Innovation, Launch, Belief 🚀
👋 Welcome!
Jeff Desjardins has written a great article in the Visual Capitalist on the 10 types of innovation. To avoid “perfect competition” companies seek a sustainable competitive advantage. They do this by building moats around their businesses. These protective moats come from different sources, but in “in today’s information economy they most often arise from the power of innovation.” The 10 types of innovations fall into three categories: Configuration, Offering and Experience. Want to learn more about how to approach innovations using this framework? Jeff links to a helpful public resource by Doblin that list over 100 tactics. Additionally, Idea to Value wrote a post last year, showing 30 case studies on the 10 types of innovation. Read the full post.
😺 Product Hunt Update
July 5, 2020
🥇 Instatus: Quick & beautiful status pages.
🥈 Readminder: Track your reading record and keep your favorite quotes.
🥉 Litur for macOS: A better way to find, collect & organize your colors.
July 4, 2020
🥇 1MB v3: Your code editor. In the cloud.
🥈 Color Palette Generator: Generate a random color palette by tapping the space bar.
🥉 Letter Builder Notebook: Perfect notebook for becoming a better lettering artist.
July 3, 2020
🥇 Respond Flow: The Mailchimp of SMS.
🥈 Entrepreneur's Musings: Personal lessons of an entrepreneur shared weekly.
🥉 Typelane: Welcome new team members better, wherever they are.
🚀 Maker News
Substack Alternative
Dan Rowden has written a post on how to create a Substack type newsletter using Ghost. In its latest version, Ghost has many features like Substack. This includes email newsletters, accounts for members and the ability to charge for subscriptions and membership. Ghost has the advantage, that you don’t pay 10% of your revenue to Substack. Dan presents a great guide on how to set this up, including which theme to use and settings to select. Learn more.
SaaS Launch
Expanding on last weeks post, Danny Postma has provided a step-by-step breakdown on how he launched Headlime. Within 48 hours Danny received 1275 upvotes on Product Hunt, won 311 paying customers (2.8% conversion rate) and made $16k in revenue. In his in-depth review, he also looks at how he structured his landing page. Read the full post.
Newsletter Ideas
This short tweet by Chris Blake is a great example of how to find valuable ideas in niche markets with demand. “People who love cars, watches, purses, shoes, clothes, wine, whiskey, cigars, skiing, bicycling, hunting, etc. will pay to learn from, connect with, and buy from other enthusiasts.” Read Thread.
SaaS Abandoned Carts
Indie Hackers provides a great Growth Bite on how SaaS businesses can improve conversions. Don’t begin checkout by requesting the customer’s payment info. Ask for their email first, as this way you can follow up in case they abandon the process. By doing this, one company achieved an 11.6% trial conversion rate on a 2-email drip sequence. Be careful to observe any GDPR or similar regulations. Learn more.
Status Pages
Yesterday, Ali launched instatus.com on Product Hunt (#1 Product of the Day, see above). Instatus is a status page service that keeps customers informed during downtime. Their status pages claim to be 10x faster at 5% of the price of other competitors. There is a forever free option allowing unlimited subscribers and team members. If you want to use your own domain, it costs $20 per month. Learn more.
🖥️ NoCode & Automate
NoCode & Lawyers
Pauline from NoCodeJournal has written a post on how NoCode is helping the legal world. Document handling is becoming more automated and client interaction more smooth. Platforms and products include Neota Logic, Bryter, VisiRule, Josef, Berkeley Bridge and Community Lawyer. Pauline concludes that NoCode "can speed up the development process, make applications easier to maintain once deployed, bring lawyers closer to the tools they use, making them more likely to provide better service.” Read the full post.
Build a NoCode Journal
Ash shares a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a digital journal in less than 30 minutes without any code. The journal is built using Airtable and the website using Carrd. This can be a great tool to document your journey on #100DaysOfNoCode. Learn more.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day, a podcast by Y Combinator with Courtland Allen from 2017. In it, he explains that as a founder “your whole goal is not to quit.” He goes on that “you don’t win by quitting. You don’t win by succeeding overnight. It’s a slog.” This is especially true for solopreneurs, many of whom give up at the first hurdle. To help overcome this, find a community which can give you feedback and belief capital. Listen to the podcast. Take care and see you tomorrow.
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