How to avoid falling in love with your ideas 💔
This month 👾 Loom’s story | The IKEA effect | Steve Jobs Archive | Snackable copy tips | How Notion Grows + loads more…
Static e-commerce sites can only show and tell you so much about a product. Adding contextual video with tutorials and product demos leads to increased conversion rates and higher order value. Check out this live interactive demo. Better still, you can recommend products while you stream and customers can purchase them directly from the stream widget – no need to stop watching the stream or leave the page.
📓 Articles
The IKEA effect describes how people come to overvalue things into which they have successfully put effort into. This cognitive bias can pose a number of risks which Howie Mann explores in this brief but insightful article and introduces four ways you can defend against it. Personally, this unconscious bias is something I'm challenged with frequently due to the nature of my work. In my example, I spend countless hours doing desktop research, speaking to customers, wireframing, and looking at data and later find myself being very reluctant to not move forward with the new feature or improvement due to the Sunk cost effect of the investment I put towards the task, despite my research telling me otherwise. A great experiment Howie cites that frames the psychological effect perfectly is an experiment with one group of participants asked to create origami (Builders) and another asked to inspect their creation (Non-Builders). The Builders valued their creation 360% higher than the Non-Builders who ascribed close to no value to the origami. Have you experienced this before? (6 min read)
Remember the 'Great Unbundling' craze a few years back? Well, Notion is bundling all the possible use cases of a spreadsheet and coming for Google's lunch.
So what can we learn from product-led and community-led growth from a $10bn SaaS startup? Turns out a lot!! In this post, Jaryd Hermann neatly documents his research outlining Notion's go-to-market strategy, how they acquired early customers, and what their current growth engine looks like.
One of my favorite parts of his research is Notion's history and their failed attempt at creating a collaborative no-code website builder. (11 min read)
🎁 Bonus content: Check out the tutorial video of the original failed concept from the Notion founders called 'Concept'.
Take my Mac, I have customized the sh*t out of it down to the location of the dock, mouse speed, accent color, default touch bar settings, you name it. However, settings aren't necessarily scrutinized during the design process, instead, they are seen as a result of design failure. "As designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustment by the user." In this post, Adrien Griveau - a product designer at Linear discusses how he approached the design of their settings and the misunderstanding about what settings really are. (4 min read)
🔗 Links
A press release also says that the archive will “act as a repository of historical materials relating to Steve, some of which have never before been made public".
This online library of snackable copywriting tips isn’t for everyone. But if you’re serious about learning copywriting fundamentals it's a great place to start. It was created by Miguel Ferreira and packed with copywriting techniques & formulas to help you write unignorable copy for websites.
Now, you won't magically start writing copy like a Pro copywriter with 20+ years of experience. But you'll write copy far more believable, more vivid, and more persuasive than the average fluff AI copywriting tools out there.
As Sam Parr - founder of the Hustle said: You don't learn a new musical instrument by writing your own songs. You learn other people's songs. Then, after mastering and finding what you like, you develop your own voice using the patterns you noticed in copying others.
🎁 Bonus content: Check out his other products for copywriting, including great landing page copy examples or this landing page template layout.
📱 Products
In a past company, I had the pleasure of using Height to run our product and engineering squads. I was looking for a solution to reduce our productivity tool overload. So many tools fragmented across the team was super inefficient. This was exactly why founder Michaël Villar built Height after experiencing a similar issue during his time at Stripe. It's a stunning app to use with incredible attention to detail making it a delight to use.
What's amazed me over the past 12 months is their ability to ship hundreds of new features and improvements consistently without comprising the user experience of the product. I'm a big fan of their real-time chat, Kanban view, Cmd-K shortcuts, and their slick-looking dark mode. Check it out for free.
There have been a number of new web browsers cropping up over the years looking to dethrone Chrome and Safari and claw a slither of their market share. Some recent ones to note are Brave and Vivaldi, both of which are built on top of Google's open-sourced Chromium project - neither of which I have tried. However, I recently got my hands on Arc - a Mac desktop browser looking to challenge the status quo. Arc is also built using Chromium. So it begs the question, why is this any different if it's using the same tech as its competitors? well, it all comes down to UI and the user experience which Arc seems to be doubling down on. The setup wizard alone guides you through its reimagined UI with handy features including, notes, sketch pad, folders, spaces and boosts to name just a few.
meaning you can migrate your browser history, cookies and extensions in seconds. It's the brainchild of Josh Miller
This month’s latest early access beta products brought you by Beta Directory are:
Threads: A Slack replacement designed for makers.
Beam: Collect your thoughts and experience the Internet.
Graphy: An easier way to visualize data.
👾 Friends of Creator Club
This month I want to give a huge shout-out to Jim Shirley. I had the pleasure of working for and with Jim for a number of years and learned a great deal about business financials and the process of raising capital. He recently launched Funding Hero - a platform to understand the fundraising process & create your own step-by-step raise plan.
🐽 Other links to consume
🐦 Tweet of the month
I'm getting tired of threads about business success from randoms looking to score their next viral post. Rarely, do you get the opportunity to hear from the founders themselves? In this thread, Loom co-founder Shahed Khan shares the story of Loom.
Loom started as a user testing marketplace but showed no signs of traction after 6 months. However, they observed one customer using the product differently and spotted an opportunity and quickly pivoted the product and renamed it Loom. Now Loom has 14 million users and is valued at 1.5b in revenue. Check out the full story below 👇
⚡️ Flashback
This month I'm going to leave you with this 2006 front cover of BusinessWeek covering Digg founder Kevin Rose. Before there was Reddit, there was Digg. One of Silicon Valley's hottest startups was founded in 2004. At its peak in 2009, the site got more than 30 million monthly visitors. Shortly after its dramatic rise it quickly fell back to earth. A recession, management problems, and a botched software upgrade all contributed to Digg's downfall. By 2012, things had gotten so bad that the digg.com domain name was sold off to a company called Betaworks for just $500,000, amounting to pennies on the $45 million in venture capital Digg raised over a six-year period. Word is it's up for sale again.
That's it for this month!
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Until next month,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻