Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #156

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The Growth Newsletter #156

Stages of Market Sophistication. Strategy, not tactics. Hook resources.

Quick reminder (because I needed it recently)

If there's something you keep thinking about or talking about doing:

Stop putting it off.

There will never be "the right time." There will always be an excuse.

Today, start making tiny progress towards making it a reality. Whatever it is.

Topics for the day: Stages of Market Sophistication. Strategy, not tactics. Hook resources.

Let's dive in 🎐

– Neal

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1. Tailor your marketing to the "Stages of Market Sophistication"

Insight from Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz.

You may know the Ladder of Product Awareness, where you tailor the message to where the person is at in the buying journey based on whether they:

• Experience the problem
• Want to solve the problem
• Are aware that solutions exist (products)
• Know which solution is best

The Stages of Market Sophistication are instead based on the maturity of the market that your product exists in, which is a factor of:

• Awareness of your product/category—is it a fork or a Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle?
• Number of existing competitors.
• Sophistication of existing competitors.

Here are the 5 stages:

In summary:

1. "The Only:" Explain what you are and why that's good.
2. "The Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 1.
3. "How It Works:" Focus on HOW your product achieves the benefits.
4. "The Even Better:" Amplify the benefits stated in stage 3.
5. "Who It's For:" Focus on how the product aligns with their identity and lifestyle.

2. Create a real strategy, not just a list of goals & tactics

Insight from Mark Pollard.

Most company's "strategies" are either purely:

• Goals:
  • Become relevant with Gen Z
  • Increase sales by 30%
• Tactics:

  • Post on LinkedIn 5 times per week

  • Create lead magnets

Mark (aka Strategy Friend) defines a strategy as "an informed opinion about how to win."

Your strategy is supposed to tell you exactly what your team needs to do in grow. Yet, according to Mark, most strategies look like this:

They're missing the key insight to the real cause of the problem and a strategy to help solve the problem. Instead, they just jump straight into tactics with no clear vision.

"Tactics are simply the activities that make a strategy happen."

Here are two examples of what a good strategy looks like:

3. Hook 'em or lose 'em

Insight by me, Neal O'Grady 🍉.

"This reminds me of that time I was in a witch’s coven in France."

7 years ago in Thailand, I learned the power of a strong hook from a quirky German man.

He had spent the past year backpacking around Asia when I met him. His most profound skill was finding the perfect one-liner to hook you into one of his travel stories.

One that makes you immediately stop and say: “Wait, what? Go on...”

His line about a French witch’s coven is a perfect example. The actual story is just of him and 3 ladies at a music festival in France deciding to call their group a “witch’s coven.”

There are infinite ways he could have introduced the story where I'd halfheartedly listen to another story about partying. But this opener got me extremely invested in the story.

A hook is the opening to anything you want people to pay attention to

Whether it’s a:

• Ad
• Social post
• YouTube video
• Cold email/DM
• Fundraising pitch
• Newsletter tactic 😜

Or even a quirky travel story including French witches.

People are gone if you don’t intrigue them immediately.

Because hooks are so important, I've compiled various free resources as I've grown my LinkedIn audience to 58,000 followers. Here they are:

1. The Hook Vault. We used Readwise's list of top Twitter thread creators and analyzed the top 4 hooks from the top 100 creators. We'll expand this as time goes on.
2. Un-ignorable Hooks Email Course. After analyzing hundreds of hooks, patterns emerged. In this course, I teach the 11 fundamental ways to hook someone.
3. Breakdown of the top 26 hooks on Twitter. Each hook is color-coded to show the smart thing each creator did to hook you.
   1. An analysis of the top 20 female creator's hook. Due to the total lack of gender diversity of the top 100 creators, I created one for the top 20 females.
4. An analysis of 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image too.

We've taught 1596 founders how to build their personal audience. The lesson on hooks is a favorite of every cohort. All of the lesson contents (and more) are in the resources above!

News and links

News you can use:

• Microsoft launches Copilot Pro for $20/month per user.

• Google is changing European search results to show comparison sites.

• Google demonstrates Circle to Search, a new AI-powered image search tool.

• LinkedIn launches sponsored articles.

• TikTok released a new guide for marketing on Valentine's Day.

• Threads now lets you hide share counts on your posts (along with likes).

• Meta released new information regarding their open-source AGIs.

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Want to be featured in front of 89,730 founders and marketers? Learn more here–booking into March.

Something fun

From Rokas Jurkénas. Startup founders be like:

What did you think of this week's newsletter?

😍 Loved it | 😄 Great | 🙂 Good | 🤷‍♀️ Meh | 🤬 Bad

If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing it with a friend. These newsletters take hours to make each week, so it really helps when you share us with fellow founders and marketers.

And if you have any comments/question, I'd love to hear them. Just hit reply!

In case you're new: Who's Demand Curve?

We’re on a mission to help make it easier to start, build, and grow companies.

We share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of founders and marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
• Enroll in the Growth Program, our marketing course that has helped 1,000+ founders get traction and scale revenue.
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See you next week.

— Neal and Justin

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer