20 February 2023
This week's additions focus on strategy, leadership, and marketing, with new digests from Dr. Grace Lee, TK Kader, and Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth. Highlights include Seed persuasion throughout — not just at the close Running tactics without a strategy is why most SaaS growth stalls
Showing 32 digests for 20 February 2023.
AI tools & automation
YouTube
Nine AI-powered business ideas to start in 2023
Noah Kagan
February 22, 2023
AI tools & automation
9
Business models
8
Growth hacking
6
Build an AI newsletter from scratch — 20k subscribers in 14 weeks is real
Service arbitrage: automate Fiverr gigs with ChatGPT at near-zero cost
Sell pickaxes in the gold rush — aggregate and resell AI tools
How IYUNO became the world's largest media localization company
EO
February 22, 2023
Case studies
10
Pivoting
8
Automation & tools
7
Losing 50% of revenue for missing a funeral forced a global pivot
Win with a vendor first, then build your own office — repeatedly
Repetition is the only fix when vision fails to land across cultures
Super Bowl LVII marketing roundtable: CMOs on creativity, ROI, and culture
GaryVee
February 22, 2023
Branding
9
Influencer & partnerships
8
Growth hacking
7
Vanilla Super Bowl ads cost $10–14M with zero return.
Tubi hacked the live broadcast — born from a casual soft pitch.
Real ROI is year-long brand lift, not day-of app downloads.
How Bernard Arnault built the world's greatest luxury empire
Acquired
February 21, 2023
Origin stories
9
Business models
8
Exit strategy
5
From $15 million to $200 billion by mastering the hostile takeover playbook
Why luxury brands have natural diseconomies of scale but luxury groups do not
The Gucci miss that accidentally created LVMH's biggest rival, Kering
How Will.i.am turns big opportunities into epic leverage
Masters of Scale
February 21, 2023
Case studies
10
Long-term planning
8
Product-market fit
5
How Will smuggled a giant Beats logo past the NFL at the Super Bowl
Why owning the hardware beats licensing your song to sell it
Transmitting a song from Mars — and why it promoted three things at once
Founding Sales: a founder's handbook for B2B SaaS selling
Startups For the Rest of Us
February 21, 2023
B2B sales
9
Objection handling
7
Closing techniques
6
Founders must sell first — you can't hire sales until the motion repeats.
Losing 75–90% of deals is normal; mindset, not talent, is the fix.
Objection handling is where the most important sales work happens.
Six practices for building a leadership team that gets results
EOS Worldwide
February 21, 2023
Management
9
Business operating systems
8
Processes & SOPs
5
Every person needs a number — no scorecard means no winning.
Solve issues at the root once; never revisit the same problem.
90-day priorities keep teams focused without losing sight of the vision.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Gary Vaynerchuk behind the scenes: what he's actually like in person
GaryVee
February 21, 2023
Founder interviews
8
Growth hacking
6
Identity & self-belief
5
Gary matches his online persona — and exceeds it in real life
Word of mouth works, but social can silently double your business
NFT mass adoption will come from unexpected institutional integration
Building an effective employee onboarding checklist
HR Party of One
February 21, 2023
Processes & SOPs
9
Hiring & recruitment
6
Four essential components every onboarding checklist must cover
A step-by-step timeline from offer letter to first weeks
Why department-specific checklists prevent gaps and inconsistency
Resilience & grit
Podcast
60 Stoic lessons: core principles for a better life
The Daily Stoic
February 21, 2023
Resilience & grit
10
Productivity & habits
9
Identity & self-belief
8
Your anxiety is self-generated — no external event causes it
Enough is never enough for those who treat enough as too little
The best revenge against difficult people: simply don't be like them
Identity & self-belief
Podcast
How to Human: Three Ways to Share Life Beyond Distractions, Divisions, and Disconnection
Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life
February 20, 2023
Identity & self-belief
7
Work-life balance
6
Reframe identity: you are not your productivity, titles, or achievements.
Proximity dissolves bias. Walk 12 feet to see the person you've built a story about.
Move conviction to action. Seeing people demands uncomfortable relationship-building and real service.
How to Optimize TikTok for SEO in Four Steps
Neil Patel
February 20, 2023
40% of Gen Z users now prefer TikTok over Google for search.
Competitive Google keywords face far less competition on TikTok.
Low-engagement videos suppress ranking across your entire TikTok account.
Building strategic alliances and networks to accelerate business growth
Cameron Herold
February 20, 2023
Vision & mission
8
Delegation
7
Founder interviews
6
Masterminds beat stock markets: $250k in rooms returned $2M.
Business class seats have closed six-figure coaching deals.
A strong COO eliminates earn-outs and lifts exit multiples.
SaaS Positioning Strategies: Own a Market Corner, Not the Whole Market
Rob Walling
February 20, 2023
Niche selection
9
Branding
7
Positioning is one sentence that signals fit to buyers in three seconds.
Four strategies: niche down, low-cost, single benefit, make scary approachable.
Combining two or more positioning strategies creates compounding competitive advantage.
Business structure
YouTube
How to hire the right lawyer for your tech startup
Dan Martell
February 20, 2023
Business structure
8
Hiring & recruitment
6
Your family lawyer is costing you when deals get complex
Wrong-fit lawyers can turn a small acquisition into a $100k legal bill
Get referrals from founders, not your accountant