Raw intuitions about startups
Free templates | Validating SaaS | Startup handbooks public | Learn copywriting in 76m | Serious play + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
In last month’s edition, I mentioned I was considering creating a special edition which included my top 3 articles, products and hyperlinks. I ran a poll and the results are in.
An astonishing 79% of you wanted my personal favourites, 14% the readers choice (you) and 7% couldn’t care less and didn’t want either.
So next month expect a special issue in your inboxes. Now I need to look back at 4 years of newsletters and whittle all the content, links and products down into my top 3! Wish me luck.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last editions top link: The Forged Apple Employee Badge
🔗 Hyperlinks
Learn Great Copywriting in 76 Minutes
David Perell interviews the “best copywriter he knows”, Harry Dry - and despite his last name, copywriting isn’t dry. In fact, it’s arguably the most important skill to learn if you're going to convince anyone to try/buy your product or service.
So who’s this Harry guy then eh? Well, let me introduce the king of copywriting, the man himself, Mr Harry Dry. He’s not your typical social media influencer, no, no, no. He's a marketing guru on a mission to spread the gospel of stellar marketing through copywriting. His blog, Marketing Examples and newsletter consisting of 130k disciples is your go-to guide for crafting killer copy, leading marketing campaigns, and boosting your writing skills. Basically, he’s mastered the art of getting to the heart of the matter with the least number of keystrokes.
In this 76-minute video, you’ll learn “The Three Rules” of good copy. You’ll compare ads that worked with ads that didn’t. You’ll get an inside look into how Harry writes his copy, down to his favourite software tools and tea of choice.
Serious Play
Why on earth would something think “Hey, we need another weather app”? There are over 11k weather apps on the Apple app store alone - so why on earth would someone think there’s a gap in the market?
That was exactly my thought when I noticed Andy Allen launch his weather app via his suite of other apps under the Not Boring brand.
However, once I watched his short talk at this year's Figcon I was absolutely blown away by the level of intracy, attention to detail and sheer design wizardry that went into the app. Seriously, you will be blown away!
In this talk, Andy explains how he looks towards the gaming industry for inspiration, adopting the principles and techniques used by game developers to build sticky apps that users continue to go back to time and time again. And no, it’s not as simple as adding gamification. Just watch it! you'll see.
A treasure trove of free templates
Shout out to all the Product Managers out there. I don’t know many other roles where there are as many bloody frameworks, methodologies and mental models used. RICE, ICE, Double Dimond, JTBD, MVPs, AARRR, Kano, MoSCoW etc etc etc.
Paweł Huryn a PM at iDeals and fellow newsletter writer for The Product Compass has just shared his entire Google Drive packed full of PM templates on for us all to feast on. Cheers Pawel!
Startup internal handbooks - now public
Aren’t you curious what the internal handbooks of high-growth startups look like? what their operating principles are, how they build product, and their procedures and processes?
If so, you will be glad to learn that a growing handful of startups are making their internal handbooks public.
📓 Articles
Raw intuitions about startups
I’ve just discovered Gordon Brander’s writing but according to this fantastic post, he’s a first-time founder. If he hadn’t alluded to this fact at the beginning of this post I would have said he’s a seasoned founder with decades of experience. This post of Gordon's is his notes to himself after a crash course in founding his first business and it’s absolutely packed with wisdom. Within this post, he outlined his personal intuitions about startups, and how he wants to build them going forward.
One of my favourite intuitions mentioned is startups pull a thing from the future into the present (but not too far into the future). As Gordon puts it “A startup’s job is to spot a thing from the future, then pull it into the present as quickly as possible.”
The sweet spot for startups is seeing 24 months into the future. This is a stone’s throw into the adjacent possible. It’s far-out enough to be asymmetric, familiar enough to be pitchable, and time enough to build.
But as he points out, you need to build fast as the dimension of ‘possible’ (outlined in the diagram above) is ever-expanding and not nessesarly a predictable measurement of time - just an indicator.
To this point, some great examples of startups which were perhaps too primitive at a moment in time include, Gocities (think Squarespace), Webvan (think Uber eats), Friendster (think Facebook) and Rdio (think Spotify).
How I validated my SaaS
Internet friend Andrew Askins is back online after a break selling his agency Krit and back to grinding out content and building new products. Welcome back Andrew!
In this post, Andrew documents his lightweight approach to validating his next project, Chart Juice - a no-code chart designer. After undertaking some desktop research he identified high search volume, a wedge into the market with competitor differentiation, he and his co-founder already ticked off the founder-market-fit checkbox so the next logical step was to validate their conceptual idea whilst controversially working on the MVP in parallel.
To test for early signs of desirability they went with the classic landing page experiment. Then they kicked off the customer discovery interviews after sharing their concept across socials. Lastly, in just a couple of weeks, they launched their MVP and gave themselves a deadline to the end of August to gather feedback and make a decision to pivot, persevere or abandon the idea.
One particular element of this post which really lept off the proverbial page was Andrew’s mention of “The sunk cost fallacy” (i.e. the more we invest into something the more we feel the need to finish it). Some personal advice, don’t underestimate this. I’ve personally fallen into this trap multiple times!
I guess we will need to wait for the follow up post to see if he listened to his own advice.
📱 Products
Windows 9x | operating system of future's past
For all the software historians out there, you might be squinting at the title of this and thinking “There never was a Windows 9 OS released, Microsoft skipped 9 and went straight to 10” and you would be right fellow nerd.
This obviously isn’t Windows 9 I’m sharing, in fact, Windows 9x is on an open-sourced OS where all the apps are AI-generated. The concept of a generative OS (AKA on-demand software) is something I’ve covered in previous editions, however, I’ve yet to see this theory in practice, until now.
This project was created by Sawyer Hood ex Figma and Facebook engineer now a solo software tinkerer. This is an experiment in end-user programming and seeing what it could be like if an OS could write applications for you as you need them.
What if Windows 98 could generate any application that you wanted on the fly? You enter the description of a program you want inside of the run dialog and the OS creates that for you on the fly.
The only limit is your prompt engineering skills. But to get you started check out this tutorial from Sawyer to understand what’s capable.
Lastly, you don’t need to run it locally, it’s also accessible via the cloud using the link below. Put those prompt engineering skills to work and let me know what you manage to build.
Never Enough - From Barista to Billionaire
Ok, this isn’t a product, but for lack of a better category, it’s filed under products.
Despite the uber-cringy book title, I absolutely loved this book. For someone who has personally struggled with the obsession of money and appreciation for capitalism, this book was extremely thought-provoking.
Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of Metalab and Tiny and a pretty fascinating guy by all accounts. As you might have guessed by the title he didn’t get wealthy being a barista. He started learning to design websites, later hiring more developers and designers and by accident building Metalab which is now a household web dev agency to some of the biggest tech companies. Wanting to diversify the ups and downs of running an agency and begin deversifying his income he began investing and later acquiring cash flow business. Using Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s investment philosophy but tweaking it specifically to mostly tech-enabled business he began building his empire. This is his story from being a skint dropout to “almost” growing his net worth to a billion and his personal struggles with and without money.
P.S. The link below allows you to download a chapter for free.
Keak | Automate Your A/B Testing
As a growth PM in my day job, A/B testing is something I’m consistently undertaking. However, one of the major challenges is coming up with variations to consistently test. Coming up with these variants is typically down to the designer and dreaming up on-demand alternative designs is challenging. Additionally, and perhaps a personally controversial statement - I believe designers can harvest personal bias based on past experiences, preferred design styles and patterns and at times lack the growth vs aesthetic balance.
So with that controversial statement which I might later regret, let me introduce a potential solution - Keak, an AI model to assist with generating website variations coupled with the ability to run A/B tests based on your specific optimisation requirements. Simply install the browser extension and input what you want to optimise for, for example, email capture, demos, sales calls, views, purchases, you name it. Then sit back and let Keak provide a bunch of variations to consider and begin A/B testing them. From what I understand, it scraps your website and uses AI to produce variations based on past conversion data and UI patterns.
However, this isn’t going to work for your personal website unless you get a wild amount of traffic as you're going to need to reach that P-value baby (AKA statistical significance formula) which speaking from experience ain’t easy or impossible if you don’t have a sizable amount of traffic going to the page.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest tech products
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Hero: Sell stuff faster using AI.
Radical Calendar: a calendar app that reimagines the traditional calendar structure with 3D.
Ladybird: a truly independent web browser.
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
Studying history to learn the future
This month we’re going back to 25th June 1998 with the launch of Windows 98 - I don’t have much commentary this month, other than, wasn’t it wild to think people used to queue to be the first to get their hands on a new operating system which we had to pay for ($109 back in 98) and then install via a CD?
However, as I write this it just dawned on me that I basically do the modern-day equivalent by downloading the Mac and iPhone beta OS with my Apple Developers account every year.
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
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Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
Great job Sam. Lots of good stuff.