Is this the ULTIMATE hack?
Firstly, what is Bitcoin SV? Let's start with the name, Satoshi Vision. It comes from the belief that BSV aligns with the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, who first published the white paper explaining Bitcoin. I'm personally interested in it as its fees are super low compared to Bitcoin and lastly because it's currently affordable. So, if you want to chance to win £10k worth of BSV simply click on the link and download the app and add just £1! Learn more.
📓 Articles
Jack Smith's legendry LinkedIn hack back in 2015 got him a video meeting with Thomas Korte, founder of AngelPad. With just $0.01, it landed him $120k in funding for his product - Vungle, which he later sold for ~$750m. He gave a talk at the conference Hustle Con, detailing exactly how he pulled off the LinkedIn hack. There is also a great write-up here. (6 min read)
I've always been obsessively curious about what makes a great digital product, but only recently discovered this post discussing 'Product Thinking' which perfectly summarised what it is and how to further develop it. Julie Zhuo mentions "The simplest way to define product thinking is that it is the skill of knowing what makes a product useful — and loved — by people." This skill also provides you with a unique lens when studying and observing products, allowing you to spot patterns and new opportunities. (9 min read)
Jake Singer (writer of The Flywheel) put this great post together centred around Packy McCormick, author of the popular Not Boring newsletter and his goal of reaching $1m this year in revenue. Jake breaks down Packy's Flywheel and goes into detail about how this $1m goal could be reached. I also found his explanation of the term 'The Multi-SKU Creator' fascinating - "most creators won’t make 100% of their income from just one source" (8 min read)
Firstly, this post is about the mentality, not the reality of being broke. David Hoang explores this mindset of how being over-resourced can stunt creativity, resulting in a lower quality outcome. When you're broke, you maximize everything and make a dollar out of 15 cents. I generally believe this, when I needed money I would create within my constraints and make something out of nothing. Shaan Puri also discusses this exact principle the founding team of Alibaba took in this podcast (Skip to 3 mins in). (3 min read)
🔗 Links
Whether you're looking to improve your sites backlinks, SEO and discoverability, or just discover new early-stage products, this handy Airtble base includes 280+ thoroughly selected sites. I've seen a lot of directories like this, however, after reading this post by the Rocket Labs team I'm confident this isn't just another scraped list.
Learn Product Management from 250+ curated Twitter threads sourced by Yang and taken from some of the best minds in Product Management. As a PM I'm fully aware of the amount of content out there and I think most PMs will agree it's overwhelming. The great thing about this resource is the learnings are the size of a tweet, therefore it's super easy to digest and you can pick up some great folk to follow in the process.
📱 Products
I'm a big fan of Figma, but I'm also no designer. I think I use about 30% of Figmas potential and to unlock that other 70% I need to learn a ton more. Recently I discovered ProtoPie and from what I can see it's like Framer but much easier to grasp with loads of pre-defined interactions and animations to use. If you want to bring your idea to life and test it with users before spending a lot of time and money developing it then I would highly recommend prototyping first with a tool like this.
Check out some of these examples here and here - pretty mind-blowing.
Looking for some more retro products to bring back some 80's nostalgia?
👀 Retro App Store is the App Store, but in the ‘80s
👂 Retro AirPods are AirPods, if they were invented in the ‘80s
👾 Neon Drive is an ‘80s-style arcade game set in the future
🙌 Retro Patents are bespoke prints of keystone inventions
😍 The Internet Arcade houses over 900 classic arcade games
📱 WANLE iPhone Case turns your phone into a Gameboy console
🐦 Tweet of the month
I absolutely love this tweet thread by Trung Phan AKA the legendary lord of memes. This thread explores Steve Jobs obsession with simplicity and design starting with his keen interest in Pablo Picasso's "The Bull", a series of 11 lithographs (stone prints).
With each successive print, a bull is simplified and abstracted. Picasso's goal was to find the "spirit of the beast".
At Apple, employees are taught this philosophy.
⚡️ Flashback
I'll leave you with this image of the Spurs basketball players setting up an in-flight Local Area Network (LAN) for a game of StarCraft after winning 1999 NBA season. There are so many great things about this image! Firstly they have just won the championship and instead of popping bottle on the flight, they are playing StarCraft! The trophy is just sitting on the floor (bottom right of the image) and lastly, they know how to create a LAN on a private jet back in 99!
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 🗄