Order my USA TODAY Bestselling book: toxicgrit.com TOXIC GRIT: How to have it all and (actually) love what you have. It will help you create a new approach to ambition and find space for all the diverse parts of yourself. Join 75K+ others who read my newsletter 🧩 Life's a Game at amandagoetz.com. It’s full of free tips to play the game of life at a whole new level. In 2018 I found myself at the height of my marketing career with 3 kids under the age of 4 and filing for divorce. In a world telling me to find alignment......I realized that was impossible. The work version of me didn't want to leave early to go be with the kiddos. The mom version of me didn't want to miss a moment with them. I wanted to be fiercely independent and yet also wanted to find love again. Other versions of me didn't want to feel responsible for anything or anyone. This diversity within me led to the creation of my Character Theory Framework. This framework helped me to create space for the 10 characters that make up the movie of your life:  The CEO → wants to pursue big goalsThe Partner → desires companionship  The Soloist → cares about personal growth and development The Caregiver → deep desire to take care of others and show up for themThe Goddess → wants to be desired and pursue pleasure  The Lazy One → loves to couch rot, no goals whatsoever The Socialite → values connection The Creative → desires creation and creativity The Doctor → your inner health &amp; wellness character The Explorer → craves novelty And it helped me. I was able to let go of the idea of balance and give permission for hierarchy, boundaries and the transition sequences necessary to embody these diverse characters. So I put it all in a book and it was an instant best seller!! I'm so excited for you to create space for all parts of you and to see ambition as multi-dimensional. Follow me here for advice as I build a multi-hyphenate life as a CMO, Author, Mom of 3 and getting married again. 

Amanda Goetz

Co-founder & CEO @ Revenue Roll

3rd-generation entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Tie.

Tie helps ecommerce brands de-anonymize their highest-value web traffic with names, email addresses, advertising IDs and demographic attributes. We’re trusted by brands like Macy’s, Cozy Earth, Crunch Fitness, Caraway, and Baby Brezza.

On average, our customers de-anonymize up to 90% and grow their cart abandonment list by 225%. Join them: meettie.com.

Michael Diesu

2 weeks ago, we announced a program called Tie(d) Together. Obviously I’m a little biased, but it really is one of the most generous bonus programs I’ve ever heard of at a tech startup.

The way most startups think about incentive alignment, especially financial incentives, does not work.

Startups are a 10-year, or longer, journey. The average employee tenure at a startup is about 2 years.

Which means as a founder, at least half of the company you have today will not participate in the value they create for your company outside of their salary.

As we place loftier goals on our team, that misalignment sounds more and more like a terrible deal for employees.

So, we went back to the drawing board to see how we can do better at Tie.

Here’s how the program works:

For every $1M in ARR we generate above our annual revenue goal, we create a $100K bonus pool for the team. It scales with no ceiling — the further we exceed the goal, the larger the pool.

We pay out based on tenure, then role (C-suite and officers are excluded) and OKR completion. The longer you stick around and help the company exceed its goals by delivering on your OKRs, the more you get to share in the proceeds directly.

No more waiting 10 years to get paid for helping the company win.

It’s a simple promise that forces alignment across the board — from setting the right goals to begin with to elevating a culture of delivering outcomes.

Over time some smaller details may change as we expand the team and learn more about how this impacts the way we work (the core structure will always stay the same), but to say I’m excited about this is an understatement.

Hopefully this starts a movement among early-stage startups to share the rewards with their team sooner.

“We hit $100M ARR in 2 months!”

I’ve seen more headlines like that recently than I can count.

And don’t get me wrong: ARR is great. But it’s not the real measure of business health.

Net revenue retention is.

And right now, it feels like the only thing that matters in startups is achieving an insanely high ARR number on an even more insane timeline.

NRR is something I’m focused intensely on improving this year at Tie, because a business that doesn’t keep customers and gets them to purposefully spend more over time is a dying business.

Here’s a challenge we’ve been working to solve at Tie:

Sales wants to close more, and larger, deals which require more customization. 

CS wants smoother implementation which requires more predictability.

Nothing unique to Tie, but it is a tricky problem because they’re both focused on what will help them hit their targets.

The question isn’t whether or not to blanket-accept or reject custom deals.

The question is about who owns the outcomes.

From a sales perspective, revenue is revenue. But once that customer lands in onboarding, our CS team has to get the product set up and driving value.

That can be really difficult when you’re working with a non-standard tech stack or any other combination of custom terms.

So we built something called a Deal Desk. Any deal that falls outside our ICP and standard exception criteria, has to have sign off from both Sales and CS.

It’s only fair that since CS’s job is to onboard, retain, and grow customers that they get a voice in which deals we sign… and accountability for the outcomes.

CS and Sales leaders - what do you think? Is this a better solution than letting one side or the other control what deals get done?

The advice early-stage founders typically get about how to scale people is bad. 

"Hire great people, set clear expectations, get out of their way."

You're supposed to write the process doc, schedule the weekly 1:1, hand off the function, and step back. Because the modern leadership orthodoxy says that's what good founders do — trust your team, don't micromanage, give people room to own things.

Six months later, you're noticing slips and decisions being made that may not kill your business, but also don't push you closer to your goals. Now you're back in the weeds.

The new hire is smart. Works hard. But they're making decisions from their own mental model that's usually built at their last company, in a different stage, with different tradeoffs. 

A culture deck and onboarding checklist doesn't fix that.

When our first AE joined Tie, I spent six weeks on the road with him — four trade shows, long car rides, airport downtime. I gave feedback on everything. Probably too much. I was intense in the way early-stage founders are when they know exactly how something should be done and need someone else to do it without them.

By month four, something had shifted. 

He just knew what I'd greenlight. We didn't need to debrief after every call. The was a rhythm that had been built because we'd been in enough situations together that he'd started to think like me.

That's what culture actually is.

Not the values on the website. Not the principles deck. It's the judgment that makes someone make the right call when nobody's watching and there's no rulebook to check.

When you give someone space before the context is there, you're not trusting them. You're leaving a void. And that void often gets filled with whatever they bring from their previous experiences.

This is also where scale breaks down. You can only scale what lives in other people. If the judgment is still only in your head, you can only scale yourself. And that has a very low ceiling.

Six weeks on the road felt like a lot at the time. In hindsight, it was some of the most critical time I spent that year.

Because that proximity and hands-on time was how we built the company to this point.

Identity data won't save a broken marketing operation.

The analogy I keep coming back to: identity data is premium fuel. It's precise, it's powerful, and it's wasted if the vehicle isn't built to use it.

The brands that get the most out of identity data don’t necessarily have to be the biggest. But they do need to have already built a real multi-channel marketing operation — email, SMS, and paid all dialed in, and a lifecycle motion that can actually act on new signals. 

When you hand a brand like that a richer, more accurate identity dataset, every one of those channels improves. Email reaches more of the right people. Paid audiences stop bleeding. And the experience tightens across the board.

When those channels aren't in place, the data just adds complexity to a weak foundation.

I find at Tie, it’s sometimes better when we’re honest with brands that would benefit from having a better “engine” first before they buy from us.

It puts them in a better position to succeed long-term. And it helps us focus only on brands we can truly help.

I know some people would argue against turning down customers but you don’t build a Skyscraper business by trying to be all things to all people.

Every hype cycle creates the same pattern.

A new technology arrives. Capital floods in. Valuations detach from fundamentals. Founders rework their pitch decks overnight. Everyone calls themselves [trend] companies.

Then the cycle peaks. Capital tightens. And suddenly the market asks a question nobody was asking on the way up: is there an actual business here?

Most of the answers aren't great.

What separates the companies that survive isn't better technology or a bigger team. It's whether the core value proposition existed before the trend — and holds up after it fades.

Here's the test: strip the trend out of the pitch entirely. If the business doesn't survive that, you're borrowing against a cycle, not building a company.

Tie is no exception. Brands lose revenue when they can't identify who's visiting their site. That problem existed before AI became a buzzword. It'll exist after. The tools we use to solve it get sharper every year, but the underlying problem doesn't go anywhere.

The companies still standing in five years won't be the ones that raised the most at peak hype. They'll be the ones with a clear answer to "why does this need to exist?" And it needs to be an answer that holds up when nobody's excited anymore.

So, what's the takeaway from this random rant?

Build for the world after the trend dies. That's where the real businesses live.

taplio

The Battle

Amanda Goetz

Michael Diesu

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreMichael Diesu's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Amanda Goetz

Michael Diesu

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Michael Diesu's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreMichael Diesu's LinkedIn Performance