Brian Balfour: evaluation

Transcript context

…Lesson six. Ooh, I like this one. Do the opposite. So I think a story from very early Reforge days. So when we started Reforge the norm in the education space online, that thing that everybody was talking about at the time was essentially these short form, self-serve, low-priced, available for everybody courses. And that was the thing, I don't know if you remember the term [inaudible 00:46:58] or massively online courses. That was the rage. It was like, ah, this thing is going to revolutionize our world. And there was just so many people going after that. And so when Andrew and I did the first growth series, we essentially did all the opposite of that. We didn't let everybody in, it was for a small group of people, it wasn't purely online, we did some stuff in person. We priced it super high, it wasn't purely self-serve. We had these live components. We essentially did the exact opposite of what's out there. I think if anybody was looking at the time, it was just very counterintuitive. It was like, who's going to really actually be interested in this? But of course the first one that we did, we had an amazing response on the first one, and then the rest is history. With Reforge and then cohort based courses became a thing and all those things. But I think the real lesson in here is that if you want to gain traction around something, you often should be looking at what everybody is doing. And the purpose of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand those best practices, so that you can repeat them. Your goal is to understand them so you can ask the question, well, what is the opposite? Because in every kind of major trend that everybody's pointed to, there's almost always an opportunity on the other side, on the 180. A couple other places this applies is that if you're trying to figure out a new ad channel as an example, a new paid acquisition channel. One of the best things that you can do is you can look at what all the other advertisers who are advertising to your audience are doing, like look at their creative, all that kind of stuff. And then basically figure out how to do something completely opposite, completely different. And that's how you will stand out, that's how you will get the CTRs and that's how you'll get the performance. But most things have these gravitational forces where everything converges. There used to be this meme where every SaaS product had the same exact character design that Slack had. And I can't remember, I think maybe Intercom had it. Anyways, that was the thing. And so you can visually see this. But this dynamic I think actually takes place everywhere, whether it's in a strategy within a category, a design of a product, ad creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic as part of it. is. But this dynamic I think actually takes place everywhere, whether it's in a strategy within a category, a design of a product, ad creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic as part of it. A third quick example is that about 10 years ago when I probably really started to write a bit more on my blog is the playbook at the time that was really developed by HubSpot was that you would do a lot of high volume short content. At one point, the HubSpot team was I think pumping out like 10 articles a day. It was something crazy. And that worked at the time because they were early in the game, they had the domain authority to rank for each one of those. And a lot of people followed that playbook. But then I and a few others in the space started writing really low volume, very long content. And I think as a result, it stood out and it performed much better among the noise. And most of my email subscribers probably came from all of those early things because it did stand out. And this is a constant game because of course, as you figure something out and you do the opposite of some piece, some other people are going to start to copy you. And then you got to take a step back and be like, well, what is everybody doing? And how do I flip the pendulum back to the other perspective? But the major lesson here is if you're trying to get traction in something, whether a new product, a new growth tactic, a new channel. The goal of learning what everybody else is doing is not so you can mimic them, it's actually to figure out how you can do the opposite of it. That's the ultimate goal of that behavior.…

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