Hi there!

I'm keen to get back to sending my newsletter regularly, and here's the first one for 2021.

I'm not sure what's the best format yet, so expect it to change. Feel free to share what you like or dislike about the newsletters.

A new essay

I recently chatted with a startup founder about marketing. When I was preparing for the chat, I had the chance to consolidate some of the ideas I have had in my mind for a while. The founder said the session was very useful. So I thought I'd write down the ideas.

The result is this essay, The 2-step Marketing Framework.

What I read this week

• ​Stories of Asana vs Flow: Asana's revenue for fiscal year 2021 was $227 million while Flow did $3 million of ARR at its peak. It's interesting to hear the product and marketing stories from both sides.
• ​Asana's pyramid of clarity: I felt pretty frustrated in the past few years when we didn't have a clear direction at Buffer. Smart people were running in various directions, and the company wasn't moving anywhere. We finally got more clarity this year, and this article summarizes it well. We are also using the OKR framework at Buffer.

See you next week!

Alfred

P.S. Oh, I just switched over to ConvertKit from Mailchimp and am enjoying the experience so far. Importing my subscribers, adding a form to my site, and sending this email were all super easy. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about this, or if you are a power ConvertKit user, share some tips with me!