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It’s been a jam-packed November. I’m writing this months newsletter from London and boy is it good to be back. I spent 7 incredible years here before moving back to Scotland 2 years ago and I miss the buzz.
During the lockdown, I didn’t have the FOMO - if anything, I was more connected than ever. I met so many interesting people via Twitter, this newsletter and various online communities. As soon as lockdown was lifted I struggled to find the same tech buzz in Scotland. However, I did manage to attend the first Scottish No code meetup last week and it was brilliant!
Lastly, we got a new hairy member of family! I’ve had little to no sleep for the last two weeks but ‘Luna’ is awesome ❤️
💎 Top post last month: No-Code is Hitting an Inflection Point. Are You Ready?
Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup 👇
Earlier this month Microsoft gave a sneak peek of their answer to Notion. When I say their answer I mean an almost complete clone. This, of course, isn’t the first time a tech company has attempted this, in fact, it’s pretty common and whether we like it or not it’s going to continue to happen. In this post, Evan Armstrong explores how do you win when your competitor has more money, better distribution, and can undercut you on price? Evan also discusses the battle Notion has ahead of it, and what strategies they are responding with. How do you think it’s going to play out? (5m read)
🎁 Bonus Read: “The Browser Wars” of the ‘90s.
Josh Spector provides some great advice for anyone who’s looking to roll up their sleeves and make the first move to be an online creator. It’s getting to that time of year when we are experiencing a bit of introspection coming into the NY. However, there is a lot of bad advice out there with people telling you what you need to do to succeed. Josh challenges some common advice and potential misconceptions. You’re closer to success than you realise. (4m read)
“I hope the following list frees you from pressure and guilt you may feel and gives you permission to focus on what you actually want to do.”
Three of my favourites are:
I love reading about other creators tech stacks, so when I discovered this post about Justin Welsh and how he built a membership program and sold $40,000 in memberships in 48 hours it blew my mind how stripped back and simple his no-code tech stack was. Together with some thorough thought on the user journey and some clever automation, this is a pretty impressive set up for any course, community or consultants out there. (5m read)
🎁 Bonus Read: Check out these two insightful Twitter threads by Justin. “How to build your first 2 online revenue streams” & “Last week my little one-person business crossed $1.3M in revenue”.
I often get asked by young PM’s just starting their career to suggest any books, courses and resources to help them navigate the expansive landscape of product management and its frameworks, mental models, methodologies etc. So when I stumbled across this extensive reading list complied by Mike Hudack I spent the best part of the weekend rummaging my way through it. Mike is the Chief Product Officer at Monzo - so he certainly knows a thing or two about Product Management. It’s full of stuff to read that’s either influenced him directly or which he’s sent to people to describe core concepts of Product Management.
Sahil Lavingia - founder of Gumroad recently published his first book titled “The Minimalist Entrepreneur”. Sahil documents the steps to becoming a minimalist entrepreneur/building a minimalist business.
“Minimalist entrepreneurs create sustainable businesses that are profitable from the very beginning instead of prioritising “shareholder value” or unsustainable growth.”
I’m a huge fan of Gumroad and personally use it to sell my Notion website templates and also a super small investor when they became the first company in the US to crowdfund $5m earlier this year. I can’t wait to read this book to read over the Christmas holiday period!
I would also recommend checking out this post he wrote in 2019 about his “failure to build a billion dollar business”.
🎁 Bonus Read: Fancy the tl;dr version or just want to get a flavour of the contents? check out this great 5 min summary someone wrote on Reddit.
If you’ve been hanging out online this month you will have noticed Facebooks recent rebrand/deflection to Meta and its plan to own the “metaverse”. If you’re as nerdy as me and watched the full keynote you will have noticed an incredibly uncomfortable and strange presentation hosted by its robotic founder. However, an extremely clever and progressive bunch of marketers for the tourism group in Iceland created a fantastic viral advertising campaign by bringing us “Zack Mossbergsson,” the “Chief Visionary Officer” of the Icelandverse who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain uncanny tech villain 😂
You probably noticed most websites are beginning to look all the same, right? Marketing optimisation has A/B tested websites to the nth degree stripping most of their personality and creativity, and I get it - you want conversions. But what if you want to express your creativity and create something unique? Most drag and drop website builders are built on ridged grids. XH launched mmm.page earlier this year with the aim to bring back nostalgic personal websites with personality! This is perhaps the most fun I’ve had building a website! Check out showcase section.
🎁 Bonus Read: Product Hunt sit down with the creator
While we are on the topic of website builders, Ben Stokes recently launched this wild project where you can create websites using just a pen and paper. Yup, you heard that right! From analogue to digital! I love this concept of sitting back undistracted and writing a blog post on your notepad and then simply taking an image of it and letting the AI wizardry turn it into a blog post ready to publish online. It also provides spell check functionality, design editor and analytics.
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