YOU'RE SLEEPING ON THIS

Started off the week walking in Central Park with Mara Auginis

Worked IRL with my favs at Melius (hi joowon)

Soma Capital Happy Hour hosted by my favorite Kristine

Weds worked out of the Harvard Club with Talha + his cofounders at Outpost (bootstrapped & crushing)

BoomPop board meeting CRUSHED (most MQLs and SQLs in 2026) 

beehiiv X war - our creators showed tf up!! 

Barry’s & coffee catch up with my work friend 

Kyra’s State of Beauty presentation on Thursday morning at Soho House was incredible – congrats Dev on the new platform (he’s also a subscriber)! 

Thursday night event at Lenox (150-year-old company; $150M/year in rev) hosted by their CMO Raul + Brand Innovators (favs)

Friday morning caught up with my friend Will (Principal at Lerer Hippeau) 

Spent an hour with one of the students from my Columbia University Business School lecture, who is building a sick company + wanted to chat all things marketing  

Sitting barside at JG Melon, eating the world’s best cheeseburger with Rachel

Walking the halls of the Natural History Museum with Kennedy (who is now 14 weeks pregnant!!!! Baby’s first dinosaur) 

Catching up on work things 

Comedy show last night

Aka, what does someone see in iMessage when they share a link to your product or website? It should populate with a graphic and a little title.

You need one sentence that collapses your entire product. If you can't say it in one line, do you even understand your product??

Put it everywhere: the link preview, the share text, the first thing they see on the landing page. Make it spicy. 

People think that this moment can happen externally, like in marketing content. That’s FALSE. This needs to happen in the product experience to hook people to want to use your product.

The first thing someone does in your app has to produce a result they want to share/screenshot = aha moment

The best aha moments always: 

2 phone screens long, maximum, with as few words as possible 

Use motion or a screen recording to show exactly what you want the user to do on the landing page above the fold (don't make people read instructions; no one reads anymore)

Btw, if your core flow requires users to take a manual step, assume most of them won't do it and design around that

Experiment with partially gating content so people are required to give you some info

Gate something desirable behind an invite to use your product, e.g., a reveal, a result, etc.

When a user shares an invite to your product externally (like in iMessage), the preview should show something personal and specific to the recipient, like something about people they know who are already on the product.

Gatekeep until user shares: Before the user gets the thing they want (like unlocking more matches on a dating app or more tokens to spend in a SaaS product), they must share the product externally with at least 3 people. 

100 users in one city > 1,000 scattered across the country

Density creates engagement, which creates the feeling that everyone is using your product

Start with your immediate network and keep it geographically tight until you’re ready to scale

Give people a reason to open the app tomorrow that has nothing to do with what they did today.

The best retention hooks are social and specific: not "check out what's new" but "someone you know just showed up."

FYI: You need to get permission to drip people marketing emails or SMS

The drip has one job: get the new user to invite their friends. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it!! 

The mechanic that works: blend the invite into something that feels like a friend request. 

Couple what they want with the invitation & you’re setting yourself up for a double win = user shares and their friends convert

22–35% user penetration in your target market before you start locking things behind a paywall (My advisor from Citizen, Nikita Bier, taught me this & he’s now Head of Product at X)

Before that threshold, the thing people actually want (which should be connected to the aha moment) should only be attainable through invitations + scarcity drives the invite loop

What is considered high-volume is different depending on what type of marketing content you’re talking about (organic, UGC, or paid ads, etc)

You should be ripping tons of content (20+ pieces of content per month minimum in paid to 100s), testing out different hooks, angles, and narratives with creators 

Our brands at KV are scaling to 100+ creatives per month in paid

This allows your brand to build in your end customer’s mind like crazy because the creative is always fresh, so the brand story always evolves