Help wanted Over the last six weeks, I've done job reference calls for eight different people. This is a huge uptick compared to what I've done the rest of this year. Has something changed recently in the job market? To find out, I asked job seekers on LinkedIn to share their current experience. 288 people responded and here we are. I surveyed respondents about how many jobs they've applied for, how long they've been looking, and how many replies they've gotten. I also asked about their...
10 days ago • 3 min read
PSA: Viral Data Stories 101 discount this week, only for nerd processor subscribers 📈 🎉 🙀 Subscribe and learn to tell your own data stories. Now read on for your regularly scheduled weekly nerd processor 🤓 💻 💡 I ❤️ sales! I have both sold software and had software sold to me. Nothing, and I mean nothing, annoys me more than showing up to a call to try to buy software and having the salesperson grill me for 30 minutes without ever showing me the product. I led sales at Textio off and on for...
17 days ago • 3 min read
More than 200 founders later In 2024, I've spent time with more than 200 different startup founders. I've worked deeply with several as coaching clients or helped them tell data stories to accelerate their businesses. I've gotten to know many more in introductory conversations, at events, and in their search for customers and investors. These conversations have informed a lot of the writing I've done about startups this year, especially in AI (where it is hard to build effectively, hard to...
24 days ago • 3 min read
An entrepreneur and a newsletter walk into a bar It's been 33 weeks since I launched nerd processor and started publishing every week. A couple of weeks ago, I did a look back on how the first 30 newsletters performed. I feel pretty good! 4 have gone viral 6 have been published and/or cited by mainstream press 10 have brought me new coaching clients 3 have turned into paid speaking opportunities I launched Viral Data Stories 101 as part of nerd processor, which captures my whole playbook for...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
I hope this message finds you well! In my nine years as Textio's CEO, I wrote 1,100 messages (!!!) to reignite conversations with people who, despite initial enthusiasm and engagement, had gone ghosty on our sales team. Most salespeople will tell you that this kind of exec outreach is hit or miss. After all, if someone wanted to talk to you, they wouldn't be ghosting you in the first place. This week, I break down all 1,100 messages to figure out which patterns fizzled out and which got a 90%...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Fight me! Earlier this year, I began collecting recorded workplace meetings from as many different teams as I could. I now have over 1,100 hours of meeting data from more than 150 different teams, and have published lots of insights about it: In-person meetings are more inclusive than remote ones Women love to tell other women "I told you so" Everyone take's credit for women's ideas Your boss is the only one who can interrupt in hybrid meetings This week, we're diving back into the Big...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Buying robots from robots Last week I received the following obviously-ChatGPT-generated sales mail in my Textio inbox: What is the product? Who knows! As I've written recently, I'm currently receiving hundreds of identical-sounding sales mails every single week, most obviously written with ChatGPT or with tools that wrap ChatGPT pretty thinly. The majority of these messages are offering AI-powered sales and marketing tools. Oh, the irony. Here's what I'm wondering: Is anyone reading this...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Slack is no place for the Great American Novel(and it's terrible for that project update you just wrote too) The other day, someone asked me to read an important project update. I was interested in the project, but I kept putting it off. Every time I looked at it, a thousand words written in Slack chat, all in one paragraph, all in plain text, I felt overwhelmed. Not reading it in a timely way definitely made me worse at my job, but I just didn’t have the fortitude. Sending long status...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Selling AI sure is fun! Recently, I had a conversation with the founder of an AI startup who described an interesting dynamic: CEO of a traditional enterprise announces that every department should be modernizing operations with AI Every team rushes to investigate, including teams with limited tech expertise (think HR, finance, marketing, legal) Suddenly everyone wants to buy stuff, per the CEO mandate, so IT scrambles to assemble an AI review board, usually without experienced personnel...
2 months ago • 4 min read