate more short, Q&A-style tactical HR topics that could rank high for SEO. It was a huge learning experience for me".
La vélocité c’est avoir de la vitesse dans la bonne direction.
"Check engine light" signals that point to a poky marketing department:
You're not shipping."If it's been two weeks since we talked about a program and nothing's live yet, that's a bad sign. If we talk about launching an event program, we better have an MVP event within two weeks — something's got to be live."
Your goals are all long-term. “If the metrics for your program all say, ‘At the end of the quarter we’ll have this,’ that’s a red flag. Long-term business goals are important, but they need to be complemented with short-term goals, such as ‘In two weeks, we’ll have 10 new demos.’
Your team lacks new learnings. “If you ask, ‘What do we know this week that we didn’t know last week?’ there better be a new answer to that question. (...)Fast teams are always solving new problems.
You’re too dependent on other teams. “Many leaders accept limitations that can actually be removed, especially when it comes to cross-functional dependencies. How often do you hear something like, ‘Well, it takes engineering a month to build us a landing page’? Earlier in my career I accepted these as facts. With experience I learned it was my responsibility to voice, even demand, what marketing needed to succeed.”
Avoir des points d’étape hebdomadaires est un must-do très pertinent pour répondre à ces questions essentielles : chez Alan, chaque Alaner publie chaque semaine une update hebdomadaire (HPFO) pour faire le point sur ses objectifs personnels, les équipes (crews) ont leur crew weekly updates aussi et nous publions une weekly update au niveau de la boîte à lire par tous pour identifier les shippings et les points bloquants.
Move faster by getting out of the basement — especially if you don't feel ready.
It's hard and uncomfortable to do new things, which tempts us to spend months of planning and creation in isolation to get it right. But you don't learn anything in the basement.
Ceci est probablement la conséquence d’une tendance à ne pas assez valoriser la prise de risques ! Décomposer le risque en plus petites étapes permet d’en prendre plus.
Marketing strategies:
1. Put on your black hat to break down large problems. "Start with defining one big, inspiring statement. For example, 'In one year we will have 5,000 partners that are selling our product to their customers.'" (...) "Let's assume that it's one year from now and we've failed at our goal. What went wrong?" (...) "The aim here is that you want to get to a list of five to 10 major assumptions implicit in achieving the long term goal." (...) "The next step is flip the negative statements into positive ones and reframe them to include the key levers that will make the program work. These are your core assumptions that must be true for you to hit your long-term goal.
2. Lean into motion goals to get into that "ship it" mindset. (...) "Instead of spending all your time building the perfect plan, the best thing you can do now is to try to ship something within one to two weeks," (...) To jump-start that kinetic friction, she sets motion goals to get everyone moving. "An example of a good motion goal could be to sell the program to one partner this week. (...) It should take six days, not six months to get in front of your target audience with a marketing concept.
3. Obsess over weekly targets. What can you do every single week to move the needle?"
4. Establish a biweekly learning meeting. Every two weeks host a meeting where you try to codify learnings across the team. You articulate what people have learned that they didn't know two weeks ago,
5. Pick the right tools — not just the shiniest tools. (...) Before you start looking for shiny new toys, Rezaei cautions against jumping the gun here. "At the beginning of any new program, I keep it low-tech because otherwise that just contributes to the sunk cost fallacy. (...) Any one tool is only as valuable as it is simple and enables quickness. When adding to your marketing stack, prioritize technology that has ease-of-use and removes repetitive workflows for your team, not old school enterprise tools that technically can enable a workflow if you bring on an army to operate them,"
6. Make a decision on whether to go forward. "If after one quarter of iterating, you keep missing goals and just can't get it right, honestly consider if you should abandon the program.
En plus d’articles triés sur le volet, je partage un principe de leadership d’Alan par semaine. Le même que je partage en interne et à nos investisseurs tous les mercredis.
👉Nous donnons du feedback avec empathie (Healthy Business)
👉New Defaults: les principes fondamentaux pour construire une entreprise (Stratechery).
J’ai particulièrement aimé la partie sur le “status quo”.
👉Les trois règles du freemium (Medium)
The downsides of freemium
The benefits of freemium
Making the decision
1) Does your paid plan have a gross margin of 80–90%?
If you have a lower gross margin — for example, because your product is not fully self-service, requires extensive customer support or is extremely costly in terms of tech infrastructure — freemium will probably not work for you.
2) Does your free plan attract the right audience?
If your free users are too different from your paying users, your free-to-paying conversion will be low — and you’ll risk developing your product for the wrong audience.
3) Is your product inherently viral?
If your answer is no, that doesn’t make it a complete no-go, but it does mean that it’s much less likely that freemium is right for you.
👉 Ce que les réseaux sociaux peuvent apprendre des lieux publics (Casey Newton).
Public spaces display a number of features that build healthier communities, according to researchers. “Humans have designed spaces for public life for millennia,” they write, “and there are lessons here that can be helpful for digital life.” Here’s a list (emphasis theirs). These spaces:
👉 Checkout.com lève un demi-milliard de dollars (The Information).
👉 Arnaud Vaissié: “la santé devient une préoccupation majeure des entreprises” (Le Figaro)
👉 Talkspace, le fournisseur américain de thérapies en ligne, ouvre son capital (Bloomberg)
👉Comment concilier la croissance d’une entreprise et le bien-être des salariés (BSmart). J’étais ravi de participer à l’émission Smart@Work aux côtés de Xavier Laurent et Éric Albert pour discuter du management de demain et de nos Leadership Principles.
C’est déjà fini. Bonne semaine et à vous de jouer maintenant ! Invitez vos amis à s’inscrire, ici.