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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Leading Intercom’s AI Transformation. Des Traynor on zero-to-one mess, AI momentum, and leading with intent.
🗝️ Unfiltered: Vanta’s Product & Growth Leaders. Vanta leaders spill the beans on how they are going from 1 to 100.
🦠 The Black Death & How It Birthed Today's Prosperity. How one little flea, on one little rat, changed the course of history.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

My friends at PostHog just announced their Series D, right whilst I was writing a surprise post about their building in public strategy. This was the piece I was planning on shipping out to you today, butttt, I am still cooking it up. So instead, I thought I’d put together a short piece that dives into a few things I have seen around the internet (and the world) lately.

What I do know is that you can apparently get 15% off signing up to Attio using my code. Anyway, I hope you enjoy today’s piece.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

1/ Revenue per employee as a metric

Something that has been at the top of my mind for a while is revenue per employee. As the leader of Athyna, it’s a metric we added to our All-Hands ~18 months ago to ensure we are getting more efficient as an organisation. Luckily for us, we’ve been able to double our revenue per employee over the last year—87% in 15 months to be precise—not because of rapid growth, but because of stable growth, and stagnant headcount.

In the interest of moving this idea forward, a few of our leaders and I are doing this Maven course on AI for senior leadership. I am pretty AI literate, but it’s giving us structure around how we think about being an AI-forward organisation now and in the future.

2/ The AI agent org chart

Another shiny obsession of mine is my budding prompt library, and the AI org chart you can see here from Jacob Bank (the same Jacob Bank we interviewed recently). I know a lot of people are poo-poo’ing the whole trend of calling every Zapier zap an ‘AI agent,’ but even so, I really think there is something to this.

It seems like an excellent way to visualise who you’ve got—agentically—working on what and in which area. Brilliant.

3/ This guy’s newsletter

One thing I have always wanted this newsletter to be is tangible. Useful in specific ways for founders, investors and leaders in tech. And while I feel like I do a pretty reasonable job, I do try to be lean into the entertaining a bit more than the educational at times. One newsletter that is tangible as all get out is Marketing Ideas from Tom Orbach.

Tom is the Director of Growth Marketing at Wiz, and therefore, I am ascribing most of Wiz's recent $32 billion Google exit to him. This guy is quite literally, brilliant again.

He talks about the uber-tangible. I take his ideas and put them into practice. And they work. Recently, I wrote about the founder letter landing page. Well, after we rolled out a successful, quite meaningful improvement to our conversions, I tested a landing page hack from Tom’s newsletter that left our best converting pages in the dust. Good news for Tom, but bad news for us is that Tom just paywalled his newsletter. But if you like growth, I recommend shelling out a shekel or two for this beauty.

4/ Landing page split testing (+240% win)

After relying heavily on outbound in the early years of Athyna, the last 18 months have seen us double down on traffic to our site. Due to that, we are trying to dial in our conversion rates. The first winning experiment we made was the founder letter I mentioned earlier (inspiration). A direct, albeit long-winded message from me destroyed any conversion rates we have seen in the past. To be precise, it was a 33% improvement upon our typical landing pages. A meaningful result.

More recently, we ran another experiment, blurring out the landing page's background.

This created a feeling of FOMO—fear of missing out—and intrigue for the prospect, leading to a far better result again. How much better?—240%. And you know where I got the tip from: Marketing Ideas from Tom Orbach.

💡 Note: This is the obligatory call-to-action you were probably waiting for. If you are hiring remote talent, Athyna can help!

5/ Marketing that gets away with murder

I’m going to admit it. I am obsessed with this racist, sexist, and overtly offensive Twitter profile. Click through, you’ll see what I mean. Aside from the fact that this account is outrageous and large, it also seems to be operated by Sol Casino. Gambling sites are obviously the pits, morally speaking, but even so, this account shows you can get away with murder if you are, in fact, kinda funny.

6/ The Fre3d0m oF sPe#ch on Twitter

As a guy who loves/d Elon, I’ve become very frustrated with the calls from those on the right of tech + politics to how lucky we are that Elon saved us from the tyranny of pre-acquisition Twitter. Fact-checking and legacy media be gone. Evil. “You are the media now.” Then you see this (over and over, I might add).

I have no real love for legacy media. I don’t subscribe to The New York Times, or The Walk Street Journal, but I’ll be damned if I’ll trust the parasitic world of social media to get my news and viewpoints.

7/ How false narratives work

If you listened to the Trump administration, you’d hear a lot of hatred towards ‘illegal aliens.’ They are rapists, drug-dealers, gang members etc. But you’d be being fed a false narrative, a white (or grey) lie, an untruth. It’s a shame because most people don’t take a deeper look into the data, and trust in leadership. This little piece of data was shared first by Jason Calacanis in the week and then shared by Sheel Mohnot.

Interestingly, if you just look at this data alone, you’d also be being fed somewhat of a false narrative, as the original chart doesn’t allow for time spent in the United States. The (somewhat) adjusted version, for time spent in the U.S., looks more like this.

From what I understand, this data was from a piece published 11 years ago, but it is directionally correct (as per this more recent study). My larger point is that the U.S. may be safer letting in more immigrants, not less. Or, probably more correctly, neither one is better than the other.

8/ Photos that rip

Not too much to add here. I just found some of the photos from the Los Angeles ICE riots pretty compelling. If you look at these two images below, you can probably sum up the feelings towards Trump from the left and the right.

If you are a Trump fan, the photo on the left is the ultimate act of leadership, courage under fire, and a galvanising effect. Conversely, if Bernie Sanders is more your thing, the image on the right is probably more up your alley. When associated with Trump, you see disorder, authoritarianism, and a country tearing itself apart at the seams.

This is not a political statement, just an interesting look at how a picture can tell a thousand words.

9/ Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal

The more I mature, the more I find myself leaning into novelty content-wise. Newsletters-wise, I started with Lenny, but more and more find myself reading things with a little more depth. Packy and Not Boring, the Uncharted Territories newsletter. Stuff that tells me more than how to increase the efficacy of a Google Ad.

An example of this is The Rehearsal by Nathan Fielder. This might be the strangest and most intriguing thing I have seen in a long time. Nathan Fielder is like a real life David Brent. A man totally comfortable sitting in discomfort for an uncomfortable amount of time.

10/ The weirder side of YouTube

And lastly, in line with this newfound foray into the wilderness of the weird, I have a few YouTube channels that I’ve been absolutely devouring lately. From my new buddy Frankie’s cultural observations, to the indescribable wonderfulness of Conner O’Malley, to Bobby Fingers. The stranger the output, the better for me.

The video below by Bobby Fingers is one of many absolutely incredible, creative masterpieces by the weirdest guy on YouTube.

All of these recommendations are of an acquired taste, but if you are like me, and consider weirdness to be art, then you’d probably love these recommendations too. Enjoy!

And that's it! You can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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