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Hey 👋

Apologies for not getting a newsletter sent out in November. I've been busy working on marketing for MetaMonster (we're getting close to onboarding our first users) and consulting work through my friend's agency Miscreants.

Quick refresh -> MetaMonster is an SEO web crawler that fixes issues for you. Keeping metadata on a website up to date on a big site (or if you're managing multiple sites) can be a real time suck, and boring as hell. We find missing or broken page titles and meta descriptions and make it easy to generate new ones in a single click.

I'm working on it with my old Krit co-founder, and it's feeling super promising. My focus is on sales and marketing, while Austin handles most of the product work, and I've been working hard to get our marketing engine running while we're still building the product.

Which brings me to this month's piece. I recorded a coaching session with Alex Hillman, founder of Stacking the Bricks and 30x500. We got into a ton of good stuff related to early stage marketing:

• The mistakes I made with a recent launch
• What I’m doing differently now
• How identity and imposter syndrome can impact your marketing
• What professional wrestlers get right about storytelling
• How to create content for a niche where you aren't an expert

If you're a marketer, early stage founder, or interested in starting your own company some day I think you'll really enjoy the conversation.

Cheers,

Andrew

For bootstrappers

​The Reverse Content Silo - internal linking strategy​

This simple internal linking strategy is guiding how I'm thinking about building content for the MetaMonster website.

1. Identify target keywords
2. Create a pillar page for each one (link from homepage)
3. Create 2-3 supporting pages that link to the pillar page

​Rand Fishkin's new mostly bootstrapped video game studio​

Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, was one of the first to develop an alternate form of fundraising that helped him get his business SparkToro off the ground without getting stuck on the VC hypergrowth hamster wheel. Now he's raised another round to kickstart a new video game studio. I love seeing this, the more options people have to get their businesses off the ground while sticking to the lifestyle they want the better.

​Getting PR for your SaaS​

This post from Iron Brands outlines the strategy he used to get traffic and backlinks for Simple Analytics. It's pretty simple, monitor news stories for your niche, write an article summarizing them and providing additional commentary, then post to Hacker News. Won't work for everyone, and I believe it eventually got him banned from Hacker News. But while it worked it worked well.

From me

​How your identity impacts your marketing with Alex Hillman​

I invited Alex Hillman, founder of Stacking the Bricks and 30x500, to come on Small Efforts and talk to me about early stage marketing. The conversation turned into a live coaching session, and we got into a ton of great topics. Most interesting to me was our conversation about identity and how it impacts your marketing efforts. I really enjoyed talking to Alex, and I think you'll enjoy listening.

For fun

​Filmmaking lessons from a Youtube misfit​

I loved this interview between Jack Conte (founder of Patreon) and Beau Miles, one of my favorite Youtube creators. Beau is an outdoor educator from Australia and an amazing storyteller. He has an amazing knack for finding adventure in the every day. Some of his most popular videos are running a marathon around his house, kayaking through small streams to commute to work, and building things out of trash.

​The Husbands​

One of my favorite recent reads (although it didn't get great reviews on Goodreads). A woman comes home from a bachelorette party to find a husband who wasn't there when she left. She then learns that everytime he goes into their attic he comes down a different person. She starts to cycle through husbands, and potential lives, and learns about what really matters in the process. Classic sappy time travel (sort of) story. I loved it.

​Lateral​

I get a little tired of business podcasts sometimes (although I still listen to plenty of them) so I'm always looking for something fun, and interesting to listen to in between. Lateral is a silly game show from Tom Scott where guests try to solve lighthearted puzzles using lateral thinking. Mostly it's just an excuse to listen to smart, creative people make jokes and chat with each other.

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