Unapologetically product-led: Rejecting the growth hacking wisdom of 2010s

I just spent one week of full-time work on moving my personal blog and my company's blog to Ghost. Most of that time was spent on coding custom themes to turn these blogs into "websites of my dreams".

While doing this, I had a weird realization -

I am never more productive than when I'm coding or designing a new thing.

It's weird because it almost feels like procrastination. Like I'm not working on the real business stuff. You know, the revenue generating stuff. The marketing stuff. The stuff that serious founders do to get the money. Especially since out of the 2 cofounders - i'm the less technical one.

So I often struggle with the question - am I investing my time optimally? Am I being productive?

Optimizing for a state of flow

One answer to the productivity question is do things that keep me in a state of flow. If I'm able to spend 40 hours a week doing A and only 15 hours doing B, then doing A is going to be a good bet. (Except when task B has an asymmetrically positive outcome - which is rarely the case when it comes to the kind of marketing I'll talk about).

By simply working on creating the best theme, best website possible on Ghost, I was able to put so many deep work hours. I'm sure I would not have put half as many deep work hours if I was doing any of these marketing things, like cold outreach or content repurposing etc.

I mean, I don't even mind the mundane stuff. I'm more in a state of flow when I'm editing podcasts in Descript. Or stuff like copying and pasting a bunch of articles from one place to the other - something that I had to do for 3 hours during the migration to Ghost. Or spending 45 minutes to collect headshots of all my past guests and make this grid to put on the homepage.

Surprisingly, this kind of mundane work doesn't break my state of flow.

But doing, let's say, a Product Hunt launch or repurposing of content to schedule one month of Twitter posts, or sending like meaningless cold DMs - that's painful to my soul and everything I believe in.

If I wanted to do soul sucking work, I wouldn't have quit my day job to become an entrepreneur.

Rejecting the growth hacking wisdom of 2010s

All those marketing best practices that have emerged in 2010s don't create any value for anyone. Cold emailing, cold DMing, building an audience, launching on product hunt, SEO, ai-generated content, content repurposing. Take your pick.

That's why I've decided to reject them all.

Instead, I'm going to take a product-led marketing strategy because that's the natural inclination of our small team of 2. According to our strategy, we will be pouncing upon any opportunity to:

• build robust tool / feature to solve a pain for our users
• make something "drop-dead gorgeous"
• offering it for free or no-brainer prices

Cost of building software has never been lower. You can essentially build an MVP in the same time it takes to write an article (not ai-generated). What better way to collect emails than the signups to your product?

Now, while I say this, I also believe that marketing can be a positive sum game if done right. Especially through education. If we create some unique educational resources through a journalistic fervour, we will end up "out-teaching our competition".

That's what we'll be doing with Beginner Maps. We seek top community creators, interview them and share their magic sauce. This + product = our winning strategy.

Min-maxing: why this strategy will win

A couple years ago, one of our podcast guests, Murtaza, told me about the idea of “min-maxing”. It is a technique derived from some video game. Here's how it goes:

Imagine the game in which the character has a different skills like attack, strength, defence, range and magic. The game does a little bit of math to determine the character’s over all combat level.

What some gamers ended up figuring out was that if you took just one skill like archery, took it to level 99 while leaving every other skill at level 1 and go into fights, you will hit like a truck. You go around killing everybody in 1-2 shots.

You can get outsized returns with just 1-2 skills.

This idea has stuck with me. We can create some really beautiful and really amazing software products. We can create some unique educational resources with a journalistic fervor. And that's what we're good at.

It is clearly a waste of time to work on anything else.

So in 2025, we're going to optimize on doing the things that we enjoy, which is being a builder, being a creator, being a teacher.