.jpg)
Greetings from Portugal 🇵🇹
I’m currently writing this from my parents in a pretty remote part of the country. It’s been a great opportunity to experience a new environment and break my routine and mental pattern. In fact, it’s the first time i’ve been abroad since the pandemic and it’s reminded me there is a whole lotta world out there.
I haven’t travelled myself in a long time, this might be the longest in fact. It’s an odd but an enlightening experience and gives you time to think and break your routine and try new things. To that effect, I was confident I would manage to get a lot of personal work done on this trip, however, in reality I hardly managed to do a thing. Perhaps this is exactly what I needed 🧘♂️
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this issue. My content consumption has perhaps been shaken up with this trip, for better or worse, you decide.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup 👇
🔥 Top post last month: How to start a blog that changes your life
Product Discovery has been a large a part of my day job for the past 6 years but also occupied part of the consultancy work I do and my side projects. However, there isn’t a lot written about the very earliest days of a startups discovery process. A lot of product discovery content is written by PMs at big companies with access to huge user bases and datasets to tap into, therefore, for most folk the advice is ineffective. In this short but insightful post by Ravi Mehta (ex Chief Product Officer at Tinder, previously Facebook et al) provides 5 Product Discovery lessons taken from his past and now current learnings building his latest startup - Scale. This post provides some great advice for anyone currently or considering starting a new business or side project. (7 min read)
🎁 Bonus Read: Gibson Biddle - VP of Product at Netflix shares his product discovery process creating the new previews feature on Netflix
As a self confessed pedantic planner and personal finance nerd I was instantly drawn to this post. The idea of sitting down and strategically planning my next 5 years and my personal goals and how i’m setting out to achieve these goals fascinates me. Cory Zue documents his goal to create a passive income stream to achieve his goal of financial freedom. I personally love his 5 year chart documenting his salary, software products and consulting income where you can clearly see his dependence on his salary reducing and passive income increasing. Spoiler alert - he managed to achieve it in 3 years not 5. Find out how. (14 min read)
I finally made it. After five years of scratching and clawing, I’m officially earning enough from my products to sustain indefinitely.
🎁 Bonus Read: What actually goes into making your first dollar from a SaaS project
I’ve been fascinated with the mechanics of Pre-launch waiting lists and the strategic options available at the pre-launch phase. So much so, I wrote this in-depth piece and created Beta Directory. However, despite this pivotal customer and product discovery phase there hasn’t been much writing about it. I recently met with Kate Donahue (Product Marketer at Pitch) which reminded me of an incredibly insightful talk Kate provided at a TypeForm event discussing the Pitch waitlist strategy.
What’s pretty unique about Pitch’s beta waiting list phase was it lasted an entire year, which got me thinking of the advantages of such a timescale. Most notably the fact you can continue to iterate based on customer outreach to understand who would ideally find value in the product, prioritise beta user selection, establish customer relationships and create excitement for what’s to come. Although, it does have a major caveat - this timescale is not available to most startups without a lot of funding.
Prefer watching her presentation? Check out her 30 min presentation on YouTube.
🎁 Bonus Read: Flowrite’s viral referral program – How we 8x’d our weekly signups by Aaro Isosaari (Founder of Flowrite).
I’ve recently been binge watching a lot of Colin and Samir’s YouTube channel during my travels. In particular, I really enjoyed their tour of MKBHD’s studio. If your into tech and gadgets this is a fascinating tour of one of YouTube’s tech review OG’s. Marques Brownlee (aka MKBHD) as of 2021 he has over 15m subs and continues to push the boundaries of his production output. Take for example his $350k robot arm camera to get shots just not possible by humans. He even mentions he is already outgrowing his studio and already planning his next move.
I would give my right arm for a days access to the studio to play around with some of his tech and gadgets.
🎁 Bonus Watch: Check out Colin and Samir’s $20k studio transformation
During the first wave of Covid I decided after years of pathetically attempting to learn Webflow I would finally attempt to master it. Flash forward ~6 months later and numerous occasions of wanting to give up, I finally started to understand the fundamentals and migrated my personal website from Weebly to Webflow. This month Ben Issen launched Learnflow - a series of 22 walkthroughs and exercises to integrate extra functionalities into your Webflow site. This is the resource I wish I had a year ago!
P.S check out his promo video and his YouTube channel. My personal fav ‘How I stay organised as a creative’.
🎁 Bonus Content: Free curated list of Webflow resources to take your skills to the next level.
I’m a big Figma fan, although it did take some convincing. I’m sure the Figma team didn’t think people like me would be using it to create floor plans for my house renovation, creating posters, social content, logos etc - but this versatile design tool just got a whole bunch more utility. Makers is a Figma Plugin to help you build and publish sites directly in Figma. Yup you heard right, directly within Figma. Check out this example, not bad eh?
🎁 Bonus Content: The team at Relume have launched a free Figma kit with over 700+ Figma pre-built components. Pair this with makers.so tool and boom you could have a site up and running in no time 🔥
This months latest early access beta products brought you by Beta Directory are:
Each month I share the latest digital products, fascinating content and resources the best new and established digital creators and makers. Join 6,500 other curious readers each month.