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Five years ago, I (Jonny) was the Digital Marketing Manager of a contact lens subscription startup.
I say Digital Marketing Manager lightly because I was only the third full-time employee and covered growth, product and marketing. I also worked with several top agencies and a £350k+ monthly budget.
It was a lot of fun. Direct-to-consumer subscriptions were getting all the attention, and we felt pretty special. We raised millions, and our investors even took us for dinners and meetups in fancy Mayfair restaurants.
Because I was a young jack and fresh on the startup marketing scene, I had a LOT to learn. But it was okay — because, as startups, we generally followed the approach of failing fast to learn fast and doing things other people hadn’t thought of first.
One big help was being surrounded by a bunch of other similar startups. Also some world-class performance marketing agencies. It was a great community.
Now to what I really want to share in this email.
Have you heard of Cornerstone Razors? They’re one of the many razor subscriptions.
Early on, we decided to get together with Cornerstone’s founder and marketing lead and review each other’s websites, purchase flow and first delivery experience.
I signed up for a razor subscription on their site, and they subscribed to our contact lens service.
We then made a long list of what was great, what was missing as a customer and what we’d do ourselves if we were the marketing manager of the other business.
This was really valuable. We uncovered some blindspots and brought two founders and two marketing leads together who were solving many of the same problems but with different experiences and data.
There was one idea I shared in that meeting for the razor guys to try - the Golden Razor.
The idea at the time was to list a solid gold razor for sale at many thousands of pounds on the website. There would be no expectation actually to sell it, but it would grab the attention of customers and press, as well as help strengthen their gold-standard positioning!
I saw it come to fruition as a Valentine’s Day campaign a couple of years ago. More as a gold-colour special edition razor handle people could buy. Still cool.
Stay tuned — in a couple of weeks, I’ll share how you can create your own Golden Razor for your business. A stand-out and attention-grabbing activity.
I bought a deck of cards recently — but no one’s playing poker with them. Well, kinda.
They’re called Workshop Tactics and help you run more productive workshop sessions. Really valuable, and I’ve already had success using them with several clients just recently.
One card has an exercise called Crazy Eights.
You can actually view the instructions on the Pip Decks site here:
https://pipdecks.com/pages/crazy-eights
It works because you get those small ideas in your head onto paper. They might be rubbish ideas, but at least they’re out. And now you can work on something more wild.
Kas and I also recently used it for ideas on growing and improving this newsletter. There were just two of us, but even on your own, it forces you into a process and different way of thinking.
You and your team only have one perspective. Try getting opinions and ideas from others solving similar growth problems as yours.
Three ways to do this:
Check out Cornerstone today - they've since expanded from razors into hair, sex, body and dental too. 👉 cornerstone.co.uk
Keep being an outlier 💪
J + K
For bootstrapped entrepreneurs – how to grow your business without spending a fortune.
Every week, we tell you how an existing brand has overcome a growth challenge, sharing the insight, mindset and actionable tips to do it yourself.
