CEOs run marketing campaigns.
Brand guidelines, quarterly reports, approving copy, hiring agencies. All part of a regular marketing process, nothing strange about that.
But eventually, the marketing of big companies (and established thought leaders) is boring and predictable.
Dumbed down by committee.
Growth is linear. Nothing moves the needle. The work does the bare minimum to stay in customers' heads.
But entrepreneurs make pirate moves.
And pirate moves are different:
Joining a new social media platform and doubling down. Finding a lesser-known feature of a mature platform.
Being controversial. Making a ballsy call. Playing the game and finding the cheat codes.
- My friend Kyle started posting daily on TikTok, to get fast feedback and iterate. TikTok doesn't care how many followers you have. Last month he had a six figure launch from TikTok alone, that wouldn’t have happened on Instagram.
- I got 3,000 new followers within 24 hours of publishing a LinkedIn newsletter. Three weeks later? 5,000. It’s a feature LinkedIn is secretly pushing, rewarding those that get involved.
- Also on LinkedIn, when you create an event you can invite up to 1,000 people a week when you hit “invite”, filter by industry or location and then “select all.” Now they’ll get a notification.
The pirate moves are everywhere. But you have to be looking.
How do you find pirate moves?
Identify the practitioners. Go down rabbit holes. Find the outliers.
Not the established, but the hungry. The "f*ck about, figure it out" ethos that a select few have.
How do you make pirate moves?
Act fast. Get over perfectionism. Experiment and test and be prepared to fail.
When the stakes are low, you can afford to mess up. But you might not.
Doing what everyone else is doing only leads to slow growth.
Be more pirate.
