📰 Idea Generation by Sam Altman

Here’s a secret: You don’t need fancy software. I actually recommend against it in many cases as there is a large learning curve and most people haven’t studied the accounting that goes on behind the scenes. I talk more about software choices in this article.

When your business is small and uncomplicated, try using a spreadsheet. Once you have it set up the first time, it should take you maybe half an hour a month. Create a file in your favorite spreadsheet software and follow the steps below.

Everyone else moved to Mountain View and worked for Google for years with a nice package. I got to work on JustReachOut, a PR outreach tool to find and pitch relevant journalists.

The product wasn’t even validated at that point. But I had been working in the space for a while and I had launched a course that did really well, so I knew people were looking for a solution.

I built it to $30k MRR and it was acquired in 2020 by SEOJet for $750-$800k. It was later acquired from SEOJet by Jon Katzur — one of the early Slack employees — in early 2024.

Then, in 2021, I founded SmallBizTools, an affiliate blog site featuring the best business software tools. I built it to $10k-$12k and it was acquired by SemRush in September 2023. Per the contract, I can't comment on specific numbers, but it was a part cash, part stock deal.

Now, I’m working on TopicRanker, a software tool that helps you find long tail keywords based on weaknesses and problems in the SERP. It’s built on Vercel, Postgres, and DigitalOcean.

Startling fact: as much as 80% of users who sign up for your product end up never coming back after the first day.

This means only 20% of top-of-funnel users come back to use your product in a meaningful way.

It also denotes the importance of first impressions — which are paramount to converting, retaining, and expanding your customer base.

And where first impressions typically form is within your initial onboarding experience.

But despite this, onboarding is frequently overlooked as a one-time checklist – often becoming stale as your product, messaging, and GTM tactics evolve.

And we’ve been guilty of this too at Supademo, where we struggled with a pattern of less-than-ideal customer activation, slow time-to-value, and low onboarding completion.

In an effort to improve these metrics, we focused on hypothesizing and implementing a series of tactics to reduce friction and accelerate time-to-value.

Ultimately, these:

Increased onboarding completion rate by ~10% Increased activation rate by ~20%; Decreased time it took to achieve the "aha! moment" by ~39% Here’s an actionable guide on the five tactics we implemented to improve our product onboarding:

It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think.

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.

Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future.

You want to be able to project yourself 20 years into the future, and then think backwards from there. Trust yourself—20 years is a long time; it’s ok if your ideas about it seem pretty radical.

Another way to do this is to think about the most important tectonic shifts happening right now. How is the world changing in fundamental ways? Can you identify a leading edge of change and an opportunity that it unlocks? The mobile phone explosion from 2008-2012 is the most recent significant example of this—we are overdue for another!

Not long ago, the regular use of social platforms by corporate leaders was rare — or even unthinkable. Now, it has become the norm, with companies seeing it as a fresh, immediate and relatable way to engage audiences. Some even believe it’s become a core strategy for improving overall performance.

CEOs dabbling in social media is a strategy riddled with risks, though. Several have already paid the price, with bungled communications damaging reputations and share prices, and even costing a few their jobs. Elon Musk’s tweets have landed him in hot water, including with regulators; CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman resigned in the wake of offensive tweets; and T-Mobile CEO John Legere had to delete controversial tweets during merger talks.

Many communication professionals are still nervous about the whole idea. But lessons are being learned all the time, and there are steps leaders can now take to tap the power of social media safely.

The voices criticizing Google for killing small sites are shouting louder.

Cases like HouseFresh or Retro Dodo garnered a lot of attention and make compelling cases. Hardcore updates and the growing rift between SEOs, publishers and Google add kerosine to the fire.

The most volatile market in the world is not Brazil, Russia or China. It’s Google Search. No platform has as many changes of requirements. Over the last 3 years, Google launched 8 Core, 19 major and 75-150 minor updates. The company mentions thousands of improvements every year.

The common argumentation is that Google is breaking apart under the weight of the web’s commercialization. Or Google is cutting off middlemen like affiliates and publishers and sending traffic directly to software vendors and e-commerce brands.

But does the data support those claims?

As the saying goes, "In God we trust, all others must bring data."

Does Google give big sites an unfair SEO advantage? I thoroughly analyzed sites that lost and gained the most SEO traffic over the last 12 months to answer the question of whether big sites get an unfair SEO advantage.

TL;DR: Google does indeed seem to grow large sites faster but likely due to secondary factors instead of the amount of traffic they get.