528. Bad ideas 🐹
How to brainstorm headlines, strategies, solutions, and more
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
The path to more good ideas? More bad ideas
When I was at Buffer, I picked up a habit that has stuck with me in every marketing job since: Whenever I need a good bunch of good ideas for headlines, strategies, solutions, you name it, I write down a long list of as many as I can think of—usually 25 or more—that certainly contains some good ideas but also contains a lot of bad ones.
Quantity breeds quality, you might say.
Well, I wrote about this process in this week’s Bonfire newsletter, which contains:
The how and why for coming up with 25 ideas at a time
A video of me doing this live! 🤩 🎥
25 ideas for subject lines and website headers
25 ideas for drumming up business for a lemonade stand
As (I hope) you’ll see, when writing a list of 25 ideas, the first few are great, the middle is quite weird and often unusable, and then it comes back around again to good by the end.
Let me know what you think! Is this a process you’ve tried for yourself? What works best when you’re needing inspiration for new ideas?
Speaking of bad ideas, we went on a pricing podcast. And it turned out good!
I am far from a pricing expert.
So bless the folks at Pricing I/O who had me and Shannon on their Street Pricing podcast to discuss the intersection of brand strategy and pricing strategy. We had a blast with host Marcos Rivera who very kindly let us yap about brand for 30 minutes.
You can check out the full episode here or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
