Issue No. 3: Mistakes, Why Employees Quit, Best Marketing Advice, Getting to PMF, Exercise's Link to Anxiety, Management 101, and more.

Nov 9, 2021

👋 Hey! Andy here. Andy’s Newsletter is a free newsletter I publish almost every week that is full of articles and resources for startup CEOs and founders building their companies and staying sane while doing it. If you’re new, subscribe to get it in your inbox each week.
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Hey Everyone!

When I sent this issue to clients, all this paragraph said was “[preamble].” I saw it right after I sent it, but not in time to undo. It was a good reminder that nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes, and we choose what meaning we ascribe to our mistakes (and how mean we are to ourselves with the meaning we pick).

It’s easy, after seeing our mistakes, to layer on meanings like, “I’m such an idiot.” But those meanings (stories) become our reality. My recommendation? Cut yourself a break. Ask yourself what you can learn from the mistake, do your best to digest the learning, and move on. If that’s not working, ask yourself if the inner chatter you’re having about your mistake is something you’d say to your spouse or best friend (hint: the answer is usually, “absolutely not.”).

Things I Found This Week (That You Might Find Interesting)

My friend Jonathan Poma (CEO at Loop Returns, Series B) tweeted a terrific reminder for leaders on why people leave their jobs and get annoyed with management from his own internal Notion. His advice? Print it out and tape it to your monitor, desk, and bathroom mirror.
George Mack tweeted a terrific short essay on "the best piece of marketing advice" he's ever been given. The advice? "Think of the group chat message first…If you can't think of the group chat message people will do for your campaign, keep iterating."
Gagan Biyani, CEO at Maven, tweeted an endorsement of "Marketer Hire" as a place to find great marketers. "Pretty amazed at the quality of work we got for the last 6 months…"
John Danner (he just doesn't go away does he), tweeted a great thread on how startups can build their products to find product-market fit.
Brad Stulberg, a fellow executive coach, tweeted a great thread on the connection between exercise (or lack thereof) and anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Ethan Mollick tweeted a study on how teams that focused postmortems on what the team was doing right instead of what was wrong had better outcomes. Makes sense.

Things Coming Up a Lot

Management 101: I spend a lot of time with clients discussing management. What is it? What is a manager's job? How do I assess a manager's effectiveness? How should we be running 1:1s? So I put together a V1 "Management 101" doc in Notion for folks to wrap their head around management using a number of different frameworks I've found helpful.
The Four Stages of Competence: This is such a helpful way to think about how we learn. We start off making mistakes we don't even know we're making (unconscious incompetence), graduate toward knowing our mistakes (conscious incompetence), then toward getting good at something but really having to try to do so (conscious competence), and finally we land at being good at something without thinking about it (unconscious competence). I find this framework helpful to self-manage and also for providing feedback to others.
The "life cycle of confidence and skills in a job": This is related to the four stages of competence. I've always found this helpful to see how "competence" (or "skills") and "confidence" are related, and how a manager can jump in with helpful feedback to a team member as to where they land on this chart.

Network Asks

For new folks, I use this section to feature a few asks from my clients and subscribers looking to use the power of the network to find a resource. If you feel like you can be helpful with an ask below, please reply!

This Week’s Asks

Virtual Assistants (“VAs”): Does anyone have referrals to either 1) services who match CEOs and founders with great VAs or 2) know of any other resources for finding a great VA?
Candidate Sourcing: Where are folks sourcing candidates from these days? AngelList can be hit or miss. What are your “must use” services for sourcing different types of candidates?

Last Week’s Asks & Responses

Compensation Data: I usually refer folks to Option Impact and Levels.FYI, but if you know of a good source of comp. data for sales or engineering, I'd love to be able to share it with clients I coach!

Open Comp: “Pretty good for the U.S., but lagging in new stuff”
Deel: “U.S.; they are newer.”
Figures: “Good for France”
Behop: “Global data”
Radford: “Can be expensive, but good for leveling."
Connery: “Ask your VC if they have access to Connery's data or services.”

That’s it for this week. I’m looking forward to what’s next.
Andy.

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