How to succeed as a creator 🚀
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📓 Articles
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:
You don’t have to have any credentials
You don’t have to have started years ago
You don’t have to be everywhere
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".
🔗 Links
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 😂
📱 Products
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.
⭐️ Community Showcase
This month I want to share John Bardos's free weekly newsletter - Idea Economy. John shares a weekly digest of what is working in the creator economy, how to build your audience and grow your business. I've already found a load of new content creators and tips since subscribing. Check it out!
🐦 Tweet of the month
Pieter Levels is a prolific maker and pioneered 12 startups in 12 months challenge back in 2014. When he last shared his public revenue he was making over $1m a year as a solo maker. But why am I telling you this? Well, from the fringes, it seems everything he launches attracts huge success. But of course, this is rarely the reality, but sometimes you need some confirmation he is in fact a mere mortal and doesn't always hit a home run. So when he shared this tweet listing out all the 70+ projects he launched and mentioned only 4 out of the 70+ actually generate revenue it gave it us all hope.
As the saying goes, the more you swings you take of the bat, the higher likelihood you hit a home run!
⚡️ Flashback
This month I'm going to leave you with the 1989 Nintendo Power Glove.
Personally, I was completely unaware of this wild toy existed despite being a Nintendo obsessed 90's kid. The original concept was called the 'Data Glove' and was the brainchild of two other companies and started life as a prototype fashioned out of a gardening glove and some LED tubes. From there it began to take life but the cost of $10k per glove wasn't viable , therefore the team were challenged to get it below $100. Come launch at CES they actually ended up hiring a child actor to demo the glove and pretend it was working - very similar to Steve Jobs first iPhone keynote. Despite a lot of hype the glove was a flop and was plagued by technical issues. You can snag a new unboxed one for about £150.
Personally, I would love it if they brought this back with today's VR/AR tech. Watch this space 👀
That's it for this month!
If you made it this far, hit reply and tell me what you thought of this newsletter. What did you love? what didn't you like so much? I read every response 👀
Until next month,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
P.S you can view all my past content in this Notion repo 🗄