Gross Profit vs. Net Profit: How to Calculate Both (And Why It Matters for Growth)
If you don't know your gross profit and net profit numbers, you can't make good decisions about hiring, marketing, or growth. Here's how to calculate both — with a real…
Read more →Bootstrapped vs VC – Building Houses Before Skyscrapers
I love architecture. Part of the reason why I worked in rentals/real estate for a while was so that I…
Why I Create Side Projects I Never Finish
The Internet is littered with side projects that never received the attention they could have and thus never took off…
How Getting Laid Off Led Me To Double My Salary and Follow My Entrepreneurial Dream
Update: thanks for all the amazing reactions to this post! I have loved reading all of your emails/tweets/direct messages and…
Want To Be Successful? Become A Doer
I’ve been working on the Internet for what feels like a long time now – 6 years. In that time,…
HireGun Launched Today
Today I launched HireGun (now known as Credo) to the world via Medium and Product Hunt. It has been quite…
Why I Unplug On Vacation Every Year
In early 2012, I was tired. I had been pushing 80+ hour weeks at work for a while. I found…
What I Would Tell All Executives About Growth
I’ve worked with a lot of companies helping out with marketing and growth over the last years. I’ve seen some…
Does A Startup Really Need The .Com Of Their Brand Name?
Recently Paul Graham, a VC and entrepreneur whom I very much respect, wrote a post called Change Your Name in…
The Full Stack Marketer’s Valley Of Sorrow
I recently read this post entitled The Curse of the Full Stack Marketer. I tweeted a few brief thoughts (a brief rant really) around this post, but…
Learning To Say No
Today I tweeted something that seemed to resonate with others. This was the tweet, with an embedded quote from this…
Lessons Learned Scaling The HotPads Marketing Team
A little over a year ago, I joined HotPads.com as their online marketing manager. I was the first marketer at…
My Manager Hack: Relentless Transparency
In my role at HotPads, I manage an ever-growing team of smart marketers. My job is to hire, train, and…
I’m Not A Good Employee
Have you ever heard someone say “I’m just not an employee” or “After working for myself, I can’t imagine ever…
The Difference Between Agency and Inhouse Marketing
Last October, as many of you know, I made the move from search marketing agency Distilled to become the Online…
I was an entrepreneur for two weeks. Here’s what I learned.
A month and a half ago I took a new job as the Online Marketing Manager for Hotpads.com, the nationwide…
Becoming A Better Marketer
I’ve been in search for a few years now. I just realized recently that I graduated high school and started…
Time For Fresh Adventures – I’ve Joined Hotpads in San Francisco
In 2011, I created a playlist called “Brooklyn” in Spotify. This was because I had just moved to Brooklyn to…
Leveraging Editorial, Self-Placed, and Owned Content for Marketing
Marketers produce content. We produce a metric ton of content every day, actually. We’re told to create great content and…
Get Executive Management to Approve Anything
*Note from John: Today’s guest post comes from Ryan McLaughlin, who is the Director of Marketing at Clarity Ventures. He lives…
Marketing Your Startup With Founder Interviews
*Update for 2016* – Now that I am a founder (of Credo) I more fully believe in this. Early stage companies…