Aug 5, 2020

Growing an email newsletter to 16k+ subscribers whilst validating your startup idea

By Sam Dickie • Issue #2 • View online

Hey 👋

So this month I seem to have the writing bug. I put out a couple of new pieces of content this month and made a point to promote it more. I’m terrible at spending days writing a piece of content and not spending the time to drive traffic towards it.

A few handy tips I found. Firstly, Medium allows you to manually add canonical URLs in their post settings. This is important as duplicate content can hurt your SEO. Now i’m writing content on my personal site I want to ensure search engines know the content on my site is the original content and not Mediums. So I get all the SEO benefit but get exposure via Mediums traffic.

Secondly, be sure to consider submitting your post to a publication. I published my latest piece below and got contacted by ‘The Startup’ (Medium’s Top Publication) and now my post get even more exposure - including all their 680k followers, socials and newsletter

Lastly, I identified a list of platforms to promote my content. This includes Hacker News, IndieHackers, Subreddits, Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter. This great piece of content by Harry Dry inspired me.

If you don’t promote it how will people know see it?

Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup below 👇

Articles

Growing an email newsletter to 16k+ subscribers whilst validating your startup idea

Unlike most user interview strategies Dan decided to publicly publish his interviews and insight. To do this Dan created a newsletter. Now he has 15,000 subscribers.

www.samdickie.me • Share

Creating a new coffee brand like a software product

Instead of developing the recipe and brand in a somewhat closed-loop, Michael brought some of his previous 8 years of experience in creating software at Facebook and applied lean and agile principles developing his recipe and brand.

www.samdickie.me • Share

How to take advantage of the new iOS 14 Widgets

With the recent announcement at this years WWDC 2020 keynote, Apple unveiled the long awaited iOS14 update. But are we overlooking something huge as product creators?

www.samdickie.me • Share

Links 📓

The Guide to Unbundling Reddit

I’m currently obsessed with unbundling. Once you understand what it is you can’t stop noticing it. I have been working on a post around this for a while but this unique take about creating business and communities by unbundling Reddit is fascinating.

latecheckout.substack.com • Share

High Output Founders' Library

As a founder, you have dozens of decisions, worries and demands at any given time. There’s simply not enough time each day. This comprehensive library of curated resources from around the web to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.

www.notion.so • Share

How MSCHF built a business out of squeaky chicken bongs

I’m slightly obsessed with MSCHF and their approach to building viral products. This is the company behind Jesus Shoes and Puff The Squeaky Chicken works. This post provides a rare insight. Spoiler: it’s a lot harder than it looks.

www.theverge.com • Share

How to 👨🏼‍🏫

Product Managers - It's time to create a Product Lab. Here's why.

As Product Managers, how can we create new features and improvements to our products whilst also balancing the trade-offs of user experience and foster a community? In this post, I’m going to be discussing a new approach I’ve been watching closely.

www.samdickie.me • Share

Products 📱

Previewed - Mockup Generator

A while back I curated a list of mockup generators and got it to the 1st page of Google. So I have tested a lot of mockup generators but this has to be the most customisable one I have used.

previewed.app • Share

Create Headlines Like Copywriting Experts, Without Writing Them

I’ve been using this handy tool to generate landing page headlines. It so easy to use and has a generous free tier to try.

headlime.io • Share

Personal Update

Last week I was writing a piece of content about the new iOS Widgets feature coming later this year and decided I would have a shot at creating a mockup of a Product Hunt Widget. A few days later Ryan Hoover (founder of PH) retweeted it 🤯

Ryan Hoover

@rrhoover

Cool idea, @thisdickie! Want to make it real? 😄

https://t.co/wMSWobUaOF https://t.co/nmyg7ZAnI4

3:58 PM - 22 Jul 2020

Let me know what you thought of this newsletter by hitting reply.

Sam | @thisdickie 👨‍💻

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By Sam Dickie

This isn't your typical newsletter! I'm not going to send one if I don't have anything interesting or of value to share.
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It's a simple once a month newsletter packed with super interesting content I have been digesting this month.

Including;
• Product Management
• Hottest Software Beta's
• Tech Trends, Personal Experiments
• No-code tools and hacks
• Productivity
• and much more

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