What things are you not doing?

When we founded our company, we intentionally told ourselves we would never growth hack.

We were disgusted by the gurus & the jargon. We couldn't stand the concept of disruptive inbound customer gamification or agile growth wizardry, blah blah blah.

Instead, we began it very slowly. There was never some bleedingly high spike in contracts or revenue.

But it just grew, very slowly, very dependably, and still is.

I'm the same with ads. What's the quote, you waste half of your ad budget, you just don't know which half!

I'm not worrying about what my competition is doing.

With some exceptions I avoid conferences and events. These tend to be major distractions. The same is true for events or socials designed to attract leads-- they have a very high up-front cost for planning and often don't lead to meaningful conversions. I also don't sponsor events for the same reason.

Hosting or doing events can make sense in some situations, but I am shocked at how many new startups sponsor free lunches, happy hours, sampling events, etc., that are very costly in terms of resources but don't convert nearly as well as online marketing.

I'm not creating an Instagram account, going to their site or even checking Facebook more than once a week. I'm not relying on Google for analytics (except YouTube). I'm not buying ads through either. The only algorithmic newsfeed I regularly subject myself to is IH itself.

The world, especially the online world, is becoming more addictive and rather than try to resist it directly, I'm opting out at the entry point as much as I can.

• Don't use the cloud

• Don't make mobile apps for my sites

• Don't use email - I probably should but i can't be bothered to do email marketing. I only use them for things like account password recovery etc.

Great question! I actually keep a "not to-do list" and one of the most important things on there is:

Don't switch context from your most important task to a lower important task.

Using Most Important Tasks (MIT) really helps me get the things done that make the most impact. The doist team has a great blog post on this: https://doist.com/blog/eat-the-frog-todoist/

I'm intentionally not running Facebook ads because I disagree with pretty much all of their privacy behaviors.
I'm intentionally not basing my software around ad revenue and trying to sell it directly to customers. If it works, it'll be a much better incentive alignment and feel more "honest".
I've intentionally designed my software to track as little as possible about each user. The only data collected is whatever is directly necessary to serve them, and I don't do anything with it. Planning to anonymize it further as well.

I am happily not doing sponsored ads. Had a horrible experience using Weibo (China's twitter) with over 5000 views of my educational posts (world class resumes & LinkedIn Profiles) in seconds, 25000-50000 views within a few hours. Tried this for a couple of weeks. Not a single lead even though we posted in English and Chinese. Felt like a huge click-bot ripoff.

Not meeting people if all they are looking for is a software developer. I intentionally say I am busy and cannot take on new projects.

I'll probably get heat for this. But not looking for a co-founder until the market-product fit is truly achieved and the business model fully validated (i.e. an ad spend of $1 will guarantee a $3 in revenue minimum).

I'm intentionally not buying ads to promote my product. I know it has some advantages compared to competitors but I decided to grow it organically. I'm an SEO expert and I know what to do instead.

I'm intentionally not trying to attract a lot of users. I can't handle massive support if needed and I must focus on my agency and clients. So it's better to grow slowly for now.

I'm intentionally not actively selling the paid version. I'm focused on the free one to get feedback to improve the product over time.