12 February 2024
This week's additions focus on strategy, marketing, and mindset, with new digests from Rick Fawcett - Expert EOS Implementer, Cameron Herold, and Rob Walling. Highlights include Force every issue into one sentence before discussion starts. Acting before 60 days is almost always a costly mistake.
Showing 28 digests for 12 February 2024.
Hiring & recruitment
YouTube
Why every visionary CEO needs a COO as their operational counterpart
Cameron Herold
February 14, 2024
Hiring & recruitment
9
Management
8
80% of CEO time is spent on draining tasks a COO should own
A well-hired COO returns 5–10x through freed CEO capacity
CEOs and COOs have opposite personality profiles — that gap is the point
Super Bowl ad strategy: what top CMOs learned from game day 2024
GaryVee
February 14, 2024
Branding
9
PR & media
7
Growth hacking
5
CeraVe's three-phase fake-news campaign beat every traditional Super Bowl playbook.
Experiential and sampling at the venue are massively underused by big brands.
Most ads miss business outcomes — DoorDash and Opendoor showed how to close the gap.
What makes a Super Bowl ad win: lessons from Beyoncé, JLo and Taylor
Masters of Scale
February 13, 2024
Branding
9
Vision & mission
6
Spending $7M to be forgettable is worse than not showing up
Memorable, ownable, relevant — the three-part test every ad must pass
2024 brands chose safety and nostalgia over risk, signalling the year ahead
How to reverse-engineer your competitor's paid ad strategy
Semrush
February 13, 2024
Paid ads
9
Growth hacking
7
Ads running long are winning — stopped ads reveal expensive mistakes to avoid.
AdClarity shows spend and impressions Meta's ad library never will.
Tangential keywords expose top-of-funnel acquisition plays competitors bank on.
Long-term planning
Podcast
Playing the long game: how compounding work and skills build a career
Startups For the Rest of Us
February 13, 2024
Long-term planning
9
Motivation
7
SEO
5
Why short-term thinking is a bootstrapper's superpower and weakness
Blogging for free since 2005 led to a seven-figure angel investment opportunity
The signal you're playing the right game: you've done it for years, for free
Productivity & habits
YouTube
How top engineers manage time: Matt Martin on Clockwise
EO
February 13, 2024
Productivity & habits
7
Origin stories
7
Automation & tools
5
Without intentional weekly planning, others will consume your time by default
Unregulated shared time is an economic tragedy — Clockwise acts as the regulator
Viral-within-org growth: one user seeds a team, value compounds as teammates join
Monty Moncrief: building a Texas oil dynasty from the frontier
Founders
February 13, 2024
Case studies
10
Long-term planning
6
Monty drilled 29 dry holes before his life-changing discovery
Why limitless opportunity always starts cheap and accessible to small teams
The founder's shadow outlasts them — over company and family alike
Identity & self-belief
Podcast
Stoic strategies for lasting happiness in daily life
The Daily Stoic
February 13, 2024
Identity & self-belief
9
Resilience & grit
8
Goal setting
5
Happiness comes from controlling your mind, not external events.
Wanting less is more reliable than acquiring more.
Adversity is practice — the untested person is the least happy.
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Remembering better, not more: how memory shapes life
Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life
February 12, 2024
Productivity & habits
8
Deep work & focus
7
Memory evolved for quality predictions, not perfect recall—optimize for usefulness.
Sleep flushes toxins and consolidates knowledge; stress, diet, and exercise directly preserve cognition.
Struggle and error fuel learning; curiosity and reframing unlock healing.
Seven productized service models that scale to $100K/month
Brett Malinowski
February 12, 2024
Business models
9
Processes & SOPs
7
Pricing strategy
5
One active request at a time is the key to async, scalable services
Solve the entire customer problem — not just one component — to widen your market
UGC content agencies: high demand, low barrier, recurring e-commerce need
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Cal Newport's minimalist note-taking system for work and life
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
February 12, 2024
Productivity & habits
9
Deep work & focus
7
Processes & SOPs
5
High friction note-taking systems ensure you capture nothing at all.
Store project notes inside the tool you'll eventually use to write.
Your brain remembering which book mattered is a feature, not a bug.
How fearlessness, patience, and platform timing drive creator careers
GaryVee
February 12, 2024
Social media
9
Identity & self-belief
8
Founder interviews
5
Facebook and YouTube Shorts are wildly underused by creators who should know better.
Crashing Drake's party with a gifted painting turned $250 commissions into $50k ones.
Saying 'I'm gonna' is the surest sign nothing will actually happen.
Magic Spoon and Exo: building two food startups from crickets to cereal
How I Built This with Guy Raz
February 12, 2024
Case studies
10
Pivoting
8
Product-market fit
6
Exo's cricket bars hit a ceiling mainstream consumers wouldn't cross.
Cereal: an $11B nostalgic category with zero real innovation in 25 years.
Allulose — a natural sugar that doesn't spike blood sugar — made Magic Spoon possible.