Dec 8, 2020

How the latest tech products do early access beta's

By Sam Dickie • Issue #6 • View online

Hey 👋

I’m Sam and welcome to my once-a-month newsletter. Each month I share the latest digital products, fascinating articles covering no-code, web design, productivity, product management, business and anything else I think might be of interest and provide value.

What’s new

Last month with the launch of my Notion website template and Component Kit I thought I would submit it to Product Hunt. In the past I’ve been super fortunate to get a few products featured - this time…. not so much. Why? perhaps due to my lack of planning and ability to get enough quick upvotes to get on the ‘most popular’ page. Turns out not many people realise PH has a 'newest’ tab according to a poll I ran on twitter.

This month I have been working on a new piece of content I have been dying to publish. It’s certainly one of the longest and most comprehensive pieces I have written. It took me the best part of 6 weeks to write. Check it out below 👇

Onto last months numbers:

📈 November: Open Rate 38% | CTR 29%

Slightly disappointing - however, you might have noticed this month I’m sending this newsletter from a new custom email domain. Kirill a reader of this newsletter provided me with some awesome advice to prevent my emails going into the dreaded Gmail spam/promotional folder. Let’s see if this improves the open rate.

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

How the latest tech products do early access beta's

I’ve searched high & low for the hottest beta access invites in tech to show you the dos/don'ts when it comes to early access onboarding processes. Here’s what I found 🕵🏻

www.samdickie.me • Share

Articles

We Tore Down a $100, Counterfeit iPhone X

Vice bought a fake iPhone X and disassembled it and asked security researchers to probe it to find out what it is. Verdict: It’s wild.

www.vice.com • Share

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

As it turns out, there is such a thing as a free lunch! This is one of my favorite articles which i have read multiple times. The food delivery business is big business just now! But check out this genius hack by a pizza restaurant.

themargins.substack.com • Share

Tiny products

If you are looking to create digital products and make passive income online with a side project read this! Tiny products take two weeks to build, generate income and require zero ongoing maintenance.

www.supercreative.design • Share

John McAfee promises to ‘eat his d*$k’ if Bitcoin fails to hit $1M by 2021

In 2017, John McAfee, the antivirus magnate, got a little caught up in Bitcoin’s hype cycle. When asked if Bitcoin would reach $500,000 in value within three years, McAfee responded: “if not, I will eat my d%£k on national television.” The countdown has started!

thenextweb.com • Share

NoCode Builders are Single Player Startup Studios 🎮

This piece really resonated with me. “As a NoCode builder, you are not a single-startup-founder. You are a startup studio, looking to create a portfolio of profitable ventures.” This is something I am personally challenging myself with next year.

venturism.io • Share

Understanding TikTok & ByteDance

Thousands of articles have been written about TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, but no one has told the complete story. Until now. This deck is a fascinating summary.

www.dropbox.com • Share

Products 📱

Universe

Universe is the first website builder and commerce platform built for mobile devices. With its magical drag and drop interface, anyone can easily create a website and start selling online in minutes from anywhere.

onuniverse.com • Share

Spline - Design tool for 3D web experiences

This is the Figma for 3D design. After just a couple of minutes playing with Spline I managed to create a pretty impressive 3D interactive design. 3D design seems be a big design trend currently. Now you can create them yourself.

spline.design • Share

Sidekick – the browser built for work

Yup it’s another browser, BUT, this one has a unique twist. As their founder says “Browsers were built to browse” but Sidekick is looking to create a browser to improve your work. I really like their favourite apps navigation feature and tab management tool. Also, it’s based on the Chromium browser.

www.meetsidekick.com • Share

Craft | A fresh take on documents

As a mega fan and super user of Notion it pains me to say this but this is an extremely close contender. The UI is stunning and super slick looking. The mobile experience certainly blows Notions out of the water in my opinion. They have recently just publicly launched.

www.craft.do • Share

I’ve been asked a couples of times if I will be making my website design available to clone on Webflow. Heads up! I’m working on it. Hopefully it’s something I can get round to over the holiday period.

If you haven’t already - check out Webflow!

Tweet of the month

Hiten Shah recently started a twitter thread of his best content and resources for early stage startups. He’s been curating and sharing content for years through his wildly popular Product Habits newsletter. There is so much golden content within this thread. Highly recommended for any early stage founders or makers.

Hiten Shah

@hnshah

This is a never ending thread of the very best online content and resources for early stage startups.

Relevant for both self-funded/bootstrapped and venture backed pre-seed/seed stage companies.

5:24 PM - 1 Nov 2020

I’ll leave you with this 2013 Forbes cover story about the once market leader in cell phones, titled “Nokia - one billions customers - can anyone catch the cell phone king”. This was only 13 year ago! 😧

That’s it for this month!

If you made it this far, hit reply and tell me what you thought think 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 check out my past issues here

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By Sam Dickie

I’m Sam and welcome to my once-a-month newsletter. Each month I share the latest digital products, fascinating articles and resources from some of the best new and established online creatives.

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.
‍
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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