Rejecting Conventional Thinking with Jay Acunzo

Embracing Quirks and White Noise

Jay Acunzo is the world’s most passionate craft-driven marketer and a highly sought after keynote speaker.

Today, he makes things to help makers at NextView Ventures as VP of Platform (content and other resources for startups) and as creator and host of Unthinkable, a show about people who made the leap between what logic said to do and what their intuition urges them to try.

Jay launched his career as a reporter for The Hartford Courant and PR writer for ESPN before landing a job with Google as a digital media strategist. He went on to lead content creation and marketing strategies for brands like Breaktime Media (fka Dailybreak) and HubSpot. Today, Jay helps early-stage startups gain initial traction at NextView Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Boston and NYC. When he’s not helping one of the firm’s 50+ tech companies, he’s hosting two award-winning podcasts and traveling the world inspiring others to create marketing that doesn’t suck.

Listen in as we discuss how to effectively tell stories and upsell naturally through unconventional thinking and trusting your intuition.

In This Episode

• How being your most human self leads to your company standing out
• Why harnessing creativity means rejecting conventional thinking and taking small steps
• Where content quantity and quality live
• Why owning white space is better than competing on the playing field
• How better serving your customer leads to a focus on story delivery as opposed to tactic

Quotes From This Episode

[Tweet “”I make things to help other makers.” —@jayacunzo”]

“If you’re craft-driven, what you really love is the process of what you do for its own sake.” —@jayacunzo

“The more you can let your quirks out and trust yourself, the more you can stand out.” —@jayacunzo

“In a noisy world, the only real differentiating factor is the people working for your business.” —@jayacunzo

“It’s not a hollow listicle factory. It’s the ability to leverage the people you have and produce something new.” —@jayacunzo

“Creativity is actually a series of small steps that feel logical and easy to achieve.” —@jayacunzo

“If you’re going to reject conventional thinking, you need to be open to new possibilities.” —@jayacunzo

[Tweet “”Quantity and quality are sliding scale traits that exist in everything you do.” —@jayacunzo”]

“Stories help you upsell naturally and effectively.” —@jayacunzo

“Your job is not to catch up to other people. Your job is to better serve your customers.” —@jayacunzo

[Tweet “”You have to create something worthy of distribution before distributing it.” —@jayacunzo”]

“There’s a lot more ‘Click Here to Tweet’ and a lot less doing things that are worthy of tweeting.” —@jayacunzo

Resources

• Jay Acunzo on Twitter: @jayacunzo
• Unthinkable
• Sorry for Marketing