Happy Sunday! Q4 is here and I can already tell it’s going to be an action packed one. This month we’re coming up on Jones Road’s 4th year anniversary. Around any milestone I like to do some thinking and reflecting. I’m not great at it because I’m usually heads down in trying to drive growth and don’t stop to reflect on how far we’ve come in such a short time. So I make myself do so at any big occasions like end of the year, or an anniversary.

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Here are a bunch of lessons, tips, and notes to self from the past 4 years. Like most tweets, most of these are really notes to myself. Here goes:

Marketing

• You don’t know who your customer is and what they care about for the first few years of your business. Who you think your customer is and what they care about is probably drastically different than what you think. Allow yourself to be wrong.
• Ignore your bias as a marketer. A lot of the things that piss us off or fee cliche are either novel, or just a non-issue to our customers.
• You don’t need to be everywhere at the beginning. Avoid shiny object syndrome and get really good at a few things before you try to do everything.

Growth

• Have a spreadsheet or file with daily plan vs actuals. It will be one of the most important assets in your organization.
• On that note, have an annual forecast that breaks down into monthly, weekly, and daily plan versus actuals for all of your main KPIs.
• Don’t neglect non-click methods. Learn how to measure them, but also be ok with not measuring some of them or being able to know exactly how valuable they are.
• The worst way to get inspiration for ads is by looking at your competitors ad libraries.
• Your job as a leader is ruthless prioritization. I hate our about page, but we’ve been able to grow to hit our goals with it. If it doesn’t bring in revenue or profit, it can wait.
• No one is going to care about your business like you will. No one is going to spend your money as carefully as you will. Don’t expect them to, but try to get them to care about the team goals and not just individual KPIs.
• Products are more important for growth than ads.

Website/CRO

• You don’t have to test everything, but within reason you should. So many of things I thought would help either made no difference or have hurt. -
• Constantly look to test price, shipping price, and free shipping threshold. Lots of alpha here.
• Don't neglect simple headline tests.

Finance

• You can’t cash %s to the bank. Focus on net dollar amounts.
• Understand operating leverage and stay as lean as you can.
• Efficiency will degrade as volume increases. Do everything you can to resist it, but it will happen.
• You don’t have one ROAS. You have many different ROAS’s at different spend levels.
• Marry up marketing and finance as closely as possible. Make sure finance doesn’t make dumb decisions like asking you to spend more on brand search because the ROAS is the best, but also make your marketing leaders accountable to contribution margin versus anything else.

Leadership

• Don’t try to do things because you think you have to. I tried to do OKRs; it wasn’t the right fit for our organization. I tried to do manager mode, it wasn’t the right fit either.
• On that note, another example of don’t try to do things just because you think you have to. For example, I thought you had to hire people and get out of their way. I resonated a lot with the Founder mode essay because that’s what I instinctively have been doing once I realized that Manager Mode wasn’t for me.
• Get comfortable with hard conversations, because having them is now your job.

People

• I’ve nearly always regretted title inflation. It’s bad for the company, but I don’t think it serves the employee well long term either. It’s better to lose a few people to getting the titles they want at other places than it is to give them the title they want at yours if they aren’t ready for it.
• Anytime we’ve had “chaos” in a department, it was due to a lack of a leader. When we hire a leader of it, most of those problems fade away. If they dont’, we didn’t hire the right person.
• Don’t try to do things because you think you have to. I tried to do OKRs; it wasn’t the right fit for our organization.
• Hire people who are not only open to feedback ,but actually want it.
• Don’t sell someone on working for you in a recruitment process. Sell them out of it and tell them all of the reasons they shouldn’t. If they are unphased and still want to work for you, they will be a culture fit and will likely be a great employee
• There are great employees, and great startup employees. They are not the same.
• Notice I have more about people than any other category. Shows you what’s most important as the business grows.
• Every time a bad culture fit employee leaves, you’ll wonder why you don’t do it sooner.
• Someone can also be the best fit culturally and be loved, but not have the skills and you’ll want to keep them. It also won’t work out long-term, so don’t drag it out.

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I'll be speaking at the Creator IQ event on Thursday in LA. If you will be there let me know!

-Cody

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