As I sit down to write this, the last newsletter of what has been a dramatic year, I find that I can’t concentrate.
It’s Christmas, and also Vaikunta Ekadasi, an auspicious day on the Hindu calendar. Wishes are being exchanged, my family is sending pictures from a get-together, and my friends are out and about, travelling, enjoying great food, and generally being happy.
But that’s not why I can’t concentrate.
This year, my ability to actually sit down, focus and get stuff done has taken a dramatic beating. I tried real hard, mind you, but the mental and physical stimulation of an office space and a calm mind is difficult to reproduce. On top of that, we moved this year, and it took me time to get used to the new space.
And that’s when the idea for this newsletter came along. I had some time, and I was in a new role, and I had things I wanted to say. This newsletter was, in a way, me training myself in focus and clarity. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, but I’ve made progress, and in light of the kind of year it has been, I’ll take that.
The best things I wrote this year also dealt with the same things, now that I think about it. Seen in that light, picking the best of the year has been pretty easy.
Read.
Written over three weeks in 2019, this was what gave me the confidence to actually think that what I had to say was important enough to put down on paper. It remains my most-read essay. Bestselling romance novelist Preeti Shenoy, whom I’ve known for a while, recently read and shared it too.
It’s also what led a lot of you to my writing in the first place, and I’m thankful for that. Most importantly, it is also my most influential essay. It kindled, at least for a while, conversations among India’s startups and founders about the power of storytelling.
If this is what you found me by, do take a minute to share it.
If there is one essay that is a distillation of all my marketing ideas, it is this one. I enjoyed putting this together more than I thought I would, and some of the folks I most respect reached out to me after. I also think it’s the most operational of my essays, with a lot of inputs of how to execute the ideas in it.
Though it was originally meant for this newsletter, it was published on the SaaSBOOMi blog. Some of you know I’ve been a volunteer there for a while, and there are a couple of marketing related things I’m working on with them for next year too. Do keep an eye out.
In which I lay out my manifesto for the 2020s: Marketing is back.
From the essay:
There remains only one way to differentiate and grow in the 2020s, in this post-product decade: Better marketing.
But what does better marketing mean?
You could formulate, activate and reap the benefits of a referral program like Dropbox, or build in some inherent virality, which powers Drift. You could construct a huge content marketing engine, like Hubspot, or go big on brand and social, like Fast.
But all of this cannot be an afterthought. If you are not baking marketing into your product as you are building it, you cannot possibly compete against products who will.
We are already seeing premonitions. SaaS marketing talent in India is scarce, and this is going to drive up demand. If you are a founder, you need to pay attention.
I argue that the majority of Indian SaaS founders, who are naturally builders and engineers, tend to be ridiculously wrong in the way they hire and manage marketing talent. I also take aim at the new cool thing: growth teams.
From the essay:
I hang the blame for this kind of thinking squarely on the growth-hacking philosophy that seems to have pervaded every part of startup land. What this philosophy (and way of operating) states that everything has a shortcut, if only you look for it.
I’m talking about a particular kind of belief that posits that if only you do some A/B testing, fiddle with a CTA here, and change a colour there, acquisition will shoot up. Engineer-founders tend to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of mumbo-jumbo because it appeals to their binary way of thinking. Zero and one. Right and wrong. Left and right.
The problem is that the world doesn’t work that way.
My most personal essay this year, in which I describe what got me through the year. When I was younger and coming through the ranks at Freshworks, I had no guide to tell me, in tougher times, that what I was going through was okay, and that things would get better. That part of this newsletter is aimed at filling this gap is a function of how seriously I take that responsibility, and how important I think it is.
In the essay, I try to elaborate on the rare-in-these-times quality of digging in and scrapping it out. It is something I wish I had read at 25.
I wanted to leave you with two things: one, that I have a tremendously interesting list of topics to get to next year, which I’m excited to start on, and two, that the year will start with a bit of a surprise as well.
But all that is next year, and I’d like to appeal to you to take it easy for the next few days, however the year has gone for you. Take care of yourself, have a drink and a laugh with the people you love, and enjoy the colder weather, wherever you are in the world. We deserve to because we survived, and for now, that’s enough.
Before you go, like I’ve been doing all month, I’m going to ask you again to take a minute to share one of these essays, or endorse the newsletter itself (you can use the CTA below), on LinkedIn or Twitter.
See you in 2021, dear readers, and I wish you a very merry christmas, and a happy new year!