Week 1: How 7 Unicorns Actually Grew + Lessons for you + My Week of Daily Analysis

Hey there!

What a week it's been! After making some big decisions, I'm excited to share what I've learned, and honestly, writing this reflection feels pretty refreshing.

Here's what happened: I decided to dive deep into startup analysis daily, sharing insights on both YouTube and Medium. But then I thought, why not take this meta? I'm treating this entire content creation journey as a startup itself and building it completely in public. Welcome to what I'm calling "the content business experiment."

Since I'm starting from zero and building in the open, I needed a way to bring you along for the ride. That's where this newsletter comes in, and you're reading the very first issue!

Here's what we'll cover today:

This week, I analyzed seven unicorns and found actionable patterns that any entrepreneur can apply. Instead of chasing the next shiny marketing tactic, these companies won by fundamentally rethinking how they approached growth, metrics, and user psychology.

From Notion: Turn Your Users Into Your Content Team → Stop creating all your marketing content yourself. Build systems that let your best users create valuable content that naturally showcases your product. Templates, case studies, tutorials: if your users can build it and share it, you've created a content engine that scales without burning your marketing budget.

From Canva: Solve The Emotional Barrier, Not Just The Functional One → Your biggest competitor isn't another product: it's user self-doubt. Before building new features, ask: "What limiting belief prevents my users from succeeding?" Sometimes, a 23-second confidence boost is more valuable than 23 new features. Design your onboarding to create psychological wins, not just product education.

From Loom: Pick One Metric That Proves Real Value → Ignore vanity metrics and obsess over the moment your product delivers actual value. Loom's "first view" metric was brilliant because it measured communication success, not content creation. Find your equivalent. The single action that proves someone got real benefit from using your product.

From Calendly: Embed Virality Into Your Core Workflow → The best viral loops don't feel like marketing: they feel like natural product usage. Every Calendly meeting was a product demo for the person being scheduled. Look for ways to make sharing your product feel like using your product, not promoting your product.

From Typeform: Question The Fundamental User Experience → Instead of building a better version of what exists, ask "What if this worked completely differently?" Typeform didn't make better surveys, they made conversations that looked like surveys. Sometimes innovation means throwing out industry conventions entirely.

From Miro: Integration Strategy Beats Feature Wars → Don't try to replace your users' existing tools: become part of their workflow. Miro integrated with 100+ apps so users never had to leave their familiar environment. When your product works seamlessly inside tools people already love, adoption becomes frictionless, and switching costs become massive.

From ClickUp: Target Competitor Dissatisfaction Directly → Build growth by finding unhappy users of competing products and reaching out personally. ClickUp wrote scripts to scrape review sites for complaints, then messaged those users on LinkedIn. It's scrappy, but it works because you're solving known pain points with proven demand.

🔥 Most Popular: The Notion video is leading with 23 views, likely because it's had the most time to gain traction as my oldest upload. But here's what's interesting: the Typeform video is showing real promise at 17 views in just 2 days. That's a strong early signal.

The highlights from my analytics are:

🎯 Key Insights & What They Mean

Let's be real, $0.12 isn't paying any bills. But it is encouraging to see the potential in what I am doing. When I saw the very first $0.1, I was excited and got renewed energy to continue on this journey.

Here's my current toolkit and what I discovered:

💭 The Honest Reflection

Wednesday hit different. I woke up completely drained and honestly didn't want to create anything. But that public commitment? It pulled me out of bed.

Reality check: This hasn't been the smooth 2-hour daily routine I envisioned. I'm clocking 5+ hours most days, which isn't sustainable long-term.

So here's my pivot for next week: batching everything. Research sessions, video recordings, and Medium posts, all blocked into focused chunks instead of spreading them throughout each day.

What's Next?

Week one is in the books, and I'm already learning that building in public means being honest about both the wins and the messy reality behind them.

Next week, I'm testing this batching approach and diving deeper into what makes some content resonate more than others. Plus, I'll be sharing the frameworks I'm building to analyze startups more systematically.

Thanks for joining me on day one of this experiment. Hit reply and let me know what you would want to see me cover as I build this thing from scratch?

Until next week,

Dr. Ehoneah Obed

P.S. If you found this useful, forward it to someone else who might enjoy watching this journey unfold. Every share helps this little experiment grow.