Push, Pivot and don't give up!
This month I've partnered with Zumo - A crypto wallet and payments platform making it super easy to store, buy and sell cryptocurrency. 5 minutes - this is the amount of time it took me to register with Zumo's crypto wallet and buy Ether! That's the same amount of time it took me to make my morning coffee! Learn more
📓 Articles
Deciding on which piece of content to feature from Steph Smith was a job in itself. She's a prolific writer and maker whilst also working full-time at The Hustle. But how on earth does she do it all? In this detailed post, Steph shares her personal process and mental models to prioritise her work-life balance with her side projects, passions, and a full-time job. (14 min read)
Peep Laja recently shared a fantastic account of his first year building his new startup Wynter. His approach to building lightweight versions of functionality to rapidly validate the product or new features is fascinating as well as his ruthless ability to quickly pivot. You can check out one of my favourite excerpt here. (16 min read)
What does the future of the creator economy look like? David Sherry, the founder of Death to Stock and host of the Caffeine Conversations Podcast shares his thesis for what he calls micro-coaching. The basic idea is that individuals will be empowered with tools and tech that would allow them to build their own niche audiences around their work and interests and moving towards creating subscription-based models and scaling their products and services to a wider audience. (5 min read)
🔗 Links
Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, coined the term "Do things that don't scale". (Something I've written about in the past here and here). This fascinating collection of curated crowdsourced unscalable startup hacks provides real examples from some of the biggest tech companies. Some of my favourite examples are Slack, Airbnb, Zappos and Doordash.
Check out their latest experiment here called 'Giiggle'.
I've recently been seeing Jane Manchun Wong pop-up everywhere this year. She's an oracle for predicting new features in popular social platforms. How? Well, she's a developer who reverse engineers apps to discover what large tech companies are building behind a cloak of code. Jane found hidden features in apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify before they release the information to the public. She then publishes the findings on her blog. Devs are now leaving her messages in the code in anticipation.
📱 Products
Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes just launched a new platform that allows you to share, browse, upvote, and comment on business ideas as well as socialise with fellow creators and entrepreneurs. I've personally been using it for a couple of weeks now and loving the community vibe and feedback people have received for their ideas. If you're like me and have a long list of business ideas it's certainly worth getting some feedback and validation from others (not your mum). You can read more about it on IndieHackers.
Flowrite turns words into ready-to-send emails, messages, and posts in your personal style. Instruct with a few words, click, and witness the text write itself. It's designed to supercharge your productivity. It's also built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 (read how they got access to it here). You can view a quick demo video here.
🐦 Tweet of the month
Jack Butcher of Visualise Value shared this simple piece of advice that I couldn't agree more with. Once you make your first $1 online it's a game-changer. I would encourage everyone to try this. Getting your first sale provides a sense of validation and motivates you to find your next sale.
There has never been a better time to try than now.
⚡️ Flashback
I'll leave you with these Polaroids by Bill Atkinson's (Apple principal designer and developer) documenting the design and development of the Apple Lisa user interface back in 1978.
Macintosh User Interface wasn't designed all at once; it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development.
I can help but think how much time would be saved prototyping in tools such as Figma nowadays. You can learn more about the Polaroids here.
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 🗄