Write, Traction, Loops, Patience
☕ Good Morning!
Tim Ferriss views writing as his most important practice and credits much of his success to learning and practising this art. His advice to others is to write one to three pages in the morning, on anything. This helps take away anxieties and lets you get on with the rest of your day. It will also help you realise where you are sharp or dull in your thinking and to improve, you should try finding proofreaders of different backgrounds to honestly review your work. When doing revisions of your work, you should remember that “writing is actually re-writing”, so try and spit out two crappy pages per day, then review these in multiple stages and “when in doubt, take it out”. This approach will help you sharpen your cognition, analysis and awareness of how to you use words, explanation and questions. Watch the video on YouTube.
🚀 Maker News
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth was written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares and teaches you 19 different channels that you can implement to grow your customer base, as well as a framework to understand which will work best for you. The 19 Channels include marketing strategies such as targeting blogs, unconventional PR, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing and affiliate programmes. Ali Salah has summarised and condensed this book into a 37-minute short read for Sipreads. You can find his summary of the book here and if you wish to delve deeper buy the original on Amazon here.
If 37 minutes is too long for you, can flick through the following SlideShare which Justin Mares shared way back in 2014. View here.
Daniel Vassallo has given us an update on his monthly income since last November for his two publications on Gumroad. In the past seven months, he made $171.7k in revenue and had $14.1k of expenses, giving him a profit of $157.6K before tax. That’s $22.5k per month. Impressive! The majority of traffic came direct or via Twitter and his email list provided him with 180 sales. You can view the full Twitter thread here.
🏗️ Build + Launch
Marketing Examples by Harry Dry has released an insightful post on Growth Loops, a summary of the in-depth work done at Reforge. Makers/marketers should think more about loops and not funnels, as these feed themselves: “The actions of one user create an output which create a new user.” Harry lists a number of different case studies and finishes with the valuable observation that “the product doesn't precede the marketing. The product is the marketing.” You can learn more by reading his case study or by reading the following post by Reforge.
Indie Hackers provides us with a helpful Growth Bite on how to increase conversions by always keeping the CTA visible. Read the full bite here.
🖥️ NoCode
Bryter from Berlin has just completed a $16m funding round led by Accel and Dawn Capital. Byter is a NoCode platform built on the same idea as Zapier with which you can build enterprise automation apps that allow workers without any special technical skills to build tools like chatbots or trigger automated database actions. Since launching in 2018, the company has onboarded 50 enterprise customers. Luca Bocchio hits the nail with the observation that “No-code software is really reducing the barriers of adoption” and “if people like you and I can use the software, then that means demand can multiply by big numbers.” Read the full TechCrunch article here and visit the Bryter site here.
💭 Afterthought
Pomp (Anthony Pompliano) gives us his four rules to gaining financial independence. The one I have found most difficult, but also most valuable is to “be patient, stay disciplined, and understand that wealth is built over time.” Take care of each other this weekend and see you next Monday.
Correction to yesterday’s newsletter:
palabra.io was built and launched on Product Hunt by mrs. robot and not by Temirlan.
You can also find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow my thoughts in real-time!