An open letter + Product marketing quiz

I'm doing the mushy thing and writing a recap letter. But also, here's a fun quiz.

Hi there.

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We’re right at the end of the year, phew.

Last year, in a moment of boredom, I made a quiz based on previous MFG issues. I got positive responses, so I’ve decided to do it again this year.

The quiz is solely based on previous issues, but the topics are related to (product) marketing principles, models, and topics. It’s a fun way to test your brain, but it’s by no means an indicator of your marketing prowess.

I’d love to hear about your score (and your general thoughts on the quiz) so please feel free to share and tag me (@ladefalobi on all social platforms).

Have fun with it!

End of Year Recap

Like everyone else, I am playing 2024 back in my head and thinking through my wins and losses. Last year, I started a tradition of writing a personal Year In Review article; I intend to do the same this year.

While I haven’t yet written my personal Year-In-Review, it’s a good time as any to create a mini version for Marketing For Geeks specifically.

Funnel Vision

In March, I launched the Funnel Vision section of the newsletter, where I interview marketing professionals at successful African startups and write case studies on them.

I wrote some of my best work as a result of this.

📈How Piggyvest Achieved Over 40k App Downloads From Content

📈Inside Risevest's Growth Playbook That Took Them To 600k Users

🚚🥘How HeyFood grew from a small campus tool to 100k users in 5 cities

I had intended to publish 1 case study every month, but was only able to publish 3 before the year ran out.

The case studies have turned out to be the most difficult type of content to produce for Marketing For Geeks, because I spend up to 48 cumulative hours creating them.

It’s a lengthy process — deciding people/companies that would be a good fit, reaching out to them, following up, booking the interview, doing pre-interview research to make sure I ask great questions, holding the ~2-hour-long interview, transcribing the conversation, doing post-interview research, requesting/editing/creating visuals, and then writing the actual article.

Since I have a full-time job (and am determined to have a personal life), I only have so many spare hours in a week. So, I do most of the work overnight, which is utterly unsustainable.

But the case studies have also become the most read, shared, and engaged-with content for MFG. This means I won’t be discontinuing them anytime soon.

Instead, in 2025, I’ll figure out how to reduce the amount of time/effort it takes to create Funnel Vision articles, without reneging on its quality. Alternatively, I will simply reduce the frequency to a more realistic cadence.

Consistency & Getting Serious

One of the biggest struggles I’ve faced since starting Marketing For Geeks has been consistency. Every few weeks, I make a re-commitment to be more consistent with MFG and post frequently. Yet I fail each time.

At the beginning of the year, my goal was to publish 2 issues every month. But there were multiple months during which I didn’t publish even 1 issue. It’s a constant struggle and I have tried many solutions.

My most recent solution is to unbundle the newsletter sections into 4 distinct parts that can be spread over 4 weeks each month. My goal was to create an even more repeatable framework, so I wouldn’t have to do much thinking from scratch before each issue.

I arrived at this structure, which I shared with subscribers.

• Week 1: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 2: 5 standout marketing pieces & hot takes from the internet

• Week 3: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 4: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story that you can use in your marketing.

It might seem counterintuitive to attempt a weekly cadence when I failed at a fortnightly cadence. But here’s how I see it: if I fail at a “2ce per month” cadence, it might mean over a month with no content. But if I fail at a “4ce per month” cadence, it might only mean a couple weeks with no content.

The biggest issue I envision is with the Funnel Vision issues. As established, they take an immense amount of time, effort, and coordination to create. But Funnel Vision isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll power through regardless, even if it means reducing the frequency of the Funnel Vision issues only.

I also wanted to get more serious about MFG in 2024. So much so that I finally bought a custom domain (marketingforgeeks.com), paid for a few tools, had a new logo made, and produced merch. These are MFG goals I completely achieved. I am very proud of these. Yay me.

~2k Subscribers

At the beginning of 2024, I set a goal to hit 5000 subscribers. Which was a little ambitious since I only had 671 subscribers at the time. But maybe if I’d stuck to some of the plans I set for MFG, I might have hit the goal.

While 1,903 isn’t the number I hoped for, it’s certainly one I’m proud of. Despite doing a less-than-optimal job of promoting the newsletter and staying consistent, I was able to:

• Publish 10 issues which were read over 15k times

• Reach a minimum of 1.5k views on each issue

• Reach a minimum of 2k views on Funnel Vision case studies

• Get 1,232 new subscribers, almost double the previous number of subscribers

• Get my domain rating up to 8 from 0, having lost my previous rating by switching from Substack to a custom domain.

• Get a total of ~3.5k search impressions with a 5.9% average CTR

• Grew MFG’s WhatsApp community to 200+ members.

Some of these are merely vanity metrics, but I will allow myself to be vain today.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting Marketing For Geeks. I really do mean that.

Happy New Year’s Eve (or Happy New Year, depending on when you’re reading this).

See you in 2025.

Cheers!

Lade.

A (bad) photo of Lade and her personal assistant with MFG’s 2025 marketing calendar in the background.