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First principles approach to marketing, content, and founder branding.

Harshith Varma

2 months ago, I walked into Stanford University Graduate School of Business with a rough idea of what to expect. 

Last week, I walked out with a clearer sense of how much I'd been leaving on the table.

My background has been in marketing, specifically for B2B SaaS and service businesses. That's where most of my thinking has lived. 

So when I first came across the curriculum, subjects like finance, regulatory frameworks, design thinking, and strategy felt like electives. Sure, they sounded interesting but I assumed they were not really relevant.

That assumption didn't survive the first few weeks.

We typically develop fluency in one or two functions and quietly treat everything else as someone else's problem. It works until the cracks show. 

These functions bleed into each other constantly, and operating with command of only one of them means making half-informed decisions everywhere else without realizing it.

What the program gave was enough of a foundation across each domain to recognize when a decision has dimensions you're underweighting. The way you think about a problem changes when you have more than one lens to look at it through.

Then came the venture project with Senmiao "Samuel" Sun, Lauren Koepke, Suvinai Jiraboonsri, and Galaktion S.. It was in biotech, a space I had zero prior experience in. 

When you're building something credible in a vertical you have no history in, you're forced to rely entirely on frameworks and first principles. It turned out to be one of the more valuable parts of the whole experience.

There's something about being on the Stanford campus that's difficult to articulate without sounding like you're overselling it. I'll be back for sure.

What made it all special was the quality of the professors teaching it. They brought in decades of deep experience in their field. Learning from people at that level is a genuine privilege that you don't fully appreciate until you're sitting in the room.
 
Huge thanks to Professor Yossi Feinberg, Kelsey Carlson and Jiaying Feng for this experience!
 
Grateful for this one.
 
For now, back to building.

Founder - H2H Copy | $2M+ in revenue generated through organic LinkedIn

The Mr. Beast-ification of B2B content is finally happening!

For Wispr Flow's Android launch, Tanay Kothari offered 5 people a Porsche 911 GT3 RS if they could get their AI voice dictation app to make a mistake. Each challenger pushed harder than the last. The product held up every time. 

And this isn't a one-off stunt. 

WisprFlow also has a UGC program, reportedly built by a 19-year-old, that has generated over 500M views in 60 days. (Separate post on that later) 

It's entertaining, it compounds, and it's product-led. That's a hard combination to pull off in B2B.

We've already seen the early wave though. 

Tycho Luijten, Sam Dunning, Todd Clouser, and Tim Davidson proved that B2B content doesn't have to be boring. 

But Tanay just raised the bar quite a bit.

The obvious caveat: this playbook works when you have a product with a bold, falsifiable claim at its core. Not every startup does. But if yours does, a feature launch doesn't have to be a boring announcement. 

Well done, Wispr Flow and Tanay!

I *genuinely* believe I have one of the best jobs in the world.

Every week, I get to talk to founders 1:1 to understand how they built their businesses and how they grow their clients' businesses.

Their clients include some of the LARGEST retailers, hypergrowth start-ups, mid-market and enterprise tech companies on the planet. And I get to understand how they think about solving problems at that scale.

And over time, I've built a fairly good understanding of

...What it actually takes to build a successful product-led company

...The marketing foundations that need to be in place long before you worry about tactics

...How enterprise sales actually work from the inside

And I'm pretty sure all of this is gonna come super handy in the future.

This is the kind of knowledge that takes most people years of trial and error to accumulate. I'm getting it directly from the people who've already figured it out.
You genuinely cannot learn this stuff from a course or a book.

On top of that, I know exactly who to reach out to when I need help in a specific area. I've spent enough time on this platform to know who the best people are in any given domain. 

And getting paid to do all this??

That's kinda insane when I stop to think about it.

I also get to work with extremely talented folks like Jeff Odarve and Navya Shree, and do all of this while traveling wherever I want.

Is it hard? Yes. Absolutely.

As you scale, things break. I'm scrappy by nature, and scrappy has limits.

But when I zoom out and look at the full picture, the people I get to learn from, the teammates I get to build with, the freedom to do it all on my own terms, I feel nothing but grateful.

I don't know how many people get to say their job genuinely makes them smarter every single week.

I get to say that. And I don't take it lightly.

(Well, we *finally* tried skiing for the first time this weekend at Tahoe! Only regret is not having tried it sooner)

LinkedIn is perpetually 14 business days behind Twitter.

Emergent just hit $100M ARR eight months after launch. One of the fastest companies to ever do it. And nobody on LinkedIn is talking about it.

But yeah, let's all *still* talk about PayPal CEO hiring a ghostwriter for $200k because it's not quite self-serving and is super insightful.

Meanwhile, the algorithm is out here surfacing posts from 2 weeks ago and destroying whatever little organic reach creators are left with.

It's a weird dynamic. The platform keeps shooting itself in the foot by disincentivizing creators.

Anyway. If you want to know what's actually happening in tech, go spend 30 minutes on Twitter.

And if you're active on Twitter, let's connect!
https://lnkd.in/gCFBfaAr

I'm SO done with Bay Area startup events man.

Every single time I explain what I do, I get the same blank stare. 

And I'm not talking about one awkward conversation - this has been a pattern. At this point I've tried every possible angle and framing. Doesn't matter.

I've tried explaining it as distribution strategy - how if nobody knows you exist, your product doesn't matter. I've tried the top-of-mind angle - how your prospects need to think of you the moment they have the problem you solve.

I've even broken it down into pure revenue terms with actual client numbers.
Still nothing.

I used to think it was the curse of knowledge - that I was too deep in this world to explain it simply. But that's not entirely true.

And look, this isn't me saying I know everything or that I'm too good for these rooms. It's just basic market fit. Matthew Hunt posted about it yesterday:

"Stop trying to convince people who don't care about the problems you solve.

Preach to the choir.

Sell to people who already know they have a problem. 
People who are actively looking for a solution.
People who want to change."

The frustrating part is that good events DO exist. I had a great time at Sculpt last year! (Bruno Estrella/ Clay - bring it back faster please?)

But they're almost never the ones you find scrolling through Luma. The ones worth attending are private, invite-only, and nobody tells you about them until you already know someone inside.

Request: If you're in the Bay Area and you actually know of events worth attending, please drop them below or send me a message. I'm genuinely done wasting evenings making small talk with people who've never heard of founder branding.

There has to be a better room somewhere.

I just finished reading Paul Graham's 4,288-word essay on taste. It was published back in 2002, and I think it's more relevant today than it's ever been.
 
Taste is the word everyone is using right now. It's also the word nobody can quite explain.
 
I've been thinking about it for a while now — long before I read that essay. Writing 2,000+ posts for founders will do that to you. You start noticing things you can't un-notice.
 
Once you accumulate enough reps, your eye develops an intolerance for what's off.
 
And the more you feed it with great content — really great content — the sharper it gets. Your standards keep getting higher because you now know what great looks like. Once you've seen it enough times, anything less becomes harder to ignore.
 
Graham puts it well: "As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that."
 
Even Ashley Lewin recently wrote a great post about it. She defines taste as pattern recognition built through fundamentals and repetition, specific enough to name what's off and why.

That said, knowing what taste is and actually developing it are two very different things.
 
Jeff Odarve and I have started blocking time each week just for this. We look at what's working in this space, understand the mechanics behind it, and ask how we can take it further.
 
We want to be the absolute best in our space.
 
And we'll do whatever it takes to get there.

taplio