3 competitive advantages you can start building today
Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Spark Teen Weekly. Each week, we'll send you handmade, hand-picked, and handpacked content on teen entrepreneurship, investing, creating, and more.
Let's dive in!
🚀 The growth marketing handbook
This is the ultimate playbook for acquiring or converting more customers for your startup. In this post, Julian Shapiro breaks down each step of the growth funnel and why certain strategies work or don't work. Here are some key takeaways:
Brand marketing focuses on establishing a cohesive brand that connects with a target audience, increasing the potential for revenue in the future. Growth marketing converts this potential into purchases and revenue through the referral, retention, and monetization of customers.
Growth marketing is data-driven. Iterate constantly to understand your target audience and market your product accordingly.
Word of mouth is the least expensive and most sustainable way for growth.
Not every growth channel is suitable for a particular company. Use Shapiro’s handbook to determine your channel-startup fit.
💪 10 competitive advantages to start building today
High tolerance for failure. Learn to fail smart and learn fast.
Low time preference. Play the long game to build real value.
Relentless consistency. Keep showing up to produce work, day in and day out.
These are just 3 ways you can outperform. In his post, Sahil lists 7 more competitive advantages that don’t require talent.
💡 How do creatives come up with great ideas?
Behind every great company is a good, perhaps even revolutionary idea. But, how are these ideas formed? Here are 3 important takeaways from Adam Grant’s TED talk on the habits of original thinkers:
Good ideas often develop during procrastination: when time is given to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, and to make unexpected leaps. Thus, procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but can be a virtue for creativity.
Great innovators are afraid of failure like the majority of us, but they are even more afraid to not try.
Chrome and Firefox users have better job performance and are more creative than Safari users. Why? Because they seek out a better version of something that is already available, rather than sticking with the default.
Resources & Opportunities
Alias.co - All the essays, podcasts, tweets, and videos of some of the highest-signal investors and founders in 1 website.
The Remarkable Students Competition - Submit your project for a chance to win $10,000 in funding.
That's it for this week!
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Jodi & Mei from the Spark Teen team