Hey Everyone,
Hope you're having a great week. Here are a few things I've been reading, writing and pondering lately. Enjoy!
1. 5 Mental Models for Content Marketers
Mental models are frameworks and principles that help you make decisions. They don’t provide answers, but they do provide new ways to approach old problems.
Try running a few problems through the same mental model and see if it changes the way you think about those problems. You might find a new solution, but you’ll almost definitely level up your thinking—and this is where the real value is.
The mental models below aren’t specific to content marketing, but I’ve found them to be particularly useful.
- MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable)
- MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive)
- The Circle of Competence
- Simple vs. Simplistic
- Strategies vs. Tactics
2. 45 sales tools to build the ultimate tech stack
Yes, this is another list of sales tools—but this one comes with a framework for helping you choose the right ones.
3. The Breakout Tech Company Of 2018
The analysis here is really interesting. I won't spoil it by revealing who investor Semil Shah chose.
4. Tweet of the Week
There's lots of good stuff in this thread.
Top startup blogs 📝
— James ✌️ (@jamesg_oca) November 25, 2018
1. Both Sides of the Table - @msuster
2. YC Blog - @ycombinator
3. Feld Thoughts - @bfeld
4. Andrew Chen Blog - @andrewchen
5. Mike Troiano Blog - @miketrap
6. Product Hunt Blog - @producthunt
7. Intercom Blog - @intercom
Any suggestions?
5. Random Links
- Reforge featured one of my recent blog posts in their excellent newsletter. Thanks guys!
- Yes: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back
- Very interesting: Podcast Advertising: $51,975 Spent. Here’s What We Learned
- How Guy Raz Built ‘How I Built This’
- A good read from CoSchedule: How to Create Content for Google’s E-A-T Algorithm Update
Have a great weekend!
Jimmy
PS - I’m looking to partner with a few great businesses to sponsor this newsletter. It reaches a bunch of smart folks from places like Google, Apple, Spotify, New York Times, Marriott and Harvard. Shoot me an email if you're interested in working together.
PPS - I'm now an official Ghost partner. I've been using Ghost to run my blog for years and I absolutely love it. If you signup for Ghost with my link I do get a commission, but you get an incredibly powerful and simple way to manage your website. Markdown ftw!