Positioning consultant for AI and frontier tech companies. I help founders define their category, sharpen their message, win their market. Clients: Temporal, Pinecone, Pydantic, Runlayer, and more.
Visit gkogan.co → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2014 – Aug 2024
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The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that
You know the nagging feeling that your product, project, or company has become more complicated than it needs to be? You can solve many problems and get better results by doing something unthinkable to many: removing parts that once seemed essential. My crusade against complexity continues with this short story
The fate of many startups depends almost entirely on one conversion point: When a visitor becomes a user. All too often, this pivotal role falls on the shoulders of a pitifully generic “sign up” button that’s lucky to get even a minute of consideration during development. If you take
This is a story of how a software company was able to start a conversation with 8x more of their users by cutting the length of their emails by 90%. You could set up a test of this method in less than an hour. The Problem One of the most
I used to dread setting up email automation and email campaigns. Why? Because before a single sales or marketing email could be sent, it needed a design. In my attempt to sidestep this time-consuming process, I learned that plain emails not only save time but work better. Why Design
Being swamped — overwhelmed by stuff to do — is the default state of being within a startup. There's always more to do than time to do it, and the list keeps growing. Everyone else working at every other startup feels this too. Even if it doesn't look that way
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply…
Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast. Is it worth it? Long ago I got fed
TL;DR - I spent five years earning a side income by drawing and selling cartoons to magazines, mostly of various animals in business suits. I found the cartooning industry to be old-fashioned and inefficient. So I’m building a product to disrupt the industry and help cartoonists make more