Pete Sena

Hampton

Member

ThinkFWD

I believe creativity and curiosity are broken in business. When we lead more creative and curious lives, anything is possible. 

I founded thinkFWD to connect and cultivate a community of forward-obsessed business innovators focused on delivering and applying practical applications of education, events, and toolkits to move people and their careers forward.

Our mission is to build a community and curriculum to help curious minds. Wherever you are in your journey, personally or professionally, you can lean into curiosity to activate new possibilities to become a true catalyst for change within your teams and social circles.

We invite you to join us in our ongoing quest to build and share in the thinkFWD mindset. Together, we can use our collective networks and expertise to create the progress our world needs to keep moving forward in the only direction that matters.

Join us in our mission of helping inspire others to create meaningful progress.

Real change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Whether offering up your time, knowledge, mentorship, or donating a cup of coffee, we’d love your support.

Co-Founder

FWD Obsessed

FWD Obsessed - The Podcast for Forward-obsessed Founders, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. 
 
From devastating pitfalls to life-changing aha moments, hosts and serial entrepreneurs themselves Pete Sena and David Salinas push interviews past the surface for an in-depth, insightful glimpse at the future of business and brands. Take your seat at the table to hear guests recount their failures, re-live their midnight planning sessions, share their hopes & passions, and explain what’s next for their business, industry, and the world.

Author, Podcast Host, Brand Consultant

Digital Surgeons LLC

At Digital Surgeons, we design demand. We are an independently-owned forward-obsessed brand experience consultancy. We believe that design goes beyond how a brand looks. Design transforms how a brand is experienced. How it’s perceived. How it’s felt.

We focus on specific high-growth categories and help businesses reimagine their brands’ future. We craft three types of outputs for brands: branding, digital experiences, and growth marketing.

That is why we confidently say: We Design Demand.™

As Chief Creative Officer, I build and lead cross-functional teams to create brand experiences that drive business growth. Competencies include: digital marketing & advertising, brand building, creative strategy & direction, tech direction, talent-development, team building, interaction design, user experience design, and product development.

Founder

As CEO and Chief Creative Officer, I’m charged with setting a strategic vision that ensures our organization’s design and culture evolve faster than the needs of the market. Above all else, I’m passionate about partnering with visionary entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, and marketers to help them understand and realize their full potential.

CEO and Chief Creative Officer

UConn Technology Commercialization Services

UConn TIP - Technology Incubation Program

Entrepreneur In Residence

Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, Yale University

As a Venture Mentor in Yale’s Entrepreneurial Institute, I work with student-lead startups inside of Yale University's incubator to provide strategic counsel. My areas of expertise include the many facets of early stage business and brand building, as well as product development and digital innovation.

Some areas of focus include:
- Monetization Strategy
- Brand and Product Positioning Strategy
- Creative Direction / User Experience
- Launch Strategy and User Acquisition

Venture Mentor

Pete Sena is a creative entrepreneur and forward-obsessed business builder. He partners with founders and business leaders to 10x their growth through marketing innovation, branding, and digital-experience design and create what’s next.

Specialties: Branding, Marketing Innovation, Strategy, Web3, Digital Transformation, Creative Leadership.

As founder of Digital Surgeons, a forward-obsessed brand experience consultancy, Pete designs results-driving strategies that unlock new possibilities and growth for ambitious brands and businesses. For nearly 20 years, he has built and led cross-functional teams that have delivered innovative, bottom-line boosting activations and multi-channel programs, ranging in scale from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 organizations. As a human-centered problem solver, Pete focuses on the behaviors and systems that drive people, products, and experiences. He designs demand by relentlessly exploring the interplay of connection, curiosity, and creativity to help companies of all shapes, sizes, and business life stages optimize their potential. 

Pete believes experiences build relationships, and relationships build brands. His thinking, teams, and work have impacted some of the world's leading brands and corporations, including but not limited to:

Unilever
PepsiCo
Walmart
Microsoft
Google
GE
Comcast
LEGO
American Express
PayPal Holdings
Demandware (Acquired by Salesforce)
Carrier Global
Mastercard
Stanley Black & Decker
Halliburton
Omnicom Group
Otis Worldwide
Hershey
eBay
Church & Dwight
Borderfree (Acquired by Pitney Bowes)
Gap Inc
EMC (Acquired by Dell)
Masterbuilt (Acquired by Middleby)
Columbia Sportswear
Guess
Revlon
SoFi
Epic Games
Sperry (Wolverine World Wide, Saucony UK Inc)
Sharp
USTA (US OPEN)

Pete lives at the intersection of design, technology, and consumer behavior. He brings a unique pattern-recognition capability to each project shaped by his eclectic experiences, enabling him to swiftly enact positive change and increase business value through design.

😍 As someone who has been advocating for more brand in B2B since 2012, this is a welcome sight.

Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg, formerly of LinkedIn's B2B Institute, make the case in MarketingWeek that their long-predicted "Flippening" is finally happening...

🐬 The Flippening isn't a horror movie about an evil Flipper (though I'm calling dibs on that idea, Hollywood), but something much less scary, except to some CFOs: 

They call the Flippening "the magical moment when B2B businesses realise that brand marketing creates much more financial value than so-called ‘performance marketing’, and B2B CMOs start allocating at least 51% of their budget to top-of-funnel activities."

📓 This topic came up for me last week with Peep Laja and the Wynter team when I was talking about brand studies at their Wynter Games virtual event. A simple brand study is table stakes for any B2C marketer. How else is a marketer at Coke or P&G going to know what's working and where without it?

⚖ But, on the B2B side, because we have better attribution and a more onerous sales process, we've gotten addicted to performance marketing and lost the plot. Don't take this as a knock on performance marketing. I've spent my fair share of time in the Google Ads trenches and loved it. And here at G2 we are all about enabling smarter account-based marketing plays using buyer intent signals. The real unlock is how you balance the two...

💻 During my time Intuit Mailchimp, we ran dozens of incrementality and funnel tests across our paid media programs. In many of those tests, we'd pit lower funnel performance marketing vs. upper funnel brand marketing and the results were almost always the same... 

🏝 When you double down on performance marketing, you see an initial lift in conversions and efficiency that, if you aren't careful, creates a mirage. As the test goes on, without brand marketing feeding the top of the funnel, it starts to run dry. Fewer conversions, way higher costs. It's like a sugar high - an initial burst, but you can't avoid the crash. When you right size the two, you start seeing sustainable results over the long term. Balancing brand and performance marketing is like kicking soda and getting on that happy balance of hydration and health for your business.

🤔 What Jason M. Lemkin has repeatedly said about brand marketing in the context of SaaS businesses has always resonated with me:

"$1m ARR: Makes Little Sense
$10m ARR: Ok Let’s Do Some
$100m ARR: Most of Marketing
$1B ARR: All of Marketing"

This just validates that even more.

Enough of me, read the full article here, featuring a whole host of great examples from G2 customers like Salesforce, IBM, ServiceNow, Asana, SAS and more...

https://lnkd.in/eThpKVZc

You think AI will destroy society. 
You're wrong. Keep reading...

All new tech can be magic if we look at it differently.

My son loves trucks.

He's obsessed with truck videos.

But we wanted to limit his screen time. 

So I took one of the trucks I saw him watching and made a coloring book with AI.

I printed it.

Then we colored together.

What if tech could bring us closer?

What if it could bring more joy and analog experiences?

Change your frame. Change your game.

How are you using AI to create more joy in your life?

---

Follow Pete Sena for more posts on divergent creativity. And comment if you want the prompt I used to make the coloring book.

I help busy entrepreneurs and business leaders use divergent thinking to unlock creative solutions that fuel growth for sustainable success.

How can AI be used to create more joy in our lives?

A little boy coloring a coloring book of a truck with a crane on the back in the Forrest. 

In PX Design we need to think MVE… not MVP

I LOVE having my thinking challenged and evolved, that happened to me this week when I read a medium post by Pete Sena which introduced me to the phrase:

Minimal Valuable Experience💡

Let’s backtrack slightly for context

I am a huge proponent of Eric Reis’s Lean Startup methodology, in fact it is a core model in how I think about and teach PX design

but I have always had a slight reservation about the phrase “MVP”

MVP = Minimal Viable Product

For brevity, an MVP is a version of the solution which requires the least investment to create and test a usable version with the end user

This is hugely useful as it allows you to get your “product” into the hands of the end user as early as possible and then develop more sophisticated increments over time using direct end user feedback

Massive ✅ for this approach

It remains core to how we should work in PX Design

However…

The problem I have always had with MVP is the nature of “minimal viable” means the potential to create a negative initial user experience is high as you are largely expecting (and relying on to some extent) user “pain” to create the feedback required to improve the product

OK, so what’s the alternative?

One alternative is Minimal Loveable Product (MLP)

MLP = an initial solution that users love from the start

However, I have my reservations about the MLP approach too as the potential to delay the release and allow “feature creep” to occur is high

With MLP, where do you draw the line?

The temptation will always be there to add “just one” more feature to make sure the end user “loves” the experience from the get go

I have been musing over this for months now and then BAM! 💥

Pete’s article hit my inbox this week and gave me the answer (at least for the time being):

💡 Minimal Valuable Experience (MVE)

MVE = an initial solution that provides an experience of value from the start

Now this I can work with!

After all, even a Product Led People Team is ultimately in the Experience design business, not “product” design in the strictest sense

In People OPs, what we do has a DIRECT impact on employee and business success

So, it’s important that we provide some initial value in all that we do, at the very least, we don’t want to negatively impact PX and business success through a usable but frustrating MVP

Even as we experiment and iterate using the Lean Startup approach to incremental user led continuous improvement

MVE may just be the answer I have been looking for to allow us to carry out rapid experiments with employees and business stakeholders to improve our PX design whilst still adding immediate and frequent value…

In tomorrow’s newsletter I am going to expand on the MVE approach and how I believe we can utilise it for more impactful PX Design

Sign up link in the comments (👇🏻) 

along with access to all 45 previous editions of the newsletter🤘🏻

#Peopleops #PeopleExperience #ProductLed #ThePostHRGeneration

Shocker.

Maybe now that B2B leaders have a trusted stat to prove investing in brand matters they will start paying attention.

Ps - if you need a clear connective narrative and compelling design to help your brand resonate my team has a few spots left in April. Drop me a DM if we can help.

How can B2B marketers balance brand and performance marketing?

This McDonald's Framework will change how you lead.

If you're into the stories of how businesses think differently to win differently, you’ll love this one.

I call it the 𝗠.𝗖.𝗗.𝗢.𝗡.𝗔.𝗟.𝗗 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸.

McDonald's wasn't always the drive-thru titan we know today. In the 1950s, as car sales skyrocketed, McDonald's made a move that would redefine not just its business but the entire fast-food industry.

They didn't just build a brand; they literally owned the entire category.

𝗠 - 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: McDonald's aligned their brand with America's growing automobile culture. Their fast-food outlets turned into reliable pit stops, making them a part of the popular highway culture. Their addition of the drive-through was a break-through; the idea of receiving food while staying in your vehicle was unimaginable. While they didn’t invent it, they perfected it.

𝗖 - 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: Those golden arches became more than a logo. They served as beacons of consistency - a promise of familiar comfort food at each exit.

𝗗 - 𝗗𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀: Instead of chasing trends, they created them. They introduced a dining experience that capitalized on the highway system.

𝗢 - 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: The operational excellence of how they perfected and trained their teams created a masterful franchise experience for consistent CX for everyone.

𝗡 - 𝗡𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀: Catering to families, truckers, and travelers, McDonald's became a haven for those seeking a quick and familiar feast while on the move.

𝗔 - 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Predicting customer behavior and innovating accordingly was their superpower. They anticipated trends and filled the gaps others didn't even see. Confession: I had way too many happy meals as a kid.

𝗟 - 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆: McDonald's has consistently stayed ahead by leveraging technology to enhance customer experience and streamline ops. From the introduction of self-service kiosks to the deployment of AI in drive-thrus for order taking, McDonald's use of tech has not only improved service speed but also personalized the customer experience. This novel use of tech has allowed them to maintain relevance in a rapidly evolving world where they meet the modern consumer conveniently and efficiently.

𝗗 - 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: A key strategy for maintaining global dominance has been the diversification of its menu to cater to a wide range of tastes & dietary preferences. This includes introducing healthier options, local menu variations that respect cultural preferences, and limited-time offerings that create buzz and attract customers.

____

Want the cheat sheet? Comment with 🍟

Follow Pete Sena for more posts on divergent thinking.

What is McDonald's strategy for diversification?

How did McDonald's stay ahead of the competition?

The true MVP of startups isn't what you think. 
Hint: It's not about chasing viable.

What are some recent developments in the startup world?

What are some examples of MVE in startups?

Hint: V isn’t for viable — it’s for valuable Most startups start with a light-bulb moment. The founder suddenly clearly sees a problem with no apparen

Open article: MVP is Over. You Need to Think About MVE. by Pete Sena • 8 min read

MVP is Over. You Need to Think About MVE.

The startup struggle is real.
From out of business to a $4 Billion dollar valuation.

I love an underdog story with a great ending. And Webflow is that story.

Webflow isn't a web design tool. 
It's a no-code revolution for designers. 

Imagine turning a simple idea into a product that empowers millions to create on the web without writing a single line of code. 

The Webflow story:

The journey begins with Vlad Magdalin realization in 2004. As a college intern working at a web design agency hustling to pay back his student loans, Vlad saw a glaring inefficiency: designers dream, coders build. 

But what if designers could directly bring their visions to life?

Fast forward to 2013, a pivotal lunch around his younger brother Sergie’s laptop becomes the birthplace of the Webflow revolution we know today. 

A drag, a drop, and a publish - the co-founders witnessed the first website born from Webflow. The vision was no longer just a dream; it was reality.

From Vlad's initial vision, Bryant Chou tech expertise, and Sergie's design chops, Webflow wasn't just a product. It was a mission to democratize web design, making it accessible and empowering creators across the globe.

The early days weren't smooth sailing. 

Webflow faced rejection, financial hurdles, and skepticism. Yet, their pivot from agency to product, combined with a never-give-up vision, paved the way for what we now know as the no-code web design platform for designers today.

Where most would have quit, they kept going.

They mastered the art of community building, using early feedback to refine their product, even when traction seemed impossible.

Viral moments on platforms like Hacker News and Product Hunt weren’t just luck; they were orchestrated by placing Webflow at the right place, at the right time for the right audience.

The result?

Webflow didn't just join the no-code movement; they dominated it. 

They transformed web design from a technical PITA into a creative playground, empowering designers to own their full creative process without code.

Fast forward to 2019, Webflow secures a $72 million Series A raise, a testament to their impact and the growing no-code space.

In the world of startups, it's not just about having a good product. It’s about vision, adaptability, and never giving up.

Today, after their priced 120M series C funding round, Webflow is valued at a post-money valuation of $ 4 billion.
___

Learned something? Comment and follow Pete Sena for more stories on thinking and winning differently.

#webflow #startup #PLG

What can we learn from Webflow's journey?

How did Webflow master the art of community building?

If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with Starbucks.

Hearing Peter Thum's story about building Ethos Water and selling the business to Starbucks was so much fun.

I love what I do. 😀 

Wanna hear the full episode? Grab it here - https://lnkd.in/e36HW7Pw

5x Founder | Co-Founder & CEO Muse | Founder Ethos Water (acquired by Starbucks)

What a blast to talk with Pete Sena & David Salinas on their podcast about entrepreneurship! Our conversation covers a lot of ground about the nuts and bolts of bringing new ventures to life, becoming a founder, overcoming adversity and what success really means.  Check it out if you like.

"Made by humans."
The next big creative idea sweeping next years award shows.

- the idea made by a human
- the design made by a human
- the code made by a human

🤩 who would have thunk it.

#Ai #creativity #sarcasm

What are some best practices for fostering creativity?

I love sharing real-world ways to think and grow businesses. 

As a neurodivergent entrepreneur my brain works differently. Writing helps me crystallize my thoughts.

The best part is when it helps people in the process.

Thanks for the shout out Luke!

What is Minimal Valuable Experience (MVE)?

Founder @ Sapienˣ | People First. Product Led. That's my jam 😎 | I create Content, Courses & Community for The Post HR Generation | ...Head of People in recovery🫣

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