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Welcome to Volume 70!
How do you make productivity a priority in your organization?
Blocking time on your calendar is an effective productivity hack our team relies on.
We even have an acronym for this—CREAM:
“Calendar Rules Everything Around Me.”
Whether it is writing a Twitter thread, researching a new case study, scheduling an email sequence, or even drinking water, we embrace the idea of using the calendar to understand the things we need to do, remind ourselves, and track our progress.
If you don’t do this already, you should start now.
Speaking of productivity, did you know that having talents at your company jump ship can affect your team’s productivity and your business’ overall health?
Before we dive in to read the full story, here’s a peek at what’s to come in this piece:
- Pendo + Mind the Product
- Grammarly’s $13B+ Strategy
- Your Top Talents Would Jump Ship If…
Pendo + Mind the Product
Last week, I stumbled upon a tweet many product people might have found shocking, but exciting:
Product Analytics Software, Pendo acquired Mind the Product, a product community leader. Pendo’s goal is to elevate product management and offer better support, education, and training to product teams.
Pendo has zero plans of dissolving Mind the Product’s team or changing anything about its existing program.
Instead, the product analytics company intends to keep the team in place to help give product teams the best education and support they need.
One of the reasons this acquisition is such a big deal is the unification of a software and a media company under one umbrella.
If you’ve followed Mind the Product for some time, you should know their story.
The community grew from 25 people in the back room of a London pub in 2010 to become one of the world’s largest product communities.
Apart from their large social media following, Mind the Product boasts:
- 15.5K monthly organic traffic
- 20,000+ product people in the Slack community
- 150,000 community members
- Meetups in 200+ cities around the world.
- 49.7K Twitter followers, 45.9K LinkedIn followers, &16.9K YouTube subscribers
- Podcast library of over 150 episodes.
Pendo, on the other hand, is a leading product analytics software that helps SaaS brands like Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk create products their customers would love.
Combining their superpowers—Mind the Product’s community and Pendo’s software —gives the $2.6 billion-dollar brand an edge over its competitors.
As a result, Pendo is now better positioned to offer product people the training, content, community, and software they need to build and ship products people love. This is certainly a good deal for Pendo and the start of a revolution in the product space.
As you might already know, Pendo isn’t the first software company to acquire a company that offers media, training, or community services.
We’ve written about some similar acquisitions like this:
- Semrush acquiring Backlinko, a content/SEO training platform
- Hubspot buying The Hustle, a leading B2B newsletter
And some we haven’t covered:
- Twitter acquired Revue, the newsletter platform
- Stripe bought Indie Hackers, a Bootstrapped Founders’ community
- Zapier bought Makerpad, a no-code education, and community that helps users learn to build software.
I still believe there’ll a ton of similar acquisitions in the months and years to come. Hopefully, more B2B SaaS companies will see content, training, and community as a valuable customer acquisition and retention channel.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Pendo acquired Mind the Product to elevate product management and help software companies become more product-led.
- Pendo is now better positioned to offer product people the training, content, community, and software they need to build and ship products people love.
- More software companies will invest the money joining forces with a promising niche media/community brand.
Grammarly’s $13B+ Strategy
Grammarly is fast becoming everyone’s primary editor and confidant.
That’s because everyone wants to write their emails, blog posts, and other content assets or communication materials like a pro.
I have come to depend on Grammarly so much that I installed the keyboard on my phone, and the Google Chrome extension to act as a second pair of eyes on my work.
Currently, around 30M people also use Grammarly to write and sound confident. The company leveraged our need for content excellence to build a $13B company.
How did they do this?
Grammarly knows that everyday professionals, not just writers, search for spelling and grammar tips. So they position themselves as the solution at every step of the way.
Take a look at one of their most popular blog posts, “What Is the Oxford Comma?”
The first thing you see when you get to the page is this pop-up:
Beyond helping the reader understand what an oxford comma is, Grammarly gets ahead by showing the reader what they can become and do with the tool.
Just in case the reader dismisses the popup to read the content, Grammarly carefully inserts a copy in the guise of a tip just below the introduction, followed by the CTA:
The “tip” presents the reader with a quick solution that can potentially keep them from reading till the end of the article to get what they need.
Most competitors focus on giving people information on how to spell something, instead of a solution of “never having to think about how to spell anything, ever again” like Grammarly does.
My colleague, Ryan McCready, did a full breakdown of Grammarly’s strategy.
He discovered that Grammarly’s blog content is split into two categories for search: Common Typos Content and Grammar Questions Content.
The Common Typos category is optimized for people who want to avoid common misspellings.
For instance, the keyword “traveling” attracts 156K monthly searches. Grammarly currently drives about 87k sessions from that single blog post. Not to mention how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.
The Grammar Questions category also takes the same approach, but it focuses on people looking for complex grammatical concepts.
Grammarly dominates the SERPs for grammar questions keywords like:
We admit Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com, and a few of Grammarly’s competitors have higher monthly organic sessions. However, Grammarly does an exceptional job targeting the right keywords and positioning its product as the go-to solution.
Ryan also covers other key strategies, including how they found product-market fit in the case study. You can read the full case study here.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- 30M+ people use Grammarly everyday to write and sound confident, contributing to their $13B valuation.
- Grammarly’s blog content is split into two categories for search: Common Typos Content and Grammar Questions Content.
- Grammarly does a great job targeting the right keywords, attracting those who need these answers, and positioning their product as the solution.
Your Top Talent Would Jump Ship
There’s been a progression in the number of people quitting their jobs in the U.S, within the last six years. For example, 47.7 million people voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021.
That’s a 30% jump from the 36.1 million people who quit in 2016.
The Great Resignation is in full swing,, and these numbers will climb higher if companies don’t reassess and adapt their culture to match current workplace trends.
One of the reasons talents are “breaking up” with companies is their desire for more appealing perks, and most companies are beginning to catch on.
According to CNBC, Amazon, PayPal, and others admit they could lose talent to competitors who offer more appealing perks like remote/hybrid work.
Not having a culture that accommodates flexibility can hurt your ability to attract and retain your top talents. It’s the same reason 4.3 million people in the U.S. quit their jobs in December 2021 to find jobs with better perks like more flexible hours.
Your employees are one of your companies’ greatest assets.
If you ignore their needs, there’s a competitor lurking nearby, ready to swoop in, capitalize on their desire for flexibility, and lure them with mouth-watering offers.
Losing top talents to competitors can hurt your team’s productivity, increase burnout, and hurt your business as well.
If you don’t want to see the investments you’ve made in your employees become an asset for a competitor or another company in a different industry, you should listen to their needs. Show you value them beyond their contributions.
Since flexibility is a major concern for employees, you can consider a remote or hybrid setup. Companies like Shopify and Twitter have also adopted a remote work culture. Coinbase and others have adopted a remote-first workplace, while Atlassian lets employees work from satellite locations.
Of course, B2B tech companies can adopt either of these models easier than those in the health or food industry. That’s probably why the hospitality and food industry continues to see higher rates of employees leaving their jobs.
It’s important to choose a model that works for you, and get started on implementing it. Doing this would not only show your employees you care about them. It can go a long way in keeping your top performers with you for the long haul.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Amazon, PayPal, and others admit they could lose talents to competitors who offer more appealing perks like remote/hybrid work.
- 4.3 million people in the U.S. quit their jobs to find jobs with better perks like more flexible hours, higher pay and improved working conditions.
- Companies can lose their top talents to competitors if they don’t create a remote/hybrid work culture that encourages employee flexibility.
OTHER NEWS OF THE WEEK:
🎟 Instagram is rolling out a new profile banner that lets you build hype for upcoming live streams.
💸 Atlassian acquired Percept.AI, an AI-powered virtual agent technology provider, to help customers boost employee and customer support experiences.
💻 Meta, Facebook’s parent company, sets records for the largest single-day wipeout in the history of the stock market. The company lost nearly $220 billion.
BRAIN FOOD OF THE WEEK:
If you describe how you feel about Mondays in one word, what would it be?
Hyped? Upset? Exhausted? Indifferent?
The way you feel about Mondays says a lot about your career.
Here are eight ways to make Mondays a day to get excited about:
📍Don’t let other people teach you how to think about Mondays.
📍Set clear goals about what you want to achieve during the week.
📍Let your calendar rule everything around you. Schedule time blocks to get important things done.
📍Avoid overscheduling your Monday.
📍Spend time during the weekend with your loved ones and/or something you love.
📍Start your day with some meditation and a workout routine.
📍Use some music to get yourself in the mood.
📍Drink lots of water.
Sometimes, the dread for Monday can be the result of toxic work culture.
Working in a place where you have zero autonomy, contributions go unappreciated, and your boss’ words make you feel disposable, and you’re losing your self-esteem in the process is unhealthy.
The danger of staying in a toxic environment is that it will affect your emotional, mental, and physical health.
Silent treatments, offensive words, and other forms of abuse in the workplace can also trump your growth and leave you feeling jittery—always trying to guess your boss’ next moves.
If this is your experience, you can turn your Monday and week around when you choose to walk away from toxicity and start over.
Environments shape our perceptions, and we always want to be in places where people support and positively challenge us to be better and do better.
That’s one of the reasons I love being at Foundation—the culture.
Beyond creating content that shapes culture, Foundation has a culture that shapes every team member to be the best version of themselves. I know I am a lot better than I was 9 months ago.
If you are looking for a place to grow, contribute, and impact individuals and businesses, you should consider joining the team. We have tons of available positions, and we’re excited to get to know you.
WE ARE HIRING BRILLIANT B2B CREATORS, MARKETERS, AND LEADERS:
TWITTER THREAD OF THE WEEK:
5 Ways To Breathe New Life Into “Failed” Content by Chantelle
IN CASE YOU MISSED SOME OF OUR GREATEST HITS:
- Why API Documentation Is Content Marketing Gold
- You’re Wrong About The Backlinko + Semrush Acquisition
- 100+ Marketing Experts To Follow On Twitter (2022)
- Three Good Content Plays Between Ryan + John Bonini
WHAT WE’RE WIRED INTO THIS WEEK 🎧:
These round-ups are brought to you by me, Jessica O., every week ✌!
