Hi, I’m @visakanv! I help people get better at marketing.
I was the blog editor at ReferralCandy from 2013–2018, where I helped grow traffic 100x from under ~1,000 hits/mo to over 100,000 hits/mo, and helped bring in millions of dollars in revenue.
I’m moderately “twitter-famous“, having grown my Twitter audience to over 55,000 followers. I also have a youtube channel (4,000+ subs) and I’ve published two ebooks (5,000+ sales). I’m also a 3-time Quora Top Writer, from back when it was cool. I share numbers because lots of people find that to be meaningful proof-of-work, but really I don’t think raw # is a good metric for quality. I consistently prefer to focus on trying to build meaningful relationships with people rather than try to reach as many people as possible (hence the tagline “slow marketing in a growth-crazed world”).
I co-founded Statement.sg (currently on pause), a Singaporean t-shirt and lifestyle brand. You can read about our journey here.
I’m currently available for consulting and speaking gigs.
You can also follow me on Twitter.
These are what I consider to be some of my best writing that helps marketers:
- How to get better at marketing – started out as a note to a friend, continually being expanded and updated
- The instructions I wish I was given (as a newbie startup marketer) – advice about how to think, how to plan, how to proceed
- Networking advice for self-conscious noobs – you’re going to have to talk to people!
- How to deal with creative anxiety – you’re going to have to write things down, or talk out loud, and share them with people
- Minimum Viable Content: Real talk about content marketing (and the 4 mistakes you’ll make) – resource constraints are real and you can’t ignore them
- 5 years of content marketing – this is a slightly cleaned-up transcript of a talk I gave at Saleswhale in 2018, where I talk about the lessons I’ve learned in content marketing.
- Play long games – the longer you last, the more you benefit from compounding gains, and the more valuable your work becomes
- Solve for distribution – conscientiously reaching more people helps you achieve better outcomes, which can help you improve your process, improve your product
Stuff I think is generally interesting
- The final form of any brand logo is hypersimplicity – this is a work in progress, so it’s quite reader-unfriendly – but I think there’s an interesting and important idea in here
- Brands sell building blocks of identity
Recommended reading
- Dan and Chip Heath’s Made To Stick (twitter thread)
- David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man (twitter thread)