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I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a Telegram group for some time but have been reluctant to potentially add more distractions. However, after chatting to a lot of subscribers I’m blown away by the diverse talent and unique interests of the Creator Club subscribers and feel there is a missed opportunity to connect with one another outside of this newsletter and share content, side projects, ideas, wins and foster connections with other curious minds. If this is something you are interested in just hit reply and say ‘hell yeah’.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Top post last month: A Five-Year Journey to Financial Freedom…and Beyond
Creating SaaS is tricky, I know, I’ve been working in teams for the last ~7 years creating software. But you don’t want to hear my account, there is tones of content out there by venture-backed SaaS teams. What’s interesting about Max Rozen‘s post is that he’s the Founder, Developer, Designer, Customer Support, and Customer Success Manager of OnlineOrNot and has a full-time job at Atlassian. Sounds interesting now right? In this post, Max shares his learnings from his first year running his side project and it’s packed with great tips and tricks for those considering starting a SaaS business, for those already in weeds or just curious.
One piece of golden advice I couldn’t agree more with is “Ship first, worry about scale later”. Too many founders get bogged down with optimising for scale before they even have their first customers. (8 min read)
I don’t usually feature articles from large publications, mostly due to the mission of this newsletter being to surface great content and resources from independent online makers and creators, however, sometimes I need to make exceptions when the content is too good not to share. When one of the most secretive technology companies shares some insight into their best in class design studio it’s worth a read. If you appreciate design, craftsmanship and the thought process that goes into the worlds leading hardware and software products you will certainly enjoy reading this. Additionally, there are some fascinating images to examine from their design team at work, however, there is no way their studios are that tidy all the time. (14 min read)
Remember Paper for the iPad? that delightful free app for drawing and taking notes on your iPad? Well, it became one of the most downloaded apps of its time and pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved on the iPad. Andy, is the founder and designer at FiftyThree (creator of Paper) which was acquired in 2018 by WeTransfer. He has since launched Not Boring - a suite of standalone mobile apps looking to bring some fun and delight back to your most-used apps. In this post, Andy shares some fascinating insight into the genesis of Paper now some 10 years later. A few things that jumped out at me. Firstly, it was their first time building an app. The iPad was only a year old at the time and the App store was also relatively new too. They created a spatial navigation model and defined some gestures we now take for granted when using our devices. Lastly, they designed and iterated their concept on hundreds of Keynote decks. (11 min read)
The Maze Question Bank is a Notion database template compiling 350+ ready-to-use questions for rapid research and testing. If you undertaking any form of customer discovery and validation work surveys and interviews are a key component. Asking the right questions is the next challenge - so if like me staring at a blank document is overwhelming then this handy bank of example questions will get you off to a great start.
P.S if you haven’t heard of Maze check them out. I’ve been using the product on and off for a few years now as my go to tool for remote usability testing and research.
So you might not have heard of Yuga Labs but il take a wild guess and presume you are aware of The Board Ape Yacht Club? Well, last month their pitch deck was mysteriously leaked. For some businesses this could be disastrous, however, from what I’ve seen online it’s only built more hype for the future of the brand’s ambitions. And it certainly did impact their ability to raise as they just closed an eye-watering $450m round to bring their NFT metaverse ambitions to life which includes gaming-focused metaverse (check this sneak peek out), a sale of 200,000 digital land worth $178 million, and the highly anticipated cryptocurrency “APECoin” (just purchased some 🙈 ). This is fresh off the back of their acquisition of CryptoPunks, another stratospheric NTF collection.
The founders of Yuga Labs responded to the leak mentioning “There are a lot of things in there that have already changed, and plenty more things that will change because f*ck doing expected things.”. Believe what you will, regardless, this pitch deck offers an inside look at the future of the largest and most successful NFT project to date.
🎁 Bonus Content: Speaking of pitch decks, I found this curated collection of 350+ pitch decks including those from Airbnb, Uber and Spotify by Nico Cerdeira (founder of Failory.com)
If you design websites, create illustrations, apps, or digital art you gotta have a good colour picker in your arsenal. Recently, I discovered this super handy free colour picker. The best thing is it’s not a Chrome extension, rather a Mac app and therefore, can be used across my other Mac apps such as Figma. While we are on the topic, I also discovered Huemint which uses machine learning to create unique colour schemes for your brand, website or graphic.
About a year ago I wrote a post about Dennis Müller’s MVP for an exciting new calendar and to-do list concept. However, it’s been what feels like years since I first signed up for early access to Amie, but the good news is it’s finally launched in beta with a stunning new brand and website. Amie’s unique approach as a standalone productivity app seems to be its all-in-one calendar, to-do and contact list. Additionally, the app is full of little delighters such as their Spotify integration to track what you listened to and when on your calendar (do I need that? no, do I want it? yes!) and also keyboard shortcuts which can trigger a handy shortcut modal which makes the process of navigating around the app frictionless.
Admittedly I don’t personally use this product, but if I hadn’t spent a lot of time hacking my current stack together I would certainly consider this. Matter pulls everything you want to read into one beautiful place. With powerful tools, social curation, audio and more. It’s like Pocket, Feedly and Medium had a baby and produced this little fella.
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