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🆕 Personal Updates
I made it out alive from a month of giving up alcohol and as a Scottish guy this is sadly a tough challenge. Personally, I didn’t feel much of an improvement to my health but what I did notice was a huge improvement to my productivity (not being hungover).
In other news, Softr won Product of the Year 2021 by Product Hunt and we announced our Series A funding of $13.5m. We couldn’t be off to a better start to the year 🚀
Lastly, I finally purchased my first NFT after almost a year of sitting on the sidelines. Only thing is, I still have no idea what I have bought until it reveals itself on Saturday.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup 👇
💎 Top post last month: Mega Notion Website Template Pack ⚡️
I stumbled across Nat Eliason’s site recently and have been consuming his content since. It might not be the prettiest, most modern looking site but that doesn’t seem to be effecting his readership. He’s getting 10k-20k visits a day and passively making £10k on an average month and 60k on a good month. In this post Nat provides a ton of advice on how to start a blog and consequently the backbone of his passive revenue source so he knows a thing or two. If you’ve considered creating a blog, writing content or building a personal brand this is a must read. (31 min read)
🎁 Bonus Watch: Nat chat’s with Nathan Barry (founder Convertkit) about the evolution of his newsletter, his strategies on developing online courses (which he made $300k) and how to find product-market fit before launching a course or product.
🎁 Bonus Read: Alexey Guzey recently published an in-depth piece which compliments Nats post above titled ‘Why you should start a blog right now’.
Danny Postma founded Headlime, an AI-powered copywriting SaaS product that writes copy for you. Danny then reached $20K MRR a year ago and got acquired for a 7 figure sum by Conversation.ai last March. Danny is now working on rareblocks which is looking to raise funding through NTF sales for a community-driven component library for Tailwind (fascinating idea). In this post Danny shares is background, including his previous projects, advice surrounding acquiring his first users, his biggest obstacles and what he’s currently working on. He seems like an incredibly humble guy and super transparent - It’s a refreshing read. (9 min read)
Ok, so I might be a little late to share this one but trust me it’s worth a read. Jordan Singer is a prolific maker and has been churning out some fantastic content on twitter for sometime now. I first discovered Jordans Airport App - an that showcases Testflight builds which was imo one of those products I wish I had thought of and built. Anyway, he’s continued to ship some great mini apps and early conceptuals ideas and recently he put a post together looking back at what he built (or tried to) last year. (4 min read)
🎁 Bonus Listen: Speaking of mini-apps, In this episode of Metamuse they speak with Linus Lee - another fascinating and prolific creator of his own personal software ecosystem. Lastly, andy.works and his collection of Not Boring Apps.
I’ve mentioned it before and i’ll mention it again, I love nerding out on workspace setups! This month I was lucky enough to be featured in Ryan Gilbert’s workspace.xyz newsletter. I’ve been reading his newsletter for a while so it was a huge privilege to be featured.
I really enjoyed the process of documenting my hardware and software as I had never listed it all out before. However, I was slightly shocked at the amount of hardware and physical items I have for my setup (despite me trying to stick to a minimalist setup) and also surprised at the amount of software products I use daily. Going forward I would like to consolidate and pair back my software stack.
Personal websites are an extension of your digital self imo. I’m obsessed with them. I personally think more people will carve out a corner for themselves online to stand out from the crowd in this digital world. Brian Lovin (designer at Github) embodies this and created a fantastic personal site. Firstly, it seems more like a dashboard than website, additionally it even has the ability for you to login with Twitter so you can add comments and save content. He even has an AMA page, list of all his current web bookmarks and tech stack directory complete with Twitter integration with show who else uses those tools and their reviews.
“My personal website is an over-engineered playground where I can tinker, learn new things, test new tools, break all the rules, and just scratch that itch deep in my brain that wants to understand how the hell web software works.”
🎁 Bonus Resource: A Free Notion directory of the best personal websites
Harry Dry is the creator of Marketing Examples - an epic site which documents real world marketing examples from successful companies. Recently he took some time off to create this fantastic collection of 330+ handpicked screenshots from original campaigns with Harry’s take on them.
It’s a deep sea. Dive in. Filter to find what you’re looking for. Hover over each example to see why it works.
It’s entirely free and a bloody goldmine! Get it bookmarked!
🎁 Bonus Read #1: A story about how Harry went from lying in bed with no ideas to negotiating with the biggest superstar on planet earth - Kanye West!
🎁 Bonus Read #2: Good friend Charlie Ward interviewed Harry about how he grew his newsletter, his background and future plans.
If you haven’t used Reddit before it can feel like a dated labyrinth of content to wade through. However, it’s a goldmine for research, marketing and acquisition.
Fed launched Gummy Search about 6 months ago to help you quickly discover your customer’s pain points, what solutions they need, and what they are eager to pay for. Simply, Think of it as a audience research tool that helps to quickly validate business ideas and find potential customers. I briefly tested it with a topic ‘startup founders’ and particularly liked the results it found for ‘ideas’, ‘solution requests’ and ‘topic content’.
I first discovered Topia last week at the Golden Kitty Awards event and gave a brief shot. Simply create an account in minutes and start walking around in a virtual word in your browser with an avatar of your choice. When you come into proximity with another avatar your camera and mic will activate and you can interact with the other user. You can join public rooms or create your own private one and customise your environment. It’s a neat idea and could be great for larger remote teams or communities for socials, meetings or events. You can also join their beta here for access to new features.
This month instead of adding 3 new products I thought I would use this third slot to showcase some incredible new super early access beta products that have been discovered on Beta Directory (my other side project). So far I have almost 150 beta products featured and some fascinating new web3 startups fresh out of closed beta and ready for early adopters to give them a shot.
Here is a brief list of some of my favourites this month:
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