Marry me! 💍

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👉 These are the crazy things I learned last week.

1/ Marry me

I am in beautiful Crete in Greece 🇬🇷 for a wedding that is going to happen in a couple of hours (congrats Kyriakos and Mania!), and this is my view:

But let me tell you about a guy that proposed to his girlfriend AND entered the Guinness Record by drawing with his plane "Will you marry me" using GPS.

First of all, it wasn't easy. It took 3 months. And he had to leave his job.

But at least she said yes 😀

Check more of the story here.

2/ Kafka

"Everything you love will probably be lost."

This is the (unconfirmed) story of Franz Kafka and a girl that lost her doll and a sweet twist.

Kafka was in his 40s and was strolling around the park. All of a sudden, he saw a little girl crying. He asked her why, and she said she lost her favorite doll. They looked around together, but they couldn't find the doll. 🙁

The next day, Kafka went to the park, found the girl, and gave her a note. The note was from her doll.

📝 Don't cry! I took a trip to see the world! I will write you all about my adventures!

Before Kafka died, he met the girl and gave her a note from her doll, describing her adventures around the globe in great detail. The girl was happy!

After some time, Kafka bought a new doll (the doll returned!). The girl immediately said, "This doesn't look my doll," and Kafka handed her another note:

📝 The travels have changed me.

A year later, Kafka died.

The girl grew up, and after a very long time, she found a final note inside the doll, the last letter from Kafka:

📝 Everything you love will probably be lost but in the end, love will return in another way.

3/ Character Alarm

I wrote a couple of times about how to use Alter Ego to improve yourself, but this is a new trick I plan to start using soon.

It's called The Character Alarm.

The idea is simple:

You put 5 alarms during the day, and each alarm "wakes" up a character. You need to act like that character for that period.

Example of three alarms from Eric Partaker below:

4/ KPIs 101

A few months ago, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing app ever, surpassing 1 million users in just 5 days.

And then Threads came out and hit the same milestone in just one hour! 🤯 For context, Threads had 100 million users in its first 5 days of launch (100X more than ChatGPT).

It sounds incredible, but unfortunately, these metrics don't tell the full story. 😟

As a startup founder, you want to track important KPIs and not fall into the trap of vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but don't help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies.

For example, Threads' active users are down from an all-time high of about 75%. Ouch! 🤕

📊 Here's a list of 10 KPIs you must start tracking to help you better understand how your business is performing.

1/ Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) How much money are you making each month?

2/ Annualized Run Rate (ARR) What's your annual revenue estimate?

3/ Gross Margin Is your business making more money than it's spending?

4/ Monthly Active Users (MAU) How many people are using your product each month?

5/ Customer churn Are you losing more customers than you gain?

6/ Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) What's the long-term value of a customer?

7/ Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How much does it cost to get a new customer?

8/ Product Usage Metrics Depending on your product, track specific usage metrics such as feature adoption rates, task completion times, or content engagement (for content-based startups).

9/ Customer Feedback & Net Promoter Score (NPS) Are your customers happy enough to recommend you?

10/ Runway The runway measures the time that a startup has before they run out of finances.

💡 Success isn't just about huge numbers; it's about understanding these KPIs and how they connect. It's like building a puzzle - you need all the right pieces in place.

What KPIs do you find most valuable in your startup journey? 🤔 

5/ Tools to Grow 🚀

🤫 This is your chance to steal my secrets.

For the last topic, I will give you a glimpse of the 🛠️ tools and 🔁 processes I use to grow my brand as an Angel Investor & Entrepreneur.

Read it, get inspired, and start building your brand today.

It's actually super simple.

I maintain 4 mediums where people can read about my adventures and reach out.

1. My LinkedIn profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnvlachoyiannis/
2. My Website - https://jon.io/
3. My Weekly Newsletter - https://jon.io/category/newsletters
4. My YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@jonvictory

📬 Every Friday, I send an EPIC newsletter with 5 awesome things I learned during the week around topics like Startups, Entrepreneurship, Crypto, Metaverse, NFTs, Technology, and many more.

So make sure you are following me everywhere.

To run these mediums, I use 3 tools.

1/ Buffer - https://buffer.com/ Buffer is a platform that helps you organize and schedule the content for your social media profiles.

2/ GitHub Pages + Code - https://pages.github.com/ Since I'm a software engineer, I created my website from scratch using technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and used GitHub pages to host it for free. But don't worry if you are not a coder. There are plenty of options out there to create your website in no time, but you might have to pay a small amount to use them.

3/ SendFox - https://sendfox.com/ SendFox is a simple email marketing solution that lets you set up email automations, send campaigns, and create landing pages. I use it to send my weekly email.

And that's it. 🎉

For exactly $0 per month, you can start building your own personal brand online, and I guarantee that it will open more doors than you could ever imagine.

Start building! 🚧

That's all for now. See you next week!

- Jon V (as in Victory) 🚀

- Tue 22 August 2023