The end of an era
This month 👾 Ridiculous design concepts | Open Startups are dead | Leaked internal tech emails | AI landing pages + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
This is the first issue of the Creator Club newsletter on Substack after a painstaking process of migrating from Revue.
As a huge help to figure out the deliverability of this issue could you hit reply with “I got it”. It would mean a lot.
Anyway, it’s been a wild few weeks. Most notably, I was impacted by the mass tech layoffs and am now in search of my next PM role. It’s both a stressful yet exciting phase.
The good news is I’m back to creating and experimenting. This week I explored a bunch of generative AI tools. To put my learnings into action I built an entire landing page using AI tools. This included letting AI select the colour palette, font, copy and imagery. Everything you see here was generated by AI, all I had to do is use the content and instructions and build the site on Webflow. Check it out and let me know what you think. I will be sharing a write-up with all the prompts shortly.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Top post last month: The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack
📓 Articles
The golden era of being an open startup is gone
When I first discovered startups sharing their revenue, user growth, and churn metrics it was on Baremetrics open startup directory. I couldn’t believe some startups were being this transparent. I would sit and watch their live dashboards showing new users subscribing to different plans, subs cancelling, LTVs, and active users and apply different date filters to see yearly weekly, and monthly metrics and sit in awe and wonder why on earth would these startups such as Buffer, Ghost and Converkit share these numbers so openly with strangers? Eventually, it dawned on me the open startup philosophy is based on the idea that companies should be transparent and open in their operations, both with their customers and the public. This includes sharing financial information, product roadmap, and other internal details, even their salaries. This approach strategically worked. Most notably, it was great for hiring and marketing. However, the past two years have seen some of these early pioneers tap out. But why?
In this post, Damon Chen, founder of Testimonial discusses his take on why the golden era of the open startup movement is dying.
🎁 Bonus content: Sabba Keynejad, founder of Veed shares the reasons why he stopped sharing his numbers after crossing $500k MRR.
How to Finish What You Start
How many times have you come up with a great idea and tucked it away to come back to later… but don’t? further still, how many times have you taken that idea and started but struggled to finish it? I have about 5 ongoing side projects and numerous half-finished blog posts just sitting collecting dust. Does any of that resonate with you?
In this post, Sam Julien discusses how to overcome mindsets that block us from finishing projects and provides practical advice on how to reduce our idea backlog and pick the right projects to work on. There aren’t any fancy frameworks or productivity hacks, instead, Sam provides great actional tips and an understanding of human psychology to help us get out of this funk and begin shipping!!
🔗 Hyperlinks
Creating elaborate videos to push change
I’m sure you have experienced the need to convince others at work something you have a particularly high conviction for. It might be a process, a new feature, a strategy or in this example an icon. Alex Cornell, ex-FB, Substack and now Linear product designer took the means to convince colleagues and stakeholders to another level through a series of highly produced, comical videos. In this example, Alex is trying to push the Facebook team to consider using the three-dot icon (…) over the chevron (V) icon to trigger the menu dropdown options. To generate support for the change, he broadcast this elaborate live video with an increasingly ridiculous premise.
The Product Managers Prompt Book
Like most curious tech folk I’m falling deeper into the generative AI rabbit hole. Partly out of curiosity but also admittedly out of fear of its ever-advancing capabilities. Chat GPT-3, in particular, has been discussed everywhere I look, but I struggled to figure out its value for me day-to-day. Recently I downloaded Martin Slaney’s ‘Product Manager Prompt book’ to understand the potential it could have in my role as a PM. After reading through it and trying some of the examples shared in the PDF I was pretty blown away. I can see this being a super value add for any PM.
Internal Tech Emails
Every once in a while, a whistleblowing employee, government investigator, or hacker comes along and delivers us some fascinating internal comms of big tech companies. However, usually, it’s way too long, dense, and dull for relaxed perusal. Like the Elon texts discussing his purchase of Twitter, I literally spent hours doomscrolling through a 200-page document. However, it turns out I no longer need to waste my precious evenings with a fantastic publication and Twitter account called ‘Internal Tech Emails’ which does all the digging and finds the best content to share.
What’s more, some of the screenshots contain some of the most extraordinary insights into how the famous tech peeps (Zuckerberg, Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes included) make their decisions.
This particular link is an internal email from Zuckerberg discussing his bet on VR. What's fascinating is Mark’s confidence in his 10-year vision. This isn't something he's expecting to pay off in the near future but instead, he's willing to bet billions and his company’s reputation that VR/AR will be the computing platform of the future. One thing I found interesting was his mention of Google and Apple’s control of devices and that Meta doesn't have such a hardware product which as you will read is something Mark is desperately trying to achieve with this huge bet.
Ridiculous Design Concepts
I recently discovered Soren Iverson’s series of visual experiments where he takes known products and ideates and designs conceptual ideas, most of which are useless, some are hilarious and a couple really makes you think, “what if that was a thing?”
Take for example opting out of email subscriptions, why not gamify the experience to make it even more frustrating and make people play mine sweeper to successfully opt out if they lose they need to wait for another 24h until they can try again. Or this example of a Zapier workflow which deletes your search history automatically when you die by connecting to your Apple Health data.
🎁 Bonus content: Check out Gaut’s and Levi Eirinberg’s hilarious design concepts for new features of well-known products.
📱 Products
Read.cv
I don’t know a single person who isn’t a recruiter, in a B2B sales role or a “business influencer” who likes using LinkedIn. Most folk don’t use it until they need to. You log in about once a month, you accept the “invitations to connect” from a handful of strangers, and you log out. And you’re sent, on average, 32 emails a day for the privilege.
LinkedIn isn’t geared towards creatives and doesn’t provide flexibility for expression. It’s all about listing out generic professional work experience in a super text-heavy format.
Recently I found an interesting alternative geared towards more creative roles in tech. It’s called Read.cv and it takes a different approach to StinkedIn, it’s a show, don't tell professional network with beautifully designed profiles to which you can add links, images and videos and share what you have done and interact and comment on others’ work. It’s a great place for inspiration, expanding your network, finding collaborations and especially for hiring.
Graphy
I find it increasingly hard to discover simple, intuitive, well-designed products these days. Feature bloat is a real thing, trust me. Recently I discovered this super slick chart creation tool in beta by Andrey Vinitsky. The chart types are stunning and ridiculously easy to edit with a stripped-back UI with a bunch of valuable options to customise the chart and either download or embed it. Check out this Loom demo of it in action.
It's as simple as pasting your data and voila, your chart appears! Customise to make it your own and share it as an image or an interactive embed in tools such as Notion.
In the future I could see huge value in Graphy hosting the data and allowing me to connect to Zapier to send live data and embed the chart on my website.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest beta drops
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Kosmik: The spatial browser to explore ideas.
Raster: Powerful, next-gen photo manager.
Texts: The one messaging app to rule them all.
👾 Friends of Creator Club
This month I want to give a shout-out to Katt of nocode-exists.com. She’s done an incredible job at building an audience centered around surfacing the stories of successful makers using no-code tools to build products and sell them. Join 3,000+ subscribers for free and learn from real-life No-Code success and exit stories in a weekly 5-minute interview. Check it out.
🐽 Other links to consume
The founder of Teenage Engineering opens up his creative space
Realistic computer-generated handwriting
🐦 Tweet of the month
I often think about the opportunities I’ve missed or not taken advantage of which is a bad symptom of regret. This tweet from Sahil (founder of Gumroad) argues to focus on not being in a good position to make enough of them instead of worrying about past opportunities.
Some of the most casual exchanges with strangers I’ve met online have led to some of the most random but valuable opportunities - I just need to get into a position to make more of these.
⚡️ Flashback
This month I’m going to leave you with a series of images taken back in October 9, 1984 at John Lennon’s son’s 9th birthday party, featuring a fresh-faced Steve Jobs providing a demo of the latest Macintosh computer to guests including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Yoko Ono to name just a few.
That night, Warhol recorded a note in his diary. He’d told Jobs that a man had been calling him repeatedly, trying to give him a Macintosh, but Warhol had never followed up. Jobs replied, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.”
That’s it for this month!
If you made it this far, hit reply and tell me what you thought of this newsletter. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻