11 December 2023
This week's additions focus on leadership, strategy, and mindset, with new digests from Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth, Cameron Herold, and Rob Walling. Highlights include Why VC money teaches spending, not the skill of making money Shutting an entire division is sometimes the highest-ROI decision available.
Showing 38 digests for 11 December 2023.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe on selling, ego, and building 3Com
Noah Kagan
December 14, 2023
Founder interviews
10
Prospecting & outreach
7
Management
6
Inventing Ethernet made Metcalfe famous; selling it made him wealthy.
Not learning to sell earlier is his only significant career regret.
Steve Jobs mentored him to hire better operators and accept adult supervision.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Three mindset shifts founders must make to scale beyond seven figures
Ryan Deiss
December 14, 2023
Identity & self-belief
9
Delegation
8
Long-term planning
6
The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable it is.
Scaling to eight figures requires dying to what got you to seven.
At scale every problem is a who problem, not a how problem.
How an artisan bakery grew organic traffic 214% in four months
Semrush
December 14, 2023
SEO
9
MVP & prototyping
6
Offline and online competitors are often completely different businesses
A dormant blog unlocked 84 high-value content topics in weeks
Technical fixes plus new content and store delivered 214% traffic growth
Content marketing
YouTube
Six habits that quietly destroy digital marketers
Ahrefs
December 13, 2023
Content marketing
8
Productivity & habits
6
Vanity metrics feel personal — track what drives customers, not dopamine.
Groupon scaled a flawed model to $16B, then lost 98% of its value.
Copying competitors erodes creativity and is a gateway to ethical collapse.
Ferrari: how a racing obsession became a $70 billion luxury brand
Business Breakdowns
December 13, 2023
Business models
9
Origin stories
7
Retention & loyalty
6
Ferrari sells 13,000 cars a year — scarcity is the strategy.
Margins match luxury goods, not automotive: mid-to-high 20s EBIT.
A collector pyramid drives recurring lifetime value, not one-off purchases.
Hiring & recruitment
YouTube
How to cut sales team attrition with better hiring and onboarding
Cameron Herold
December 13, 2023
Hiring & recruitment
9
Processes & SOPs
7
High sales attrition is caused by poor interviewing, not poor salespeople
Two weeks of structured onboarding beats throwing people into the fire
A 10-obstacle brainstorm turns a 20% failure-rate goal into a 20-point plan
Founder interviews
YouTube
College dropout builds $2.5M ARR AI startup while fighting thyroid cancer
EO
December 13, 2023
Founder interviews
10
Customer discovery
7
Bootstrapping
6
Eight years of failed startups before a single viral tweet changed everything
Surgery for thyroid cancer arrived right as the company finally hit growth
Talking to users beats raising money — give the product away to learn faster
Content marketing
YouTube
Winning organic reach and building brand in 2024
GaryVee
December 13, 2023
Content marketing
9
Business models
7
Customer discovery
5
LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok beat Instagram for reach now
Film your best customers — free content that doubles as lead gen
Every commodity business is saved by brand, not by product
Iteration & feedback loops
Podcast
What product leaders and founders learn from their biggest failures
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
December 13, 2023
Iteration & feedback loops
9
Post-mortems
8
Management
6
Trust must be earned before driving change — not assumed from authority.
Excess funding can trigger irrational arms races that destroy companies.
Inconclusive experiments that can't be killed waste years of team effort.
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Exploding Kittens built a co-creator empire from a card game
Masters of Scale
December 12, 2023
Founder interviews
9
Customer discovery
7
Growth hacking
5
Kickstarter stretch goals built community — not funding milestones
Players, not the game, should be the entertainment
His five-year-old daughter co-designed four Target bestsellers
Mobile optimization: conquering the mobile SERPs
Semrush
December 12, 2023
SEO
8
Conversion rate optimisation
6
Why ignoring mobile optimization makes your site forgettable
Use PageSpeed and SEMrush to diagnose mobile performance gaps
Reverse-engineer top-ranking mobile content by browsing it live
Prospecting & outreach
Podcast
Freemium, high-touch vs. low-touch, and selling as an introvert
Startups For the Rest of Us
December 12, 2023
Prospecting & outreach
8
Competitive analysis
8
Pricing strategy
7
Honor-system pricing loses most eligible paying users by default.
Network effects — not brand or size — are the real barrier to displacing incumbents.
Introverts sell better by focusing on fit, not persuasion.
How a visionary and integrator built trust and scaled a wealth firm
EOS Worldwide
December 12, 2023
Case studies
10
Delegation
8
Business operating systems
7
Standard V/I org charts can accidentally cut the visionary off from the business.
High-trust relationships make blunt feedback feel collaborative, not threatening.
Core value alignment — not industry expertise — is what attracts and retains a great integrator.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
How to pre-sell an online course before building it
Sunny Lenarduzzi
December 12, 2023
MVP & prototyping
9
Closing techniques
8
Sell your course first — building blind wastes years of effort
Client interviews hand-deliver the curriculum you should build
25 conversations at 20% conversion rate nets your first $5,000
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Accountability as the quickest path to happiness
GaryVee
December 12, 2023
Identity & self-belief
10
Resilience & grit
8
Real confidence comes from your relationship with losing, not winning.
Vulnerability without accountability keeps you stuck in blame.
Owning everything in your life is the fastest route to happiness.