Reading Time: < 1 minOver the past two weeks I’ve heard two opposing takes on trusting your intuition, and it’s been interesting trying to match them up. First, I was listening to an episode of the Founders podcast about Oprah Winfrey, which covered her rise to fame. When she was first looking to start her talk show, people told […]
Business
Businesses don’t need to be moral to succeed
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are a lot of ways to run a business and make good money in a way that is fair to everyone. There are also ways to run a business that are manipulative and exploitative, and those can make good money as well. A great example would be those companies that are using AI to […]
There’s no copying, there’s just execution
Reading Time: 2 minIt’s easy to think that your ideas are to be tightly controlled so that no one “steals” them, but that’s almost never the case. I shared a few years ago that almost every NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) that I’ve signed has been unnecessary. I’m happy to sign them to appease the other party, but they’re not […]
Branded searches are taking over Google
Reading Time: < 1 minAs time has gone on, and our search engine patterns have changed, a big new trend is beginning to emerge: people are using Google for branded searches more than ever before. Put another way, people are searching for “Nike” instead of “best running shoes”, or “GreenMellen” instead of “web design companies in Atlanta”. People are […]
How your brand can grow
Reading Time: < 1 minMost companies are looking for ways to grow their brand, and options for doing so are nearly limitless. However, some strategies will work much better and have longer-lasting results than others. In his book “This is Marketing“, Seth Godin lays out his overall philosophy on this: The truth is that most brands that matter, and […]
I haven’t heard anybody complain
Reading Time: < 1 minHearing complaints from your customers can be a good thing. While we ideally don’t want to hear any because we’re doing a great job, complaints can be a great way to improve your systems for the next person. However, a lack of complaints doesn’t mean you’re doing things perfectly — you may just be not […]
Assumed execution
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve shared a few times how the trust I have for my team can make my life so much easier. Specifically, if I email any of them with a task or question, I can just let it go and be confident that it will be taken care of (or that they’ll respond with follow-up questions, […]
Blameless Postmortems
Reading Time: < 1 minThe idea of a “postmortem” is something we try to do after every major project. We look back at how things went, be glad about what went well, and work on things to improve for the next one. The key to a solid postmortem, and to leading a solid team, is to focus on the […]
People who do great things are doing them for the first time
Reading Time: < 1 minHaving a fresh perspective on an existing system can be a great thing. With GreenMellen, I attribute part of our success to the fact that Ali and I never worked for another agency before starting ours, so we weren’t saddled with bad practices and messy ideas. Related, this is why we love that fact that […]
What are libraries for?
Reading Time: < 1 minWhat is the purpose of a library? Really, what is it? There are two ways to look at it: While the two are similar in practice, the philosophy behind each is very different. In Seth Godin’s famous “Stop Stealing Dreams” article (which you should think of a free two-hour book, not just a super long […]