Peep Laja

Principal at CXL

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Book Recommendations:

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

“I've been listening to the author-narrated autobiography by Dave Grohl (@foofighters / Nirvana)... and it's 🔥. If you grew up on Nirvana and punk rock, this first-account storytelling is mindblowing. Super addictive, great fucking stories. The book is called The Storyteller.” (from X)

The #1 New York Times Bestseller * Named one of Variety's Best Music Books of 2021 * Included in Audible's Best of The Year list * A Business Insider Best Memoirs of 2021 * One of NME's Best Music Books of 2021 So, I've written a book. Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ("It's a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!") I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. This certainly doesn't mean that I'm quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it's like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters…the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

“Hiring interviews is a skill like any other. Poor skills lead to bad hiring decisions. The book that gave the best process for hiring interviews: Who - The A Method for Hiring. Game changer. I recommend all your people in charge of conducting hiring interviews read it.” (from X)

This is a book summary for the New York Times Best Seller Who: The A Method to Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. The most essential information is condensed and organized so its practical, simple and extremely useful. To hire the A Players for your company, one need to implement a rational and thorough hiring process. In WHO, this particular process is split into four chronological sections:1. How To Use A Scorecard2. How To Source Your A Players3. How To Select Your A Players4. How To Sell Your CompanyEach step is summarized and analyzed so its easy to read, directly to the point and saves you loads of time.This summary is designed for:1.) The busy individual familiar with the process and seek a solid reinforcement of key principles one may have missed.2.) The newcomer who values time spent on EXECUTION and ACTION, not re-reading.Key Benefits:Excellent compact summary of the Who: The A Method to Hiring in a fast, convenient format.Saves you precious time from re-reading the 200+ page book to re-absorb, remember and categorize concepts. We did all the work for you.Keep the topic relevant and in front of you for times when you lose sight of the rational and proven into voodoo hiring methods.Quickly identify A players, understand the 6 traits that indicate candidate risk, establish solid ground work by asking 4 introspective questions before you even start the process..and much more. Understand the potential shortcomings of this exhaustive process and learn to adapt it to suit your unique situation and company.A Players are fundamental if you want your business to be successful. Ask any CEO and they will tell you that an overwhelming reason for the success of their company lies with the team. Your company is only as good as who you hire!And finding them is easy once you learn the rules and how - FAST, with our expert guide extracting the most fundamental principles of finding A talent.This summary is designed to be purchased alongside the reviewed title Who: The A Method To Hiring.Keyword: Geoff Smart, Who: The A Method of Hiring

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

“@jlinowski @mcmillanstu this is the idea of half-life of things... as well as "science"... facts change great book on the topic https://t.co/ERJEwEI0Qv” (from X)

New insights from the science of science Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science. Knowl­edge in most fields evolves systematically and predict­ably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowl­edge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. Companies and govern­ments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. And by tracing how and when language changes, each of us can better bridge gen­erational gaps in slang and dialect. Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable amount of time—a radioactive half-life—so too any given field’s change in knowledge can be measured concretely. We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread. Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. He shows that much of what we know consists of “mesofacts”—facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he of­fers intriguing examples about the face of knowledge: what English majors can learn from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it’s so hard to measure a mountain, and why so many parents still tell kids to eat their spinach because it’s rich in iron. The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard. Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls’ home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. When Liz’s mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman’s indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Anyone selling products or services online can benefit from this book. You will learn exactly how to make your website more successful and increase the amount of money you make from your website or e-commerce store. This also includes clear, actionable steps for you to increase retention and create loyal customers that will come back to spend more money. Plus, you can get examples of each case study listed in the book. In this book, there are three hundred different tactics to increase conversions, generate more leads, and maximize ROI. The key is to find the most profitable tasks and start with those. The advice outlined should be organized into an annual marketing calendar. A marketing calendar is an organized schedule of when you need to create and promote the marketing throughout the year. This way, you can proactively set up the success of your e-commerce website. The book starts off with general advice about driving traffic to your website. Then, it details how to better understand your target customer. This is where we start to understand exactly to whom you should be marketing and why. Creating personas and your customer avatar will help you determine how and where you should be marketing your products. Next, I dive into specific areas of an e-commerce website. Each section has specific tips to maximize the effectiveness. I recommend trying as many of the tips as possible. Not all the advice will work exactly as I have outlined it. You need to test and experiment to determine the right approach for you. Finally, you will read specific suggestions on how to make more money from your e-commerce website. This money will come not only from new customers but also from repeat customers. This strategy is to help improve retention, resulting in a larger lifetime value. That includes suggestions for when your customers receive their products at their home or office. Apply the tactics listed in this book to any self-hosted shopping sarts or hosted ecommerce solution. The most popular hosted ecommerce software includes Shopify, BigCcmmerce, Volusion, NetSuite, Magento and Wordpress.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

The small BIG: small changes that spark big influence book cover

by Steve J. Martin, Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini·You?

At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - your boss, a co-worker, a customer, client, spouse, your kids, or even your friends. What is the smallest change you can make to your request, proposal or situation that will lead to the biggest difference in the outcome? In The small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice -- Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini -- describe how, in today's information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences. In the last few years more and more research - from fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and behavioral economics - has helped to uncover an even greater understanding of how influence, persuasion and behavior change happens. Increasingly we are learning that it is not information per se that leads people to make decisions, but the context in which that information is presented. Drawing from extensive research in the new science of persuasion, the authors present lots of small changes (over 50 in fact) that can bring about momentous shifts in results. It turns out that anyone can significantly increase his or her ability to influence and persuade others, not by informing or educating people into change but instead by simply making small shifts in approach that link to deeply felt human motivations.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

This ebook outlines a number of ways that comedy and improvisation can make us all better marketers and make our content more fun, more human and more engaging. And who doesn’t want that? Humor is human! Laughter lowers the intellectual shield your busy prospects have up all day just to survive the messaging onslaught. Humor opens up a space for connecting because it disrupts the expected pattern. I hope by including many examples here in this eBook, I am giving you all lots of variety and ideas on what can be done. Many of these ideas aren’t high-risk or hard to implement. So before you rule it out, ask yourself what you have to gain from connecting emotionally with your customer. Happy Reading! Kathy

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

THE LIFE-CHANGING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD “Essentialism holds the keys to solving one of the great puzzles of life: How can we do less but accomplish more?”—Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist. Essentialism is more than a time-management technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter. By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for where to spend our precious time and energy, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices, instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing to do. It’s a whole new way of doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Join the millions of people who have used Essentialism to change their outlook on the world.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Is your eCommerce business stagnant? Do you want to get to the next level and get there quickly? Would you like to be able to triple your leads in under six months? Are you unsure of what your next steps should be to boost sales? The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter how much traffic you drive to your site if you can't convert it to sales. In this book, you will learn the five-step Marketing Optimization System to scale and grow your bottom line. This proven method is used to increase the percentage of visitors to your site that convert into customers. You will learn to gather intelligence through qualitative insight and quantitative data, and then execute successful split testing to increase sales and leads. Small Business Big Money Online will give you direct, actionable advice and techniques that you can simply apply to your own process, developing your own system along the way.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Harness the Secret Principles of RELENTLESS! Are you ready to supercharge your career…grow your business beyond your wildest dreams…turn your life up to eleven? Learn the secrets of success from "Mr. Relentless" himself. Capitalist evangelist Wayne Allyn Root—bestselling author, reality TV producer, serial entrepreneur, former vice presidential nominee, and business speaker on the international circuit—reveals the seven principles of relentless that will take you to a level you never imagined.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Imagine if you could connect with your website visitors the moment they landed on your site. They understood exactly what kind of value your product or solution provided. And they were eager to join your email list or hit the buy button. What would that mean to your business? In Finding The Right Message, pro conversion rate optimizer and online copywriter Jen Havice walks you through how to ask the right questions of your customers to learn what they need to hear from you to take action on your website. In the book you’ll get a step by step guide that any small business owner or marketer can easily start using. You’ll learn: step-by-step process for review mining so that you can paint a picture of your customers with the words they useBest practices for conducting interviews and surveysHow to analyze your voice of customer research findings and apply them to your copyHow to write a value proposition that speaks directly to the customer’s problem and how your product of solution will help fix itWhat the differences between features and benefits really are and how that affects your website copy

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond. It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace’s sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn’t stand a chance against the Goliath that was  New York City Yellow Cabs. So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building  a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies’ extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and it’s practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers. Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers: attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more. An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible” “This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there” Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign―aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. Pinpoint why you aren’t growing fasterUnderstand what it takes to get to hypergrowthNail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient)What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales teamThere’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now!

PL

Recommended by Peep Laja

Written by a leading pricing researcher, this book provides a simple unified system for the setting and management of prices. The pricing procedures described are grounded in basic research and are generally applicable over products, situations, and times. The result is that students gain a deeper, more generally useful understanding of this essential aspect of business. The author demystifies the math necessary for making pricing decisions.  Using clear, direct language, he explains in detail how to apply expected value, multiple regression, price elasticity, and generalized breakeven analysis to essential pricing tasks.  He uses a descriptive approach to explaining mathematical techniques so that formulas can be seen as simply more detailed specifications of intuitive ideas. Used in dozens of college and MBA classes all over the world, Pricing Strategies is now available in a second edition. This revised edition includes updated examples and exercises as well as expanded coverage of topics such as freemium and in-app pricing, subscriptions, tipping, pay-what-you-want pricing, pricing algorithms, and dynamic pricing. Robert M. Schindler is a Professor of Marketing at Rutgers University, USA.