Day 1 - full-stack marketer creation kit
I'm building a full-stack marketing education product.
Over the last 6-12 months I've stepped away from career marketing full-time, and I want to pass on the knowledge I've applied to startup founders, agencies, blue-chip clients, and tech companies.
What's a full-stack marketer?
Someone who can take a project from inception through to delivery and generate an outcome.
Most people will tell you that this doesn't work. You need a specialist for SEO or landing page builds or running social media ads.
They're wrong.
The reality is once you learn one specialisation, it becomes easier to learn another.
This in turn has a subtle domino effect, as each discipline becomes slightly easier to learn because of your existing knowledge.
This compounds over time, and if you're curious and interested, your "stack" can become quite comprehensive.
Anyway - here's the rough plan with some guiding principles.
Plan:
- Build out a series of ebooks, courses, and coaching with a bias towards getting knowledge out of my head and empowering others
Principles:
- Give as much value as I can upfront
- Go deep on 3-5 communities
- If in doubt, do something rather than contemplate
- Speed towards outcomes, over perfecting
- Be kind
I think I can release my first product in 30 days (ebook) and will go from there.
Some tasks I want to punch out:
- this post
- adjust my Twitter to reflect this project
- Pick 1-2 more communities where I can start dispensing value
- re-do some of my website
Some tools / channels I'll focus on:
- Airtable
- Webflow
- Gumroad
- Zapier
- Calendly
- Integromat
- my YouTube channel
- my Twitter
- newsletter - I recently registered with Revue
I'm fairly active on LinkedIn with my day job, so will hold off using it for now.
Some full-stack marketer of the topics I want to cover:
Tech
- Nocode
- Digital fluency
- Data
People
- Networking
- Sales and Service
- Leading
Strategy
- Gathering
- Creating
- Convincing and executing
Craft
- Presentation
- Copy
- Design
On a budget
- Hacking solutions
- For impact
- Being an honest and curious human
Partnership
- Finding partners
- Pitching
- Ways to add value
I'll keep refining as I go.
I'm keen to be as transparent as I can, and currently I'm a customer with (prices in USD):
- Webflow - $45 p.m.
- Zapier - $20 p.m
- Calendly - $131 p.a.
- Descript - $144 p.a.
I've got a good computer and some other tools from day job - like Screenflow and Pixelmator Pro.
I won't get too caught up on finances right now, but part of this process will be trying to itemise for each month to get some efficiencies.
I'll see what cadence I enjoy for these updates, I'm thinking 1-4 times a month with a day counter, and a monthly update as a minimum.
If you want to suggest some suitable communities or have a question I'd be happy to hear from you!
So I've kept this going, and now have launched speedmarketingdemos.com - it complements the work I've done with the book, and moves more towards this concept of full-stack marketing.
I got 3x pilot clients and shipped 1x days each worth of work for them.
I'm still chasing feedback, but got one back!
"Wow, I am thrilled with the output Luke has delivered with this speed to market offering for my startup Zonely! Firstly, he understood the brief perfectly. With the use of AI tools combined with existing brand collateral on our social media channels and website, Luke performed some kind of magic with the final deliverables which I will be implementing on my website www.zonely.co and via email outreach within my team."
I'm now going to push the demos angle more as a form of lead gen, and think there's scope to:
Anyway, I love that his post is here and hidden away. My intention is to circle back and update again with more demonstrable progress later.
So this was wildly optimistic.
Since writing this post I went through a divorce, got made redundant, moved somewhere new, met someone, have twin boys arriving next month, and managed to break both my arms and one foot (foot has 1 more week of plaster).
I did manage to finish writing my ebook and will launch it in two weeks - startmarketingbook.com
I also tested an idea on "full-stack marketing" with the concept of speed marketing - and did a demo for a startup I found in a local startups group.
AI tools are obviously fun and shortcut a lot of creating processes - you still need the expertise though, and feel like eventually the bar for what is considered "good content" will go up as more and more people get comfortable with the tools, and the barrier to creating quality visuals/structures/code will go down.
Glad to have got somewhere though, and looking forward to a more concerted push after some paternity leave.
I'm fortunate to be able to continue consulting this year, which opens up some flex for creative projects like this.