🪄 Poaching competitor's employees and customers

Hey there,

The Startup Maester is back!

Welcome to the 4th issue. We're gonna learn how to poach competitor's customers or their employees.

Now you might find this slimy but these are the business tactics all top businesses in the world use.

Recently, World-class Talent in AI from Google has been joining OpenAI. Or they go from OpenAI to Google.

If you didn't know, Meta's Ad Platform (Facebook) is the best in the world for all kinds of SMBs for their targeting. The lead guy from Meta was hired to make Pinterest's Ad Platform which is why its so good.

So we are gonna learn how to poach the talent from other companies in your niche or using adjacent niche.

We are also gonna learn how to poach your competitor's customers.

Today's topics:

1. Poaching competitors' employees and customers

2. A site that lets you get a gist of a book

3. One recommended video on how to build wealth from nothing

Poaching competitors' employees and customers

This can be a blackhat tactic depending on how you see the world.

On one hand, you might be paying the employees you are poaching much better than their current employer.

On the other hand, they trained the talent, bet money on them to get the idea to fruition and you are only reaping the benefits of it by hiring someone who has done the thing before.

Regardless of what you think about it, this is a pretty common strategy in war and business.

I'm sure you've seen enough movies where there's betrayal by your own.

If you haven't, you can read books like Sun Tzu's Art Of War and Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power or you can read the summaries to get the gist of how the world really works.

If you've lived enough life, you might've already experienced something similar.

So how do you actually poach employees?

Well, you can directly find someone on LinkedIn with the title you are hiring for and interview them offering them a salary better than their current CTC.

Or you can try someone who works in an Adjacent Industry.

So if you want to look for Viral Social Media Creators for a Gaming Company like Fortnite, you can hire someone from EdTech company who have nailed going viral on Socials like Duolingo.

Or you can use Gokul Rajaram's Framework around Headhunting Lieutenants.

The basic gist is:

And it happens in all big companies, especially, when the team is world-class at their jobs.

I bet the world's best AI experts have too many connection requests in their LinkedIn.

So this is how you poach competitor's employees either in the same industry or an adjacent industry. Or you poach their lieutenants.

Now how do you poach customers?

Well, you can find customers in public forums boasting with testimonials on their own site or reviews on sites like G2, ProductHunt, etc...

But the best ways to poach is on Social Media. You can just slide into their DMs.

This strategy can backfire sometimes.

For example, when Beehiiv's Deliverability Issues started coming up, ConvertKit CEO started poaching Beehiiv's Customers via Cold Email.

The hilarious thing was ConvertKit CEO used to be against it just a few years ago:

But when your revenue starts to decline, you do such things.

ConvertKit had no competition for years so they could boast about all the ethical things they do but when Beehiiv started taking their customers, they started to change their approach.

A site that lets you get a gist of a book

Reading a summary is not equal to reading a book but think of it as a trailer.

Sometimes, you just want to get the gist.

When you do want to get a gist, you can go to Blas to get a summary on books that interest you in the fewest words.

Note that this website has hand-written summaries (came way before AI became mainstream) in the fewest possible words so it doesn't rank for SEO.

You can also use AI nowadays to summarize books with 1m long-context models like Gemini Pro and ask it specific questions.

I like to use it for summarizing videos sometimes after watching them to get the gist.

One recommended video on how to build wealth from nothing

If you want Netflix-style educational content, you should watch this video by James Jani where he covers the book The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ Demarco as well as his own opinions on how society functions on a monetary level.

It covers how to actually build wealth from zero in an easy-to-understand way that even little kids can understand.

The future of education is edutainment (education + entertainment) and this video covers a hard concept in an ELI5 manner.

If you enjoyed today's issue, please do reply. It helps with deliverability.

Until next time,

Your Spells Maester!

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