the below snippet is from my 1x/mo newsletter, The Next Brand. if you enjoyed, sign up here for more – https://justinmares.substack.com/ the tech sector is fascinating. i used to live in Silicon Valley and still have a soft spot for all things tech. it’s inspiring to see great entrepreneurs building new things at the forefront of technology, literally inventing the future #props. health is the…
How I validated my idea for Kettle & Fire
Note – this is a republished from my Substack newsletter (The Next Brand) where I’m doing most of my writing these days. A few people have mentioned they want to know more about how exactly I started Kettle & Fire. How’d I get the idea, why did I think it’d work, what did I do in the early days, etc. Well, let me take you…
How I Fixed My Sleeping Issue
For the last 6 months I’ve had a terrible time sleeping 🛌. More nights than not, I’ve woken up after 5–6 hours completely unable to get back to sleep. Pretty typical night of sleep this past July. Though after comparing the Oura to the Dreem, I’ve noticed that my Oura ring will code REM sleep as “awake” — at least for me. After 6 months…
I’m starting an email newsletter
I started an email newsletter (The Next Brand) where I’ll be doing most of my future writing. My goal is to write 2x/month on topics of health, wellness and building great brands. Check out the 1st newsletter (pasted below) and sign up here if you want to get future episodes. Otherwise, enjoy the 1st episode! *** what’s new i went hunting for the first time…
Is Impossible Burger healthy?
As the plant-based trend picks up steam (and the Beyond Meat IPO outperforms), plenty of people are asking – is the Impossible Burger healthy? tl;dr – no. Not in my opinion. Take a look at their ingredients below: The Impossible Burger ingredients are different: their most controversial ingredient is Soy Leghemoglobin. To make this ingredient, Impossible genetically engineers a yeast bacterium to produce a protein…
shipping your calendar
there’s a relatively common idea in startup world that a company “ships its org chart”. this is called Conway’s law: in effect, it means that a given company will end up shipping a product that reflects their org chart. for example, we have 6 people in online marketing at kettle & fire. that means that – relative to our competition – K&F is going to…
stranded ideas
today i learned about “mastery learning” – basically, a process where students study a concept until they can pass test showing 90% proficiency, then they move onto the next concept. not only that, but it appears to be empirically validated. from wikipedia: Mastery Learning has been one of the most highly investigated teaching methods over the past 50 years. While it has been the subject…
quick idea – a tax policy that supports high-growth small business
one of the biggest things i’ve learned over the last 2.5 years growing kettle & fire 300%+ per year is the importance of cashflow… and how growth can actually kill you when you’re dealing with a physical product. in our case, we were bootstrapped for the first 15 months of the company’s history, and were growing like crazy. every month we had record sales growth,…
my talk at crypto refactor camp
a few weekends ago, i attended and spoke at ribbonfarm’s crypto refactor camp. the event was fantastic, and had a ton of amazing, thoughtful people. i loved it. i figured i’d share the (very rough) slides for my talk, on how i think crypto has the potential to help humanity solve our next class of problems.
contrarian thought – ideas are (almost) everything
the more i’ve done in my career, the more i’ve come to believe that it’s more important to come up with a unique, great idea than it is to choose a thing blindly and execute at an A+ level. that may work for agencies, sure, but not startups. personally, had we started Kettle & Fire just 18 months later, our journey to an 8 figure…